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Maintain control during that transition phase from flight to a land vehicle. the flight controls become less effective the slower the airplane is moving down the runway. now they rely more on the rudder control, which controls the nose wheel, and you just simply have two tires controlling this entire aircraft's direction. and if it hits an icy patch and it had a quartering left tail wind it could very well weather vane into the wind. >> frightening. >> absolutely. that's exactly why they're investigating right now, how prepared they were how prepared the roads were for the weather today, how i...

Reaction and what he was thinking at the time of the accident which would indicate there was some kind of panic or that he wasn't acting appropriately to it. the third thing that's really important about this is that the cockpit voice recorder not only keeps track of the input, the movement towards the aircraft and what's sent to the computer but it also has information and sensors on each of the flight controls that will tell fit he wants to climb and he pulls back does the flight control make the appropriate action? and that would tell you if there's a break or mechanical failure in that sys...

>> it's a gruesome process, especially for the families that have to deal with this identification process. but the way it plays out is that the two boxes, the black boxes we refer to all the time, one is digital flight data. that has all sorts of information. flight controls, altitude, speed, trajectory. it has thousands of parameters. that will be combined with the cockpit voice recorder, which not only gives all the voices from the cockpit and transmissions to air traffic control, it also provides for

The ambient pieces of information that lead clues, give clues. >> les, let me ask you, human versus machines they can really fly themselves once they're up at altitude. so when does the pilot make the decision to override and in autopilot for example to take control themselves and is there any push and pull between what the computer wants a plane to do and what the pilot wants to do? >> it's a good question but we strive to work in conjunction with the automation. we have most of the airplanes and an a-320 is a good example. it's an automated system that you're sending electronic information t...

Leah: and in this particular aircraft, it had fly-by require which we've talked about that, essentially, you put controls in, a computer decides what to do with those control inputs, and it could potentially fight the pilot. the computer system might actually say no, i'm not going to let this plane climb any higher because it's already going outside its operating end slope. >> i think that's a great point and that's one of the fundamental differences between a boeing and an air bus aircraft is that aircraft on the airbus side wants to have the health of its aircraft it doesn't want to depart c...