Recovery Efforts For Indonesia Plane Crash Suspended Overnight
WHITFIELD: Recovery efforts for a passenger plane that crashed into the mountains over Indonesia on Sunday have been suspended for the night. Transportation officials found the wreckage on the side of a mountain in the Octabe district of Papua province. Confirmation that the plane was found came shortly after villagers reported seeing the airplane crash. The search has suspended until tomorrow because of thunderstorms in the area and because it is night fall. All right. Let's bring in CNN's aviation correspondent, Richard Quest, and also CNN aviation analyst and experienced 777 pilot Les Abend. All right, good to see both of you. So Les, as an experienced pilot, give us an idea of the types of things that could happen that would suddenly have a plane, you know, crash into the mountains there.</s>LES ABEND, CNN AVIATION ANALYST: Yes, absolutely, Fredricka. You know, this is something that's still a developing story, as we all know. We can't jump to any conclusions, especially with witness reports. We know witness reports very often are inaccurate so let's wait until the morning, of course, and see what we see. What could have happened is it could have been some sort of mechanical issue. If it was related to weather, perhaps there was a possibility with a thunderstorm, breaking up in flight. It might have had a conflict with terrain, might have struck terrain. It is hard to say. I looked at a Google maps picture of the airport itself, it seemed fairly up to date. Looking at the runways and the airline pilot, I would note at the very most unless it's nonstandard markings, it's a non-precision approach, which means there's n glide slope, which would mean the weather would have to be pretty good to shoot this approach. It may very well have been just what we call a VFR approach, which Visual Flight Rule approach. So the weather may have deteriorated, worse than forecast, and that might have got them to the point of possibly striking terrain, it's really, really hard to say at this point.</s>WHITFIELD: And Richard, we don't have enough clues to know precisely what might have happened but earlier you talked about the fact that this Trigana airline service doesn't have a great track record. How much will that be considered as they try to investigate what happened?</s>RICHARD QUEST, CNN AVIATION CORRESPONDENT: The issue here, as Les puts it so well, is the set of circumstances and the ability of the crew flying that day to meet those circumstances. This was a short flight, only 55 minutes or so, takeoff to landing, so it's not going to get very high in terms of altitude. It's going to be in the descent before you know it. And there were mountains in the regions, some up to 13,000 feet, and there was bad weather. Now, in that environment it is -- these pilots fly those routes frequently, but they are challenging conditions. Especially if, as Les says, there was no landing guidance systems available to them. If you look at Trigana as an airline, as I said previously, it's got about 14 previous incidents. Some are serious, some not so serious since 1992. Which is quite a number, frankly. It's quite a number. Of that 14, one, two, three, four, five of them have fatalities. The airline only has -- I think it has fewer than 22 aircraft now as I've been looking at it. I think it may actually have you have a couple of dozen -- sorry, just a dozen or so aircraft now. So it's ratio of accidents to planes is high. And certainly when you analyze and look at the list and start to see the sort of things that has happened, there are issues of competence involved.</s>WHITFIELD: And, Richard, I know I asked you this earlier but I'd like to also get your point of view on this, Les, so with that kind of track record, why would this airline be allowed to continue flying or what would be the policing agent to address that kind of track record?</s>ABEND: Well, the Indonesian -- their version of the Indonesian FAA would allow it to continue flying. Apparently it meets their standards, I suppose. But to add a little bit to what Richard was saying with reference to the background of the airline, in addition to a very small amount of -- small fleet, the fleet is very varied. They have everything from twin otters, which is a small turbo prop 19- passenger airplane all the way up to a 737. So they may make their pilots qualify on all of these airplanes, it's hard to say. I don't know what their standards are over there in Indonesia. But, you know, that kind of contributes to part of it too.</s>QUEST: And, Fred, it's an old fleet. Now, the average age is something like 22 years old. I think the plane involved here was 26, 27 years old. Now that per see means nothing. A well maintained aircraft can go much longer than that. Look at some of the 747s and the 767s that are in the air today. So an old fleet is not a -- look, what we have here are a number of warning signs. None of which is conclusive in its own right. Collectively, they start to make you concerned.</s>WHITFIELD: All right. Richard Quest, Les Abend, thanks so much for both of you gentlemen. Appreciate it. All right. Coming up, a marriage showdown in Kentucky where a court clerk is refusing to give out any marriage licenses because she does not believe in same-sex marriage.