What the air traffic situation was at the time, the dependencies that the flight crew and legitimate scenario would require in terms of coordination with the ground crew and their air traffic control to prepare for that departure. we saw him do some incredible maneuvers in the air. if this person apparently didn t have pilot experience, how could he have done those maneuvers, based on what you saw in the air? sure. and you re right, there were some maneuvers that were done that were incredible maneuvers with the aircraft. to our knowledge, he didn t have a pilot s license. so to be honest with you, i mean, commercial aircrafts are complex machines. they re not as easy to fly as, say, a cessna 150 so i don t know how he achieved the experience that he did.
Saying and they believe that there was only one person in the aircraft. but they want to scour that scene extensively before reaching that final conclusion. now we know that investigators went to the island early this morning. so we should be seeing them arrive here sometime in the hours ahead. now, in terms of kitron island itself this is a sparsely populated area, sort of akin to a gated commune. it s a private island. the last census showed only 17 people living there. all right, dan simon, so much mystery. let me get mary in here the former director of the department of transportation. the ground service agent managed to take off, taxi work radios and perform flight maneuvers before he crashed and died. how did he pull it off? he had to have some pilot experience, right. i think he did because of one
Scenario would require in terms of coordination with the ground crew and their traffic control to prepare for that departure. incredible maneuvers in the air, if this person apparently didn t have pilot experience, how could he have done maneuvers from what you saw in the air? sure, and you re right maneuvers that were done that were incredible maneuvers with the aircraft. to our knowledge he didn t have a pilot s license, so to be honest with you, i mean, commercial aircraft are complex machines, they re not as easy to fly assay 150 so i don t know how he achieved the experience that he did. is it possible he would have learned that with video games? i wouldn t speculate on it.
Though this was something in the order of 19 years old, these are highly cared for, highly monitored, highly inspected aircraft. they fly for decades. the pilot as i recall, something over 12,000 hours th s which is highly experienced pilot. so i don t think we re dealing with an issue of pilot experience. it doesn t mean that the pilot s actions or inactions may not be implicated. but as i said, the black boxes really do tell the story. and we ll have the answers to that very quickly. and make you a good point, the airlines are under a lot of pressure to keep everything up-to-date and inspections are on a regular basis. well, i think in this case all the airlines, whether it s a russian airline and i think there has been a lot of comments in the media recently that over the last 20 years there have been a number of accidents involving russian airlines since the russian federation and all the changes and so forth. but the fact is that there is no benefit to an airline doing
Will be very anxious to get these bodies back, get them identified and start to get some answers, christine. kathy, tell me a little bit about the context of the safety record of this airline and the rapidly growing airlines in the region. reporter: absolutely. the black box, as you mentioned, has been discovered. hopefully the data there will give some answers on what happened here. there was no distress call, but what we do know about this airline is it has a very small fleet but a disproportionately high number of accidents, including this one. five of them fatal. this is part of a growing industry that you re talking about, christine. it s expected to triple in the next couple of decades as more and more middle class indonesians fly around the region. with the expansion questions are being asked about the safety concerns, infrastructure, pilot training, pilot experience and with another crash now being reported out of indonesia, the whole industry is going to take another look