thank you. a few things we should wade through here. first off, the search coordinator angus houston discounting radar equipment that indicated these altitude dips, something we talked about right here on cnn. the plane went up. it went down. you have said from the beginning, if i go back through my mental hard drive, had you said from the beginning that the altitude data was an assumption. is that primary radar even reliable for determining altitude? not for altitude, no, not for altitude, mike clampt it s really designed to tell you where the aircraft is, what direction it s going and what speed it s going. it has to be very carefully calibrated and looking for altitude. in addition to that it needs a secondary primary radar to give them verifying radar as well to be very accurate about altitude so i m really surprised and a little disappoint that had they actually used that in their calculations to determine the fuel consumption. it s really surprising to me. help me underst
point. we know the cyclone is going on there. we know why it disrupted the search. obviously anything that s on the surface still and that s very unlikely, there s less chance now because the cyclone will blow it around. i mean, that s just a point of information. so that cyclone is going on. they re going to continue searching. and that really leaves us with this issue that we started with. they didn t answer the questions of the families but they do put out this useless information about the altitude of the plane. we think it is now 39. they don t know it s at 39 any better than they knew it was at 43, any better than at 4,000. so why throw that out there yet not address what the families are asking you? exactly. that is a complete mystery because we have now had at least the third set of altitude data. remember, at one point they were saying it went to 45,000 and then dipped low and there were theories about why they did that. then they said it went down to 5,000 and flew across t
accurate. now we ve got this third set of data. i think really what s behind it is they don t have good altitude data and i think we will find as the investigation goes on that some of the persons who were supposed to be monitoring the radar were asleep at the switch. i think they simply don t have it and are trying to reconstruct it. shawn, quick last word. yeah. i agree with mary 100%. here s the deal. we talked about this three weeks ago. these data points are very, very suspect, right? so placing all of our hopes an all of our goals predicated on those data points, as we said weeks ago, is extremely challen challenging. and really we have to, you know, eye that data very, very carefully and realize the limitations that it really posse possesses. the question for investigators, if you re going to stick your neck out and speculate why speculate things that don t help the search when you could at least extend that curiosity to the families questions and give them comfort.
another set of altitude data coming out. making sure i had this correct this time of around. in the course of a typical crash investigation, does altitude and these kind of basic facts, it seems, does it change this much? no, it does not. and the reason it doesn t, in most investigations you do have a couple things that apparently are missing here. one is you have reliable air traffic control data. and at a minimum, you have the air traffic controllers voices on a air traffic control transcript or tape that s released. in the united states, that s public. that s released. you can get the irtraffic control communications. and you usually have a black box flight data recorder which would unequivocally tell you the altitude, flight control and placement and movement. engine performance, you know what the engines are doing. we have none of that here. and, of course, most of all, why don t we have reliable reports from the several countries in the area whose radar the plane
mary, when you take into account everything we ve heard, including some of the new information that we have, which is the plane after the turn went up to 39,000 feet within its safe operating range and went down to 4,000 feet, which theoretically would have been able to avoid oncoming traffic, but possibly do you think could have been this whole thing could have been mechanical? certainly, and what we don t know is much greater than what we do know, and by the way, all that altitude data is highly suspect. remember, first of all, they had it wildly fluctuating from 45,000, down to skirting radar down skimming the surface, now it s at 39,000, then we had the 5,000. then we have it skirting ind knee is that, but indonesia didn t really see it, which is why indonesia concludes it skirted indonesia when indonesian radar is only on 12 hours a day. anything we re basing our