you haven t got the luxury of time. you ve got pingers that may expire, so you ve got to say, this is our best guess now. their best guess is a remote area more than twice the size of california. good morning. these are all the aircraft flying today. the australians take over the search. and soon after the australian ship lowers its pinger locator into the water, pings are detected. clearly this is a most promising lead. it was wow again. it was miraculous. they had just put the pinger locator in the water. i was convinced this is it. they ve got the answer. it s a matter of days. a robotic submarine scours the 329 square mile area where the pings were heard. it s painstakingly slow work. then two months later
is where you want to look for the black box material. so they really should be looking at and i m sure they are, looking at that raid yar ddar d me to determine where the plane was last known to be. most loss of control accidents have the plane being within 25 miles of the last known location. if the wing came off and severe icing that brought the plane down or other struck trstructur failure, it should be close to that point. we don t have a window into what they re doing at this point, but you should be dragging a pinger locator back and forth listening for the pingers attached to the black boxes. that s how you can most easily find them. now there have been many cases where the ping pers don t work for whatever reason. in which case you won t be able to find the pingers. and so then you might do a side scan sonar search going up and
kind of information. and, jeff so much talk around mh-370 when it disappeared was the race against time because of the pings, right? and the pinger locator and the batteries run out after i think 30 days. is there a race against time here for that? i wouldn t expect there to be. it s funny, we haven t heard much about pingers. at all. that s one of the pieces missing, yeah and i don t know why. it might have to do with the weather. the forecast that i saw for the area is we ve got two good days of weather ahead of us and so they should be telling us i think the surface search is mostly for the recovery of remains i think for the loved ones. as time goes by that debris becomes less useful from a forensic point of view trying to locate the underwater material which stays put near where it entered the water presumably. that s what we really want. that s the stuff that s where the black box will be. that s where the answers are going to be found. and, yes, the way you find that
it certainly would be of great assistance to get divers down there, of course safely. absolutely. mm-hmm. okay. and then what other kinds of technology doctor, do you think will likely be introduced to this area? it s almost certain that autonomous underwater vehicles and remotely operated vehicles will be used in this. the nice thing about those types of systems is it keeps the divers out of the water until they really are needed. you know the risk goes up for personnel, and the complexity and time lines stretch out, as you put people in the water. they ll probably be using some type of a pinger locator, which is really a directional listening device to listen to the pings. that will let you zero in on the tail section, part of the tail section that has the two black boxes. but as was stated the forensic evidence is important. so the side-scan sonar imagery will really build a map of what s happened or of kind of the whole picture of what things look like on the bottom.
black box and in this case bodies. chad quickly to you, maybe i m throwing you under the bus by asking you this but currents are an issue here too, right? you ve got those currents that can take debris that s floating and can even pull things under the water. and i think we find that in this situation. there was a lot of wind from the last-known location to where that was found. wind can push things around. there s a small current, one or two knots. not a lot, but enough to move it just that enough. so there we go with that. but something else. when you talk about the side scan sonar or about the pinger the ping locator, you re talking about if it s only 100 feet down, that pinger mower, you know they talk about mowing the lawn. you can mow farther apart because the pinger locator can hear farther to the side compared to trying to hear 15,000 feet down. it doesn t have the depth, doesn t have the real attenuation at that three-mile depth. you only had 100 feet, so that s much much