Altitude Data News Today

>> thank you. >> a few things we should wade through here. first off, the search coordinator angus houston discounting radar equipment that indicated these altitude dips, something we talked about right here on cnn. the plane went up. it went down. you have said from the beginning, if i go back through my mental hard drive, had you said from the beginning that the altitude data was an assumption. is that primary radar even reliable for determining altitude? >> not for altitude, no, not for altit...

Point. we know the cyclone is going on there. we know why it disrupted the search. obviously anything thats on the surface still and thats very unlikely, theres less chance now because the cyclone will blow it around. i mean, thats just a point of information. so that cyclone is going on. theyre going to continue searching. and that really leaves us with this issue that we started with. they didnt answer the questions of the families but they do put out this useless information about the altitud...

Accurate. now weve got this third set of data. i think really whats behind it is they dont have good altitude data and i think we will find as the investigation goes on that some of the persons who were supposed to be monitoring the radar were asleep at the switch. i think they simply dont have it and are trying to reconstruct it. >> shawn, quick last word. >> yeah. i agree with mary 100%. heres the deal. we talked about this three weeks ago. these data points are very, very suspect, right? so p...

Another set of altitude data coming out. making sure i had this correct this time of around. in the course of a typical crash investigation, does altitude and these kind of basic facts, it seems, does it change this much? >> no, it does not. and the reason it doesnt, in most investigations you do have a couple things that apparently are missing here. one is you have reliable air traffic control data. and at a minimum, you have the air traffic controllers voices on a air traffic control transcrip...

Mary, when you take into account everything weve heard, including some of the new information that we have, which is the plane after the turn went up to 39,000 feet within its safe operating range and went down to 4,000 feet, which theoretically would have been able to avoid oncoming traffic, but possibly do you think could have been this whole thing could have been mechanical? >> certainly, and what we dont know is much greater than what we do know, and by the way, all that altitude data is hig...

>> [ inaudible question ] >> as a understand it, the speed has been determined on the basis of the pinks that happened over a period of time. we dont know what was happening between each one. we dont have any altitude data. >> [ inaudible question ] >> altitude this impacted the speed because i am getting very technical here but fundamentally, if you are at high altitude, your ground speed increases quite dramatically. if you come down to a low level,

Altitude data that were getting with a lot of caution. a number of reasons for that, don. the first one is that the evidence we have so far suggests the transformer was turned off or the transponder was off. there is a number of reasons that could happen, i wont go into that now. the bottom line is the transponder gives you position, attitude, speed and information. if that was off, you wont get altitude information from primary radar. primary radar drops off at 125 miles off the coast anyway. s...

Quickly. its highly unlikely that a plane would turn in such a dramatic difference from the intended flight path and continue on a route thats very, very different than the intended one. >> theres some talk about altitude data being fed through these sort of automated update systems. that altitude data seems to fluctuate wildly and has been discounted by some of the folks in the reporting ive read. one of the data points is that the plane at one point climbed to an altitude of 45,000 feet which ...

Does that give any indication to what happened or could that just be a separate mechanical failure? >> thats what investigators are going to look at. theyre going to want to see where that exact transponder failure occurred and whether or not there was actual radar coverage in that particular area. because the transponder provides a discreet code. it provides altitude information and ground speed. if the rest of the radar data after that is just what we call a skin paint where youre not getting ...

An hour after the flight, which we think is possibly an hour before total contact was lost. does that give any indication to what happened, or could that just be a separate mechanical failure? >> thats what investigators are going to look at. theyre going to want to see where that exact transponder failure occurred and whether or not there was actual radar coverage in that particular area because the transponder provides a discreet code. it provides altitude information and ground speed. if the ...