Accessing 777 Electronics and Engineering Compartment
BANFIELD: As the mystery swirls around Flight 370, the series about what happened or what could have happened to this jet ranged from the logical to the absolutely outlandish. Whoever or whatever turned off flight 370's tracking system shortly after takeoff may be the key to solving this mystery. Just how it tough is it to do that? Joining me about the technology onboard the aircraft is CNN's aviation correspondent, Richard Quest, and he's joined, as well, by Les Abend, a 777 captain with nearly 18,000 hours in the cockpit. Captain Abend, I wanted to ask you, I heard you on our morning show this morning, "NEW DAY," suggest there is this access through the cabin to the belly, the guts of the plane, that you had actually seen. You had had a chance to see in your career that many 777 pilots actually had not. Can you expand on that and tell me a little bit more what that is and how one gets to it and help me, Captain Abend, understand that?</s>LES ABEND, 777 PILOT: It's called the E-and-E compartment.</s>BANFIELD: E and E?</s>ABEND: It's electronics and engineering compartment, and it basically is the guts of the airplane. This goes back to the days of the 707, this particular compartment. There's one there. There's also one in the tail of the airplane that's not accessible in flight. This one's accessible in flight. You can pull the carpet out. It's an operation to get to it. It really takes a lot of knowledge, not only to access it, let alone to know what's down there.</s>BANFIELD: As a 777 captain, could you access it yourself or did --</s>ABEND: Yes.</s>BANFIELD: -- someone have to open it for you? You can do it.</s>ABEND: I could do it myself.</s>BANFIELD: So presumably this captain could as well.</s>ABEND: He could, but we're trained to fly airplanes and to go from Point A to Point B, and the bottom line is there's some stuff down there that one checklist may take us to, but it's a real mystery. This is an electronic airplane that has all sorts of controls. We wouldn't know each little -- each box that's down there.</s>BANFIELD: But this -- and I don't want to suggest for a moment until we know the facts of what happened -- but since the Americans and the Malaysians have come out saying that we're now looking more towards those in the cockpit being responsible for this and deliberate action taken by someone on board, Richard, weigh in on this. If there was -- if there were perhaps a co-pilot or a captain that had an intentional, nefarious plan that was able to, say, disable his partner and then access that, is there something they could have done that would make all of this make sense?</s>QUEST: No. Well, yeah, you have a possible -- yes. But you're talking about -- it's like you going into a computer room. What you're talking about this, this area under the flight deck, is the computer guts of the plane. It's not that sort of -- it's not like -- there is so much technology, so much wiring, so much sophisticated -- if I understand you correctly, that, you know, you --</s>BANFIELD: Not like he'd know what he was doing.</s>ABEND: Even the engineers that designed the airplane, I'm not so sure they're -- they're going to have to go to their own schematics to determine --</s>QUEST: It's not like it's a single computer.</s>BANFIELD: I hear you. I hear you, but then I hear this morning that this particular pilot had a flight simulator in his home and was known for being, so to speak, an aeronautics geek who could not get enough of this kind of technology.</s>ABEND: My wife and I own a little airplane. I do busman's holidays. I love, still, flying airplanes. So this was the same thing. In Malaysia, there's a good chance that flying airplanes at the level that I am able to do here in the states is just not -- it's just too cost prohibitive. So this was his way of enjoying aviation on his own.</s>BANFIELD: So we shouldn't think anything --</s>ABEND: No. Absolutely not.</s>BANFIELD: Because it does spark a lot of memories from the flight simulation courses that the 9/11 pilots took, et cetera, and people get very nervous when they hear that someone's got one in his home. You're saying it's perfectly all right.</s>ABEND: Why would a professional flight crew and a captain with a lot of time and many years supposedly with this -- with Malaysia, why would he even consider, you know, doing something nefarious when he could do it on the airplane or in the simulator when he goes to training? It just -- it doesn't make sense to us as professionals.</s>BANFIELD: So much of this doesn't make sense to any of us as laypeople either. Last thought?</s>QUEST: I've got a question for you, Captain.</s>BANFIELD: Just quickly.</s>QUEST: Every pilot is talking about this at the moment, aren't they? This is the big talking appointment in the industry.</s>ABEND: It's a big point, yeah. It is. It's very -- these are one of our colleagues that we've lost, and we need the answers. We really need to -- not only for these four grieving people, we need answers for them. That's what's the most important thing, but we need answers to find out what -- how do we prevent this from ever happening again, whatever it is that occurred.</s>BANFIELD: It's such a great point, Richard, that you just brought up, because I tell you, every time I hear a whiplash judgment from a country or from an analyst from someone in the know that suggests it's nefarious, it's accidental, it's mechanical, it's deliberate, I grieve for the families of those pilots, as well. Because if they have nothing to do with any of this, and they have been, you know, excoriated worldwide for what they possibly may have done, we are all going to feel horrified at the possibility we thought that they -- and I can't imagine you as a pilot being that these are your colleagues and you could be in the same boat. Theoretically you could be in the same boat. Les Abend, thank you. It's good to have you on. Your expertise has been very helpful. And, Richard Quest, as always, stay? Can you stay?</s>QUEST: I'm here.</s>BANFIELD: You're the expert. Just so many questions, like how far would that plane have actually been able to fly after the communications were turned off? How much fuel did that plane have on board? If it flew high, if it flew low, how far could it go? There are so many possibilities. We're going to lay out some of them, ahead. And then, what do you do when an earthquake hits in the middle of your newscast? That's what these people did. The alarm bells rang. They ducked for cover. Find out about what happened in Los Angeles in a moment.