matter what was going on, if they had not heard from the aircraft in the air or from the crew on the ground saying they had an emergency somewhere and landed somewhere else, that there was probably not a great deal of hope that they re going to find the air flight in one piece. is there ever obviously when you suspect an aircraft may have gone down, and we don t know what has happened in this situation yet. is there any reason to think terrorism outside influence on this aircraft? well, i mean, as i said earlier there are only a couple of reasons that an aircraft would go as we call go completely dark and just you know, disappear out of the sky with no radio, no radar, nothing. and certainly there could have been an explosion on board. for whatever reason, we don t know. but again, there is not very many causes that could have been so catastrophic that this crew
couldn t even have gotten off a radio call. but the one thing we do know is that with them having spoken to air traffic in the vietnam area, we at least know where they were at their last report, because aircraft we re required to give report updates on the route as we go. so at least if they know where the last report was that they actually had communication with the airplane and they know how fast it was going, they will have some idea of the radius that they re going to need to search but it could be quite large. you talk about the may day call, the fact that they didn t get one off, would air traffic control how sophisticated of the systems would air traffic control be able to see any ftd mechanical data on that flight in the absence of a may day call? well, we saw very soon after the air france aircraft went down, the air france the air
apparently suicidal. and took his aircraft down, a perfectly good working aircraft, took it down after taking off from jfk airport. the swiss air flight that went down. that was another wide body jet that went down off nova scotia in 1998. that went down because of the cockpit, the wiring on the entertainment system in the airliner, the wiring became overloaded. the insulation caught fire, brought smoke into the cockpit. the pilots couldn t see, they became distracted and that plane went down. and even more recently, think about the ethiopian aircraft that was hijacked by the pilot. there are any number of reasons the plane could have gone missing but i don t see a happy ending here. what do you think certainly they are not reporting