Page 2 - Altitude Data News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

>> [ inaudible question ] >> as a understand it, the speed has been determined on the basis of the pinks that happened over a period of time. we don't know what was happening between each one. we don't have any altitude data. >> [ inaudible question ] >> altitude this impacted the speed because i am getting very technical here but fundamentally, if you are at high altitude, your ground speed increases quite dramatically. if you come down to a low level,

Altitude data that we're getting with a lot of caution. a number of reasons for that, don. the first one is that the evidence we have so far suggests the transformer was turned off or the transponder was off. there is a number of reasons that could happen, i won't go into that now. the bottom line is the transponder gives you position, attitude, speed and information. if that was off, you won't get altitude information from primary radar. primary radar drops off at 125 miles off the coast anyway. secondly, surveillance radar with the transponder drops off at 200 miles. my question on how they'...

Quickly. it's highly unlikely that a plane would turn in such a dramatic difference from the intended flight path and continue on a route that's very, very different than the intended one. >> there's some talk about altitude data being fed through these sort of automated update systems. that altitude data seems to fluctuate wildly and has been discounted by some of the folks in the reporting i've read. one of the data points is that the plane at one point climbed to an altitude of 45,000 feet which is above essentially the cap on how high you're supposed to take that plane. what do you make of...

Does that give any indication to what happened or could that just be a separate mechanical failure? >> that's what investigators are going to look at. they're going to want to see where that exact transponder failure occurred and whether or not there was actual radar coverage in that particular area. because the transponder provides a discreet code. it provides altitude information and ground speed. if the rest of the radar data after that is just what we call a skin paint where you're not getting an actual altitude, you're just getting a track of the airplane until radar coverage is fwoen or ...

An hour after the flight, which we think is possibly an hour before total contact was lost. does that give any indication to what happened, or could that just be a separate mechanical failure? >> that's what investigators are going to look at. they're going to want to see where that exact transponder failure occurred and whether or not there was actual radar coverage in that particular area because the transponder provides a discreet code. it provides altitude information and ground speed. if the rest of the radar data after that is just what we call a skin paint where you're not getting an ac...