This pitot tube issue was really the problem and the pilots didn t know they were descending somehow, like the 400 flight over the caribbean, then there could be the problem. they couldn t see the ground because you can t see the tops of those mountains because of the cloud cover and the fog today. chad, i m just going to throw this out there. but you can t defend on a plane without equalizing your ears, you would at least know from the feeling, right? you know there must be something else going on here and i don t know what it is. but this thing appeared to just fly and keep its speed up, keep the speed up at 400 miles per hour but not dive out of the sky at 600 miles per hour. it flew and it flew at a straight line at 26 degrees, just to the east and northeast, flew there for about eight minutes. so they didn t even try to move the plane around. something s going on here that we don t know and the black boxes, i know they re painted orange, but they will know
Think about what it s like if you were to go to denver and hike around the foothills of the rockies there, that s what you re getting. a strain on all people trying to reach the location and strain on getting out with everything. it will be a tremendous amount of work. overriding all of it right now, john, is the urgency to get in there and get flight data and voice recorder because that s what will explain what actually happened to this plane because we know now it was in good repair based on an engineering check yesterday. we know that it had a skilled and experienced pilot onboard. we know it wasn t particularly old for an aircraft of this time. they have to get to that wreckage despite challenges to figure out what really went wrong in those final moments. a mountain guide in the area telling us there was cloud formation coming in making it harder and only way to access it by air right now. there are a lot of questions about air speed. the pitot tubes. the devices that measure ai
The airflow over the wing and the airflow over the wing is the thing that makes a plane like this fly. if the airflow gets separated from the wing because angle of attack becomes too severe or you get too slow or something like that, there s a serious problem and there s no recovering from that as a general rule. it can be done but only by an experienced pilot. that s why pitot tubes matter. if there was something wrong with them and there were problems in the past, it could give a false reading to the cockpit. we don t know that s what happened now but that s why they have to get to wreckage to find the evidence. one of the first questions that we ll be asking here. tom foreman, thanks so much. kate? ahead for us at this hour, more details are coming in about the plane s final minutes. what could it tell us about why it went down? we ll talk to a commercial airline pilot coming up next.
Breathtakingly horrific because it s really, really rugged terrain. and it s so widely dispersed. to get a chopper down in there and land it and plus with deteriorating weather, it s not feasible. they did say i saw some reports here in london that they have flown over enough to know that they don t see any signs of life, terribly sad news, of course. but they cannot risk the lives of the chopper pilots setting down if they don t think it is a rescue mission, a recovery mission. so i suspect they will have to wait. the big mystery here is of course the reports that there were from at least two other pilots in the area saying that the weather was not bad at the time of the crash. so regardless of what the situation with the pitot tubes, if the pilot had any visual clues, if they could see out those windows, the question is why departmeidn t they divert t course? yeah. and whether the weather was
Speculating on this one. the important thing about the pitot tubes if indeed this contributing factor to it, if they froze up, this not only feeds information to the pilots and the autopilot itself, but this is a computerized airplane. it s all flied by wire. that information is required by the computers for all the air data information. we also know that apparently that plane had been checked out well. it was in, quote, good repair being checked out just yesterday as well, whether something was missed won t be known until we get the black boxes. mary, could you join in on this, on the issue that it appeared when chad was giving that report, it appeared actually, i don t even know if it was chad or tom. but between the two, we learned the crash site, that plane may have been going as fast as 400 miles per hour. and that sounds just extraordinary to me. does that sound like that to you or not? no, that s actually not even