Page 15 - Automatic Pilot News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

We did video recreations of the flight. in that case they would take the nose up, try to throw them to the back, and try to throw them off balance and rock it back and force. that is the only thing that struck me like terrorism. everything else is basically six or seven pings. and pings don't tell me terrorists. pings say something is wrong if that is all you have. but there is like i said -- >> what about the transponder being turned off? that is something the pilot can do manually? >> no, we don't know if the transponder was turned off. we know we got no more signals from the transponder. th...

Flying. it is 90 minutes later they realize the plane is missing because it never showed up in chinese air space. it is well off course, pretty well determined, right? >> and no pilot would go off course without enunciating that it went off course. that captain was not just 18,000 hours but a training can't and certified by their government to give instruction and testing. if they had an emergency, which never was enunciated, if they had a problem they would have said something. remember, the key factors, you're going to aviate, navigate and communicate. those are the tenets that you fly by. >...

Automatic pilot it will fly straight to its destination. the transponder usually -- this is not a plane known for its mechanical failure. the track record is impeccable. and then it gets off course then the changes in altitude. that is not going to happen on a flight that is on automatic pilot. is it? >> right, but we're trianulating. we don't really know what happened. we have the -- >> again if it is on automatic pilot. the motion on the airplane, or -- >> sean, the problems we don't yet know that. all we're dealing with is a plane that was not trying to communicate, again that is the import...

So is it plausible, is it possible, that a pilot could convey this, all right, good night, and not even know that this acars, the aircraft communications addressing and reporting system, has been disabled? does it have to be the pilot that actually disables that system? >> no. i mean, the system could fail for any number of reasons, however i can't think of a way the system would fail. say an electrical fire. electrical problem. that's going to fail the acars first, the transponder second, and the pilot not know that, that's going on, and the pilot would not give a normal -- i'd have to actual...

These reports today? >> well, sean, i am digging on the reports that the pilot may have deliberately taken the plane off course. now, that is a reuters course, what it says basically is that the plane looked like it was flying on an aviation corridor. i'm putting up a map, the aviation map, we have this. this is an aviation chart, you can see all the lines and then the dots. those are way points. they help to define the different navigation routes. >> this would almost be like a highway in the sky? in other words, planes fly particular paths and then they follow the same paths and replay infor...