captain would have to go and use the bathroom giving him time to change the flight course. did he make his terrible decision in the spur of a moment? another question even though this area plane was shredded like confetti is there a way to retrieve the texts, e-mails, the videos that passengers likely took and wrote in the last terrible minutes? here s one more. what s the duty of a mental health professional to report on a troubled pilot? our experts are here to break it down but first, to the very latest of what s happening right now on the ground. cnn s frederick is in germany with more. i know that the newspaper has spoken to a former girlfriend. what is she saying? reporter: well she s saying she was together with andreas lubitz for about five months last year. she said or described him as a very sensitive man, someone who needed a lot of care attention, who could also be quite flattering. she was an airline stewardess
was a factor. the pilot asked to divert around it. we also to remember there are i would say there are three factors. mother nature the machine, the aircraft itself and the pilot. the human performance. and it s the interaction of all three of those that will lead us to the answer of what happened. i don t think we can say it s just one, as you said pilots other pilots flew through other aircraft. the question what was going on with the flight with the crew with the particular aircraft and the weather. john talk about flying in conditions like this. bill karins talked about the severe thunderstorms in the area at the time. we know the pilot asked to change flight course because of the weather conditions. talk about flying in weather like that and what it would be like for the pilot who had more than 20,000 hours of flying experience. professional pilots deal with thurps on a routine basis. we have on board weather radar and had doppler weather radar.
an alternate airport to use in case of emergency. what was flight 370 s alternate airport and could that have affected the flight course? mary? the alternate airport has to be an airport kind of near where you are going. in other words, if beijing had an emergency or you couldn t land. the alternate airport is where you would land near beijing if you don t couldn t get in though airport. it shouldn t have affected the flight or caused the flight to go on the path that it did. every flight has to have it and they have to have an alternate airport for their flight plan and enough fuel to get to that alternate airport and 10% beyond that. i don t think it would have caused the vast deviation. don, there s something i did. i pulled up the list of the debris. there is a similar crash of a 737. we are wondering why there was no debris. in that case they couldn t find the plane a month. they put out a reward for debris.
on an oceanographic survey. and it is equipped with some of the most high-tech equipment that there is available to try and verify these pings and to try to map the bed of the ocean where this missing malaysian airliner could be. it will be a big contrast with the kind of equipment the chinese say they identify these apparent pings with over the course of the past several days or so. we ll see whether they are able to verify. again what the chinese say they detected. jim clancy, you have been in kuala lumpur since day one of the investigation. malaysian authorities just today confirmed they believe the plane deliberately skirted indonesian air space? what are they saying about that? well, you know, this source has given us some good information about how this plane traveled. this extends that information and it may reflect the cooperation of neighboring states giving up their military radar records to help confirm the flight course.
most likely yes, unless there was another in between waypoint which i have not heard of. most likely as soon as he hit that way pointpoint it s starting to make that nice slow curve to the west. these are not dramatic turns. is it your information that the plane had turned west and was heading west instead of northeast than it was supposed to, was that different from the report that had been generated 30 minutes earlier at 12:47 a.m.? we don t know what the flight plan was other than it was the traditional route up to beijing, the next report shows it has a new flight path. when the new york times broke information yesterday that the u-turn off the intended flight course had been programmed in by somebody, the plane had been told to do it, the one piece