illegal passports. in the cockpit the captain and first officer make the final preparations. oxygen, check. instruments, check. reporter: in the sim yu ulat pilot mitchell casado shows martin savidge the route. and programming the simulator how to fly to the destination. so it will take this plane essentially from kuala lumpur to beijing. reporter: and the plane is ready, and before taking off, paul weeks sends a message home. the last line says that this counts as one day, so it means that it is only 27 days until i see you all again. reporter: around 12:30 a.m., malaysian airlines 370 flight pushes back from the gate and eases toward the runway and the aircraft is cleared for takeoff. all right. so the brakes are off, and everything is set.
arlington, washington. paul, i understand that some water is receding and teams are able to get to some areas that were once inaccessible to possibly even search for, what is it, 90 still missing or unaccounted for? reporter: that s right, fredericka. that s the number that s been given out daily. you were talking about the water receding a little bit but those workers were able to get a little progress and now the river behind me. just downriver from the slide zone. the water is moving fast again. this is just going to compound the effort by the search crews. they talked about wading in waist deep mud. others talking about four hours just to fill four buckets of mud. this has been a very challenging and difficult time. let s take a listen. i believe the crews are finding bodies in the field. it s a very, very slow process. it was miserable to begin with and as you all know it s rained
and perhaps nobody suffering more on two different levels than a young woman who lost her mother and then just recently saw the firefighters recover her 4-month-old baby. let s take a listen. and i got to hold her, and i maybe dropped a couple tears because i was so excited that we found her and all i could do is grin because we found my baby. reporter: it s just an unimaginable what these people are going through. there s an official death toll of 17 but another least athd other bodies have been located and they will be back out there in this soggy mess again today trying to recover more bodies from this slide. paul for us there in arlington, washington. paul, thank you. thank you, paul. we re going to get back to
emergency on board, why didn t any of the passengers try to communicate with their family? or maybe they did. some experts say that they could have tried and there is a chance, believe it or not, that those final messages could be retrieved from the ocean floor if they can get to it. cnn s ted rowlands has more for us. reporter: paul weeks left his wife and two sons at home in australia to start a new job and boarded malaysia airlines flight 370. now his family and others are left wondering if their loved ones tried to use their cellphones to send a message before the plane went missing. but so many questions still unanswered, texts and e-mails could provide crucial details about what happened to flight 370 and all of that information could possibly still be retrieved. absolutely. i m sure there are text messages, i m sure there s drafts of e-mails, video, testimonials that people made. chad gough is a partner at
that she can t get them an answer until noon the next day. no, answer us now, this man yells. we are not getting any information and whether they know anything and they are not telling us, and at this stage, i m just it is just blank. blank, waiting and praying. reporter: just north of perth, australia, danika weeks waits for news of her husband paul. and the good news is that they have not had to deal with this before, and the bad news is that malaysia has not had to deal with this situation before. and the unfortunate situation is that we are all having to watch them learn how the deal with this. reporter: with a lack of clear miscommunication, speculation and theories abound.