Surface Ceiling News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

That could override the pilot's actual intent. what is your assessment of what could have happened base on the information we have? >> fly by wires, essentially what that means is the pilot puts in control input and those don't go directly to the control surfaces. rather they go to a computer which decides she put in this much input this is how i'm going flight controls. this aircraft limits what you can do because it's a system that limits allowing you to pull too many g's or fly too high, for example, based on your fuel, your loading and other things. in this particular case maria was saying...

They were up too high. the aircraft was heavy. it was only about an hour into its flight. it would be the equivalent of flying from new york to atlanta and this happening around richmond. so, they were still heavy. they were up high. right near the surface ceiling with all the violence. these thunderstorms are reported with tops of 50,000. that's breaking the troposphere which means they are violent storms. each one of them are packing enough energy of a nuclear weapon. they are masses forces that are at play here. when you're up dancing on that thin air anything can happen. >> we've been talk...

>> the pilot can just put that in any mode and actually fly outside that area. what's not clear to me is was the airplane at a low altitude, avoiding the radar where at a low altitude you'd rather be closer to land and avoiding radar or was it at altitude and further away from land? >> carleen, about the idea that they i've been so focused the pilot, although they have background checked all the passengers as i understand it and the other co-pilot, but you envision more a scenario where it was not the pilot. >> absolutely not. there's numerous reasons. first the pilot would not fly his own air...

Eliminate that anderson, i'm still -- there's pieces of the puzzle that are baffling to me. this is above my pay grade as far as being a pilot is concerned with reference to the data. have you to take it as gospel. you have some really smart folks. >> there's obviously still so much we do not know, so many pieces of this that are yet to be filled in? >> yeah, the conflicting data, way back last week, we got the airplane climbing to 45,000 feet above its surface ceiling. going different levels. now the other night, we got it descending to 12,000 feet. i'm not -- so if it was at 12,000 feet, my ...

Above its surface ceiling then dropped at a rapid rate to another altitude. and there are all kinds of reports that the airplane turned one way and then back another way and then another way. it's pretty obvious somebody was in there doing something. was there a fight going on in the cockpit? was that creating this kind of crazy flying? when they did finally finish all this up and down and everything else and the airplane was flying relatively smoothly, was there somebody at the controls that was doing that? did they do it on their own? was there a gun in the air or the captain? we have those ...