changed the track of the airplane. the other one disabled a data link system known as acars but only the data stopped flowing. the acars system continued to talk to the satellite network. >> right. i've had some pilots say well, you know, a fire could have broken out and that could have disabled the transponders but if a fire broke out, it wouldn't be delivering signals the next eight hours, right? so we can rule out a fire on the plane? >> well, let's not rule anything out. let's do this. let's say that the likelihood of fire is low because when you look at statistically inflight fires in the fleet history it's usually from a major fire to loss of the airplane is about 17 minutes. for this airplane to fly eight hours would make it such an outlier in the statistically probability that it is not very likely. >> it's not likely that it's a fire. let's also talk about how there -- how we had a payne