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Speed was 137 knots. And the question was whether or not we had the lowest speed that the crew achieved. I will tell you that the speed was significantly below 137 knots and we are not talking about a few knots. We still have to corroborate some information. This was a preliminary read. The 137 knots came from the crew conversation about their approach speed. We need to take a closer look at the raw data on the Flight Data Recorder as well as corroborate that with radar and air traffic information to make sure that we have a very precise speed. Again, we are not talking about a few knots here ...

Aircraft. a database maintained by the federal government reveals several concerns here. one of them, quote, the flight manual is inadequate and almost criminally insufficient. still, the faa is standing by its decision to keep the jets in the air in the u.s., as is boeing, as is a number of airlines that use these jets. look at this. this is the live radar tracker for this specific type of jet, showing all of them over north and central america. pretty striking there. cnn aviation analyst justin green is the former president of the international air and transportation safety bar association a...

Throttles failed. explain exactly what may have happened here. what are they referencing? >> well, they're referencing the auto pilot was probably engaged. i read these statements. they're taken, unfortunately, a lot of them out of context and i would have to read the whole thing, because i've done this myself as a pilot. but the bottom line is the autopilot would be connected, which would take over the function of both the throttles themselves and the pitch and roll of the aircraft in its navigation. so that's essentially where it is. but where they're going with this is there was some kind o...

It has a speed limit capability built into it as kit referred to it. i think something has been lost in translation here. he was changing the rate of descent probably trying to point the nose at a mountain. the aircraft it was flying on auto throttles, would have maintained something less to or up to the maximum allowed speed. he was increasing his rate of descent. do you want to make it impossible for a pilot to do that? that's dangerous. if you have some rapid need to get down to a lower altitude a decompression or fire you want the pilot to be able to do that. the same goes for this inabili...

Knots. and when it gets to 12,000 feet it's going to level off on that heading and the throttles are going to come up and that airplane is going to hold 275 knots or whatever that heading is set until it runs out of gas if no one intervenes. that may explain at the high powered setting this they were going faster than 250. if he used flch to do an emergency descent, that filter flight level change, that gets you down the very fastest. the auto throttles pull them back to idle. at 12,000 fight the auto idles will come back up and fly at 12,000 feet. >> this is fascinating i think and very signi...