Time. Good evening. Breaking news helicopter crews are beginning to air lift the remains of the 150 people lost when that german airliner crashed into the mountains. This is as the mystery. Investigators scrambling to analyze the cockpit recorder. We know voices can be heard on the recorder. What caused the plane to plunge for ten minutes without a distress call is unclear. French officials will not rule out terrorism and we are learning the fbi is scouring the planes passenger list. Covering the story from every angle tonight in washington. We begin with nic robertson. What are you learning about the efforts to retrieve the remains of the people who lost their lives . Reporter very hard area for the helicopters to get into. They have been wenching those recovery teams in. These are the first details were beginning to get that some of the victims remains have been recovered from the mountainside. Not clear how many people have been recovered so far. Were learning details from investigators as well. The mystery surrounding the crash only deepened today as french investigators reveal new details of flight 9525s final moments. 10 30 a. M. Local time roughly 29 minutes after take off, the plane crosses close to the french coast. Someone in the cockpit radios air traffic control. The last Message Broadcast from the aircraft to the control center in which it was in contact was routine. Reporter 10 31, roughly a minute later, the plane begins its dissent. Investigators say it dropped 2,000 feet the first minute. 8,000 feet after three. Almost 14,000 within five minutes and that dissent even longer than previously reported. The descent lasts roughly ten minutes, a bit less. The last altitude recorded by radar is a bit more than 6,000 feet. Reporter 10 41 a. M. Just ten minutes after the routine contact, the plane disappears from radar and plows into the mountainside. Among the many questions, what happened during the minute between the routine communication and the descent. Why was there no distress call from the cockpit in. I think they were incapacitated or for some reason to respond and control the plane. For what the plane did in the final few minutes, i dont think a conscious pilot was doing it. Reporter what could have caused the pilots to lose consciousness . Two of the theory rapid decompression or a fire in the cockpit. One official speaking to the New York Times refuses to rule out terrorism saying we dont have any evidence that points to a technical explanation. We have to consider the possibility of deliberate human responsibility. Another said its not considered the most likely explanation for the wreck. A little more than 60 years ago another airliner crashed into these alps killing all on board. The crash site less than a mile from flight 9525. Reporter it will be in about seven hours daylight here. Thats when helicopters will begin flying. Well see some of the families of the victims arriving here searching for some answers and some solace too. Thank you very much. At any moment investigators could be hearing the pilots final words. What they were before flight crashed into the french alps. They are working every moment night and day to figure out what could be heard. What do they need to get from the black box . What must they get . They must hear the sounds in the dockcockpit. They will be listening to everything from background noise to alarms that may be going off to the pilots conversation. They will help answer the question of what was happening in the moment leading up to the crash. Theyll listen to this information in taemgeams of six. Theyll listen to the stress in the voice, if there is any. Even be listening if theres an intrudesr in the dockcockpit or the sound of explosion. Perhaps they may hear nothing. That could mean something as well. Could mean the pilots were incapacitated. We will never hear what ever is on the cockpit voice recorder because they do not release that. We know they will reveal what they heard on the recorders. They are still at this point looking for the flight data recorder which is quite different. That would tell them whats happening with the plane from second to second. Were all of the planes systems functioning or were they not. Erin. Thank you very much. I know theyre trying to get the data recorder. They found the casing but not the actual recorder itself. Right now they have the crucial voice recorder. A panel of experts will be with us through the hour. Okay. Great to have all of you with us. John let me start with you. Right now officials are going through the voice file that renee is talking about. Thats what they have. They have one track. Multiple tracks came in. They have one track they can hear at this time. What are they listening for . They would be listening for any clue especially with respect to the exchange for the pilots. Hopefully theyll have some verbiage between the pilots. If, in fact, it was a voluntary thing. David whats interesting is theyll never put the audio out but put out a transcript and say what was said. We did hear today was they have heard voices but they arent telling us what the voices said. That wont be released until its cleared of any criminal investigation or anything going on. Thats private and it will never be released even in transcript at that point. However, having that Information Available is incredibly important. You can locate where the sound came from as well. You think about that. When i only have one track, what does that mean im missing . There are other inputs. One track is only one channel of sound. One microphone. Thats going to say there was a switch flipped. Thats all youll get from that. If you have colocated microphones you can say this had a higher volume than did this other microphone. You can pinpoint which switch was pushed or the general vicinity. If theres only one channel available, doesnt mean they dont have more. He just said at this point it was damaged. They could retriever others. Richard, if the conversation doesnt solve the mystery here then youll need