british travelers, but the truth in all of this is going emerge through whose investigation and as she points out is it the black box and then corrupted and then to get the cockpit voice recorder. yeah, absolutely. this is essential to come up with the conclusion and all speculation again and whether it s from the british officials and the american officials and it s all speculation and they re saying that likely it s a bomb because they don t have the capacity to down it using a surface missile. they do not have the capacity. we have two other scenarios. one a bomb squabd or one that the plane had a tail strike that lead to damage in air and of course breaking off the plane. we don t know, and it s all speculation. thanks so much. i know that we re going to be talking again about this. i want to go down to francis. she is tracking the results of
coming up with more sophisticated devices. he s been experimenting, it is believed, with new generations of shoe bombs and new generations of underwear bombs. and brian todd joins us. now, what more are you learning about the airbus tail? anderson, in the course of reporting on this incident over the past couple of days, we ve learned that this very same aircraft in november of 2001 had what s called a tail strike. in that incident, it was landing in cairo. it was operated by another airline at the time. it was landing in cairo and the nose was too high. so, the tail struck the tarmac and it sustained considerable damage. now, airline officials of this particular russian airline say that that was completely repaired and that it passed all the inspections since then. but we ve had several airline security and safety experts tell us that in these inspections, it s very sometimes easy to miss maybe a slight fracture or other stress point in that part of a plane. and it could have gon
after it struck the runway but it was repaired. could have contributed to this crash? actually, the length of time can add to it. if the repair was made improper then the stress fractures could cause it to fail. but you know, based upon the pictures i have seen and that s not the best pictures and the best way to look at it, it doesn t appear that that pressure bulkhead failed. but if they had enough of a tail strike we may have weakened the structure somewhere else like the picture on the screen right here where the inspection is. if the structure was weakened there and had cracks in that area and they didn t materialize until later that could have been an effect. so you know, investigations are an exercise in time, patience, and following procedures. we have in the worldwide
undetected. some kind of a problem with the tail could have gone undetected. so, with the new information tonight that the tail is somewhat apart from the rest of the wreckage, that could bear out some possible theory that maybe that particular tail strike in november 2001 could have had a bearing on what happened on saturday. all right, brian, thank you very much. we bring in our experts from brian todd s report and aviation expert and former transportation mary sciavo. paul, do you think terror could be a prime i m pretty skeptical it s criticism at this point. no full throttle claim of responsibility from any terrorist group. on saturday the isis affiliate put out an eight-line statement. if this was the terrorist attack, the biggest win since 9/11 to take down a russian passenger jet. even isis doesn t believe it is isis affiliate in sinai has been
if it is, this would go down as one of the biggest loss of life since 9/11 at the hands of terrorism. and i do want to make this point. we don t have any u.s. official definitively saying this was a bomb. we have u.s. officials saying there s evidence it may have been a bomb. there s still the other possibility, and that is that this was a result of a catastrophic break-up in air that may have been the result, for example, of that tail strike on the runway in cairo 14 years ago, and then a repair made to the plane, which then, if it wasn t done properly, might have come apart. so the only reason i make that point is because we don t want to go down this road of saying definitively this was a bomb. we have u.s. intelligence or military sources telling jim miklaszewski that increasingly they re concerned about that possibility. tom, a point very well taken. we have a u.s. official telling nbc news that evidence indicates