right, exactly. however as you know this is no ordinary 747. i mean, when people think of air force one they think of president obama landing in a town waving to the crowd. but really, the mission of this plane is the 9/11 scenario. it has to have electronic counter-measures on board for surviveability. it basically has to be a flying white house, mobile command and control center. so you have electronic counter measures such as jamming devices, you have flares that can throw off enemy missiles, and a huge amount of communication. the president needs to be able to talk to the nuclear forces whenever he needs to. so if you re in a scenario where you need to be up in the air indefinitely potentially what you really need is something that can survive, has aerial refuelling, it has a lot of fuel capacity. something that you can stay up in the air indefinitely.
control center. so you have electronic counter measures such as jamming devices, you have flares that can throw off enemy missiles, and a huge amount of communication. the president needs to be able to talk to the nuclear forces whenever he needs to. so if you re in a scenario where you need to be up in the air indefinitely potentially what you really need is something that can survive, has aerial refuelling, it has a lot of fuel capacity. something that you can stay up in the air indefinitely. so while it s a big price tag, it seems like, and many national security efforts have said it s worth the cost. in fact, they re hopeful that trump will maybe turn around his opinion. my sources have told me that boeing leadership reached out to trump earlier in the day, and they had a very constructive conversation. so we ll see what happens. and still having been privileged to spend hundreds of
the military, i was really surprised to hear about the merchant ship, anderson, they said would be on station, so it is still daylight. it will be interested to see if the merchant is equipped with the type of ship that could receive the helicopters. that will allow people to use assets that are capable of aerial refuelling so that they can fly helicopters out to the site. and if need be put people in the water to take a look at even smaller pieces of debris that they might find. i want to bring in also david suchi and richard quest, rich spent time focusing on malaysia airlines before this incident for reporting, he actually interviewed and spent time with the co-pilot on this flight. david, before we go to richard, just a quick question about the black box. we all know from past instances the report about the black box. what exactly at this point would it be able to show, to transmit,