potential human remains. reporter: quite right. exactly, jake. and also questions about whether or not something like this could have been prevented. again, this all happening this morning when these officials who were running this massive search, at the time search and rescue operation, the remote operated vehicle that was down on the ocean floor early this morning at 8:55 a.m. came across that debris field. right now what they are doing is the r.o.v.s are still there on the ocean floor, still trying to map the ocean floor, still trying to figure out exactly what is down there in terms of debris. the coast guard earlier today, the rear admiral gave his assessment of exactly what happened and in addition to that a deep sea expert weighed in on exactly what was found. we found five different major pieces of debris that told us that it was the remains of the titan. the initial thing we found was the nose cone, which was outside of the pressure hull. we then found a large de
said, it s not just for the families but for the industry as a whole to understand exactly what happened. i will say the transportation safety board doing an investigation here, you know, 25 years ago on swiss air 111, i mean, that accident, that air accident had to be investigated in waters that were much more shallow, and yet it was just such a complex investigation as it was. they are thankful that right now the resources are out there that can do as much salvage as possible at that sea bottom to recover the debris because again, it will contribute to a more fulsome picture of exactly what went on here. and especially given the tragic circumstances, they also want to bring a measure of peace to the families. and whatever they can say about how it happened, when it happened, and the conclusive proof they can gather, all of that will matter. paula newton in halifax. let s bring in diving expert rick merkar. he s an international training director at the international association of
as you might imagine has sharpened the focus on any corner-cutting when it comes to spending money on other things such as safety. now, as for the wreckage, egyptian investigators have possession of the flight data and cockpit voice recorders from the airbus. they are said to be in good condition and ready to be analyzed by experts in cairo. the question as we ve been discussing tonight, what will they say about what brought the plane down. black boxes have come a long way over the years and have unlocked a whole lot of mysteries. however as 360 s randi kaye found out, they do have limitations. reporter: this is the sound of a pilot in trouble. swissair one-11, we have to land immediate. reporter: that was the pilot of swiss air 111 minutes before he crashed into the atlantic ocean in 1988. everyone on board was killed. when crash investigators found the plane s black boxes at the bottom of the ocean, they looked intact, so they were stunned to
in your view, and based on your experience, what are the realm of possibilities in which something like that would occur? well, they tend to fall in three general areas. one, of course, is weather. we remember air france 447. west caribbean 708 and air asia. those encountered level 5, level 6 thunderstorms, horrific weather and the pilots allowed the air speed to deteriorate. that s not the case here. we also have the cases of missiles and bombs onboard. kal, panam 103. that s, you know, that s possible, but if the pilot was able it was catastrophic and instant. and then that leads us to things like any kind of a mechanical failure onboard, fire, many of those things. usually with a fire, the pilot would have time to get off more description, like swiss air 111,
issue is we clearly now know that sadly and tragically the plane is somewhere on the bottom of the ocean. right. the second most important thing to me is if we can get from the analysis on the flaperon whether this was a high speed descent, ultimately causing what i call a rip-away of the part in a way that indicated it was a high speed descent, whether it had been deployed whether it was deployed and it was ripped off in contact with the ocean, whether it plummeted to the ocean and because of corrosion separated from the aircraft. these will tell us additional things not necessarily where it s at but it s one small part of the puzzle. you got to remember we go back to picking up the pieces off the floor in long island in tw 100, the swiss air 111 when it