we have breaking news tonight as the data from the fourth bluefin-21 mission has come in, but unfortunately it has yielded no evidence of flight 370. the fifth bluefin mission underway now. it s 42 days in to the search for flight 370. the focus has shifted from above the surface to the ocean below. cnn s david mattingly is inside of a submarine off of the coast of horseshoe bay british colombia. david, talk us through the challenges of an underwater search. don, the challenge is, it s an incredibly long list, not the least of which being the tremendous depths you have to go to and the pressure you have to deal with going to the bottom of the indian ocean. we are talking a couple of miles down. there s only a half dozen manned submersibles that can actually go down and do that kind of work. this vehicle we re in right now is not one of them. we re at the bottom of horseshoe
it s important that we understand that this is not just a malaysian situation. we have a lot of lessons we are learning out of this. it is expensive learning but we have to pay the price in order to get what we need to know for future events. this is not just a one-time thing and don t worry about it. it will never happen again. don t count on that. that s not a good idea. very well put. geoffrey thomas, let s say they find something, how will this be released? is there a protocol that needs to be followed? look, i think probably forget the protocol for a moment, i think good sense is probably a better word. if they find something positive, i believe that really has to be announced by the malaysian prime minister. first of all, they are going to have to tell the relatives in a better way than they did last time, not through text messages had on mobile phones. so it may well be what they do on the fifth mission or the sixth mission find something, it
pressing issue and the government here is still failing to do it adequately, don. nic robertson in kuala lumpur. thank you very much, nic. back to perth with geoffrey thomas, and robert the editor of flying magazine. richard quest is back with me of course back with me here in new york. geoffrey, to you first, you see some parallels between what is happening right now with mh-370 and the successful search for air france 447. explain that to us. yes, indeed, don. i mean with the search for 447, when they finally triangulated where they believed the wreckage was, they put down a bluefin-21 to have a look. it took them actually eight days, even though they knew virtually precisely where the airplane was, it still took them eight days to find it. the wreckage on the bottom was confined to a very small area,
questions answered. it does seem they are sending the high-level delegation. what we have had in the last hour or so coming from the twitter account of the transport minister is underlining the three committees and he put out a note on each of them that the committee that s working with the families will send a high-level delegation to beijing over the weekend, perhaps meeting with families as early as monday. the committee that s responsible for the search and equipment involved in the search, they are going to, as you are suggesting there, put more auvs down in the water. that s that suggestion and the other committee, he said that committee is now looking at getting a panel up and running to investigate everything surrounding everything surrounding the search and what happened in the hours before and the days before that. so it does seem that he is trying to energize this earlier commitment. why he feels under pressure to do that, not clear. certainly getting answers to the famili
literally found debris within 6 1/2 nautical miles of last known position. sometimes it takes time to search these areas. the period of time where they actually found the debris it was the 18th mission. we are in the fourth and fifth mission. we are early in the search process. richard quest, i asked him what could a new mission look like. maybe it should be what should this one look like because you have been looking at what the malaysians should be and are doing. are they doing everything correctly. to a point, absolutely. but the thing normally by now, these are the two documents that regulate how you are doing. this is the annex 13 that we hear about. aircraft accident and incident investigation. it s the bible for who does what, where, when and why. this is the manual of aircraft