the other tracks . If theres a conversation between at all. At all. Id be astonished if there was a conversation during the eight minutes. If youve got two pilots and you can hear them talking and you dont manage to work out whats happening theres something very serious. The issue is its an incapacitation. It does mean at some point they were not incapacitated. To understanding the depth, not only the dynamics between the pilots but what caused what. Youre not there yet but youre a long way towards it. You really are. Anthony, they said today, the ceo said hes very confident theyll get the second the data recorder which is very important. They found the casing. They didnt find the data recorder but he thinks theyll find it and be able to listen to it. Thank goodness these are digital recorders. These are the new generation recorders. They are more survivable even if its out of its case. Were very hopeful that the data will still be preserved. If its been damaged in in way, as part of my team and my company, we have a series of forensic engineers that can retrieve data from very damaged equipment even water damaged equipment. What is the information theyll get off of that . That would have the pressurization every second as one example. It would. Theres thousands of parameters. They do two things. They not only tell you what the position of the control was but it tells you if the control up rated normally. If youre trying to lift or raise the tail you pull back and you say im going to go down or up it tells back there, it has a sensor that tells you where your elevator went. It also confirm that the movements the pilot made were carried out by the aircraft. Right. Will it be able to tell us the crucial thing. Say the pilot started the decan she not descent, it will say whether the pilot kept going. This is one of the things thats interesting. Its a different philosophy. Youre always on autopilot because youre flying a computer. When youre controlling the airplane and asking the computer to do something and it decides how to do it. Theres way to cut those off and go to alternate and form of law as they call it direct that you can fly the airplane directly. Youre always on there. That means if you push the side stick controller and start a descent, if you dont touch it its going to keep on until it hits something or Warning System sees something ahead. Which oddly it didnt see in this case. Thanks to all of you. Stay with us next fire decompression, catastrophic i didnt mean to failure. If it doesnt intentional, and well talk about that later, what did bring down flight 9525. Officials are not ruling out terrorism. The breaking news the military charges beau bergdahl with desertion. For the first time beau bergdahl in his own words. Plap 80 of the poor in africa are rural farmers. 96 of them are doing rainfed agriculture. Theyre all competing with each other; theyre all making very low margins making enough to survive but not enough to get out of poverty. So kickstart designs low cost irrigation pumps enabling them to grow high value crops throughout the year so you can make a lot of money. Its all very well to have a whole lot of small innovations but unless we can scale it up enough to where we are talking about millions of farmers, were not going to solve their biggest challenge. 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They say they will get the data recorder. They dont have it yet. What are they looking at . One of the things is how that compares to other accidents that they know about where they know why a plane went down. For example, they might look at Something Like alaska air. The alaska air crash was a big mechanical failure. There was a large thing called a gateway and it took away the how the plane was pitching up and down. Look at what happened with that flight. As they fought to control the plane you could see it pitching up and down until finally they reached to point where they couldnt control it anymore. It plunged some 18,000 feet in a few seconds. Everyone passed away. They were dealing with an evolving emergency. Tried to make an emergency landing. Look at their flight pattern. This looks like people struggling with the plane that wont do what they want it to. They ran out of time. They hit the water and also everyone died. This was a greek plane where they did have the problem of hypoxia. They have a pressure leak. Everyone in the plane passed out according to investigators and the plane flew on autopilot for some time running out of fuel and coming into the ground. Look at that pattern. Very different. Its sort of a smooth line down to where it struck and everyone was lost there. That is the type of thing theyre looking for. They are look at different wrecks where they know the cause to say what did it look like in the final minutes. If you take the german wings flights that we know against those three lines, does it measure up against the helios one. If you put that one in there you can see it looks a lot like that one. Does that mean this was an automated flight to the ground . Doesnt necessarily mean it but it doesnt take it off the table either. It doesnt look a lot like for example, the alaska air flight with the catastrophic failure. It looks like something else. They will consider all of that against the recording, erin. They hear voices after its de descending then that will tell them. Thank you. Now our experts back with us. As he points out it looks like a depressurization thats a line on a chart. Its not all the back up data. Its a realistic isistic possibility as is every other possibility. Its too soon to speculate. I cant see any way in which any of us here tonight can hang our hats on a particular cause. I think the nature of this incident is so different, its so worrying. Its so disturbing because of the external factors that you cant say id go for one or the other. Which is very terrifying and why its so important. At least they have the voice data recorder. Theyll have some kind of information. Anthony, on the issue of