Page 8 - Ghost Plane News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

>> reporter: this is the sound of a pilot in trouble. that was the pilot of swissair flight 111 talking to air traffic control just minutes before he crashed into the atlantic ocean in 1998. everyone on board was killed. when crash investigators found the plane's black boxes at the bottom of the ocean, they were stunned. >> both the recorders stopped recording about six minutes before the aircraft actually hit the water. >> reporter: leaving investigators to wonder why they suddenly lost control of the plane. it was a fire, they later found, in the jet's entertainment system which also caused ...

Surrounded by stainless steel. they're built to withstand temperatures as high as 2,000 degrees fahrenheit and catastrophic impact. after twa flight 800 went down in july 1996, just 12 minutes after takeoff from new york's jfk airport, the plane's black boxes were recovered but they offered little. >> both the voice recorder and the data recorder terminated their operation within a nano second of each other. when the explosion took place. >> reporter: still, despite all the conspiracy theories investigators say they figured out an explosion in the fuel tank caused the the crash and shut down t...

Generally. that's the custom. let's assume the left engine flamed out first. if you guys could put it -- let's go with the 12,000-foot altitude which we've been talking about. i don't believe a lot of these altitude numbers we've been hearing about. so put it on auto pilot, 12,000 feet. give it asymmetrical thrust with the right engine going and left engine off. i'm curious if the auto pilot has enough authority to compensate for that asymmetrical thrust. in other words, if one engine is going full gun, the other one's down, will the auto pilot still hold heading or will it disengage and will ...

New debris sightings and a more focused search area still haven't answered a key question about the missing jet liner. why did it fly for hours and hours to one of the most remote areas on earth. cnn's martin savidge plays out a haunting scenario from inside a boeing 777 flight simulator. >> reporter: morning, carol. it's called the zombie plane or it's called the ghost plane or the plane without a brain. whatever you call it, it is an aircraft that is now no longer in human control. here's a scenario in which it can happen. the plane would have reached cruising altitude. everything seems norm...

How, we'll have views on that. but how or why this half ping is relevant. but if they can prove the integrity of that half ping, then it adds one more if you like dot in the chain and you start to now know a little bit more about where the plane went down. because you're no longer -- you've got another point of reference. and you can coordinate that with how much fuel there was and what point you believe the plane would have been in. >> let me say it's great to have you back on cnn though not under these circumstances certainly. what do you make of this so-called partial ping? >> i think it's ...