This new strategy will likely drag out the search a lot longer. This bluefin21 submarine takes six times to search as the towed pinger locater. Today the sub can only carry an area of about 15 square miles which is about 7,200 football fields meaning the scan of the entire search area which is the size of los angeles could take up to two months. The deployment of the autonomous under water vehicle has the potential to take us a further step towards visual identification since it offers a possible opportunity to detect debris from the aircraft on the ocean floor. I would caution you against raising hopes that the deployment of the autonomous under water vehicle will result in the detection of the aircraft wreckage. It may not. However, this is the best lead we have, and it must be pursued vigorously. This morning the head of the search team says an oil slick was found in the search area, but lit take several more days to figure out where the oil came from. Cnns will ripley is in perth,
back when they first came out they were on tape. that s primarily the reason why you see when they pull recorders from oceans or water they keep them submerged in tape. that s back from the days when they needed to keep that tape moist before they got it to the lab and started the drying out process. now they re solid state chips. i ve heard of cases where these chips have actually became so hot in a slow burn fire that the saweder melted off the chips. the chips fell to the bottom of the canister and the engineers and the manufacturers of the recorders were able to take those chips, put them back into a bread board and get that data without a problem. that s amazing. kevin bayless, thanks so much for your insight. i appreciate it. thank you, carol. still to come in the newsroom, new and improved patents for black boxes but the industry seems to be dragging its feet. zain asher is looking into that.
pings detected by search crews last week could be from one of the plane s black boxes more than 13 thousand feet deep. to put it into perspective, you would pass the statue of liberty, the eiffel tower and the tallest building on the way down, a journey well worth it though because the kind of information in those black boxes could give us all sorts of answers. let s bring in kevin bayless. welcome, kevin. thank you, carol. your company provides reports from the black boxes. how does that process work? we basically get the data from the flight data recorders with the equipment that we have through the aircraft side. then we download the data from the flight recorders and perform the reasonableness test. it s really the first step in this process. it s important because it s verifying that we have a good baseline that the aircraft is recording the the flight recorder is recording information from the aircraft properly. then in a case like this, we