unmanned vehicle. it s a lot of work, it s tedious. they have to keep redoing their mapping and what they re sending the auv down to do because of the fact they don t know what they re looking for. it s sort of go down, maybe tinker again, see what you need to do the next time you send the auv down, so it s a very tedious process. good stuff, stephanie. may i ask a question of him and you, the question is, he sort of, you know, touched on it a little bit about your question the bluefin. is that bluefin and are these auvs that temperamental because twice now we ve had issues with it. just an educated guess on what kind of glitch the bluefin suffered and how temperamental is it. it s important to remember the sonar is just one part of the bluefin. can you speak to that, what the troubles would be potentially? that s really what it is, it s a complex system with multiple different components. you have navigation, vehicle control, you have all kinds of
happens when passenger jets crash. from the tragic and unexpected like last year in san francisco to the planned and controlled like this demonstration by the discovery channel in 2012 and this one from nasa and the faa decades ago. unlike the missing malaysian airlines flight 370, they all crashed on land. surprisingly, they provide clues to what might happen next in the investigation. you re telling me crashing on water is no different than crashing on land? depending on your impact velocity, depending on your impact angle, the effects could be the same between water and land. reporter: aviation safety expert and crash investigator anthony brickhouse takes me through a field of aircraft wreckage used for teaching at embree riddle university. the difficulty of finding a sonar single of flight 370 s wreckage depends on what was happening in the final seconds
right, this is what sidescan sonar looks like. the more detail you want to get, you search a smaller area. they re going to make choices in terms of what frequencies they re using, what kind of detail they want in order to decide can i cover a broad area quickly, or do i have to cover a small area and take even more time but get higher levels of detail. with the side-scan sonar, it s basically looking out from where we are. taking a look at what s around us that way. we re looking sideways. we re pinging now and we re building up as that sound comes back, we re building up an image of different things that are on the seafloor. the image in shallow water has a lot of complexities to it. this image is crisp when you get to deep water like the indian ocean. because there s less movement. right, it s a simple environment for the sonar but a complex environment for the
sucking up samples. this is about 24 feet long, about 11 feet tall, and it weighs about 28,000 pounds. it has enough oxygen and emergency provisions on board for the people to survive under water for up to five days. there is also a back cabin on the submersible called the aft observation chamber. a crew member who keeps an eye on the submersible s vital signs and another scientist share that back area, which is only about 5 1/2 feet by 3 feet. so just to give our viewers an idea how tight it is, this is where you re sitting, this is how i m sitting, and you could be here for hours. reporter: but during those hours, this is what s taking place. so we fire up the sonar and it does the sweep and paints us a picture as it spins around 360 degrees on if there s any solid targets on the bottom. it will beep and paint a small picture of what it looks like. reporter: the use of high-tech unmanned underwater
a 777. the steeper the angle, the faster the speed, the smaller the pieces of wreckage. even when it hits the water. in this scenario, flight 370 could be traveling between 500 and 600 miles per hour. wings and engines might break away. but not so for the passenger compartme compartment. the fuselage. imagine the horrific crash in shanksville on 9/11 if it happened in water. in the industry, we call that a smoking hole-type accident because that s what you have when you get to the crash site. reporter: what happens if it s in the water? water is going to act just like land would. water is not compressible. when you hit it, it s going to pretty much have the say effect that land would have. reporter: making it much more problematic to detect with sonar at the bottom of the ocean. brickhouse says a hopeful outcome at this point would be to find wreckage similar to the air france crash of 2009.