horrendous weather and winds and rain and that sort of thing and lightning? is it possible that the tubes experienced a failure? they are air sensors that every plane has. the trouble is on the airbus, they have been known to ice over in the past. that happened on air france 447. they iced over and gave bad data to the computers. the computers froze and then the pilots unfortunately went into a series of mistakes that brought the plane down. at this moment, clearly they are going to be looking at what happened to the air speed sensors. tom costello, great reporting. thank you so much. michael is the former chief of staff at the faa and joins me now. following up on that how do we learn here we are again. we didn t have cameras in the cockpit. didn t have the radar coverage. no actions have been taken.
own national standard. that s right. that s the real hard standard but the best standard would be to get some international standard because we re not seeing planes being lost over des moines or detroit. what we re seeing is planes being lost in other areas of the world where they don t have the kind of radar coverage that we have that s land based over the u.s. but getting this international standard is a real challenge because when you go to an organization like the international civil aviation organization you got to get agreement of multiple countries, and that s not just countries like the u.s. or france. it s african countries, south american countries, everyone. do you agree, david, that unless there s some sort of push for actual regulation airlines won t do it on their own? i think we have seen airlines lead with technology in certain situations. like early adoption of enhanced ground proximity warning systems or things like that but really what you re trying to get is n
that uses the ground stations also. obviously it wasn t utilized in the part of the world that we lost mh-370 in. but all this thing is going to do is being able to track the airplane and maybe get a more precise location if we have another issue. is the infrastructure in place to be able to mandate that if governments were to choose to do so? yeah, i think so. but to clarify some mythology here airplanes are attract over the oceans we don t have radar coverage like we do over most land areas. but we re still in contact with company staff on the ground. that s by regulation. we re always able to contact somebody. we re not flying blind across the ocean for hours at a time. but over the oceans in certain areas, when you re transmitting data as to your position and speed and altitude it sometimes
like this can still happen. this should be easier than the malaysia airlines mystery to solve and yet so far no sign of this plane. absolutely. it should be easier and there s really no excuse in this day and age why we don t have the technology that s out there and available in the works being installed on these aircraft. we should know where these aircraft are real time and not just be relying on a pinger that may be heard for two miles or dead after 30 days. that s the pinger that goes off if the plane is in the water. but what about the transponder? they re following the plane through the air via the transponder. why isn t it doing more to tell them where this aircraft is? hopefully it will. it s generally used to keep aircraft separate. if you re not in radar coverage at the time, you won t get a good return. there hopefully is military radar out there that we can dig up and get more returns. but the transponder is not a
soucie. mary, what are the different geographic features of where these planes may have gone down? well, in this area, as is now that two have gone missing there, before that there was another one missing in the java sea for a number of months and it was found after wreckage washed up on the shore and that was a few years back. it s the geography that is technically challenging because you have vast open areas of water and then you have small islands, literally thousands of them all over. so it s flying across the united states you don t have vast areas where you could get lost and, of course, the entire united states is very well covered with radar. so the geography, just as you said, also adds to the problem of being lost and then you have completing jurisdictions. you have radar coverage from one country, you know, they don t admit to overlapping but of course it does and then you have