yep. yeah? in attempts of locating this pinger, i mean, how big of an area i mean, how are you able to locate that area at this point? is it within a couple miles or a hundred miles? what i might do is ask one of the subject matter experts, commodore levy, to address your question, and you might just add a little bit on some of the challenges associated with the work that s being done underwater. i might just open with some of the challenges we face. as you ve heard, most of the, all of the detections that are happening at the moment are acoust acoustic. you can think of it essentially as deployed microphones listening for sound, and on the towed pinger locator, that s sitting approximately 3,000 meters below the surface of the ocean. unlike in air, where sound travels in a straight line, acoustic energy, sound, through the water, is greatly affected by temperature, pressure and
frequency for the duration of the pattern, but what it happens is that it starts to emit less acoustic energy, and in other words, it gets quiet. so as the battery dies, the signal strength is less, and that means that deteched range will start to decrease. and the chinese also report that one of the search plans detected white objects floating in the ocean near the search area. no confirmation of what those items might be, but previous objects were trash or other debris. and the hopes rose when we heard that the chinese ship had stumbled across it, and the longer we wait for the k confirmation, the less confident we are feeling. so let s bring in our analysts, michael kay, les abend, and richard quest. so michael, we have heard the experts say over and over that the black box needs to be found, and it would not be found until