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

Los angeles terminal control area. with the knowledge gained from each mid-air collision, change has been on the horizon for decades but the aeromexico crash over cerritos brings it all home. by 1989 all aircraft operating up to 10,000 feet within 30 miles of terminal control areas must be equipped with transponders that convey altitude information. by 1993 all commercial carrier aircraft with ten seats or more operating within u.s. airspace are equipped with traffic alert and collision avoidance systems, tcas. >> the culmination beginning back with piedmont flight 22 going through the psa acc...

>> exactly. had it not been in autopilot, had the pilot been controlling the aircraft it would have had a different flight pattern and it would have gone -- the altitudes may have been different. we don't have a lot of altitude information, but what we do have is the track that it went. so the fact that it stayed exactly on that track, tells us a lot of which mode of autopilot it was in. >> as we wrap up, david, one of the things about this area they're going back to do the underwater search, it hasn't been mapped. there's a couple ships in there working, one is a chinese boat, working to map ...

Believe the plane went? >> right. once it made a left turn, we ascend into an increasing area of murkiness. the data we have becomes more uncertain. we heard earlier in the investigation it went to 45,000 feet. >> exactly right. >> now, we're hearing 39,000. it seems more plausible. but it's hard to know this altitude information has been conflicting and frankly, unreliable. >> talking to mary schiavo earlier saying it shouldn't be. we shouldn't have this many conflicts information. >> the primary radar, the military radar scans up and down and it sees the plane off in the distance and it's ju...

Things that we don't have public access to, and you got a pretty big stack. as for the altitude that's an interesting point. we have cnn reporters reporting the plane was down to 12,000 feet. we had numbers all over the map. is that true or not? if it was going as fast as it was, 400 knots true air speed nautical miles per hour, if that's a case it will burn more case than going slower. we do know that much. >> right. interesting as miles points out we've heard different altitudes. today when they said it was going faster at the beginning of the flight there was no new altitude information. it...

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'...