Page 6 - Wing Tip News Today

Miles an hour. that would have been horrific. >> certainly, if there were life rafts and there have been some sort of landing intact and people fighting for survival, if that were not the case and the plane had landed there and there were no survivors, do you think debris from that would also have been scattered now and be totally nonlocatable? >> well, i dont know if its nonlocatable or not. we go and take a look where the currents were, and the currents are moved a little bit by the wind, but ...

One plane floating in a vast ocean? at the end of march, the search area was roughly 123,000 square miles. which is little bigger than the state of new mexico. now, lets say the plane is a rectangle. nose to tail. its about 209 feet. and wing tip to wing tip, its 200 feet. so the square footage of a 777 is about 41,800 square feet. so to make this simpler, lets scale it down using mathematics and algebra. if the search area was, say, the empire state building, its roughly like finding your walle...

Of flight 447, it was the wing tip that was easier to spot. >> and you saw the objects there the crews pulled out of the water there, and not too much speculation, but does it look too much like an aircraft there? >> well shgs s, it is hard to t. to me, we were initially talking before the break, that it was currency to me, but it could very well be one of the seatback, you know, exit manuals. it is possible. >> that or a magazine, page from a magazine or anything. >> yes, and it which still cou...

Look suspicious enough, and different enough that there might be a chance and we see the objects that are white, orange, red, blue, and all of these have been marked and the ships will try to locate them, because it is one thing to take a picture from the airplane, but another to have them, and have the experts s take a look at them see if there is a connection to the flight 370. we just dont know. >> thank you, will ripley. joining me is aviation analyst miles obrien, and cnn aviation analyst r...

You want to touch nose high. according to the books, you want to land on the crest of any waves. it depends. this is just a rough, general description. the sea state, the winds, this is a very big part. we dont know that. >> it does. clearly, if it is a flat call motion, thats terrific. if you are dealing with 18-foot waves, that is a real problem. if you are going down, you have no choice. the weather is what the weather is. we should point out the miracles on the hudson, the text book example....

Manners despite what his intentions may have been. but i think it was just the s k sequence of events that happened to make that thing disappear off every radar in that area. things were shut off, untrackable, untraceable, no active pinging. too much stuff happened happen stance. it just doesnt make sense. it sounds like it was something that was definitely planned out. >> wait a second. if that is so, then do you discredit this notion that the debris thats been spotted by the satellites is inde...

Black box which would have gone down pretty much immediately and not floated away with the current you have to kind of back everything up. we have to back everything up not one day or two days but literally 14 days from now. we can do it. we have the data. we have the satellite data to say which way was the wind going, which way was the current going. the problem is lets say its a wing tip sticking up out of the water. that means theres a sail area there thats not only going with the current but...

We have the data. we have the satellite data to say which way was the wind going, which way was the current going. the problem is lets say its a wing tip sticking up out of the water. that means theres a sail area there thats not only going with the current but its blowing the opposite direction maybe or with the current because the wind is blowing it, too. if its below the ocean it just sits there and goes with the current and doesnt get blown along. >> fascinating stuff. chad myers, thanks for...

Feet. does that sound consistent to you with something that could be a piece of this plane? >> good morning, john. well, 80 feet would pretty much be one-third of the length of the fuselage of the aircraft, or indeed, from wing tip to wing tip. whether or not those pieces float is probably outside of my sphere of expertise, but they are certainly the sort of size that could conform with a 777 aircraft that had broken up. >> one of the things people are discussing right now is the possibility tha...

Images, by u.s. law. so what the teams down there are likely looking at is a much, much higher resolution image than this. we dont know which particular digital globe facilities did this, but we know some of them have the facility to get down to like 14-inch resolution. which would mean if i put a license plate on top of a car and you took a picture of it, you couldnt read it at 14 inches but you would know what color it is. what they may be looking at may be a lot sharper than this. that may be...