Page 14 - Flight Level News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Stick around so we can come back to you to continue this conversation as more details come in to us. mary, we thank you. we turn now to richard quest, cnn's aviation correspondent, who joins us on the phone. richard, it's hard to believe that the year is not out yet, we're talking about another missing aircraft. we don't know the details here, but an airasia flight has lost contact with air traffic controllers. what jumps out at you right now? >> well, what will jump out at me, aisha, is first of all the moment of flight this will have happened. we need to know a lot of details about the momen...

Is dependent on altitude. you also have situations in which very, very heavy weather can attenuate, what we call attenuate the radar signal, interfear with the radar signal from an aircraft. particularly if the air trast loses electrical power or goes below a certain altitude. >> losing contact 42 minutes after take-off, that's quickly, would you say? >> yes, but this aircraft can handle 500 miles per hour. we are talking a considerable distance. from climb-out to flight level altitudes, 28, 32,000 feet, whatever he had.

Transpoppeders. there's a military identification friend or foe. it allows you to identify your friends and then everything else. and they may be foes but also might be a civilian airliner. what happens then is you have to rely on the training and the command structure of the people who collectively have their hands on the trigger to make a decision, well, issing this particular blip. we know it's not a friend. but is it just a civilian airliner? well, it's at 33,000 feet on a known corridor. we don't expect this to be -- have any hostile intent. there's nothing about a flight level at 33,000 ...

Air space. that shouldn't be a surprise. the transponter is switched off. we know this from flight level 350,000, we know that is where it was at. that was the last air traffic control that we had. and it climbs to 39,000 feet. >> sit coming. here we go. >> all right. so at this point, that point is at vietnamese air space.

Flight plan to skirt radar detection? >> well, they know where radar is. any pilot who has flown these areas will know exactly the limit of the radar. they get handed from one radar zone to the next. anybody certainly would know the limits. i must say, if you look at the map and if we run the animation again, i think it's a long shot that it would have skirted radar simply because this is highly sensitive area. it's the northern part of indonesia, it's near the coast with thailand. there are countries there. he'd have had to -- what flight level would he have flown that indonesia would not hav...