Surface Ceiling News Today

That could override the pilots actual intent. what is your assessment of what could have happened base on the information we have? >> fly by wires, essentially what that means is the pilot puts in control input and those dont go directly to the control surfaces. rather they go to a computer which decides she put in this much input this is how im going flight controls. this aircraft limits what you can do because its a system that limits allowing you to pull too many gs or fly too high, for examp...

They were up too high. the aircraft was heavy. it was only about an hour into its flight. it would be the equivalent of flying from new york to atlanta and this happening around richmond. so, they were still heavy. they were up high. right near the surface ceiling with all the violence. these thunderstorms are reported with tops of 50,000. thats breaking the troposphere which means they are violent storms. each one of them are packing enough energy of a nuclear weapon. they are masses forces tha...

>> the pilot can just put that in any mode and actually fly outside that area. whats not clear to me is was the airplane at a low altitude, avoiding the radar where at a low altitude youd rather be closer to land and avoiding radar or was it at altitude and further away from land? >> carleen, about the idea that they ive been so focused the pilot, although they have background checked all the passengers as i understand it and the other co-pilot, but you envision more a scenario where it was not ...

Eliminate that anderson, im still -- theres pieces of the puzzle that are baffling to me. this is above my pay grade as far as being a pilot is concerned with reference to the data. have you to take it as gospel. you have some really smart folks. >> theres obviously still so much we do not know, so many pieces of this that are yet to be filled in? >> yeah, the conflicting data, way back last week, we got the airplane climbing to 45,000 feet above its surface ceiling. going different levels. now ...

Above its surface ceiling then dropped at a rapid rate to another altitude. and there are all kinds of reports that the airplane turned one way and then back another way and then another way. its pretty obvious somebody was in there doing something. was there a fight going on in the cockpit? was that creating this kind of crazy flying? when they did finally finish all this up and down and everything else and the airplane was flying relatively smoothly, was there somebody at the controls that was...

Theyre saying a plane went up to 2,000 feet above the surface ceiling of the airplane then went down and up again. the other thing is, if the airplanes reporting systems, its transponder and everything was compromised, how was that information derived in the first place? how was the malaysian military folks -- >> right. >> -- able to give you the information with a high degree of certainty? i think thats one of the big parts of the problem is that we have all these silos of information that are ...

Then going down to 23,000, then back up to 30,000, then flying for several hours. what do you make of that? >> well, its interesting from an aerodynamic standpoint. the surface ceiling of the airplane is 41,500. if the plane is up at 45,000 feet, the margin between overspeeding the aircraft getting into whats sometimes called mach tuck going way too fast for the airplane and stalling the airplane becomes very, very small. youre up there in a very dangerous situation. the airplane is likely to co...