Three Factorses News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Off. >> and you say you can know that definitively why? >> well, because you have two transponders. if one stops working, you go to the second one. so to have a redundant system and both of them not operating, that means it was done by some human being. >> john, you also think if this new information pans out that human intervention is involved here. >> certainly the sequence of events leads one to believe that there was somebody sequentially turning things off in that airplane. i mean, there's just no other conclusion. i agree with several of the previous witnesses saying that. >> john is the...

Just kind of projecting where the plane should be, correct? as it moves from one radar station to another, correct? >> there are huge gaps in the radar coverage around the world. and especially over open water. in the north atlantic just every day there's hundreds of flights that go from new york or boston to europe and back. there is a pretty big chunk of the atlantic ocean that that is no radar coverage. and we use other means to communicate. that flight boeing when they built the 777 put satellite communications on board the airplane. >> that's the acars system? >> right. well, it's more. a...

Works but not enough knowledge to know how to stop everything and keep the electricity on. because you need the electrical system working so the airplane can fly. you can't turn it off like you can smaller old airplanes that were piston-driven where you could actually turn off the electrical. you can't do that in these modern jets. >> fran, what do you make of this? the mind obviously immediately turns to terrorism as a possibility. just based on if these devices are being shut off, with time apart and shut off according to both these gentlemen, it would be a human being doing that. >> that's ...

Great. >> professor, do you agree with what mary just said, or do you focus more on human intervention in this? >> well again, we have to keep all hypotheses open. it's hard to find a credible hypothesis where you have the sequence of events that we have here. if there was a problem on the airplane where you had let's say a cockpit fire or something like that, or depressurization, it could explain losing the transponder. it doesn't really make sense to head off in the direction the airplane headed off on. so they would have either done 180-degree turn and gone back to kuala lumpur or perhaps d...

Circuit breaker so you can disable the system. if you knew what you were doing you could pull the circuit breaker on that. you'd have to have a fairly sophisticated understanding of the airplane to do that. >> mary, at this point you like everybody else is not ruling anything out. what at this point are kind of the data points that you're really focusing on? >> well, i think for me and looking at it from an investigator's eye, you want to look at what makes sense, what fits together the pieces of evidence. what do we really have to suggest one thing or another. and from work on the air france,...