there is some sort of penetration from inside the aircraft or inside that fuselage to the outside. right. that doesn t necessarily mean that it came from an explosive device. we saw similar evidence from the center fuel tank blew up and caused some shrapnel to penetrate various parts of the aircraft. you have to take this with an abundance of caution, if you will. while it is curious evidence there is a lot of other evidence that it may be due to an in flight explosion. the photos have red circles around maybe a piece of shrapnel coming. that would be coming from the inside out as opposed to going into the aircraft. you re looking at the exterior side of the fuselage itself. so in the previous photo you saw the window belt. that is the you can see the windows along the lower part of that, and it looks like that that would be a bottom portion of the fuselage.
investigators have said it s going to take a few days at least before they can really confirm what those satellite images show. but what do you see in the satellite images? what can we glean about the size? the largest is about 79 feet. what do you see in the images? as tom said earlier in his piece, you know, anything that s 78 or 79, 80 feet, there s only two possibilities really, one is part of the wing section, you have a wing span of over 200 feet. that means each wing is better than 100 feet. then of course the fuselage is around 200 feet long and again, it could be a portion of the fuselage structure, whether it s the crown, or side panel with the window belt or belly section, we re not really sure. the satellite fidelity is not that good as far as what we re seeing in the public, s australians may have better pictures, that s probably what gave the prime minister some
so there are inspections of all planes before they, you know, take off, before passengers board. would a crack be detected? can it be detected, a crack that would be significant enough to cause this kind of peeling back in the fuselage, can that be overlooked or would it be that obvious? no, this kind of crack is not obvious, even to mechanics in some regards only because of its location. when you look at where it cracked, it was in what they call the crown of the airplane which is above the window belt where the windows are. and it s not visually inspected by the flight crew as they do their preflight inspection. it may be found during the course of a maintenance inspection which, if the maintenance folks were in that particular area or working in that area, unless it s a prescribed inspection. but on a normal day-to-day basis, you wouldn t see that. point two would be that if there was a breeach early on, the flight crew wouldn t have been able to pressurize the airplane.