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We'll get the voice recorder and we'll determine that. and what happens is the crew is busy and they don't make a call at the moment. >> and from the time this occurred to the moment of impact a few minutes within that time period it seems the plane stayed on the normal route versus veering right or left to an airport. does this stick out to you as unusual? does that leave a question mark in your head? >> not necessarily. i think that it says that the airplane quite possibly was still on the auto pilot and using the flight automation that would be normal and that the pilots' selected a decent....

This plane and killed 150 people. >> david barnes with us from the plane staging site. thank you for that update. joining us is tom hatter a former ntsb director of aviation safety and analyst john cox, a former u.s. airways captain and ceo of safety operations. and thank you for being --. and tom, if i could start with you. and there was no distress signal given and how unusual that to occur when a crash of this type happens? >> it is not terribly unusual. the crew will first fly the airplane and communicate when they can. the indication is something happened catastrophically. whether it is a...

We'll know the cruise input into the controls and was there anything wrong with the plane and was it responding normally. it depends on which box they have. and the bea, which is the equivalent of the ntsb in france will be reading out that recorder tonight and have that information tomorrow. >> and john what, does the size of the debris field tell you? does that tell you anything about what possibly could have happened here? >> i think the size of the debris field is going to indicate, as tom said earlier, the fact that it hit at a high speed. >> looking at the pieces small pieces indicate th...

You can't get machines into this area and you are using people looking and digging and searching and mapping out and sending back so they can form a grid system and then they will go back in and do it in terms of what they need what is the most important, the black box. they've located it and they have to recover it and get it out and get it up that hill and up to a helicopter and bring it back. so they will be doing this methodically and very carefully and very slowly. >> and that is the most important next step greg getting the black box and figuring out what information is on that to help u...

Debris field and it appears to be quite a large area. what does that tell you, sir? tom in. >> i'm sorry, tom, go ahead. >> looking at that debris scatter, one it is the high fragmentation. this appears to be a high-speed impact. it is over a fairly large area. we can't see exactly where the initial impact crater was. once it was hit, pieces could have been thrown out quite some distance. but looking at the fragmentation going on here this appears to be a much higher speed than normal. it is going to be very difficult to find all of the victims' remains from what i'm seeing on these videos. >>...