Page 9 - Flight Management Computer News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

>> at this point what we do know is that the flight plan at that point was reprogrammed. we don't know if it was before or after the plane took off. certainly that will be a key fact in this investigation moving forward. but if you think of the flight management computer on the triple 777, it's like an old school chunky blackberry with big black buttons and a you'd i amry screen. it's right in between the two seats on the plane. we have a graphic up. go ahead. >> so that system has almost like apps. different functions from your flight plan to the progress of the flight to your engines. it's d...

Problem like smoke in the cockpit if you had an electrical fire in the avionics bay or something like that, he would have turned to the nearest airport which would have made sense. under that hypothesis if they became incapacitated or if there was a flight control problem. if there was a flight control problem, they still would have had the radio, so it's hard to figure out. what really doesn't make sense on that, though, was if they did become incapacitated and the airplane was flying along, it would normally continue in the direction it was going because it would have been programmed either ...

Into the flight management computer. that has happened before where you have two fixes that may be discriminated by one or two letters, and you mistype it. that could cause a plane to turn if you're not, if you made a mistake, and the other thing -- jenna: is that something that just can happen just as easy as we're in a car and we make a wrong turn? is it just as easy to do something like that? >> it can happen, but you normally see it in the displays. you normally see your flight path as it's being projected on a flat panel display in front of you change in an unexpected way, so they should ...

Breaking news, "the new york times" now reporting that it was flight 370's computer that sent that plane off its flight path on the way to beijing. i want to bring in jon, our aerospace boeing reporter for "the wall street journal." so this seems to buttress some of your reporting from friday, right, jon? >> both duplicate and buttress. we addressed this last friday specifically when we talked about the manual change that was made to the aircraft. of course there's a lot of us chasing this story around the world right now, and certainly there are going to be new revelations about what specific...

To people involved in the transportation industry, you can do some of that and get some red flags but it is not -- in most cases it's not repeated. it's only at the entry into duty. i think trying to this do these before the fact is quite difficult. i completely defer to tom on his knowledge of the 777. my point was not only that someone knew how to fly this plane or force the pilots to but the person was quite smart about shutting down the pilots or the plane's ability to communicate with the outside world once it left its normal route. >> how difficult is that to do, tom, to shut down that c...