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from as msnbc world headquarters, welcome to alex witt reports. we begin with breaking news as we await a news conference from police in mississippi where a pilot is now in custody after threatening to crash his plane into a walmart. he circled the skies for hours and instead landed in a field in north mississippi. the faa says only the pilot was on board, no word yet confirming his identity. it started early today after the pilot took off from to pull a regional airport. the police got word that the pilot intended to crash intentionally, the walmart was closed. that plane flew haphazardly for hours before coming down in the field where police swarmed it and made the arrest. here s our affiliate as that drama unfolded. we have been able to confirm, we have at least confirmed to us that it has crashed, that does not mean they reach the crash location. one of the difficult things about figuring out something like that is just how fast the plane was moving. at its lowe ....
Jeff, thank you. we have more breaking news. just a short while ago nasa called off today s launch of the artemis moon rocket. it s spreading another worrying fuel leak this morning. we have nbc s jake ward, he is standing by at kennedy space center for us. what is nasa saying, jake, about what went wrong here? is there any timeframe for when this next launch will be? they clearly have to fix something before they re gonna put that rocket back up in the air. they want to try to do it for the first time. absolutely right. we are seeing a more clear picture of what went wrong and what comes next. what went wrong, it was a fuel mixture. it basically goes from the ground up into the spacecraft. it is liquid hydrogen at a temperature of negative 400 and something degrees. it is an incredibly complicated procedure. a quick release coupling. this is a place where two pipes come together. that scene would not hold. it was leaking hydrogen. ....
Frequently between 1000 feet and 2000 feet of the ground. and then tracking to the north. and then towards ripley, where it finally landed in a soybean field. so, circling the skies for hours like it was clearly done, how dangerous is that, jeff? what kind of a threat does that pose for other aircrafts in the area? it depends, alex, normally if the airplane circles like that, it should be done in a non congested airspace. and a time when the pilot is communicating with other pilots in the area to maintain separation. so, given the fact that most of the circling was done in a remote area north of tupelo at an altitude that was below where commercial airlines was flying, there probably wasn t too much danger as long as there were no other airplanes ....
Propellers, which is what this aircraft has. this took some aviation savvy to be able to do this. the person that stole the airplane obviously know what they re doing with regards to fly an airplane. and, jeff, i ask you about how quickly the situation would be becoming aware to people who are monitoring the skies like that? i presume there was a control tower, but in the small municipal airports, there may not even be a control tower. at one point with that plane become known to be a problem, to have an issue like this? i did little research since we last spoke. this tupelo airport does have a control tower. it s a contract tower. the faa contracts it with non faa employees to operate it. it operates beginning at 6:00 in the morning. if this pilot took the airplane at 5:30 in the morning, then there wouldn t be anyone in the ....
well we ve been listening to the news conference there, beginning with the mayor, and then the chief of the fire department. what we got was a lot of information confirming the information that we ve got. i want to bring back jeff for one more question. jeff, the chief of cleave absolutely confirmed at this guy had some flight training experience. what was so interesting was that he did not know how to land the plane. you have to wonder, the mindset of somebody who s going to take the plane, get up there, and then figure out, okay, maybe on the fly, how to land it. or potentially crash it, as the pilot had said he intended to do. but the fact that he landed safely? what does that tell you about this kind of a plane and the skill that it took for him to do that? ....