but several family members we ve spoken to already today say that they just wanted all the information and, at least in one case, they wanted the actual calculations that came to get that information. they do want to put it to experts to figure it out for themselves. fundamentally, why are they asking for this information? they want to see if they can come up with some other conclusion than what mrsat did than in terms of where the plane landed. they say they waited too long to get this information. but now that they have it, they say they want to get it to experts. what they can gain by that, it s unclear. but certainly, they want to get some kind of verification of how they came up with these numbers. thank you, david, for giving us an update there from beijing. still to come, india talks
you know, for 82 days now, families of missing on flight 370 have not seen, have not embraced, have not spoken to their loved ones. and for nearly as long, the families have made one very specific request. and today, that request was fulfilled. but here s the but. now loved ones say it s not complete. what am i talking about? the raw data between mrsat satellites and the malaysian airliners. 25-plus pages of log. it makes me think of my cell phone bill. but this is the heart of this plane s search. let me take you back. when the malaysia air flight first digs appeared, officials determined the plane could have traveled on the northern arc or southern arc from the plane s last known flight path. then based on analysis of these pages and pages of data, researchers concentrated to the south, specifically the waters off the coast of western australia. and since then, with no plane found, the question has been, how did nrsat pinpoint this
they re going back to scratch. and a size the state of indiana awfully big. what does that say to you, that it s not just another ten square miles or whatever that they re going to search but they re going to search an area the size of the state of indiana, which is a pretty big state? well, it still says they have confidence in the marsat data. if they were starting from scratch they don t have confidence in the pings they may have heard? well, less confidence because it wasn t exactly the frequency they were looking for. certainly, they re still looking in that part of the indian ocean. they re not looking in the himalayas or vietnam or china. they still appear to have a great deal of confidence in the mrsat data that put that plane on that arc west of australia. when i heard they were going to look at the bottom of the indian ocean in an area the size of indiana, my immediate reaction was they no longer have
u.s. military. are they just right now hoping they have a hail mary and they re going to find something, is that what they re about to do? no, i think they still as tom mentioned, they trust the mrsat data. they just got the look over the entire arc and they re starting. is there anything else they need down here if they re going in this whole area? the underwater search, that goes very, very slowly. think about somebody walking along all of the state of indiana, how long that could take. when they finally found air force 447, they had three rima 6,000s plus a towed array, so they need to bring in some more equipment quickly. the air france search which went on for two years, after five days, they did find wreckage. so they at least now where approximately the plane had gone into the atlanta ocean. this was a two-year span, but
along that so-called arc between the half hand shake between the plane and the mrsat satellite and broaden out that search area, perhaps introduce more underwater submersibles but the search will continue. pamela? erin, thank you for that report. joining us now to discuss the challenges, rob mccallum and ma mary schiavo. mary, they said the outcome may force them to reconsider the search. what do you expect the next phase to look like? well, i think the next phase probably won t be the search phase. they ll finish up in this area because these were the best leads they had so far and they still do have a significant