Kreindler Attorney Justin Green on Boeing 737 MAX Crash With CNN Anchor Brooke Baldwin

And flight 302 crashed shortly after takeoff. The New York Times is reporting today that the air traffic controllers could actually see that there was a problem right before the captain radioed for help, quoting a person who reviewed the flight's air traffic communications. The paper says controllers noticed the 737 MAX 8 dropping up and down by hundreds of feet at abnormally high speeds. And then seconds later, the captain frantically radioed in flight control problems telling the tower, and I'm quoting now, "Break break, request back to home. Request vector for landing." Five minutes after takeoff, the tower lost contact.

The plane's black box is now in the hands of French investigators, and Boeing has stopped delivering MAX 8s but will keep building them. Justin Green is a former President of the International Air and Transportation Safety Bar Association and a CNN aviation analyst. And he's with me. He's also an aviation attorney who represents disaster victims, and has been part of those suits against Boeing in the past. And so thank you for being here, but first just those chilling new details in the couple first minutes of that flight. I can't imagine being in the back of that plane, in that drastic up and down. What does that tell you about what was going on?

Well, what's clear from the pilot's communications with air traffic control, that the pilot was experiencing an extreme emergency from the communications. He says, break break, which is basically telling everyone else who's on the radio to basically shut up, let me talk to air traffic control. He's asking for vectors, which is essentially asking for help from air traffic control to get the airplane back on the ground. From the oscillations that you mentioned, it was clear that the pilot could not control the airplane. And this raises whether the Ethiopian crash is caused by the same problem that caused the Lion Air crash.

That's what I wanted to ask you about, because obviously so far it's still early. They haven't ruled anything out. But what similarities jump out at you that we know of?

Well, the most important thing is the black boxes, the flight data recorder, the cockpit voice recorder. Once those are down read, and they're going to be down read in the coming-- maybe a matter of days at this point. We're going to know exactly what happened in Ethiopia. We're going to know whether-- which all indications show right now-- whether the same cause that caused the loss of Lion Air caused the loss of the Ethiopian jet.

You were saying to me in commercial that this is a watershed moment for aviation safety, because I wanted to ask you about-- is this a pilot training issue?

Well, it's a basically "all of the above" issue. So it has a design issue. The FAA and Boeing let an airplane out with this design issue, the MCAS system, which causes this problem. And it also let the airplane out without requiring robust training of the flight crew. So when you learn how to fly, you learn how to fly in a safe environment. You learn how to fly in a simulator. You learn to fly with a pilot in command, who's going to make sure everything's safe. Here, these pilots probably faced this problem for the very first time with passengers in the back.

And with passengers in the back. How could they allow that to happen? Why wouldn't you be trained?

But that's why I call it a watershed moment. So this is a new variant of the 737. When they design a new model aircraft, they have to come up with a really robust training program. But when it's a new variant of the same model aircraft-- They think the pilots maybe already know how to do it, understand. That's right.

But they don't--

That's absolutely right. --potentially. Justin Green, thank you very much for that, as we wait for more details on what caused that crash.