Chris Cuomo asks the tough questions to newsmakers in Washington and around the world. Chased the plane. So that addresses what Josh Campbell was telling us a second ago. Two f15s chased the plane but were not involved in the crash. So, again, if this is to be believed, the f15s did not shoot that down that play. Lets bring in zack helm. He sat the Seatac Airport right new and joins me on the phone. Zack, i understand you saw this plane while it was airborne . I did not see the plane airborne, but i was this the terminal where it supposedly came out of. Okay. Tell me a little bit what you know, what you saw. Anything you can tell us. Well, i was in the plane, about to take off in the time that it was hijacked. In that very plane . I was not in the plane that was hijacked. I was in another plane in the Alaska Airline industry. And i did not see it take off. But i was told to get out of my plane because if there has been a hijacking. In other words, how long before departure was this . H
it s nighttime. we re seeing flames in the forest. i was just going to ask you what the danger was. and we don t know the specifics of the speed at which the plane was flying, et cetera. but in a crash like that of how far, how wide a perimeter is endangered when a plane crashes like that. well, it depends on the angle of attack. if it s going in more perpendicular, it can vary from even the 737 crash in colorado springs here was only a scatter pattern of about 50 feet wide, 50 by 60. so it could be that small, or it can be turned out across hundreds and hundreds of yards because if it skids across, it will take itself apart. if the engines are under full power, it can pull the wings further apart. so you can get quite a scatter pattern. even though that s not a densely populated area, there are homes out there and that are homes in that area. so the chance that pieces of
debris field is now defined, jeff? well bear in mind of course what we have now is just the beginning of the data that s going to allow us to define the debris field. so you know as the day continues in indonesia, they ll be gathering more material. they ll have a sense of probably more a circular scatter pattern and then they ll do a drift analysis and i presume they ve been dropping buoys and know how the water is moving through this body of water. and they ll be able to narrow down the area where presumably the black boxes will be under water. does a larger debris field mean one thing versus a shorter debris field? does that tell us how the crash happened? or is it more about currents that it tells us? it s both. listen if you have a massive depressurization at altitude or decompression that, you know, blasts the material into a wide area from altitude, then that itself is going to give you a debris field. if you have an intact airplane
audience. more important the distance the the airplanes are flying relative to the crowd. you won t see energy directed towards the crowd if the crowd is over here, you re not going to see the airplane doing an aerobatic maneuver towards the crowd. all that energy has to be directed parallel to the ground with the scatter pattern. it if comes apart in the air, none will head towards the crowd. but in europe the laws are not as strict which might have led to tragic results like ramstien. and in 2002 a crash at an air show in ukraine that killed 77 people. in that case the plane flew too low, crashed on the runway and skidded into the stands. the pilots who were alive were found guilty of negligence.