so they are much, much closer to the ping -- the beacons themselves or the black boxes. and so therefore the chances of them being picked up are considerably higher. >> david soucie, if this is it, without a debris field can we assume that the plane stayed relatively whole or is the assumption that there might have been debris but that it floated a long, long time ago far, far away. >> well, because it's within the search area, you would expect that if this is the pinger and it had been broken up into a lot of pieces you'd see at least some debris but as tom was saying, that's been through a lot of weather there, a lot of movement. so i wouldn't be surprised that there wasn't debris right above that pinger locator. but as he said, the opposite is true. if you found something on the surface, you wouldn't necessarily be able to trace that back to the pinger. so we're very fortunate that we're looking for the pinger first and may have located that before we found debris. that could indicate that it went