Page 12 - Ground Speed News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

And then i think the weather will deteriorate for the tail end of the weekend. todd? >> of cowurse, the weekend is when more ships will show up. veronica, thank you. greg feith is a former investigator with the ntsb. greg joins me now from colorado. greg, all right, so the scenario, this is where your former colleagues at ntsb said the best -- their best guess of where the search should begin, and voila, the first satellite appears, and what does this tell us? >> it tells us we should be cautiously optimistic. what they did was they actually went out and planned what the fuel burn would be, ...

Perfectly. the fact is that in the early stages we assume that, okay, somebody intentionally crashed it in the water it could have been anywhere. that's all logical based on the information that we got from day one, day three, day five. but then you have to take into consideration how far would the airplane go -- we know how much fuel was on board. we know basically what the last ground speed which was about 450 knots. we know the last altitude was 30,000 feet. they just performed a bunch of calculations and said, okay, under these conditions, with winds aloft, airplane steady state, tracking ...

Extrapolate out based on a ground speed they previously received off the radar, 450 knots or there about, at altitude of 30,000 feet and tried to determine what distance or what the fuel endurance would be on the airplane and where they believed it would be exhausted. when you match those two lines up, that's really what forms the basis for the new search area and it just so happened when they started getting into that search, they found that the satellite photo, we found these two large pieces of some sort of debris, it was consistent, it was near that area. so there is cautious opt mission, ...

Does that give any indication to what happened or could that just be a separate mechanical failure? >> that's what investigators are going to look at. they're going to want to see where that exact transponder failure occurred and whether or not there was actual radar coverage in that particular area. because the transponder provides a discreet code. it provides altitude information and ground speed. if the rest of the radar data after that is just what we call a skin paint where you're not getting an actual altitude, you're just getting a track of the airplane until radar coverage is fwoen or ...

An hour after the flight, which we think is possibly an hour before total contact was lost. does that give any indication to what happened, or could that just be a separate mechanical failure? >> that's what investigators are going to look at. they're going to want to see where that exact transponder failure occurred and whether or not there was actual radar coverage in that particular area because the transponder provides a discreet code. it provides altitude information and ground speed. if the rest of the radar data after that is just what we call a skin paint where you're not getting an ac...