voice recorder the flight data recorder fresh batteries that had just been put in but we ve still not heard one ping. what does that say to you? that s a tough one. again, the pingers, you really have to be the conditions have to be right. you have to be in the right position. and i m not surprised that they haven t heard them yet. you have to be fairly lucky to do that and fairly close, within a couple of miles to three or four miles at most. if those black boxes are buried deep in mud at the bottom of the java sea, are we ever going to find hear those pingers or find those black boxes? i m confident they will find the black boxes. it s just going to take time and patience. what a horrible situation to be in for the families. certainly is. ken, what does it say to you that there were no mayday distress calls from the cockpit as this plane was going down?
better weather conditions than they re facing in the java sea right now. they could be there for a while. and the experts say even bringing one body to the surface with a diver can be extremely dangerous. very dangerous, wolf. the dive teams have to often bring body bags down with them place a body in the bag and then maybe get it into some kind of a salvage basket or a platform lowered under water to raise it up. sometimes they have to bring the body up themselves which is extremely difficult because the bodies get very heavy. so that s dangerous as well. we wish these divers only the best. thanks brian. joining us now, cnn analyst david gallo and colonel ken christensen, aviation consultant. david, apparently they ve discovered two more pieces of metal, significant pieces of metal aboard the uss fort worth right now, one of the u.s. warships searching the area. how long will it take for them to determine whether these two
they need to know that so they can get that out to the fleet and inspect the current fleet that s flying and fix whatever could be wrong. but you wouldn t go so far as to say they should ground these planes for the time being until they figure out what happened? no. i wouldn t say they should ground at this point. this is they have tried-and-true procedures for this. our faa is very diligent about doing that as well. if you look back to the malaysia flight 370, again, boeing the manufacturer of that aircraft they want to know why that aircraft went down because they have 997 boeing 777s out there flying that they would want to modify if they neededed to. that s why the search is so important, the information is so important to try to figure out what happened so we can all learn from that to make sure it doesn t happen again. david gallo, ken christensen, thanks very much. still ahead, we ll take you to the city believed to be the hideout for north korea s elite
as they try to find out what happened to their loved ones think of an industry that relies on safety and needs to know what happened to this aircraft not tomorrow but yesterday so it s high time we got beyond the black box with these pingers and moved into some capability to put data in the cloud when something is happening on these aircraft that is not good. we ll have to see if there s any action taken because i think now is too late as you say, miles. miles o brien, lieutenant colonel ken christensen. miles, you re not off the hook yet, stick around. ahead for us cnn has a crew on board a ship searching for airasia flight 8501. we are within the area where some bodies and debris have been found but you can see how challenging it is the fact that as soon as you see something in the distance it disappears behind a wave and then it s very difficult to try and spot it again. look at those waves.
trunk of your car and you can ship them on a plane and have them there instantaneously on-site. this industry is moving into smaller vehicles. all the big vehicles are needed to get to deep water, the smaller vehicles again, are less expensive and much more rapidly deployable. that s a really good point. ken, you worked with the air force doing search and rescue. in the first week of something like this tell us how critical the aerial search is because a lot of times throughout this search planes haven t been able to be deployed. that s right. and the aerial search really drives where the ships are going to go because they have a better view from being at altitude. but, again, the weather can really hinder a successful visual search. if you want to of course get on station as quick as you can, but sometimes the weather just doesn t cooperate with you. occasionally you can drop down below, down to about 150 feet