unprofessional. that is what got the malaysians into so much trouble. so to hear this from the prime minister today, after no advancements, that doesn t add credibility, all it does it take away the small faith that the families had in the government at this point. so i am just a little concerned and confused about this sudden confidence that it is from that airplane and it is the pinger. you know, i believe that it is, i m confident that it is, but i m not the prime minister. that bothers me a little bit. it really does. van, let s talk about the bluefin-21, the next phase, after they stop hearing pings. the technology, even if it is very advanced it is incredibly challenging terrain. it is cold, pitch black, different levels of salination. explain how far it will work. so the biggest issue down there when you operate it at
malaysian area, and then this is the malaysians embarrassed they have a bad radar system as far as i can see. you know, richard you talk about other investigations. i m trying to think, has there been an investigation or crash like this or a missing plane like this where there has been no debris? that is the extraordinary thing. they re hearing pings, but no debris. correct, no debris, they re still searching and refined the search area 500 miles west to look for the track. but no debris. that is the other big problem with this investigation. because there is so much scrutiny on individual words, things frankly you wouldn t normally look at. what the final words were, it would not be as significant, anything about it. it wouldn t normally be significant, it would get lost in the morass of the investigation, but in this case because there is nothing there, anderson, there is not a single fact on which you can hang your
pingers from the black box of malaysian air flight 370. and one would think if there were black boxes out there the scientists would have told the authorities. absolutely, again, this is not a signal that occurs in nature. this is man made. and everything says this is malaysian air 370. david, time of course is of the essence because of the batteries. how much more time do think they will try to take to create these pings? we just heard from commander marks who said they would probably go two days without hearing pings before they would put in the bluefin. so if we go for one day it might go a day without a ping, then the next day they will get a ping. so until they go two straight days without any pings they will keep that tpl in the water. and tim, what is the next step? well, as david said they will keep the tpl in the water as long as they can.
to obtain from the two earlier acoustic events, well, that search area s too broad. if they had deployed an underwater vehicle right now to try and find this wreckage, well, the search would take many, many, many days. john? it s still too big. they do need to narrow it down. erin, tell me about the difference between signal strength that they detected when they were hearing pings. what does that indicate? reporter: that s right, john, we saw some video of that detection released today, that 33.2 kilohertz is the strength of the signal they detected on board the ocean shield. the signal should have been 37.5 kilohertz, but the manufacturer of the black box pinger saying that it s entirely possible that the signal strength could have been weakened, given any number of variables in an ocean with depths of 2.8 miles that they re looking at, things like
cautious optimism to the bank when the navy says it and what i like about this scenario is, first of all, the amount of time that they have heard the pings, the fact that they apparently heard two pings, meaning they might have two black boxes in one location and then the fact that it matches up nicely with those inmarsat circles which we ve been talking about for so long. it really verifies what the engineers did, remarkable piece of engineering, using technology that in ways that it was never intended to give us the only lead that we had to go on. it s just amazing that we re hearing pings, potentially, without a single shred of wreckage. we re going to hear directly, very soon, peter, from commander william marks of the u.s. navy s seventh fleet. we ll speak with him live in a few moments. but in a statement, acquisition of the two signals are encouraging and we are only cautiously optimistic pending