sent from the plane past the time we thought? you know, don, this takes a turn every few hours and a senior official is telling me that the malaysians do believe and have communicated this with u.s. authorities that they do have several pings of data from the airliner engine. it is set up to transmit about the engine as it flies. they believe they have several pings, if you will of engine data transpit mitted and picked up by satellite and now is being analyzed. the preliminary analysis they say is that this data was picked up showing a track that the plane may indeed have flown to five hours across the indian ocean. u.s. authorities working with the malaysians to analyze all of this and the flow of data from the engines that they believe
is telling us that the search field has been expanded. barbara star is in washington. jim is our national security correspondent and mary is a former inspector general for the department of transportation and will join us in a moment. first to barbara. don, a senior u.s. official is now telling us that the u.s. has been told by the malaysians there were pings, if you will, in electronic information sent from what they believe is the airliner s imagines to satellites overhead. this is a data transmission that usually happens to send information about the engineers. safety and data information about how the engines are operating. they believe they have several pings, if you will, from this system.
partnering in the search and following leads where we find them. mary. i think what they are doing is taking two pieces of information that may not be accurate, but it s all they got. if you couple the sighting or one radar tracing that somebody saw on an island to the west of malaysia. they said the plane turned around and headed past malaise why near a small island. they have a heading. if you put that in connection with the engine information, true or not, whether it exists or not, the imagines may have run for four hours, you have two key pieces. a heading and a distance. with that i think that the u.s. government undoubtedly feels an obligation to at least go look. mary, you want to weigh in on this breaking news now. i want to get to barbara star. if new information about data
well. i will echo that point for sure. this is a valuable piece of the puzzle combined with other pieces that is leading them to turn some of the attention to the indian ocean. you have the engine data and the radar from the malaysian air force that we have been reporting on that showed that path and turn and long flight to heading in a southwesterly direction out towards the indian ocean. they have knowledge of how much fuel was in the tanks of that plane when it took off and made that plane. that gives them a sense of how far it can fly. gives them a sense of the range on the map. the trouble is it can fly for a long period of time. that s an issue here. i know there has been frustration with the sharing of information, particularly the raw data from the malaysian side sharing with other countries involved with the serpent. others with the resources to analyze the data and make the best conclusions. they get that in better form that allows them to have
now you are on the western side and out to the indian ocean. this is a very real discrepancy from what we heard overnight from the authorities and no data. what we heard from rolls royce, no data. now strong reporting from barbara star that the u.s. is sending the fleet into the indian ocean to search. do we still have mary on the line? is mary on the line? you heard barbara dar reporting from the department of transor theation. i think basically that there is some information, we have to respond. no way we have at least radar heading after the plane turned or someone reported it and we have people reporting that the