what we would call a catastrophic fire engine failure type of situation, it would be possible it could have caught to the rest of the airplane and caused this heat sensing device to, you know, activate. but, you know, at this point it s really anybody s game. you can look at various, at various other aspects. would the heat have been noticed had the airplane just broken apart for what we re talking about in the tail strike? you know, that s a hard thing. this is 14 years after that tail strike occurred. did it cause fatigue? we re talking about composite material that really has not been under a historic study for a long period of time. they could have missed some sort of crack. one thing i have been considering is the performance aspect of the airplane. this airplane was loaded with over 200 people. you don t see that airplane being loaded that heavily in the united states. really? well, you really don t. you know for safety reasons? not so much for safety reasons, but, you
plane before the explosive event and before the fire engulfed the plane. and, you know, we don t have to look too much farther. when i investigate an accident or a crash, i always go back to other crashes that i worked on. you have china 6/11 and in that case the tail strike which was repaired and not well, it brought a plane down almost two decades later. and i would like to say that a bad repair is like a ticking time bomb because once it s on the plane, it stays with the plane forever and you can t see under a paint job under you do ultrasonic or other testing. and a lot of nation don t require that ever. paul, the fact that u.s. embassy is now warning employees, not to travel anywhere in the sinai penning the outcome in the investigation. i mean, it could just be prudence on their part. i don t think we should read too much into that. the northern part of sinai, especially, has been a big conflict zone. people should stay out of that region.
kate? thanks so much. i want to bring in tom costello. other officials talking to andrea mitchell saying it s likely, but premature to say that this was a bomb. what do you know about what investigators would be looking at at this point? well, one thing that has drawn their attention from the beginning is the fact that the tail section of this plane, as we ve said before, landed a good three miles or so from the rest of the plane. so was the tail section torn off, as a result of an explosion, a bomb, or is it only coincidence that that is generally the area that had the tail strike in 2001, and which the repair was made? that was a remarkable coincidence. where the patch was made 14 years ago, that part is separated from the rest of the fuselage by a good three miles or so. they ve taken note of that. to the point also about security, to pick up on joim s point and how good is the
i know the british have long and dope ties. and at any rate it is plur py. the crew through there was a problem. i don t know to me at least with what little evidence they have. something was certainly up. and we don t know what it was. we have seen a number of government saying ah we better not fly over the sinai anymore. we are going back to the ukraine accident before with the malaysian airplane. suddenly after the horses are out in the barn. we better not go there. and it makes me wonder what they knew about before it happen. there was speculation that there is a tail strike. and we have animation with what
after a number of years, you know, there was a failure. reporter: the cause traced back more than seven years when the plane s tail scraped the ground on landing. the repairs were not done properly. the plane eventually ripped away from the plane mid-flight and then there was this doomed 747 that broke apart in the air. investigators say metal around the repair work weakened and eventually caused a catastrophic structural failure. since 1982, 31 planes operated have had tail strikes. a tail strike can cause a problem. and it may not be an immediate problem. it may take years for the problem to develop. reporter: from the mangled debris field of metrojet, investigators will have to piece together whether or not an incident 14 years ago brought down this plane, something more