helicopters could go off of, any u.s. naval vessels, helicopters or other planes could go off of to try to aid in the search once an area is found? well, i should mention, this is a coordinated international effort. and everything we have done has been by request. so at first even when we sent our first ship in and the first helicopters, that was all by request of the malaysian government. so the u.s. navy, part of our role is to support all the nations in this region. if we re requested we ll certainly look at those options. but really at this time, yes. that s true. commander marks, i appreciate your time. i appreciate all your efforts. thank you. want to bring in our panel that s going to be with us throughout the evening. david soucie, cnn safety analyst, author of why planes crash. cnn aviation correspondent richard quest, meteorologist chad myers, former department of
i ve looked at it for that night. basically it was an east to west cross wind. it would have blown the plane a little bit to the west but would have no appreciable difference on the range. so basically 400 knots is as fast as the aerodynamic frame is designed to go at 12,000 feet. why they are just now realizing this, we talked about this a week ago. i m a little mystified. they have the radar data now. they ve gotten their act together. they re sharing this information. a lot of this is sensitive stuff. but that s why we have a search now that is falling shorter than it was before. question for both miles and/or mitchell. at 12,000 feet, at 400 knots, flying for six hours, or to the last ping, do you get the range that puts it where it is now, miles? just back of the envelope stuff that we have, and this is making some assumptions about how much fuel they loaded on.
with cnn safety analyst david soucie and david gallo co-leader of the search for air france flight 447. and david soucie, how does this work? explain what you have here. a duquesne tester. inside we have that s the pinger. $750 unit. doesn t look very dramatic, does it? that would be in the so-called black box? yes. both in the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder. there s two of them in here. every sea check on the aircraft, which is every 1,000 hours, this is removed and rebolted back in and replaced. the pinger includes the battery and signal transducer. inside of it if you look at this end, i don t know if you can get close enough to see that, but there s a plastic lip or plastic ring that separates the case which is the grounded area from
we felt the power of this amazing military vehicle. we were skimming, almost skimming the surface of the sea. but what really was remarkable was the sense of hope among all of the crew members. there were nine people aboard. and there was this feeling that maybe this was the answer. and you really felt it, anderson, that the people who are going up in these search planes, they want to bring it back. they want to end this. no doubt about that. kyung, thanks very much. want to bring in commander william marks of the u.s. navy s seventh fleet taking part in the search. commander, good to have you on the program tonight. the weather conditions do seem to be much better today. how s the search gone so far in this new area? thoroughly much better today. today is our new day here. it s in the morning. so we re getting our assignments via the air tasking order from the australians. what a great report i just heard. a tough act to follow there with the emotions and the feeling of hope with
conditions in the new search zone in the indian ocean where crews are looking for any sign of flight 370. how are things out there? reporter: not as good as yesterday. we re still 10 to 15 miles per hour. but yesterday it was absolutely like glass. couldn t get a better day. clear skies, sunshine, great visibility for the satellites, too. we haven t mentioned that. i know we ve mentioned all about how the planes did great. but the satellites had all good passes in this clear sky that they had right over the new search site. so yes, it will be windy. but mainly south of the site now. we have a significant weather event going on to the south through here for today and then through tomorrow. but still only about 10 to 20 miles per hour for winds. that will whip up the seas a little bit. but we re not talking about a sea state where you can t search. there will be some clouds, some lower clouds. those lower clouds won t allow the planes to fly as high. but as we heard today from kyung la