Page 10 - Flight Computers News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Special agents with homeland security are cleaning house. or maybe i should say the skies. smugglers are using commercial flights to transport drugs along with other forms of contraband into the u.s. agents work round-the-clock conducting intense cargo inspections and are screening airline employees who are often accomplices. deborah feyerick pull back the layers to see how the cartels use the system to smuggle in their drugs. >> reporter: it's in crew seats, food carts, control panels, toilets. drug traffickers using commercial planes to smuggle hundreds of millions of dollars of narcotics in...

Flight computers. we discover narcotics underneath the floor in here. >> reporter: these special agents are with homeland security investigations. >> this cover is easily removed. >> reporter: they work intelligence intercepting drugs like cocaine and other contraband. if they can bring in drugs or they can bring in guns, they can hide potentially bomb components anywhere in here. >> that's the most troubling thing to me. >> reporter: what makes an internal conspiracy involved is the people work for the airlines. >> primarily baggage handlers, mechanics, flight attendants, security guards. >> ...

Link between the cockpit controls and the flight controls on the tail, the rudder and the wings. what happens is is the pilot controls the control wheel and the control yoke and the throttles are connected to flight computers that interpret the pilot's input. if the computer accepts the inputs it then transmits that data to the aircraft flight controls. what happens is some pilots have reported loss of control of the aircraft without any pilot input. this has been a problem dogging the airbus series since its inception and fundamentally these computers have computer code just like every other ...

Irregular commands that the erratic altitudes in the flight computers, 100 feet up to 49,000 feet and the red line represents the altitude. that means that despite the erratic dialing in and out of different altitudes, the plane maintained a normal descent down to barcelona which would suggest that either he never hit engage and in other words never committed the plane to 100 feet altitude or that the plane was happening with such brief frequency that the plane was maintaining its normal flight and normal descent down to barcelona as the flight was planned. i'm not sure that we can say that he...

Co-pilot andreas lubitz may have practiced a control descent on his outbound flight that day, potentially rehearsing for the crash that would take place hours later. tom costello with details. this is extraordinary. >> reporter: it is. it's a preliminary report that comes out from the french investigative agency. it describes the flight from dusseldorf into barcelona. the flight immediately prior to the fatal crash back to dusseldorf. it crashed into a mountain, of course. we have a graph that shows the information from the flight data recorder which has the co-pilot programming erratic altitu...