that s the platform you see here on top of the ship. right now, the search area concentrated on some 75,000 square miles in the indian ocean. but time is running out to find the exact location. officials say the latest signals were weaker than pings detected over the weekend, suggesting the batteries in the black boxes are running out. buzz conroy has brought along a replica of a black box. great to see you. good to see you. you have the black box. which one? because there s two that they re looking for. which one of them do you have with you? i have a flight data recorder. this has all the information that would combine from the parameters of the flight, the engine speed, the fuel, all the type things you d need for information to do an autopsy on the flight. when you hear the reports now that they have picked up maybe five to seven minutes of these pings compared to maybe 2 1/2 hours of pings just a few days ago, what does that tell you?
every day, we receive hundreds of questions from our viewers who want a better understanding about what it is that is not being done in the search for flight 370. let s bring back our panel of experts to tackle some of these questions. our aviation analyst, mark weise, and peter goelz and law enforcement analyst, tom fuentes. let s get right to the questions. tony tweets, why this long before releasing the transcript to the public? no doubt the malaysian authority hindered success of the search. great question. i have no idea why they waited this long. they should have released it right away. two-and-a-half pages, basically. yes. mark, here s a question from you. this is from paul, a pilot. isn t it true that lots of information can be developed from the recording? i have detected alarms, engine speed and dialogue in cases. yes. you can. absolutely get a lot of the information from the recordings. we just need to have those recordings. and if there is tension in the voices,
one of the things on the checklist is after you have an event in the aircraft where something goes wrong you have to execute emergency procedures, the last thing you do is pull the circuit breaker on that voice recorder to make sure that it doesn t record over the conversations that took place immediately prior to and during the emergency. the other recorder in the aircraft lasts for weeks. that is the flight data recorder. that s the one that also has a pinger. that s what they are looking for because that will describe engine speed, fuel consumption, altitude, all of that to reconstruct the flight path and a lot of other critical systems data to know whether there was a fire onboard, something else mechanical going on. that is the one that the navy pinger locator is trying to find. not just the wreckage to do the forensics, but to get that flight data recorder. they really don t know the
sometime from now doesn t mean it s still not valuable. right? just means it makes it difficult to find in the interim? well, what they would be doing is looking for the tail section of the aircraft, which is where these boxes are kept, and hope they would still be in the tail or nearby, and they could be recovered quite a while from now. a year or two from now. and provide the data. the voice recorder, however, only records the last two hours of conversation. it s a tape loop that just tapes over itself. so that s unlikely to tell us the genesis of this accident. but the flight data recorder would have between 18 and over 80 different parameters indicating things about that flight, from engine speed and altitude and headings and virtue cal acceleration and so forth. the voice recorder would be valuable if you re buying into the charges that the crew or
or edr. in those kind of accidents edr data will be invaluable. reporter: sean dennis is a forensic engineer who reconstructs car crashes for law firms and insurance companies. it s hidden way up underneath the dash. yep. yep. yep. reporter: it is tied into the air bag system and records two to five seconds of pre-crash data, things like engine speed, throttle, brakes, accelerator, seat belts. we see here 2.3 seconds before before the crash this person, this driver has gone from brakes off to brakes on. chrysler, gm and ford give people like dennis access to information through a crash data reader anyone can buy. it s compatible with this particular system and toyota is not compatible with this system. toyota calls its black boxes, experimental and the data is only for research and