and they have the possibility of both unmanned submersibles and manned submersibles. the chinese have one that they have already said in news reports that they want to send down. i forget the chinese name but it s translated sea dragon and that holds the record for under water dives, it can go down 4.5 miles. is there other technology? are they doing the right thing from an investigation and crash stand point? we don t know everything that they know. when air france 447 was found, there was three autonomous under water vehicles that were used in a search pattern. so clearly we re not doing it as intensively as we could. but then again, the search area that they re looking at right now is fairly compact. we know where those pings were found, the range of the pinger locator is only about two miles
teledyne system is used here and the ceo of blue fin robotics. tom, first off, there are a lot of complications that can happen here. can you give us sort of the breakdown of the strengths and the weaknesses of the blue fin 21? sure, if you think about what we ve done so far, we ve been talking about listening with the towed pinger locator or the place where they ve put out these sonar buoys. that s comparatively simple compared with the job the blue fin has to do. it has to go to the limits of its performance level, because we re talking about very deep ocean here. it has to go back and forth over terrain that we really don t know much about and it has to map down here. and this is at a depth that s completely dark, a little above freezing. always a challenge to batteries, run all sorts of equipment. very calm conditions down here but supported by a ship up here that s going to be on some of
send in troops to disarm pro-russian protesters. is ukraine on the brink of civil war? we have live, team coverage on the very latest. and three people murdered outside kansas jewish centers. a suspected white supremacist behind bars this hour. new details we re learning about this attack. welcome back to early start. i m christine romans. i m victor blackwell. bottom of the hour now, and there is breaking news this morning from australia. officials have now admitted, a week after the last signal was received, they re not expecting to hear the black box pingers from flight 370 again. pulling out the ship with that pinger locator, and instead, they re putting on the final touches to preparations to launch an unmanned submarine, the bluefin-21, that can map the ocean floor about a dozen square miles at a time. so, it s literally walking here. but the search zone is this morning stretching some 18,000 square miles. overnight, crews reported finding an oil slick that could be conne
barring any snags or delays we should be seven hours into a new and critical phase for the search. six days after the last apparent encounter with pins from the jet s black boxes. the chief search coordinator called in the blue fin. that s the autonomous underwater vehicle, auv, that uses sonar to map the ocean floor. this is a painfully slow process. experts would have liked a few more pings. but it s likely the batteries have run out. the visual searches will probably end soon as well. but yesterday the same australian navy ship that deployed the pinger locator and the blue fin noticed an oil slick and picked up a couple of liters for testing. we don t know whether it s airplane related. we probably won t know for a few days. but the focus today on that blue fin is expected to cover 15 square miles in its first
debris is going to be found unless they stumble on the treasure-trove. it s all collected somewhere. so i think they re doing everything they can, but it would be nice to see even more assets in position if they could bring other search assets in. you know, could make a four or six-month search into a two or three-month search. you were involved back in 2009 in finding that air france wreckage off the coast of brazil in the atlantic ocean. compare these two operations, what you did then and it took you two years to actually find that black box after you spotted some wreckage five days after the crash. compare then and now. well, in both cases we had a large search area which we tried to narrow down to focus the underwater beacon detecters. then we spent the battery life searching for the beacons using the towed pinger locator. similar in both sense. in the air france search, we didn t detect the pings. here we have pings. so the air france search started looking elsewhere assuming