still have a few more hours of daylight. the other airplanes will get on scene probably just before it will start getting dark. all right. ken, stay with us. let s get to marianne, our correspondent in new york. marianne, we ve come a long way to this spot. but for the moment, we don t know where we are. i think for families, though, it s another moment of hope. you know, we have been hearing a little bit of chatter. we heard that the family of one of the passengers, the american, who is from texas, posted a brief statement earlier just asking everyone to pray, especially since we just don t know definitively yet. but we want to talk about the debris again, and the fact that, the question is, does it fit? well, it s about 79 feet, we re being told. so the boeing 777, it s about 242 feet long. could it fit? yes, it appears it could fit. we talked about the p-3 s and
about, well, these people were suicidal or they had a beef with someone, we don t have any of that, ken. yeah, what s good about that, we re going to assume i ve said from the start, the past couple days i ve been on. from the press investigation standpoint, you always follow the debris field and you go from there. landing in the water, they didn t impact rock or anything. assuming this is the debris field, the good things that will come out of this particular debris field is the cockpit voice recorder, and the flight data recorder. and the underwater locator beacon is attached to them. so we still have another 20, maybe another 18 days of that underwater locator beacon ticking, and that will be located. because it s going to be in that vicinity. that will be readily located and retrieved. and then you ll get that cockpit voice recorder, because they are that will be recorded and
i think the thing to be c cogniza cognizant, the orion is about a 13-hour duration. five hours out there, three hours on station, and then five hours on return. each can spend two and a half hours on station, and then will have to come back to refuel. and another aircraft will relieve them to continue the search. aviation consultant ken christiansen. it sounds it if they ll need something to float on which aircraft can take off and land to be able to do this effectively over long periods of time. you can t have ten hours of round trip flight time and three hours of search time. that s not productive. that s correct, but right now, what they re going to do, of course they ll look initially to see if there s any signs of life. so technically still could be a search operation. when they determine, which they will be able to determine from the p-3 s, they ll go to 250
sensors on them would be a very good use of that asset. the one thing that drones don t do well are fly low at low altitudes. so if they have a cloud deck, let s say the cloud deck is 500 feet, the p-3s are able to penetrate the cloud deck and then fly just under 500 feet and continue to search. and that might be a little riskier for the drones. we re not talking small drones. we re talking like predator drones that have long duration 22 hours of air time. good point. ken christiansen, thanks very much for helping us. you re welcome. the pressure and the anguish of waiting, we re going to hear from what malaysia s government is now saying to families and others concerned about the passengers. remember, there were 239 passengers and crew members aboard this missing flight 370. this is for you. [ male announcer ] bob s heart attack
the cargo ship is in the area. officials stressed the objects may just be ocean garbage, like a container or two that fell off of a ship, but they also say the sighting is the best lead they ve gotten so far. and there s also a development in the investigation, a u.s. official telling cnn that fbi investigators, they are confident they will eventually be able to recover at least some of the data deleted from the flight simulator that was taken from the pilot s home. joining us now from san francisco is retired u.s. air force lieutenant colonel ken christiansen. he s a commercial pilot, certified aircraft crash investigator. ken, thanks very much for joining us. you have lots of experience in ocean searches like this one. just how difficult is it going to be to determine first of all to find these two objects and determine whether or not they are from the missing airliner? well, wolf, first of all they have to find you go back out