That was at 10,000 feet so pretty well up there when the center fuel tank exploded. there was a decompression of the private jet carrying the golfer payne stewart a number ofiers where everybody passed out and the plane flew over hat of the understand before it but in this case there s no evidence of anything like that but we re pretty early into it. i think what is important here is getting the recorders. they ve got one and probably will find the other one, and then we should have some answers pretty quickly, is my guess. bob, the plane was almost 25 years old. is that normal? yeah that s not bad for the life of a plane. i mean maintenance is what counts. 25 years old and especially with a workhorse brand like the a320 that s not old. that would not be a factor in
Servos that are controlled by computers. so when a pilot puts in an input to move.controls he wants to turn left right or climb, he s not directly moving that surface. he s basic live giving a command that the computer mediates and then moves the surfaces for him. that becomes an issue in some people s minds. well this is a huge, huge tragedy, and we certainly there stay with this store. jay rollins, derorah hersman, bob, thank you for your time tonight. we ll we back with president obama s nouncement today about our troops in afghanistan. when are they coming home? also the new video of that alleged secret service drunk driving incident. is it time to revamp the entire agency? that s ahead.
it s an accident. there s nothing more that we can say right now. everything else would be speculation. the question tonight why did the plain suddenly descend? why didn t the pilot send out a distress signal? was there a problem with the plane? again, officials say they may not be able to recover any bodies until sunrise. we ve got this story covered from all angles. we ll go overseas and also talk to aviation experts here at home but we start with nbc s tom costello. tom, what are investigators looking at right now? well it s really a confusing and perplexing problem here because on the one hand you have a flight a plane that appeared to make a coordinated and an ordered descent from 30,000 feet down to we believe 6,000 feet before slamming into the mountain. only stayed at that altitude for a few minutes, then began a descent and then hit the mountain we believe in somewhere in the neighborhood of 10:40, 10:42 a.m. it was a rapid descent. the question is why over the
A text message sent to the families prior to the news conference said they had to assume beyond any reasonable doubt that the plane was lost and that no one survived. it was heartbreaking news for the families. and today the question is still why. why did it happen? why did the flight go so far off course? and will we ever find out what happened? joining me now is jay rawlins, a retire american airlines captain and bob hagel, who covered aviation for nbc news for 25 years. thank you both for coming on the show tonight. glad to be with you. thank you, reverend. bob, now that investigators are sure the plane went down in the indian ocean, how do they now find the black box and the flight recorder? well, this was just a mathematical calculation. they ve got to find pieces of the wreckage. if they re in the right area now
Likely to find would be the lighter things like wooden pallets or seat cushions, smaller pieces. i how would they find out how far it s drifted, bob? they have computer modeling, woods hole did it in a crash five years ago. but computer models is computer modeling, you know. it s not exact. that s still not certain it will take you back to the right place. and you ve got to get awful close if you have any hope of hearing the pinging noise from the submerged black boxes. if they can t find the black box before the signal dies, how does the search continue, jay? well, if they can t find the black box, but they are able to find pieces of debris that they can absolutely say came from that aircraft, we at least will be able to eliminate some of the theories that called for the