Deeply in the danger zone. and as you ve had experts say all morning, no pilot is willingly to go go there unless they have some alternative that is even worse. and we heard no call from the cockpit, no trouble. so that s why this is such a mystery right now. it is so odd to see that speed so high at the time of the impact. can you talk a little bit about those questionable pitot tubes now, what they are and how that could have been a contributing factor and i stress may have been. that s right. sometimes when you get on a plane, you ll see these. they re like this. this is a device that measures basically static air pressure with what s happening outside, it compares the two and calculates what the speed of the plane is. these have been known in the past to have problems with icing. they re heated so they shouldn t
It was i ammmaculately maintained airplane. an airplane doing over 100,000 flight hours and 80 and 90,000 cycles is not an issue as long as it s well-maintained and you couldn t get a better maintenance outfit than lufthansa. are there unique weather concerns when you re above the mountains, let s say you re flying at 38,000 feet and all of a sudden you begin this descent, are there weather conditions that could have contributed to this problem? the weather was reported to be fine at 38,000 feet. now, whether, for instance there was an icing issue, the pitot tubes, the senators that feed the computerized airplane or its flight data whether they stop of course i wouldn t have thought so. certainly the weather was a factor when it got down low.
Flight, air traffic controllers lost communication with this plane and on the ground, the controller declared an emergency. with me, cnn aviation analyst les abend and in our london newsroom, cnn aviation analyst mary schiavo. les, something chad myers was just talking about, the possibility that these pilots may not even have known that they were descending. is that something that made sense to you, especially with these pitots that are being problematic lately? let s take it a step at a time. no, i don t think they wouldn t have known. but the profile that was shown, the bottom line, it did not look like an extraordinary descent rate. it looked like a fast descent rate but nothing that looked totally out of the ordinary. this is an airplane with wings, even if the engines weren t functioning, they could still glide the airplane. as far as the pitot tubes are concerned, we re really
Marseille with a long run way. is it possible that the pilots didn t know they had a problem? if you had some sort of false reading from the pitot tubes that gave you an idea that your speed or altitude was wrong or something that made you unaware situationally about where the plane was, it s true they could become distracted and didn t realize they were flying into the mountains. this sounds outrageous but, in fact it has happened before wolf we don t know if any of these scenarios is really what happened. we do know that investigators have to look at all of them right now. they certainly do. tom foreman, thanks very much. let s go back to our analysts following new details on this plane crash. david soucie in november a lufthansa airbus dropped 4,000 feet in one minute after the autopilot lowered the jet s nose. how closely should investigators be looking at the autopilot
Call off. he would tell air traffic control what s going on. and there s just no now it s been corrected that that didn t happen. there was a pilot flying in the area. these are reports out of london. there was a private pilot flying in the area. he said visibility was pretty good. presumably pilots would have been able to see that they were in mountainous terrain even if they didn t have the ability to get visual reference from the instruments. if the pitot tubes were blocked and they couldn t tell altitude and it was falling, they should have been able to see it according to a private pilot that was flying. i was just going to say when you put it all together, that s why you are left with scratching your head especially early on. a pilot with a lot of experience. a good safety track record for this flight. it leaves you to wonder something had to have gone drastically wrong on that flight because obviously it ended tragically. exactly.