turn off the transponder and the acars system. so i think it might advance it a little bit but you can t tell yet. one thing that becomes clear here, clearly this is intelligence, an evolving intelligence operation and they are working with imperfect data and they are adjusting as we go. and to explain to our viewer who is have to be frustrated with the constant false alarms. and they ve got the 30-day deadline with the pingers expiring if they haven t already. they feel pressure to get one last search while the pingers are going. if they find some wreckage, they are going to drop a device into the ocean and see if they can pick up something. peter goelz, miles o brien, thank you. defending the mental state of the pilots of flight 370. malaysian airlines said they both underwent regular, psychological evaluations. but did they miss something? and later, our own reporter
cockpit. you just turn the button, it s off. the acars system is a little bit more complicated to turn that off. i don t know if you can do it from strictly sitting in the cockpit or if you have to leave the cockpit and go to the underbelly. how do you turn off the acars system? the only reason you d be pulling a circuit breaker in the cockpit. you could turn off part of acars system. that would turn it off. the only reason you d be pulling a circuit breaker in the cockpit by manual operations is to prevent, say, a fire from continuing. it s really to prevent a bus, an electric bus from continuing on a fire path. mark weiss, thanks very much. always good to get your explanation. we ll keep watching for breaking news on the search for flight 370. stand by for that. also coming up, cnn s karl penhaul, he s with ukrainian forces right now as russian president vladimir putin, he phones president obama to discuss the crisis. also exhausted searchers tell us
these things are completely irrelevant to the investigation. and these dribs and drabs come out and said in a fashion that makes it sound like they re incriminating but they aren t. let s not forget that. and really, frankly, nothing can be ruled out now. most every scenario you come up with you can run it through. some of the more plausible than others. frankly, the crew being responsible for this is a very plausible scenario but one of many that are still possible. let me go to les abend. you are the pilot here. you fly 777s. paint for me a picture where if the pilot, as some people suspect, took this plane off for whatever reason, what happened? in other words, is it possible that he could have shut down all communication, turned off the transponders, acars system? et cetera. could he have done that and taken this plane off in the way that we now know potentially
ended up in this area? is that feasible? of course he could have disabled various systems. but to completely shut off the acars, he would have had to go back into the e and e, the electronics and engineering compartment that s eight feet behind the cockpit and down below the galley. and basically vacate the cockpit. the evidence is such that the acars system was being pinged by the satellite. so he would have had to disable that, too. it just seems so implausible to me. you must be talking to pilots all the time about this. i m talking to random people in the street about this. everyone s obsessed with it for one reason, the mystery remains a mystery. when you talk to pilots, experienced, long service pilots, what is the general feeling you re now getting about what they think is the most likely scenario here? most of them kind of align with my malfunction theory and with the fuel issue we just brought up where it is plausible it could have gone a certain
turn much of with that evidence. so some presumably investigators have been looking into captain shah s background for weeks and weeks. no suicide note has come to line. no family strife. nothing from his flight simulator so far. so in your mintd, do you agree? do investigators know more than they are saying or are they in the wrong place? i think there is no oh, i m sorry. there is no evidence that is shown that this captain was involved in anything nefarious, as you say. what we do believe is that something occurred in the cockpit that caused the transponder and the acars system to be turned off and to be turned off manually. that s the only bit of solid evidence that we have. and i think the report out of malaysia from the police the unsourced police spokesperson is probably a very poor lead and has been talked down extensively