depressurization. How could that have happened . It could be insidious depressurization. In other words, a slow depressurization thats almost imperceptible but there should be cockpit audible warnings to warn the pilots against there. There could be explosive decompression as a result of some structural failure of the aircraft. Everything flies around thats not tied down. It physically feels like its punched. Its a physical event. If thats happened we expect the aircraft to have defuated deviated left to right. This is indication of some Software Failure in which there was an uncommanded control descent or perhaps incapacitation of some type for some reason whether through criminal intent by a crew member or passenger or by some other means, mechanical event or cascading series of mechanical failures. Richard is right. The issue of the fact this plane descended steadily by not out of control. Would depressurization fit with that. If it happened slowly maybe they wouldnt notice it. What would explain a descent that doesnt stop or move . When you put a command into this aircraft its going to go where you tell it to go by that command. When you let go it will continue on that flight path. Once you start it will go until you physically move it somewhere else . Exactly. This could be done in two different ways. If it was accidental pushed eded forward and released it would continue on that flight path down. Its not stable enough to say its autopilot though in my opinion it appears there was some drift. It could be explained by a different mode of the autopilot system. If the goal was to maintain power or speed or altitude those all change. John besides the pressure youre talking about mechanical failure, you think fire is a possibility. How come . I thought it was at first. The idea was based on the supposition they changed course and they did and that was the precursor to the emergency descent. Im getting more and more convinced we are dealing with an incapacitation. Youre going to see a little variance in there. Its unclear whether the autoflight system was interrupted by human or not. I dont see any evidence that this is an airplane doing what its been told to do. That tells me that something happened at the very top. That initial course change that i thought was in the last 36 hours was a purposeful thing, apparently it was purple only in terms of putting the next weight in the airplane. Thats interesting as well. Thanks to all of you. Youre not going anywhere. Well keep talking about this. The last ten minutes of that flight flying directly into a mountainside without a single distress call. What do we know about the two men sitting there at the controls . Well tell you everything we know and were learning there were three americans on board that plane including a virginia mom and her daughter. Their story ahead. Major heres our new trainer ensure active heart health. Heart i maximize good stuff like my potassium and phytosterols which may help lower cholesterol. New ensure active heart Health Supports your heart and body so you stay active and strong. Ensure, take life in. We love our smartphones. And now telcos using hp Big Data Solutions are feeling the love, too. By offering things like onthespot data upgrades an idea that reduced overcharge complaints by 98 . No matter how fast your Business Needs to adapt if hp Big Data Solutions can keep wireless customers smiling, imagine what they can do for yours. Make it matter. This is what is left of that black box and this is the condition its in after hitting the mountain. This is the most crucial piece of evidence they have. Right now very little is known about those two people. They were at the controls. Fred is outfront tonight where flight 9525 was headed. Fred today we did learn some new information about the captain, right. Reporter yeah it was very little but it was a little bit of something. We didnt learn the names of the captain or copilot. We did learn from the press conference that was held today by the ceo of lufthansa and german wings that the captain was an experienced man. He had ten years flying experience. All of them also he had about 6,000 flying hours on this particular make of aircraft. He had been flying it for a long time. We know the amount of a320 pilots in germany its a close knit community. There arent many of them around which is one of the reasons why so many of the pilots felt they were unfit to fly and had been turning down assignments from the german wings company. The company says that its very well aware of and something they do understand. Fred, we dont know much about the pilot but you know a little bit. We know even less about the copilot. Reporter yeah. Even less about the copilot. Absolutely right. It was questioned asked today after the press Conference Held by the two ceos. The only thing that the ceo said is these were two very experienced lufthansa pilots. Its not must have information. It is Something Interesting in there in the fact he said these were two lufthansa pilots. They are trying to avoid anyone saying this crash happened because this was a budget airlines. Theyre saying these were full on pilots and had nothing to do with the fact this was a german wings flight. Therefore, thats one of the things they are putting forward. Its interesting because these are the same company. If youre a lufthansa pilot you can choose to fly for lufthansa or german wings. Thats one of the things the ceo is trying to say, trying to rule out this had anything to do with the fact this wadss a budget airline. All right. Fred thank you very much. A lot of Important Information in there. They are paid the same trained the same as a full lufthansa pilot, which is one of the best airlines in the world. He said they were two experienced and trained pilots. Thats it. We dont know anything about the copilot. For you that raises some red flags. A little bit. The one thing is if theres Hidden Information and my investigations the only time i would hold that information back is if there was some other k