the probability it s there. you re just reducing it closer to zero. and the fact in the ocean, it s different from land, where if something lands on a forest or in a field it will stay there unless somebody moves it. the ocean, you ve got currents moving things around, stuff could resurface that had sunk before. this is a great question. how do we know that it s not in some patch of ocean that wasn t previously? also. again, these questions are for the families. can the detected frequency of 33.3 correspond to the pinger locator attached to the black boxes? it s a different frequency than the ones we know that the black boxes sent out but can it correspond? well, this is a great question. and this really boils down to the heart of what we re doing right now looking on the bottom of the ocean of the bluefin-21. we were told that the pinger locater box was going to be at 37.5. and yet when the signal was obtained it was 33.3. does that rule it out? some experts say no, that, in fact,
further than that. it s 160 decibels which that s as loud as a gunshot and ten times as much as the ocean requires to put hearing protection on for a human being. granted, this is underwater but the fact is, it s a very loud sound. simulations we have heard are just that, simulations. at 36.5 or 37.5 kilohertz, that s as high as a dog whistle and encouraged with it. confident that s where the sound came from. allen, in your view, now s the time to bring in new air assets, air force assets made available. to what degree? if they continue to look for the surface debris, there s limitations of the p-3. the air force have m-130s and you could send it all day long and they don t have to keep coming back for refueling so that would be something that the
in the 37.5 kilohertz range. when it was received, they are designed to be launched out to find submarines. when there are several in an area immediately when there s a sound that might be a submarine sound or any sound that can be triangulated very quick ly so it s designed for an attack for a submarine attack. so a singular sound from a singular sonobuoys could have been a number of different sounds and it was ruled out quickly that it was not consistent with the black box pinger. does this underscore that false positives is a real problem and still potentially a problem if any one of these devices feels like it is to pick up some sort of audible noise from this point forward? i m a little surprised that ping er didn t work better. i worked with the crews before with the ntsb. david s right. they re not optimized for finding pingers. the other thing, why no debris
how confident are you? well, for the pinger itself, that s the towed ping locator, it will be a fairly broad reception bandwidth. therefore, it will certainly be able to receive 37.5, but it will receive signals at some distance either side of that. i think it will probably go down to about 10 kilohertz. if being transmitted, it will have received it. so david, if australian search teams do find the black box, let s say, what are the chances that they re going to find the plane as well? we ask that because you wonder how far debris spreads across the ocean floor. well, it depends of course on how the aircraft broke up in the first place. if it was a mid-air explosion or something, it could be spread for miles. if it s something that was caused by the impact on the water, it would be probably
first of all, to get to it from the cabin area. you d have to take them they re in the back of aircraft. they d have to be taken out, brought forward. the best way take it out of the aircraft would to take it to the equipment bay and drop it overboard through the outflow valve, which is in the bottom of the bay. that would be about the only way you could do it. again, it would be extremely difficult if not impossible to get it from the tail of the aircraft into the interior of the aircraft. professor stupples, i wonder about your level of optimism. we were hearing a lot of it from air chief marshall houston, also from the prime minister tony abbott. the p3 orion has been modified to pick up these sounds, and the signals they re picking up are not at 37.5 kilohertz, which is the frequency at which the pinger locator emits the pinger.