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Happened with the ethiopian airliner several years ago. the hijacker commanded the pilots to fly them to a certain place. the pilot said we're going to run out of gas, we won't make it there and tried to do it anyway. >> wouldn't they have a moment to push a may day button to let the ground know what's going on. >> there isn't a may day button. would you have to put in a discreet transponder code of 7600 or 7700, depending on what the circumstance, is and then push the ident button so the air traffic controllers would find it on the radar. may not have had time to do that if this kind of situa...

Then it finally landed in istanbul and the fact that it was able to make that landing suggests quite likely that the people on board didn't take either the threat that seriously or weren't necessarily concerned enough to divert their course. they still managed to finish their journey and land in istanbul itself, michael. >> yeah, nick, let's turn now if we can. thanks for that. richard quest is in new york. richard, you're sort of our transport expert among many other hats that you wear. what normally is the procedure when something like this happens and a plane lands as it did in istanbul? >>...

Clarify. earlier we were hearing the plane may have transmitted a distress signal on a transponder code. we're told definitively that did not happen, they detected no coded or squawked emergency code. in fact it now appears it was air traffic control in france that put out the first distress signal when they lost contact with this plane at 6800 feet and apparently as you can see the plane went into a mountain. so a lot of questions about whether the crew was incapacitated. if that happened what were events leading up that event. was there a smoke event, decompression, some sort of event on boa...

The instruments look the same. there's a lot of redundancy in this cockpit. when it-- you hear a lot about squawk codes and transponders. they are related. a transponder is a piece of equipment that you'll find in the cockpit right here and there's two of them. that's part of the redundancy. the pilot and the co-pilot would each have a transponder to operate. if the aircraft is hijacked the transponder code would be 7500. the pilot would digitally punch in 7500. air traffic control would know right away there's an aircraft at 38,000 feet and they have been hijacked. that of course puts a lot o...