direction. the aircraft at that point wasn t going through a sort of a structural mechanical issue that was causing it to rapidly lose altitude in any way. it was able to make a controlled turn and then make a controlled climb, and then sustain that climb for 20 minutes before making a controlled descent to about 4,000 feet out over on the other side of the malaysian peninsula. so it s useful information for investigators. how much further forward does it take them, really they say they need the black box to complete the picture, erin. interesting that nick is using the word control for the ascent to 39,000 and the descent to 4,000 feet. nick, you have also learned the plane was equipped with the four emergency locator transmitters. i know people assume it might have been. you were actually able to confirm this. these are designed to transmit a plane s location to emergency satellites when they re triggered by a crash. ie if it lands in the ocean or something. they should have been t
sank, water hadn t started coming inside in sufficient quantity to trigger these transmitters to come on. and perhaps by the time the water came in, the aircraft was sinking, therefore the frequencies they were transmitting on the signals weren t strong enough to reach the satellite. i mean, these are the types of conclusions and the analysis that investigators will be placing on this information now. but the source i talked to said it was odd. those were his words. it was odd that none of these four transmitters had come on, erin. nick, thank you very much. with 107 very important reporting coming out of kuala lumpur. richard quest is with me along with aviation analyst arthur rosenberg. let s just start with the emergency locators because that s what nick finished his reporting on. they didn t activate. so obviously that could mean a controlled landing, as he said. it could also mean they were manually turned off. that even possible that you could manually disable those or not? t
yesterday, but unfortunately none of it was linked to the missing airline. so another day today. another eight or nine search aircraft. and in a couple of communications and control aircraft going up. so the crews will be out there again going their all today. i know they ve got to be exhausted as you re implying there has been absolutely no break for these people on this effort. but have they are they still seeing things with the same level of enthusiasm and excitement this might be it, this might be it, or do you start to feel the sense of you might find nothing? you know, i think it is the crews have one thing, the unsung heroes of this operation are actually the maintenance teams who are putting the aircraft up there day after day after day. so we often talk about the aircraft and the air crews. but don t forget the maintenance and all the support people but from an air crew perspective, it is discouraging when you have
they weren t. there is one on the rear door, one on the forward door, one in the cockpit and one in the fuselage. the ones in the doors appear to be part of the sort of emergency exit inflatable exit if you will that becomes an emergency life raft. so they re supposed to on contact with water, they re supposed to begin transmitting, transmitting to satellite, transmitting on other frequencies as well that could be picked up by aircraft or by ships. the satellites have a relatively good coverage of the earth. the fact that they didn t pick up any of these transmitters is perhaps for the investigators an indication here that they that the transmitters didn t go off. and that in itself according to the source i talked to is perhaps an indication, and we discussed this in some detail, perhaps an indication that the aircraft landed in a controlled way. we know that 737 landed on the hudson river in a controlled way. and therefore, when the aircraft
effort. so that s still a long way here, so to speak. and you say the air search is about the size of the state of west virginia. is that what you re saying? every day the several area that they search is about the size of west virginia. so it s a sizeable search area and that search area continues to either be refined, due to the ocean currents or the movement of that search and the potential debris field or as you ve alluded to, the more information that we get, we can refine and go to the various areas. so there s a lot of search aircraft. there s nine search aircraft and three coordination aircraft up here today. a lot of ships in the area. we re very confident that if something is on the surface, our airline will find it. kevin mcevoy from the royal new zealand air force, good luck