us now is les abend, a working 777 captain, also cnn safety analyst and former faa investigator david soucie who is joining us as well. david, just in terms of the investigation, who does it now, ntsb, faa? what is the procedure here? >> typically the faa people that are on site are those that will respond first, but it won't be a delegated accident. the ntsb will investigate it because there was potential and because there was injuries and it was an intended flight so that goes into the ntsb 800 series regulations. so it is an ntsb investigation. >> and, les, you and i spoke as i mentioned in the last hour. when you see this much smoke coming from an aircraft, how much can you prevent that smoke from getting in the cabin? >> well, the initial -- if indeed it was an engine fire, and everything is preliminary at this part of the investigation so we don't even know for sure. yes, the f. aa said it was an engine fire but it's hard to determine just by those pictures. when we go through the checklist procedure for an engine fire situation, we pull what we call a fire handle. that not only sends

we'll also be joined by david soucy. les, when you look at these pictures, what -- at this point, and obviously there is an investigation that needs to be done, but what do you see happening here? >> yeah. as with you, anderson, it's very preliminary for me looking at those pictures. i'm not so sure it's an engine situation. they aborted the takeoff for some particular reason. you know, the bottom line is this is a happy ending. this is the way emergencies are supposed to go. if you abort a takeoff, you abruptly stop the airplane. you bring the throttles back, put it into idle. you bring the engines into reverse situation. now, why they aborted, we don't know. was it an engine fire. >> you know, les, let me jump in because the faa has just released a statement as we've been talking saying it was an aborted takeoff due to a left engine fire. >> okay. then the true did a tremendous job. they stopped the airplane. with an engine fire situation, this is textbook stuff. this is what we're trained to do in an aborted situation

. >> you know, david soucie, it's not unheard of for engines to fail on takeoff. usually takeoffs are aborted, they don't necessarily result in a fire. what do you think happened here as a former investigator? >> it's very interesting, anderson, because typically in this type of situation the fire extinguisher bottles which are onboard the aircraft would immediately extinguish that fire automatically. so it's odd to me that this fire would have continued and continued. >> so this is probably a dumb question. but you're saying by the engines there are fire extinguishing devices that would automatically turn on? >> yeah, that's right. there's fire extinguishing bottles in the engine, the cell areas, so if this fire was in the cell, it would try to put that out. what that indicates to me is there may have been some kind of a breach in the fuel system to continue to feed that fire. so it's obviously preliminary. >> les? >> anderson, let me clarify a little bit what dave said. you have to -- we have to go through a checklist. we have to physically what we call shoot a