Altitude Data News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

>> thank you. >> a few things we should wade through here. first off, the search coordinator angus houston discounting radar equipment that indicated these altitude dips, something we talked about right here on cnn. the plane went up. it went down. you have said from the beginning, if i go back through my mental hard drive, had you said from the beginning that the altitude data was an assumption. is that primary radar even reliable for determining altitude? >> not for altitude, no, not for altitude, mike clampt it's really designed to tell you where the aircraft is, what direction it's going a...

Point. we know the cyclone is going on there. we know why it disrupted the search. obviously anything that's on the surface still and that's very unlikely, there's less chance now because the cyclone will blow it around. i mean, that's just a point of information. so that cyclone is going on. they're going to continue searching. and that really leaves us with this issue that we started with. they didn't answer the questions of the families but they do put out this useless information about the altitude of the plane. we think it is now 39. they don't know it's at 39 any better than they knew it...

Accurate. now we've got this third set of data. i think really what's behind it is they don't have good altitude data and i think we will find as the investigation goes on that some of the persons who were supposed to be monitoring the radar were asleep at the switch. i think they simply don't have it and are trying to reconstruct it. >> shawn, quick last word. >> yeah. i agree with mary 100%. here's the deal. we talked about this three weeks ago. these data points are very, very suspect, right? so placing all of our hopes an all of our goals predicated on those data points, as we said weeks a...

Another set of altitude data coming out. making sure i had this correct this time of around. in the course of a typical crash investigation, does altitude and these kind of basic facts, it seems, does it change this much? >> no, it does not. and the reason it doesn't, in most investigations you do have a couple things that apparently are missing here. one is you have reliable air traffic control data. and at a minimum, you have the air traffic controllers voices on a air traffic control transcript or tape that's released. in the united states, that's public. that's released. you can get the ir...

Mary, when you take into account everything we've heard, including some of the new information that we have, which is the plane after the turn went up to 39,000 feet within its safe operating range and went down to 4,000 feet, which theoretically would have been able to avoid oncoming traffic, but possibly do you think could have been this whole thing could have been mechanical? >> certainly, and what we don't know is much greater than what we do know, and by the way, all that altitude data is highly suspect. remember, first of all, they had it wildly fluctuating from 45,000, down to skirting ...