stabilized at 25,000 feet. the flight never left its scheduled path so air traffic control didn t notice the altitude changes. unless the plane is equipped to stream the data and they decide to stream the data of the aircraft performance from the flight and someone s monitoring it they wouldn t have noticed. and it was clear that the pilot didn t notice for another reason the front lab was inoperative. reporter: it appears it was a dry run for what he would do later that same morning on board the very same plane during flight 9525. lubitz waited until the captain left the cockpit, locked the door and set the plane s altitude to 100 feet. he directed the jetliner into the mountains, killing all 150 people on board. this is just a preliminary report. the investigation is still very much ongoing. germanwings refused to comment on the report wolf. rene thanks very much. let s get some insight from our
someone was flying the airplane intentionally turned off the devices, cranked it around changed course, changed altitude. then after some altitude changes, climbed back up to altitude changed course again and flew the aircraft. if that is true the reason why you may not have all of the debris and in the degree field is because if someone were flying the airplane, they could land the aircraft in the water. like the east river. you would not have a major debris field. the engines would break off when it hit the water and sink immediately and the aircraft would do what it does and slowly start to sink. you would not have a debrys field. do you believe that, that someone intentionally took that plane off course? why do you believe that and also how would investigators ever get to the bottom of that?
it s not as flexible perhaps as a boeing 777. it is still an aluminum structure wing but once again, we re speculating. we don t know if turbulence or an encounter with a thunderstorm is necessarily the situation. what the pilots did with regard to altitude changes or requesting that particular altitude change may have just been for choppy air. he may have been looking at his radar. both pilots looking at the radar trying to avoid that newscast where i situation. all right. les, i m going to ask you to stand by as we continue to follow things. they re fluid here. in the meantime we ll start at the top of the hour. hello. i m martin savage in for frederic wra whitfield, and let s bring you up-to-date on what this conversation is all about. a passenger jet carrying 162 people is now missing in southeast asia. here is what we know at the moment. the official search at sea has
and we haven t got enough information to take any of the cards off. just quickly, i want to know about entering this vietnamese airspace and what s the significance of that quickly? we ve got to treat every single piece of information regarding altitude changes from the malaysian government with extreme caution. there is a very sensitive backdrop to this information. there is an aircraft that has a huge radar cross section that was traveling at over 300 knots across the malaysian peninsula without a squawk, without a flight plane, without talking to anyone, and the malaysians did not launch aircraft to interrogate it. that to me is exposing a huge hole in their national security and their national air defense. so the information we get from them may not be correct. thank you. just because the bluefin doesn t find doesn t mean it s not there, right? i agree. it doesn t mean it s not there. you need to keep on that search. i agree with you, that s suspect. that nothing yeah
experts. we have been given facts and drawing no conclusions. what i d like the malaysians to do if they would rather analyze the information on the altitude changes, how they actually got the altitude changes. we have been around this a million times in terms of the radar. there is no transponders and surveillance data doesn t work and draw conclusions to it so when they come on the world stage and give us some information, there has to be conclusions as to what it actually means, rather than we think it went to 39,000 feet and descended. i think we need to interrogate that. not just stopping the pings, going back to malaysia and drawing some conclusions and getting the bigger picture. that is the whole investigation of why this happened and you re still at the stage, though, where is the plane, right? of course. we are still on phase one. let s not go to phase three