above its ceiling for any length of time and there s only one reason for doing that to incapacitate, quite frankly kill, get rid of all the passengers in the back. you depressure rise the airplane and you re on an oxygen mask. and that would explain coming down to a more comfortable altitude. this is a technical question, but do masks nod come down to people in the back of the plane? even if they come down, those masks are only designed to give you enough oxygen to sustain you without any brain damage from the highest altitude that you re authorized to fly a jet 43,000 feet down to 14,000. they re never designed to stay up there. consequently they ll run out of oxygen at 10, 15 minutes at the maximum. on top of that, there were walk-around bottles that the crew may get on. those are breathable even up to
a mechanical malfunction? i m very skeptical with the data still. when you re talking losing 40,000 feet or dramatic amounts of altitude, it s impossible to me, which amounts of altitude, it s impossible to me. which means that the data if it was coming from the engines there s a possibility that that data was corrupted, maybe by an icing situation, even though we re saying that it was clear air. we don t know. i m talking about a situation from the engines itself. because the engines have as we talked during the break have a similar system to the airplane itself. the pitot tubes which were in a different part of the plane though, correct, responsible for the crash of air france flight 447. they contributed to the crash. you re saying the dramatic changes in direction could have happened because the flight crew what so busy dealing with something else.
that s certainly a potential. again, as we mentioned over the past few days, until you get the voice recorder, certainly the flight data recorder but the voice recorder, you don t know who was in the cockpit and who was flying and controlling the aircraft movement. you since the beginning have been a proponent of thinking there was a hijacking. marty, what about what mark is talking about, the difficulty of moving altitude so quickly as that was happening, as we know the reporting, marty, is showing the plane was dramatically changing directions, moving around and then eventually settling on what appears at this point to be a straight path. what does that look like from the simulator? well, i mean, you know, here we re going to try to show you a sharp turn. the problem is, whats a sharp turn? there s no definition. for a commercial airliner, let s do that, mitchell, let s turn. you can see the rise and it s twisting pretty severely. let s go 35, 40 degrees and
ostensibly that hasn t happened and i don t understand why. we ll be talking a lot more about this throughout the hour with the two significant developments in the story. our breaking news coverage continues tonight. we ll take a break. when we come back, flight 370s dramatic changes in altitude. what does that mean when you talk about going from 45,000 feet to 23,000 feet. we have a live demonstration inside a flight simulator next. plus, we ll talk to pilots who have flown the 777 and the families of the passengers speak out tonight. why they are hoping this was a hijacking. (vo) you are a business pro.
and you see an unidentified flying object changing altitude that dramatically, you think you would have done something about it, right? yeah. i mean, we only have so much insight into a lot of these things. yeah. and what has also, you know, confused the americans on this is some pings that came off the rolls-royce engine that was on the plane. that shows that the plane fell 40,000 feet in the span of a minute. when the u.s. looked at that information they said, that doesn t make any sense. that s inconceivinconceivable. but at the same time it s thrown in with the mix with the other information that they re looking at. how do you make heads or tails of any of this. one of the problems that the americans have had is that the malaysians have not shared everything with them and the u.s. government and investigators feel like they re sort of on the outside looking in. hey, we have a lot of expertise here and we, you know, investigatetivelily and air wise, there s just not a lot of c