andrew stevens is at the airport in indonesia where family members are gathered. unimaginable what they re going through, andrew. reporter: yes. such pain such grief. and the way the news was delivered was just the worst possible way imaginable. the passengers families have been gathered inside the building behind the crisis center. and they were listening to a live news conference from the head of the search operation who said at that conference that he was now 95% sure that the debris that was spotted earlier was in fact from airasia 8501. as if that wasn t bad enough while he was announcing this news, the local, one of the local television stations was actually showing images of bodies in the water. a helicopter hovering over what looked like a body in the water. and i was speaking to a man who was with the relatives. he himself was a very close
search efforts for air flight france 447 which disappeared in the atlantic. all that aside, weather has been the main focus here. because the pilots relatively experienced the aircraft itself relatively new t. airline with a flewless safety weather t. pilot said they were concerned about the weather. do you see a comparison between this flight and what you studied in air france flight 447? sure absolutely. in many ways it s the same situation. they were approaching in fact the same tuned i kind of intertropical convergence cell. in the case of air france 447, they did get icing and the pilots pulled back on that aircraft airbus 330 into a stall. it was that handoff between the computer saying i can t handle the spurious information. you fly the plane, where things started going wrong.
the weather. that was the last that anyone heard from these pilots. now, you and the experts have been telling us all morning, whether it s rarely the cause of an airplane disaster but still you would have to think that the weather here based on what we have heard and what we know is a contributing factor. right. well weather is a contributing factor in a great many of aircraft cases, i mean in older days i mean in the 60s and 70s, weather was a huge factor. what s happened in developed countries, the united states and western europe most of asia is you have so many other things on board radar, in-house meteorological departments. you kind of avoid that weather. even in the united states we had cases crashes have been caused flying into level 6 thunderstorms and making wrong decisions. weather contributes, because of advances in technology at least for most places it has been
it is likely one will create a tilt and all of a sudden you are in an unrecoverable situation. this weather is almost a hurricane without the wind speeds flying around easy wind gusts up to 100 miles around. we of course went through the search for flight 370. mh 370. ocean depths of miles and miles. this is a very different area isn t it? we are talking an area not terribly far from shore in busy shipping day. . right. it will have its own chlgs, don, shallow water you can have higher tides pumping the search vehicles around the bottom. the visibility can be poor. it s shallow water. the other thing is not having a
sean mersnicky is here an air safety expert at ohio university. gentleman, good to have you with us. sean i m curious, there have been some comparisons as well to air france flight that crashed five years ago. weather was to blame there. is that a fair comparison for us to make? i know it s early on in this stage of things. i think are you exactly right, there certainly are some similarities here t. concern is driving near the top of storm clouds as a pilot, we focus on icing, turbulence and hail are the three we focus the most on. there are some similarities here. it will be an interesting development in this accident. as we said early stages rich we know there has been some speculation and conversation surrounding the top, relying too heavily on auto pilot. we know after the investigation in san francisco, that was certainly a conversation.