satelli satellite. then we had that piece of imagery from the japanese satellite, and then the p-3, and we had the chinese maritime surveillance aircraft that picked out that 1500 miles out. exactly, so we had satellite imagery and two spottings from maritime surveillance aircraft of potential objects as well. the third french imagery, which we ve got here, will build another part of the puzzle, but it s key. as you rightly point out, there s 122 objects this time. if we take a look at the satellite picture it is so, as we look at first, can we go back one if we can for a second? we talked originally about this being 125,000 square miles. yeah. now we have all of this indian ocean. how much further out are we going? that s a really good question, sean. that area has gone from 125,000 square miles where we had the
size of united states and looking for three people. if you re talking about something that is 80 feet long, if not partially submerged, how difficult a task, jeff? fortunately, you have the technology on station right now to do. that you can tell by the way they tried to phase in these aircraft that they want to maintain some technology on station. the capabilities you ve been recently talking about about the ability to determine what metal objects in the water from the high speed submarine detection platforms, basically. once you find out and in the area, you want to keep something on station. they will probably deploy bouies to stay with the wreckage. as they float, they deal with darkness. i think a real good factor working for them is the fact they even have a merchant ship coming into the area. a nonmilitary cargo ship that says they want to volunteer to help. they re getting closer than anybody else. function for search and weigh station, to give people a place
one of the objects is very large which plays both ways for experts. some say that s pretty big to be a piece of an aircraft. others stha ay that this is a g sign. if it s big and it s aircraft, it may be identifiable. there is a lot of stuff floating in the ocean, right? this area is not heavily trafficked. you re not going to have a lot of it s on a shipping lane, you don t have a lot of fishing boats. it s pretty far down and pretty remote. okay. and now again, just dealing with 1500 miles, even in perfect conditions, a lot of the ships that they re using by water, they re moving maybe 10, 15, maybe 20 knots an hour. it s going to take days for them to get there. they move much more quickly by air. one of the lucky breaks to the extent there is any, will is a merchant vessel that we heard is in the area and they want to help. they may get there first. why is it important to be on the water and not just by air here
david, we do know, what s new this hour is a norwegian merchant ship reached the area but australian navy, they re going to take a while to get there. to give us an idea, lay out what the next few hours, few days, what happens and what they re going to do. the fact that merchant ship is there is incredibly fortunate. the first thing had as to to be done is identify that it s part of the aircraft. so having that platform there to work with rather than just being able to fly over it and try to verify from the sky which is nearly impossible. now we have the capability to lift it up, put it out and figure out what it is. that s hugely important because now the next step after that is to find the impact of the scatter point. how do you work backwards? how do you extrapolate that? remember how we got this information about searching there was from the ntsb and faa working together to find out the flows and the wind and fit ran out of fuel where it would end up as the channels converge
is where different waterways come together, what does that mean about how much stuff is in the watteer? most of stuff is going to be small compared to a significant size component like has been described here, 24 meters which if it turns out to be part the aircraft is going to be a significant part of the aircraft. if that s the case, then i think it leads more towards the theory of perhaps a more gentle landing on to the water. i m always hopeful for the possibility of survivors. and it s not a high possibility but if they ditch the aircraft, the hudson had some true. and in absence of fact, why not have cause for optimism? it doesn t hurt to have it. you don t want to have unreasonable expectations. i was making a mistake when doing the reporting, you think there s a chance the plane might be there? and i was being corrected. no, not the plane. just these pieces of debris. the black box which everybody wants, the flight recorder, that would almost certainly sink.