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If the captain were having problems with the co-pilot at all or had trepidation about the individual he would not have begun the flight if he had question about his co-pilot s physical or mental stability. okay. then david, when we hear that this co-pilot activated the descent, what does that mean? that means he started went from a straight and normal flight to a descending flight. does that mean punching and plugging in numbers? you put flight control to the place you want it to be and maintain control. then it maintains descent. second is turn the rate of descent knob. over the windshield, we call it eyebrow. you turn that down spin it and spin it. it was probably at 38,000 feet excuse me probably at ....
Feet, here are the the winds. there was a tail wind with the flight between 50 to 60 miles per hour tail winds. there s nothing that hints to us that the weather was any problem at all. no thunderstorms in the flight path, no nothing. then the plane as it went down into the lower elevations, it encountered this very extreme terrain. so here s a look at the terrain. this is the alps as they extend through southern portions of swit swit switzerland and italy. the equivalent of a plane went down in our rocky mountains. high peaks, valleys, very remote terrain, not roads through the region. that s what they are dealing with. these are snow-covered. unfortunately, the weather is not great now, but it s okay for the helicopters to fly. there s a storm coming in in about 12 hours from now. as far as rescue operations go they have about 12 hours and ....
So far the maker of the germanwings airbus says it s unclear what caused the crash. a press conference is expected at 10:00 a.m. eastern time. the plane took off from barcelona just before 10:00 a.m. local time. the crew sent out a distress signal about an hour later just before the plane went down in the french alps. search crews are on their way. this is the area they are having to go through to find this plane. the king of spain, who was in france on his first official visit to the country, says there were a number of passengers from spain, germany and turkey on that flight. we just heard from the german chancellor who says she s deeply shaken and said she will head to the crash site tomorrow. reports from the french government are that no one has survived. that has yet to be officially confirmed. i want to bring in michael kay, ....
An emergency inbound flight approximately ten minutes and will clear the circuit. that s the protocol we should expect. people have to see this area where it is rugged there s a lot of mountains, there are a lot of airports right nearby. there are, if you re at 38,000 feet. if you re dropping and you re on automatic pilot and the crew is incapacitated, which seems to be the theory that s growing on air, but seems to be credible then no, there are not that many you can get to if you re on that stralgt route into the mountains. once you drop e below 10,000 feet in those mountains, you re dead. just to answer that when you re in the descent, there s a huge, huge point here of if you re in the descent in cloud versus if you re in the descent and you have visual conditions, because that will increase the workload of the pilots tenfold if they are in cloud. they will be on instruments and ....
The area wasn t a storm that was reported and we have been hearing about this rapid descent from 38,000 to about 5,000 feet in about ten minutes. we understand this is a steep decline but it is a kind of decline that many of us experience who are on planes in terms of going down quickly, but there was also no distress signal as reported by the french aviation authorities, so a lot of questions, jose, about what happened. what went wrong aboard this flight. ann as we continue to piece this information as you well put it, it is just developing just getting word thanks to you that the officials are finally reaching the area but this press conference is starting. i am going to as soon as it begins, we are going to go to it ann. we have to point out according to some officials in germany, there was some initial distress texted essentially when a 7700 but there was as you say ann no verbal communication between the ....