Page 26 - Acars News Today

That satellite. that sort of goes back to that last question about why in this day and age is someone able to turn off the transponder and, you remember on 9/11, three of the four hijackers turned off or three of the four planes the transponders were turned off. if acars wasnt turned off we would know where that plane was according to everything that i have heard from sources. im actually curious from hank, is this something that everyone knows thousand do? every pilot knows how to do is turn of...

Goleo. were know not showing our viewers any secret information. this is all information that somebody who is very interested in this can find out online and elsewhere. i just dont want to give people the idea were showing something we should not be showing. this compart participant where the computer maintenance system known as acars, walk us through this, show us what it looks like. every plane is different, but how would someone go about disabling the system? >> reporter: i like you thought i...

>> theres some speculation there, youre wright. the skies are crowded. there was only one of the reasons we have a problem here that we havent got a better direction in this area that is 3 million miles is because there was only one satellite at that point, we didnt triangulate, but this is a plane that was well outside the flight path, that wasnt matching any other of the transponders, if you will, and they isolated this plane basically in the middle of the indian ocean. thats the best theyve g...

About doing tight prescreening of pilots. around the world we are not sure what theyve got. i think the worst case scenario being out there -- >> thats why we need to get to the bottom of this. this is important, you cant stop something if you dont know what happened. >> its hard to start eye new procedure. >> what did you think of general mcinerneys theory the u.s. knows more than theyre saying? >> i do think there may be more information available than the public is being told. >> kathy, on fa...

Emergency on board. >> richard, thats what raises questions that the co-pilot didnt say anything about it when he did communicate. >> whats interesting here about what were seeing from the flight deck here is this 12 minutes, anderson. because deduct 12 minutes from the last known "all right, good night," and you get into roughly the time when the last acars message would have been sent. so a question for you, martin and mitchell in the flight simulator, if either by the heading knob or by the f...

Is possible has been squeezed out. >> okay. >> because as soon as the acars were turned off, the data part. the box, itself, wasnt turned off. thats how we got the ping, six hours of pings. the electronic box was still active. it was just the data downburst. once we lost that, we lost the transponder. the airplane went out of radar coverage and we dont have eyes in sky, the satellite data to track this airplane. now its anyones guess and we will not get any more data. if the airplane is found an...

>> reporter: thats what the information were getting that yes, there had not been a turn as yet. a lot of this has to do with the acars and what information they got and how its being interpreted. but that seems to be the way its going now. >> so because the last acars did not -- >> 107. last acars is at 107. the good night is at 119. im sort of hedging that if the nbc report is correct and that was a programmed change, how else is the ground going to know? how else would anybody know that it wa...

Will, based on the acar system, the maintenance system, going dark, and then the transponder going dark as well, eric. >> hey, katherine, its andrea tantaros. who played the message that they received, that the data was changed through acars? do we know it came from a dispatcher, where did we get the information everybody is talking about today? >> the acar system for a layperson, this is a maintenance system onboard most of the boeing flights. it offered an upgraded system, but the basic system...

And its a simple matter to switch from as you say the a route to the b route. but that would not necessarily occur at the same point during the flight as the radio transmissions. the route could have been programmed on the a route with the turn in it. sometimes that can occur as well. but it seems more likely thought could be either the b route being activated or a change in the a route. >> and would that send -- if you did make a change, and acars was still working, mary, would they know in kua...

But could that have been preprogrammed as a contingency in some way? say youve got your a route and then in some ways this is the b route if you needed to get out of that? does it work that way? or is it one route at a time? >> there is capability for a second route to be loaded. and its a simple matter to switch from as you say the a route to the b route. but that would not necessarily occur at the same point during the flight as the radio transmissions. the route could have been programmed on ...