Page 5 - Ghost Plane News Today

Im really fascinated, and we talked about it at the top of the program, this partial attempt at a hand shake. lets zero in a little bit more what could have possibly caused that. do you believe the idea that perhaps as the plane went into the water, it might have caused a surge that would have attempted this partial hand shake, anything to that? >> surge is a wide term, but when i think of a surge, youre talking about an electrical supply difference, which in my mind wouldnt have caused that but...

You pass out, passengers pass out. airplanes got plenty of fuel. its on a predemmtermined cours. it will now fly for hours until eventually it runs out of fuel. thats the scenario. we dont know if it really happened that way. many speculate it could have. >> miles obrien, the plane did make several turns. so would that be possible under an auto pilot scenario? >> you would have to put in the way-points for those turns. that given the scenario you just laid out is highly unlikely. what that pilot...

They watched the engines flame out on both sides and watched it go into the mountainside. that was on autopilot that. is an example of what would have happened. >> martin savidge, if a plane runs out of fuel, as is believed happened here, how does a plane this size enter the water? are there different scenarios? is it a glide down? >> reporter: these are things weve been trying to simulate. put it into neutral, if you will, and well show you. we cant shut the engines off, the simulator doesnt al...

But it took putting the plane back together, all 2 million pieces of it, to figure that out. bottom line, the so-called black boxes arent perfect. and theyre not black, either. theyre usually orange. on an airplane theyre tucked inside an insulated case and surrounded by stainless steel. theyre built to withstand temperatures as high as 2,000 degrees fahrenheit and catastrophic impact. after twa flight 800 went down in july 1996, just 12 minutes after takeoff from new yorks jfk airport, the plan...

Connect again at 8:19. this would suggest the plane stayed in the air longer, potentially making already massive search area even larger. thats the significance. the other breaking news, a high tech navy sense or for picking up pings from the planes black boxes landed in perth a short time ago but will take several sailing days to get into position and cant do its job until the debris field itself is located. >> i heard it described earlier today were not trying to find the needle in the haystac...

The plane is designed to be level and controlled and to make a slow descent and we are doing that. now, again, its a simulator, so of course the engines, its possible one would flame out after the other. mitchell believes that one engine would compensate automatically for that, right? >> yeah. we have a compensator in this aircraft, the 777. so yes. in an event of an emergency, im not sure if you had electrical power if that would happen. but any airplane, big or small, most of the time its goin...

The debris, then they can use it. >> david, what kind of formal pressure does the chinese government continue to try to exert against malaysia? >> there has been no love lost in this issue with the plane going down and the chinese, even the official chinese foreign ministry saying they want more evidence, as well. so through the days as this drags on, the chinese state media has put out very pointed editorials, at one point saying the malaysians at best showing a dereliction of duty. thats fed i...

Two additional turns. one sends them up to the northwest, the other one sends them down to the south to the area where were searching. so in the heat of that battle as it were, would they have put in extra waypoints or stored waypoints? even those stored waypoints didnt make any sense or take him to an airport close by. unfortunately thats where this theory tend to fall down. there must have been something else going on. >> and richard, as you look at the map and you and i were looking at it, it...

Back to a point you made earlier. its also possible that even the impact of the plane could have caused this ping? >> yeah. its hard to say for sure, of course. but theres any number of scenarios you could come up with that would sort of reactivate that box in some way to have it try to communicate with that satellite. whatever it was it was probably some sort of power surge. what would cause that? i think the first suspect would be the flame out of the engine. thats not going to be the exact sp...

Away. thats why the box has to be so big to accommodate all these possibilities. and yet even as it has that size, they try to cut it down a step at a time to increase the probability theyll find this plane. >> testimoom, thank you very mu. thats why this news tonight is so significant, because it does help try to focus the area of the search if in fact the attempt at a hand shake is when one of the last engines went out, or perhaps when it went into the water. we want to look at the tools that ...