it. despite the clues, families of the passengers are a fed up and demand answer. we want evidence. we want truth, and we want our family. good evening, everyone. i m don lemmon. welcome to our special coverage. just six days remain. that s when the batteries could die on the blacks box data reporter from malaysia airlines flight 370. that battery means no pings signaling the plane s location. though there have been a few promising pings, timing is becoming more precious now. in australia, where the search effort is based, i want to begin with cnn s will riply. he is following the ocean shield, an ocean ship with a black box detector on its way out into the southern indian ocean right now. the no bat rays means no ping signalling the missing plane s location. tell what s you re seeing right now, will ripley, as you head out, as you re shadowing this search ship? hey, don, we just arrived here at garden island.
i m not sure what the inspection is about. i guess it has to do with australian regulations. my concern is if they re going to the right area with this ship anyhow and the fact that at least they re doing two different type of searches. they re looking for debris and they re looking for the right. airplane itself. but if you have the six hours delay, that s half day or more of search lost, and we only have six days left, mike, for those batteries. you re absolutely right searching for anything in the pitch-black is a nightmare. but as les was saying, the key to this is finding the haystack, and the assets will be used will be the airborne which they have about ten as the previous correspondent said. really the ship should be doing is once it s been identify the ships can be deployed with the ping locators and everything else. the ships really are constrained with the amount of ocean they can cover within five days anyway. so yes, they need to be there. but really, we need t
just a short time ago to cnn, one of several search planes that took off from australia is now inside the search area, scanning the ocean for possible wreckage of malaysia airlines flight 370. eight ships are also in the area. in other news now, the confirmed death toll in that landslide in washington state has now risen to at least 21. in addition, crews say that they ve located four more bodies, but so far they ve not been able to recover them. 30 people are still missing from last weekend s mudslide near arlington about an hour northeast of seattle. governor jay inslee told cnn that searchers still hope to find survivors. the top diplomats from the united states and russia spent four hours behind closed doors today. secretary of state john kerry and russian foreign minister sergey lavrov trying to resolve
evidence comes in. the approach that we used in the air force search is called applying ba si an search theory. what this does is allows you to keep track of all the evidence you have and its uncertainties. and at any one time you can refer to a probability map to where the evidence points would be the highest likelihood areas to go search. that s where we would recommend day to day you put your effort. right now it looks like they re chasing a very hot clue that puts them in this northern area, but they re coming up empty, which is lending credence to the fact that maybe it s not the right place to be looking. so it might be that after a couple more days, we should be look back south. because we did see satellite pictures of large numbers of drifting stuff in the ocean. so they should be keeping track of all their evidence and all their clues and where they have looked to date, and be looking at, okay, where is the next best place to look tomorrow. i think that s important informati
when objects are spotted by the human eye, boat crews scour the water with nets. if debris is confirmed to be related to the missing plane, an oceanographer like dr. ryan abernathy from columbia university can figure out where the airplane hit the water by using satellite data. what we re looking at is a nasa satellite that orbits the earth and measures very precisely the height of the sea s surface clearly seen in these colored boxes. what we take is what these satellites measure, and then we plug it into a computer program that uses those currents to move material around, you know, inside the program virtually. so if there are objects in the ocean in these bumps, you re able to measure the movement of those objects? exactly. reporter: the hope is to find a trace of the 777. you would be able to calculate back to the crash site of mh 370? yes. the hypothetical crash site.