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And anything else that would have an input to telling us exactly what happened. it will corroborate what went on in the cockpit as far as the controls and the engine the altitude all of the control surfaces and tell us exactly where and what that plane was doing while he was manipulating the controls. >> paul that plane hit the mountain at 400 miles per hour or faster. would that necessarily damage the second black box to the point where we couldn't extract information? >> well hopefully not. the actual data is on chips, small chips, just an inch or less on each edge. they are well protected w...

That could override the pilot's actual intent. what is your assessment of what could have happened base on the information we have? >> fly by wires, essentially what that means is the pilot puts in control input and those don't go directly to the control surfaces. rather they go to a computer which decides she put in this much input this is how i'm going flight controls. this aircraft limits what you can do because it's a system that limits allowing you to pull too many g's or fly too high, for example, based on your fuel, your loading and other things. in this particular case maria was saying...

Recorder, don't have answers for us, there's going to be tremendous pressure to bring up significant parts of the aircraft. and that will be some task. >> what would jeopardize that message, a corrosion issue or simply because of the way in which the material is recorded over itself? >> well, let's assume that the black boxes are fine and intact and they work fine. the cockpit voice recorder captures the last two hours on a loop. this was a seven-hour flight and whatever happened the event which caused it to turn around is most likely not captured on that cockpit voice recorder unless somebody...

Decompression. one is with a maintenance crew forget to turn back on the automatic pressurization. another is from a crack in the fuselage. it's possible. at that point, you would assume if everyone else perished, except for the pilot, presumably there was lack of control surfaces, too. otherwise he would have taken the plane home and delivered the loved ones though perished back to the airport. there must have been something with lack of control of the plane. >> this is about electrical control system. john cook asks this. he says, what's the probability that an electrical issue rendered the ...

Manufactured from 2015 forward. it doesn't help anything in the past. >> and there are 20,000 planes up there now. could take a lot of time to retrofit. speaking with mark weiss, our aviation analyst, longtime american airlines pilot, he made the point that a boeing 777 has more metal in it than the airbus, which was the air france plane, which has more composite, which is therefore more likely to float, making parts of the 777 less likely to float because that metal content. does that make sense to you? >> in some respects. i admire mark weiss -- i know him quite well and he's definitely the ...