beiji beijing s foreign minister says they ve used 18 naval vessels, 8 helicopters, three planes, 10 satellites, some estimates in chinese media put that country s price tag, by itself, as high as $25 million thus far. as far as the other assets, including those of the united states, there s another hefty price tag with some estimates suggesting the cost of about $21 million a month. most of that money coming from military training budgets, some also from humanitarian organizations and from u.s. navy operations. for example, u.s. navy p-4 aircraft costs about, oh, $4300, $4400 an hour to fly. the pentagon originally earmarked something like $3 million for this search. but they say they ve already spent about $7 million.
were undergone on the 5th of april. so the first question has to be what were they doing searching in that area anyway. it wasn t t in the designated search zone. it looks small on the map, a small distance, but we re talking hundreds of miles are involved here. so why were they there. what did they see? all these sort of questions. and now we know some ten hours, according to will ripley s reporting, eight to ten hours later, the australians still haven t received confirmation. an hour or two ago i said this looks a bit of a mess the way the command and control structures on something so important seems to have frayed at the edges. i m being charitable. but if beijing is now saying the families don t believe it to be true, this is exactly, exactly why you can t just have these everybody announcing things at the drop of a hat to the races, because it gives unfair, un
but i think the australians were just being cautious and wanted to have confirmation. will ripley is live for us there in australia. will, good morning to you and what have you learned this hour? good morning. the bottom line, no, we don t have official confirmation. as we mentioned earlier, the australians first got word of this through some channel, we don t know which channel, they first got word around lunchtime. they ve been trying to establish communication with haixun ever since. have not been able to get any information out of beijing which has been disseminated all the facts to the australians and the malaysians. our source within the australian defense force is telling us they really hoped when they got word of this this afternoon or yesterday afternoon now, in perth, they hoped that this would speed up the process. they hoped that, you know, hours into this we would be able to speed up the line of communication. that simply hasn t happened yet. that s the reason we re no
what s your level of optimism and skepticism as this report comes in? i am skeptically optimistic. it is a mess will let s call it what it is. it is a mess because all the mechanisms designed to prevent exactly the speculation and rampant what is, what if, what happens have now gone right out of the window because of the way the chinese have announced this, through xinhua. all the command and control structures whether by beijing to malaysia to perth, it doesn t matter. this is being set up in a particular way, specifically to avoid this sort of crucial information or misinformation from being leaked at exactly the wrong moment giving painfully false information and false hope to families and setting everybody off in the wrong direction. so, what has to happen now? that s what has happened so far. what has to happen now?
vehicles. we re going to search that site and try to find it. they ve said really nothing officially. so everything is coming through china media rather than the command post in australia. i realize it s almost 11:00 at night in australia and in beijing, for that matter. but something something out, a press release, something that you re on this, you re working on it. you ve deployed appropriate resources. we re hearing nothing in an official capacity to really know what s going on. and, also, in terms of expectations, say, you know, the ocean shield with the appropriate gear won t it will take two days to get there or four days to get there, whatever it will be. give a more realistic timeline of how long it will take to verify what s been reported. mary schiavo, without that information from the australians who are leading this multi-national search and we know that this is nearly 12 h r hours old, 12 hours ago since these pictures were taken