so whoever dropped the plane down to 12,000 feet wasn t trying to evade the radar, but they were well below a heavily traveled air corridor. planes travel on the highways in the sky, they share the air space with lots of other aircraft. 12,000 feet allowed this flight 370 to avoid all that air traffic, but they were still on the radar being tracked until about 2:40 a.m. will ripley, the day is just beginning. any word on if officials will comment about the drop in altitude of this plane? no official comment. cnn confirmed this through a source with very close knowledge of this investigation. the official word we re getting from authorities here in malaysia and also in australia is that the search efforts are under way right now. some planes took off several hours before, taking off before daylight to try to maximize the amount of time available in this search area. we have for the p-8 and the p-3 orion, the backbone of this
it reached initial operating capability in december of 2013 last year with the u.s. navy. this thing has synthetic aperture radar, signal intelligence, a web cam with thermal imaging radar. and yet it still has problems with trying to find debris in the water. it also doesn t have an in flight refueling capability. it gets that in 2015. the p-3 orion, has no inflight refueling capability. they re having to make the long trek out there to get minimal hours on water and go back again. the whole area, the whole search is really testing the limitations of what is supposed to be some of the best technology in the world. it takes twice as long to get out there and search, four hours to get out, two hours of searching and have to fly back four hours. it only has four hours on
and there is increasing hope. no more than hope, no more than hope that we might be on the road to discovering what did happen to this ill-fated aircraft. live now, perth, australia. our correspondent there at the royal australia air force base. you heard him say, no more than hope, no more than hope. what are people making of this comment here? reporter: well, his comment hasn t been heard widely here at the military base but i can tell you certainly they are planning on hitting it hard today. i can actually hear the turbo jet of the australian p-3 orion. it s a jumbo jet sound. and this plane is about to take off. there will be a total of eight planes in the air today heading to that remote section of the southern indian ocean. remember, this is for those military planes a four-hour flight down. they ll have two hours to scour
the equipment on the p-8 poseidon is phenomenal. it has a radar. and thermal images and signal intelligence capability. is it a phenomenal piece of kit. when the sea states are high, when the weather is coming in and the visibility is law, the mark one eyeball is more important than the technology on board. for instance the technology that is used to hunt for submarines, the p-3 orion has a boom that detectives metal under the surface of the ocean that disturb the earth s force field but it is ineffective against something like this. it s not a big piece of metal. and it could be a shipping container which is metal.
this is a new mexico ne a alert, now earlier today we learned the pentagon had spent 5 million on the search for the jet. now, former adviser to the u.k., ministry of defense, i m 6:01, how tall are you? i m not wearing heels s eit. last night we talked about this 1500 mile stretch, which is the focus, the problem is it takes five hours to get there, five hours t hours to search. with the inclement weather, it is proving really hard to search, we talked about the p-3 orion last night, as you point out, five hours to get back, five hours straight, this type of ship comes back. it has got thermal imaging displays, that is great if you look for survivors, unfortunately in this case i don t think it is a likely scenario, these drones have it over baghdad, suck up all the when you look at a vast amount of area, let s go to the next map. okay. now, wow the area we re talking about uh-huh. is that. that is 125,000 square miles. and if we look at the circle, if you just make