using rudimentary photographs to document information. in 1942, finland introduced the first modern flight recorder, measuring more than half a dozen data points. the machine was dubbed the matahari, named after the double agent made famous after world war i. a revolutionary new aircraft. reporter: one of the first jet-powered commercial airliners dubbed comet. asked to help in the investigation, he had lost his own father in a similar wreck and was motivated to prevent more. in a 1985 interview with the australian broadcasting corporation, he explained his solution. i kept thinking to myself, if it were pilot error or something which were known to the crew, they may have said something or done something. if only we could recapture those last few seconds.
debris field. remember, that water was very, very choppy. it would take some of the pieces and wash it away and some of it would absolutely it would have broken it up in lots of different areas and it would have just thrown it really all around. reporter: still, that does not necessarily create a wide debris field. for that, a midair explosion is a more likely cause. investigators say when a fuel tank erupted on twa flight 800, the result was three separate debris fields and a tireless search to find all of the parts. weiss says the same thing could happen with malaysia flight if it caught on fire. it could have lasted for a time in the cargo department and gone through the aircraft and things would have come out. you would have had more debris along the longer flight path. reporter: a hard landing or crash into the water is no less
rob, let me start with you. you heard the scenarios that tom foreman laid out. the hard landing or cartwheeled. if you were heading up the search for underwater wreckage, which one would make your job the easiest? which would make it the most difficult? well, the the two that would make it the most easy, i guess, would be the midair explosion or the hard landing because both of those would produce a great deal of debris and debris on the surface is much easier to find than debris underwater. if you look at perhaps the most extreme example of a midair explosion, one of the space shuttles, you know, debris was spread over a great distance, indeed, and that really gives you almost an extreme example of what we would like to find in this search. please go ahead. the harder version is where an aircraft has a very high vertical speed and therefore a
relatively small crash foot print. that makes our job very hard because you have a single point for a debris origination and it makes it easier once it s underwater but on the surface it doesn t leave a lot of debris at all. miles, do you think at this point we can eliminate any of these scenarios? well, i think given the fact that we ve had this extensive search, this midair explosion is hard the scenario that works for that. given, as he puts it, the footprint of the debris field, we would have seen it by now. what makes sense now is a vie velocity impact, sort of straight in, or a sully-style ditching where the hull is preserved. rob, is there a difference in the wreckage layout depending on these two scenarios, one, the pilot flew into the water purposely or versus the plane running out of fuel and then crashes? is there a difference? my understanding is that if the aircraft runs out of fuel,