point of views. arthur, you have been skeptical about these pings from the beginning. correct. so here is the bottom line. in terms of the pings and their whether they re accurate or not, there is two ways to look at this. one way is in gross terms. well heard pings. we went to look where the pings were. we didn t find the wreckage. therefore the pings are erroneous. no one has talked about the technical side, the australian, the malaysians, the united states giving us technical reasons why they re not. but this is what we know. number one, the frequencies were off. frequencies were off. they were supposed to be 37.5. they came in at 33.3. another one was at 27. number two, the distances between the pings was always way too large. these pingers only put out a signal that can be heard one, two, three miles maximum. you re talking 10, 20, 30, 40 miles that they allegedly heard pings. it just doesn t make sense. number three, there was a chinese one of the chinese
vice president and group manager at teledine marine systems which makes some of the pinger locators that have been used in this search for the flight. also mary schiavo, aviation analyst and former inspector general for the u.s. transportation department. thomas, i want to start with you. first, are you surprised about this latest news that the pings didn t come from the black boxes? no. i mean, that was always a possibility. i think we talked about this over the last couple of months, that the frequency was slightly lower than what is the prescribed 37.5 kilohertz requirement for the aviation pinger. there are a whole bunch of reasons that could potentially be, but there are also other man made sources that could generate that type of signal. so it was an attractive target, let s say, to look at, but it wasn t a definitive target. and so the failure and the lack of finding a real item on the bottom is not necessarily surprising. and lots of time and effort
why did they continue the search. why did they spend all of this monday know continuing the search? i m a little concerned. i m very concerned about what s going on out there. you know, mary, kind of to david s point, to be fair though, and i heard richard quest talk about this yesterday. in hindsight maybe folks should be skeptical. even though maybe they couldn t match the frequencies, this is all they had to work with. what else were they supposed to do? well, skeptical or not, this was the best location, the best lead based on the inmar satd sda da a and when they raised out there to start looking for the pings, remember, this is all they had. still all they had. but when they picked up the pings it is unthinkable they would say, well, it s 33.3 instead of 37.5 kilohertz. we re not going to search. that s just not an option when 239 people are missing. so i do give credit to the u.s. navy. there was no choice. they had to look once we had the inmarsat data and picked up pings.
had spoken. the family members had spoken with many aviation experts and that they didn t have much credence in those pings. are you one of those aviation experts that feels that way, that there wasn t a lot to be said for these pings, the wrong frequency, et cetera? why was so much put on them if those were not the right that wasn t the right intelligence? well, and i was one of those people to say why don t we test them? it was amazing to me that we didn t have data that would show what would happen to the pingers when they re under water and under the pressure of water for more than 30 days? there was a study out of portugal that said there could be as much as a one kilohertz variance. so you ve had one either way off of the 37.5. but there wasn t any study that showed it was 33 that it could go to 33.3, so it was astonishing to me that in this whole time, now almost three months, that no one checked to see if that would happen to a pinger. but, you know, in an investigation,
match if you like between the authorities and everybody else. they have not staked their credibility on it. they staked the fact that they believe it to be true, which is not the same thing as we are credible and you are not, so to speak. they basically said in the extremity of the moment. okay. that we believe this to be true. now, what we have learned today is that it s not true with the pings. and yes, weeks were wasted by looking in that area. 50 days were wasted. but they have nothing else to go on. let s not be too clever after the event here. they had nothing else to go on. although based in part on the inmarsat data and the pings started to add up and add up. and as a result, they didn t look anywhere else. they haven t been looking in other locations because of this. hold on one second. mary, i know you thought these were the pings, along with a lot of people, most people. what about the frequency was never right. the standard for the plane so-called black box 37.5 k