it s not the pilots fault, they didn t have the training. but other situations where they haven t been able to get the masks on. les is so right. it s all in the training. know where it is, how to get it on and how important to do that. so it all comes back to basically how well were they trained, if they had an emergency, how well were they trained to do it? treinteresting, as paul said. pre-planning, looking for the black boxeses listening for the blacks boxes. you may have a check list were training. when it actually happens, you know what? and you don t know what s going to happen. that s right. that s right. when the real event happens, you just try not to panic, to be calm and to go through whatever procedures you ve been trained. this is just a function of how well you ve been trained. how experienced you are. yeah. we call it muscle memory. muscle memory. yeah. all right.
looking for the black backes and so far they haven t found them. fit comes down to relying on the debris, are they up to the task if they have to piece together the wreckage? look, don, i really do believe they are. australia s aviation transportation safety bureau is one of the best in the world. they ve helped nations in the near proximity like indonesia. they ve helped them with their crash investigation. they ve helped the singaporeans as well. they ve got a very, very good track record, very methodical and certainly in the same class as the ntsb and the aaib, and the bea in france. so, yes, they are up to the task but i agree with mary, hopefully the black boxes will give us the information we need because actually recovering this a
back now with our panel of experts, fabian cousteau, talking a lot about challenging marine environments. you re working with a unique underwater project we ve been talking about a little. tell us about mission 31. i m taking six aspiring aquanauts to live and work underwater at the only undersea marine laboratory for 31 days. and that allows us to experience the underwater world in a way that is very rarely afforded. and you know, we ve learned about the ocean in this particular case. it s sad that it took this incident to do that, but there s so much about the ocean that we don t really know. much of the indian ocean they re searching for this plane and the black boxes. it hasn t even been mapped. take the last three generation or last 100 years of ocean exploration. we ve explored less than 5% of our oceans and presumably it s represents 99% of our
that they re able to cull together, they still may not be able to find that one piece that brought the plane down in the first place. let s get back to our panel now. also joining us is geoffrey thomas. i want to get to mary quickly. mary, we may not have to put this plane back together. i ve asked you this question before and you ve answered it. if the data recorders are found and the information is intact, which you think it will be once they are found, the plane, they won t want to reassemble this airplane. right. that s correct. and in most crash investigations they do not reassemble the plane. obviously they sift through the wreckage looking for important clues and major component to failure, et cetera. but if the black boxes have the answer and they can glean what happened from them, then they won t put the plane back together. it s just a very expensive proposition and it s rare that they do that, actually. yeah. so, geoffrey, they have been
them. reporter: in this mission the sonobouys and orion planes deployed will detect sounds of black box pings. sonar operators on board the aircraft are manning xurcompute to receive and analyze the signals. they are dropped in a the beauty of these things, sonar buoys, they stay out a long time. up to eight hours. reporter: then expire and sink to the bottom. they can go around 1,000 feet down. how do they detect signals? possibly from black boxes which could be as far down at 14,700-plus feet. experts say the sound 34506move through the water and with good weather signals are easier to hear. with time running out our already run out on the black boxes, what s next? we ll talk about that, coming up. (dad) well, we ve been thinking about it and we re just not sure.