Page 2 - Passenger Section News Today

The cab. the engineer and a conductor who was getting experience and familiarizing himself with the territory. the actual conductor, as there is one on every train, was in the actual passenger section at the time of the accident. >> reporter: its hard to know what all of this means. we are told by ntsb in the same news conference that the engineer is allowed to control the train. but we did also learn that the engineer, the crew, didnt hit the emergency brakes, john. the emergency brakes were au...

Looking at whether the engineer may have been distracted, as you said. they say the emergency brake activated automatically when the train, which youll recall was traveling 50 miles over the speed limit, jumped the tracks. they say the engineer did not activate it manually nor was he alone in the locomotive. >> there were two people in the cab. the engineer and a conductor who was getting experienced and familiarizing himself with the territory. the actual conductor, as there is one on every tra...

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....

Dropping at over 20 feet per minute. were about selaskboulaska sell. and so the plane would be ripping apart. >> were going so fast. the fact that after that, the reportedly, the plane somehow levels off, thats whats really hard to believe and then to even try to contemplate whats going on back in the passenger section. the g-forces, the extreme sensations theyd have, it could almost be lethal for the passengers back there. and then we start talking about other factors, "the wall street journal"...

>> reporter: they need to see -- they need to keep this plane in place with the wreckage trail in place. they are looking at a number of factors. they will look at the weather which many -- there were just 8 miles per hour winds. they are going to look at the airport conditions. the landing instrument system for the run way has been off since june 1 for run way construction. they want to know if that played any role in it because that helps guide pilots into landing in the run way. they want to ...

>>shepard: this is "studio b" and it is the bottom of the hour. an hour from now officials from the f.a.a. are expected to speak about fridays midair rupture in the fuselage of a southwest airlines jet. and by rupture we mean a 5 hole in the thing in the passenger section. see it there? the airplane now, the company is inspecting dodds of jets african telling dozens of flights. and now we have passengers from southwest 812. you are sitting below the thing, is that right? >> we were right below i...

Surface, any debris whether personal effects or even pieces of the plane itself. what they need to do is map out the exact location of where this plane is sitting and how many pieces on the floor of the sea there, where are the engines, what are the conditions of the engines, where is the passenger section, where is the cockpit, what about the tail all of that will be mapped now a very thorough investigation and analysis and it may be some time before we know what truly brought this plane down. ...