they re not only not given information but details are being hidden. so you have a spectrum of objections by the families into this, but i do have to say, it s not all the families that believe this. many of them have taken the approach that they do recognize the reality of what has happened, have chosen to take what they would see as a dignified silence and are now waiting to get on with the compensation claims and to get on with their lives. and what s been the reaction to what he acknowledged, the prime minister, in that exclusive interview with you, richard, when he said that malaysian military radar did pick up this plane, they thought it was the plane flying over malaysian airspace. they didn t think it was a hostile. they didn t think it was 100% sure it was this malaysian airliner, but they didn t scramble jets because they didn t think it was a hostile environment. what s been the reaction to that? reporter: this is clearly the smoking gun, if you like, and so
the flight plan that s when they should have initiated overdue action. it s going into a distress cell. and in this distress cell you ve got high frequency radio. you ve got phones that can get in touch with the aircraft. continue going through this. i want to show this just zoomed in animation with the radar that would have been scanning the area at the time. the civilian radio radar should have gone, hang on a second, something is not going right here. the malaysian peninsula there should have been conversations going on between time military radar tracking this, military civilian radar and malaysia to say, hey, we ve had something drop off and malaysian military radar would have been looking at this and they said they ve seen this. let me ask you a more basic question. when we see this and when we hear from the malaysian prime minister, can you, from just radar, determine whether or not
questions about the co-pilot s cell phone. officials say it was turned on and searching for service around the time the plane van earned from radar. you have been tweeting us your questions by the thousands, and we have top aviation and security experts standing by to answer them, like this one from raymond. with all this technology we have, why did they wait to deploy a blue fin sub, why now, 38 days later? now i want to go right to cnn s reporters in the search zone. joe johns is in kuala lumpur. on this first day of being deployed, bluefin-21 had to l n return to the surface many hours before planned. what can you tell us about that? reporter: it speaks to what we don t know about the ocean floor there. as we ve said before, we know
just taking this casually. so it sounds like at least one family member and probably others are still holding out that a miracle could happen. thank you. i want to check in with martin savage. right now he s in a 777 flight simulator. they are reporting that the co-pil co-pilot s cell phone was on and made contact with a tower. that was during the time the plane disappeared from radar. what does this tell us, if anything? first of all, we have to determine which time it disappeared from radar. there was twice. then there was the time it disappeared off of malaysian military radar. it seems the second time there might be the most pertinent to what we re talking about. mitchell s sort of simulating it now. we re over the area where supposedly this cell tower was that intercepted this hand shake, as it were. we would send the plane down at
air space, if you will, could that have been literally flying under radar? well, it s a little confusing to me, wolf, because the terrain in malaysia offers up several peaks at about 7,000 feet above sea level. so if in fact he was flying at 4,000 feet above sea level, it s very likely he would have encountered what we call cumulus granite, which is what we call it in the pilot business which is a mountain. so an altitude above ground or above sea level, it s 7,000 feet, plus 4,000, which puts us at the 11,000 or 12,000, which we ve already reported. these numbers have been very confusing to me and i m told the malaysian military radar is not very accurate. what s your analysis of that, if in fact that plane went down to 4,000 or 5,000 feet, peter,