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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...

Joystick and the flight controls on the aircraft will give what the pilot wants. >> aviation consultant lieutenant ken christianson, thank you so much. >> thank you. coming up on "fox & friends," president obama says race relations are better since he took office but the american people don't agree. and neither does lieutenant colonel allen west who joins us next. and the weather is playing a frantic role despite the search for the missing airplane. we'll tell you more on what we know about the passengers on board the airasia plane.

So there's a lot of information, and many times it's not just the words of the pilot and the co-pilot or the radio reception, but it's the noises, the sounds, the ambient pieces of information that leave clues, give clues. >> les, let me ask you about human versus machine. these planes are so advanced that they can really fly themselves once they're up at altitude. so when does the pilot make the decision to override an au autopilot, for example, to take control themselves and is there any push and pull between what the computer wants the plane to do and what the pilot wants to do? >> we striv...

Disappear. is there any way to obscure the information recorded on those black boxes? >> other than the fact that the cockpit voice recorder only goes back two hours and the plane flew much longer and we'll only know what happened the last two, no way at all from the flight deck or inside the airplane that i'm aware of or anyone in the business has ever said you can modify what's on that flight data recorder. there are thousands of bits of information that goes back more than 30 days -- goes back at least 30 days. we're going to have a lot of info once we pull those things out, positions of fl...

What it is that we're going to be finding out if this is indeed the black box to recover, what information are we going to glean from this? >> well, this is really quite an incredible machine. of course, it's protected you should the water from harm. as long as the water doesn't get in. but you're going to find all kinds of data there. how fast the airplane was going, you're going to find out the state of the engines, how the pressurization was operating, you'll even know which direction the pilots may have been moving the flight controls and what switches were on and what switches were off. a...