narrowed in on a close enough ar area. then if we get to this point, you might see other things, for example, the alvin, which could take a human being down there to take eyes on target and look at it or yoond that to the remora 6,000, the type of robot they used with air france to retrieve things from the bottom. right now, wolf, right now all of this technology is poised but only parts of it has been deployed at this moment. and as they move forward, they ll see how they can add more and more to this armada and hopefully, hopefully leads to the actual wreckage. wolf? all right. tom, thank you. let s dig deeper right now with colleen keller, senior analyst with the scientific consulting firm metron and worked on the search for air france flight 447. are you very confident those four pings were, in fact, coming from at least one, if not both of those black boxes, colleen? well, i have to trust the experts, wolf. they ve told us that they ve analyzed the signals, they ve shown the
yards off the ocean floor and with an expensive and highly sensitive piece of equipment like this, you don t want it colliding with things, getting stuff and losing valuable time. that s whey thooy they re waiti that and focusing on the work on the surface. the ships like the hms echo. what it can do is give them a better picture before they start, wolf, of what they re taking pictures of so hopefully when they put the bluefin down there, it can be the most productive. because the big production to get it into the water and get it out safely, they don t want to lose any of that time through bad planning. very, very, very complicated. tom, thank you. colleen keller, senior analyst with the scientific consulting firm metron. worked on the search for air france flight 447. and eric is joining us from sydney, he s an oceanographer with the climate change research center. talk a little bit about these waters. how challenging, eric, are they
the debris has gone into a very different direction. much of the focus, especially early on in this search, has been about the debris moving eastward. moving toward the strait. now that these pings seem to be much further northward, much closer to malaysia and the plane maybe hasn t flown that far, it means the circulation actually would have driven the debris the other way around, much more toward madagascar, toward africa, even. colleen, here s a mystery that i d like you to explain to our viewers. the pinging sound that s coming from those two black boxes, they re supposed to be, what, 37.5 kilohertz, but we re told it was slightly different the first four pings that were detected, this fifth suspected ping. not exactly 37.5. how if they believe they re coming from the black boxes, what would explain the slight change in the kilohertz? well, it could be the environment or it could be the
you know those waters. yes. absolutely. a lot of time on the surface, because we can go down there with the submersible, they don t go very fast. you can t go you can drive your ship at the same speed as you an drive your submersible or the other way around. so the submersible can only cover very small amount of distance every day, and every time it has to get back up. this is going to take even for a relatively small area, this is going to take a significant amount of time. weeks, months. something like that. you were involved in that air france search, colleen. is there anything you think they need right now? all of the people involved in this search that they re not getting? well, you know, it s kind of strange that we re continuing to search the surface for debris. if we found a piece of debris tomorrow, what would that do for this search? i know that when we found debris for air france and we back tr k
box, itself. i know that when they recover one of the black boxes from the air france search and put it on the bench and cleaned it up and put a new battery in it and tested it, it didn t function at the frequency they were expecting. and it also didn t give the correct voltage that they were expecting which indicated that either the box had suffered some sort of damage i m sorry, the beacon had suffered damage or that it was manufactured incorrectly or had some defect inside. so it could be any number of explanations. including maybe that the water environment is changing the signal, but i think it s probably more likely it s coming from the box at that frequency. but the manufacturers still seem to think that it s coming from their beacon. so we re going to go with that. we heard in the last hour, colleen, from one of the new zealand air commanders there who s been involved the surface search is now about the size of west virginia. looking for debris that may be floating on the s