Page 30 - Acars News Today

Based on acars because they say this. acars does not translate anything having to do with gps. acars only gives specific information and thats information about the health of the plane. these pilots that i spoke to who are very familiar with the 777 say they dont know any way in which that particular system could let anyone know whether someone preprogrammed that turn into the original flight path or the itinerary, so to speak. whether they are basing it on acars, whether they are basing it on d...

System. >> remember the timing this all happened. transitions from malaysian air space to vietnamese air space, no-mans land in the sky. >> to remind people how they disabled the system. its a knob turn away. the acars, theres a lot of electronics under the cockpit in the passenger section. there are breakers in the cockpit right is this have mitchell show how simple that would be as well in terms of level of sophistication. >> acars is located in here, located in here, located in here and here....

Which is very suspicious. then a couple of minutes later at 1:21, the transponder goes off. all hell breaks loose. at 1:30 it loses control. but what were missing here is at 1:37 the acars expected transmission didnt happen. so what this malaysian airlines executive is saying, it doesnt mean someone shut it off, it just didnt go off on the half hour as it was scheduled to do. this casts doubt into whether that plane took a left turn and went into the indian ocean and got pinged by that satellite...

>> david, i guess by definition, all air disaster reporting is speculation until you can actually pick up the pieces and put them back together. but ten days, 11 days in, are we in for the long haul? what do you think about this latest conflicting report out of malaysia? >> well, with the acars system that really doesnt change too much in my mind about what happened. the acars system is also designed that if anything else happens irregular on the aircraft, it will send an immediate signal out, s...

Not just the airplane but electronics in general. youd almost have to be electronics engineer to disable acars. you could reduce functions, simplify functions, get it back to raw data. you couldnt completely shut it down unless you had -- almost to the point of knowing how its designed. >> thats why investigators dont know whether somebody had the sophistication and disabled it or something else was going on in the plane that took out the system. fair assumption? >> yes, thats a fair assumption....

Martin, put it into context. we are trying to figure out why the pilots never communicated with the tower, given the information. the reason the new york times has this report is because they say they know the acars monitoring system recorded the strokes were in there. assuming the system was still up and working which is how they got this reporting, what is the reason they wouldnt be communicating with the tower if it was such a casual change to make? >> well, i mean, it would imply theres obvi...

Again -- sorry -- go ahead. >> its in terms of keeping this, what we believe the sequence of events were. transponder is off. one line of communication is gone. thats why the tower isnt hearing anything. they make the adjustment, recorded by the acars system. it later goes off for some reason. does that give you insight as to whether they were dealing with a situation or did this intentionally? does this help or no? >> does the course change indicate they did it intentionally? >> that they were ...

Lets not jump to conclusions. if he was flying the auto pilot instead of flying the airplane, he would punch in coordinates. auto pilot gives a better ride, more efficient. companies encourage pilots to do this. he may fly the auto pilot back by punching in coordinates rather than grabbing the wheel and turning around. >> with the idea of the picture behind you of what the system looks like to punch in new coordinates. for people at home. lets play in terms of testing this information. if acars ...

You think they have a sound basis believing that that somebody did something? >> they have a sound basis that somebody put in the four key strokes or more to get the key strokes. the timing seems to be off. its reasonable that somebody was keyed into the computer. >> the a cars system means the investigators have to move off the theory yesterday that this system was disabled before anything else happened. if the a cars recorded key stroke, obviously it was working. right? common sense conclusion...

Plane took, the u-turn back across malaysia was programmed in to an on-board computer. someone basically told the auto pilot to reverse its course. this as we get conflicting reports about those critical communication systems and when they were shut down. trace gallagher picks up that part of the story. trace? >> and megyn, let me just start from the beginning, beginning with the transponder, which stands for transmitter responders. in the triple 7, the transponder is right between the co-pilot ...