Page 15 - Flight Pattern News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Flight 17, what we believe to be an attack, several ukrainian aircraft were shot down over eastern ukraine. that's led many to question, why aviation directors felt it was safe to send flights over a conflict zone. renee marsh has that story. >> reporter: the signs of danger were all around. >> this also follows a pattern of actions by russian-backed separatist. >> reporter: june 13th pro-russian rebels shot down a military transport plane, killing 49 people. june 24th, rebels shoot a ukrainian hell koericopter. this week, july 19th, and wednesday, a fighter jet shot down. the next day, flight...

>> indeed. quickly to you, jim tillman, as a former pilot. accident is a cogent explanation. the flight pattern, the size of this kind of aircraft is readily apparent from the ground or is there something about the altitude that a plane like this would fly that would be in any way similar to a it intoer jet or a military aircraft? >> no, not at all. the fact that you have avionics on the 777 to let the ground know who they are, where they are going, their speed and direction, all of that information is available real-time to the transponder. i agree it could be an accident, maybe someone with ...

Son is there was absolutely no, apparently, from the satellite pings, is that there was no deviation or change in the plane's flight pattern. now, people think that it's easy to fly straight and level and continuous, but as a former pilot, i can tell you, perfectly straight and level and no deviation flying is actually very difficult, because your plane can be buffeted by the winds, i mean, even a slight change in the positioning of your aircraft or the ailerons or the rudder can change its course. so the fact that it they would such a steady course was an implication to them that it was on au...

>> exactly. had it not been in autopilot, had the pilot been controlling the aircraft it would have had a different flight pattern and it would have gone -- the altitudes may have been different. we don't have a lot of altitude information, but what we do have is the track that it went. so the fact that it stayed exactly on that track, tells us a lot of which mode of autopilot it was in. >> as we wrap up, david, one of the things about this area they're going back to do the underwater search, it hasn't been mapped. there's a couple ships in there working, one is a chinese boat, working to map ...

But with agencies like the cia as well. but the question is, who was he trained as a spy by? there's plenty of evidence to support that maybe he wasn't trained as a spy for the united states but in fact for russia. if you look at some of the testimony -- and this was outlined in "the wall street journal" earlier this month from general dempsey saying the majority of the documents he took and was distributing, they didn't have to do a spy on americans but on military locations and military strategy. so if people think the russians aren't paying tension is a little bit naive. >> but you have som...