that appear to be human driven. you have a transponder being turned off. you have an acars system being turned off. you have the plane being turned not once but at least twice probably three times. and most perplexing, no distress call. there are so many ways to notify people that there s a distress. uhf, vhf radio, many, many, many ways. none of that happened. none of that for seven hours. could it have been deliberate? to answer that question investigators zero in on the last two men known to be in control of the plane. seen here passing through security on the night of the flight. first officer fariq hamid was only 27 years old. very young to be flying a 777 in the u.s., but had gone
don t think they re willing to say to the families those two weeks of searching have been for naught. david, i want to ask you something, here s what i think doesn t add up for a lot of people. there s a lot of people this week there s a belief this was a mechanical issue or some kind of fire. even though this plane supposedly was traveling faster than they thought it was initially. how plausible is it to you that a plane could catch fire, have a mechanical issue and then still fly for another five or six hours without any communication being able to be transmitted? well, it s a good question, looking at it in the compartment all the equipment, vhf radio, acars, all of that equipment is in one specific rack. if it were something like that, fire, smoke, i would say it would probably be focused in that area where the communications are. because separate from that are the navigation, the autopilot,
there are o several ways, vhf radio, setting an emergency code in the transponder sending out an emergency signal. it seems like we keep going up. somebody sends one up and they shoot it down. this lithium ion battery is out there and now it s shot down. it s frustrating. it s been rather chaotic and in many cases incomplete. as i ve said repeatedly, i would like to hear the air traffic control recordings, tapes, conversations between the a aircraft and the crew. was there a changeoff? some stress in their voices? all of these things we haven t heard and that s for starters. we haven t seen the maintenance record for the aircraft. have investigators talked to some of the people who flew with these crew on prior flights, the previous ten flights? were they doing anything
off navigation aids. they didn t turn off their hf radio, vhf radio, their uhf radio, they had the sat com. they had communications, listening to what was going on, and probably transmitting to the location they were going to, that s why i think the u.s. vacuum cleaners or sensors that picked up all this stuff have probably been able to detect more than we re getting. there s a very good possibility that the united states knows much more than it s saying and that we ll probably find out in the days ahead. i think they do, and i think they want to be very cautious because they don t want to embarrass certain other nations that we re working close with, et cetera, and but the best leaks have come out of the u.s. government. all right, general, thank you for being with us. coming up, it s your chance to ask our aviation expert your questions about the missing malaysian airlines jet. by the way, dana, roy are here
originating? we don t have any real answers with all of this, but we have a lot of ideas that are worth talking about here because it is such a mystery. every plane that s in the sky is emanating a tremendous amount of information about itself. largely through the acars system. most of the time that s going out through vhf radio when it s over land it goes through a radio tower. if it moves out over the water, if it s further out where it can t quite reach those land stations, then this plane will connect through a satellite and that satellite in turn will send that signal down to a ground station of some sort. now, what sort of information are they collecting? it may be information about how the engines are performing, about how much fuel is being burned or a simple message from the captain. we ve been flying and someone says they have gate information, that may come in through this same system. a simple readout. they may have information if something goes wrong with the