twitter, but american intelligence officials say so far they see no sign of terrorism, though it s not being ruled out either. we don t have any direct evidence of any terrorist involvement yet. reporter: egyptian military says militants in the area of the crash don t have the type of weaponry that could bring down the plane above 30,000 feet, so was it a technical problem? the ex-wiest plane s co-pilot told russian state-run media he complained about the condition of the plane before the flight, but airline said they have no records of complaints from the pilot or the crew and the airbus passed its routine inspection before takeoff, according to egyptian authorities. investigators have recovered the black boxes from the wreckage which is strewn over eight square miles. they have also recovered the
to figure that out. bottom line the so-called black boxes aren t perfect, even when they are found to be in good condition. they may not reveal the cause of the crash. on a plane they are tucked inside an insulated case surrounded by stainless steel designed to withstand temperatures as high as 2,000 degrees fahrenheit and catastrophic impact. after twa flight 800 went down in july 199612 minutes after takeoff from jfk s airport, the plane s black boxes were recovered, hardly a scratch on them, but they offered little. both the voice recorder and the data recorder terminated their operation within a nanosecond of each other when the explosion took place. reporter: still, despite all the conspiracy theories, investigators figured out an explosion in the fuel tank cautioned the crash and shut down the recorders. did you get ahead of american 77 by chance?
similar to the debris field of twa 800. in that case there was a flash in the air at explosion. twa 800 was a mechanical failure, center wing tag exploding and the center of the plane went one way and the rest of the plane went the other and it did pitch up before it finally crash, something that they believe happened here. colonel, again, back to the satellite imagery here, one of the things this will tell next to immediately is if there was a flash from the desert floor itself. the question is could have have been some kind of surface-to-air missile? a lot of people say it s unlikely because it s unlikely anyone in the sinai peninsula has such a device that can hit something at 31,000 feet. yeah. there s a difference in the signature of surface-to-surface missile which would give a might brighter signature and easily detectible by this system. a surface-to-air missile doesn t give off that train of a flash. i would be hesitant to say they could detect the launch of a surface-to-a
had one-off events fuel tank explosions, cargo door failures, things like that. there are horrific examples. crash of twa flight 800 in 1996 believed initially to be terrorism was later determined to have been an explosion of flammable vapors in a fuel tank. japan airlines flight 123, the 1985 crash considered the single deadliest accident in aviation history, more than 500 killed. it was determined that a previous tail strike had damaged the plane s rear pressure bulkhead and the repair was faul faulty. a similar thing happened to this russian aircraft. in 2001 this plane s tail struck a runway while landing. it was repaired and an official of the airline says the plane had been checked thoroughly for cracks. but safety experts are telling us tonight it is possible that a defect in the repair was simply not visible and a crack could have spread very rapidly during the time this plane might have been dissdisintegrating, wolf.
moment. and frankly those who, you know, say with great certainty it had to be this, that or the other, really are not necessarily being fully frank. tom fuentes, how soon will we be able to rule out if there was in fact a bomb inside the plane? remember pan am 103 there was a bomb inside that plane. how soon will they know if there was a bomb? well, i think, wolf, it could be a long time. and one of the problems is if you ll remember the twa800 when that plane crashed it was about three years before they determined that it wasn t terrorism, that it was a center fuel tank and vapors in it with an electric spark that exploded. it could take a long time to determine that. but the bigger problem here from my perspective is that both sides, the russians and the egyptians, are not going to be completely reliable. for the russians sake they re not going to admit that they had a horrible maintenance record with that aircraft. and from the egyptians side they re never going to want to