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CNN Live At Daybreak

Assessment Team Deciding to Recover or Destroy Crashed Helicopter

Aired April 11, 2002 - 05:31   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
CAROL COSTELLO, CNN ANCHOR: And for the latest on that helicopter crash, we want to go live now to Afghanistan. Our Ryan Chilcote is at the Kandahar Airport.

Good morning, Ryan.

RYAN CHILCOTE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Carol, how are you?

COSTELLO: I'm good. How are you doing?

CHILCOTE: Very good.

Very nervous times here at the Kandahar Air Base. There's actually an assessment team on the ground there right now at the site of that hard landing. And they're making a very difficult decision whether to recover that helicopter, after all it is a $15 million piece of machinery, or whether to leave it there and destroy it.

There's actually a precedent for destroying helicopters in Afghanistan that have gone down. A Chinook went down in late January, and the U.S. military decided to destroy that instead of salvaging it. So we'll just have to see how that plays out. But those -- that assessment team is on the ground right there, right now making that very tough call.

Carol, back to you.

COSTELLO: No injuries, though, just to reiterate.

CHILCOTE: That's right. Their injuries are thought not to be life threatening. They were flown from the site of that crash to the Kandahar Air Base and then they were evacuated to Germany. So we are told that they are more or less in good shape, and they're very happy for that. And now that the question is is what exactly happens with that -- with that helicopter.

COSTELLO: Well I'm sure you'll keep following that for us.

Ryan Chilcote, thank you for reporting live from Afghanistan this morning.

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