that we got, and looking at the manifest, a lot of these bookings were made in may 2014. so eight or nine months before the actual flight took place. so i do think it s a technicality. although it will become a rather interesting technicality, possibly from an insurance point of view. all right. i want to ask you about that, tom. about the same thing. in terms of what we re learning about this, that this flight just should not have been in the air. but the route obviously now is suspended. but when you think about if this flight wasn t permitted to be there, the failure on many levels. i mean, people got on the plane. they got through security. and as geoffrey was saying, it was open to book. how does that happen? well, i think the only issue i can see with this is whether or not it wasn t supposed to be in the air on sundays. because there were other airl e
too, andrew, about this. before in the wall street journal, that this flight wasn t even permitted to take that route on that very day. what do you know about that? yeah, that s right. airasia indonesian, that is the subsidiary of that plane was not authorized to fly that plane between surabaya and singapore. it is approved but only four days a wakeek. the ministry said it s going to investigate the airport authority itself to find out why that plane could take off without approval. and it s also investigating the department of transportation. that the director general s department within that. so it s a wide-ranging investigation. what we ve heard from airasia indonesia so far, christi, is they say they re going to help with the investigation and not
sunday. they said the flights were only permissible on mondays, tuesdays, thursdays and saturdays. that s the route the doomed flight took here when it went down on sunday. the airline says it will cooperate with the probe by indonesian authorities. joining me on the phone. former pilot alastair rosenschein. alastair, first, let s talk about these two pieces of debris. is there anything that can be gleaned about this as to the size of this as it relates to narrowing this search? well, the first thing that one can glean from it, any large parts of the aircraft that are detached from the rest of the aircraft, indicate the high impact well, contact with the sea. so that would indicate the aircraft was descending at a high rate. or that if it was an attempt at control of the aircraft, it was an unsuccessful one.
the black boxes will be there. the voice, the data recorders. also, there will be expected many, many bodies still trapped within cabin. so that is the grim assessment. and that s a working assumption of the investigators. as i said, terrible conditions on the site, even though it s the most sophisticated vessels and assets out there. it s actually getting in to see eyes on what is actually down there. it s so frustrating. i m sure. i want to ask you, though, about these new questions this morning as to why flight 8501 was flying the route specifically on a sunday. because as we understand it, according to the wall street journal, that were not permitted to do so, to fly this route on this sunday. what do you know about the investigation? well, the ministry of transportation in indonesia has clearly said they weren t allowed to fly on sunday. it was clear that airasia did have an license to fly between
is that the primary consideration? is that possibly why airasia indonesia was not licensed to fly on a sunday? yes, as a matter of fact they did have authority to fly this route until just recently, last month. at that point they were supposed to restrict that flight through march. this indicates a couple things, at a lot of levels. the airline itself didn t return the route which is their responsibility to do that. the other thing is that the overseeing authority allowed them to continue to fly even though they hadn t which indicates there is a lack of oversight as to over the airline which they do have a history of, iko has done several attempts to work with indonesia to change the way they do their oversight systems. this is a developing problem with indonesia and they have been working on trying to change that. it s slow in coming and iko is aware and they have been investigating that. developing challenge as this