a new report one year after the disappearance of malaysia airlines flight 370 is offering more clues into the investigation into the missing plane. the battery on one of the underwater pingers may not have been working. making finding the plane in the first few weeks of the search nearly impossible. this is the search for any signs of the missing plane continues. mh370 was on its way to kuala lumpur, you ll recall when it vanished. joining me from denver is former ntsb investigator greg fife. first, the battery of one of the pingers who was supposed to be powered up for 30 days expired back in december 2012. that s more than a year before the plane disappeared. how important is that? well it s important from the standpoint that apparently there was a paperwork issue. the malaysians are saying that the battery did, in fact get changed, but there is no formal record of that. so it s been basically asserted
have faced a bigger challenge than first thought. the battery that was supposed to power one of two underwater pingers for 30 days to help search teams hone in on black boxes had expired in december of 2012, more than a year before it disappeared. because of a record keeping glitch, it was never replaced. the question no one can answer was the battery dead or still working as search teams scoured an area the size of west virginia listening for a transmission. the maintenance records show the batteries were overdue being changed out. i don t think we have any way to determine if they were in fact working or not. reporter: search commanders are going on the radar and satellite data which suggests the plane flew into the southern indian ocean before possibly running out of fuel and crashing. a year later, not a single piece of debris washed ashore or been picked up at sea. nothing. search teams have covered 40% of the search zone hope to finish
pingers, only to find out that one of the pingers may not have been operable it s interesting that a year later we re finding this out. why didn t this information come out before? because that may have altered the course of where they searched and how they searched. a year later, have they corrected the gaps in communication between those atc groups? that s a hard question to answer andrea only because we don t know what they re doing. we know what they said they ve done. we know that they are coordinating and that they re trying to they re trying to tighten up those notifications. but if they are actually in practice or not, that s yet to be determined. hopefully we will never find out again. and the search area now is the size of west virginia. they ve searched about 40% of it. do you expect that they will ever find this wreckage? andrea i m not real confident of it. that s a vast ocean out there. they spent a lot of time and assets in what they believed was
four u.s. stops are planned. it has been a year since malaysia airlines flight 370 disappeared. a new report by the malaysian government indicates the battery on one of the underwater pingers may not have been working, that could have been made finding the plane the first few weeks impossible. tom costello has been covering this since it broke a year ago. good morning. reporter: hi jose. 239 were on board that plane. search coordinators believe everyone was likely incapacitated somehow and the plane ran out of fuel and crashed into the southern indian ocean. were underwater pingers working with search teams, we are listening for them. the last words from malaysia 370, a full year since it disappeared on the red eye, news that the teams who scoured the ocean looking for the plane may
over what s on paper documents versus computer. apparently what happened was when, according to the airline and indeed it seems to be accepted to some extent on page 60 of the record when they changed is the batteries on the flight data recorder the computer registered it had been uninstalled, but didn t register the new one had been installed. therefore, my understanding from malaysia is from people there is that the investigator in charge who wrote the report said the paperwork doesn t comport correctly, we can t say it was installed, therefore we have to say it was expired, but the airline is pretty certain that it was actually installed. by the way, there s no question of doubt on the cockpit voice recorders or any of the other pingers that were involved. so david, is this common that perhaps there may be documentation on paper that conflicts with what s on