mary you were here with us as well. your reaction to gary tuchman s news. well you know it s kind of a repeat. there was a number of years ago an adam air flight that went down in the java sea, and that too was very difficult to find. in fact pieces of the plane and remains, other parts of the aircraft washed up on the shore. and then that helped them many many weeks afterward to help them trace back. so while it s more shallow than other places where searchers are used to looking, it s proved to be somewhat elusive in the past as well. as i ve been watching the reports throughout since we have been on last there s been some you know consternation about whether the pingers are working or not. whether they re getting signals from the pingers, from the black box. what s going on mary? well you know in many cases, i think there s an estimate of about a third of the time pingers don t work for various reasons.
voice recorder the flight data recorder fresh batteries that had just been put in but we ve still not heard one ping. what does that say to you? that s a tough one. again, the pingers, you really have to be the conditions have to be right. you have to be in the right position. and i m not surprised that they haven t heard them yet. you have to be fairly lucky to do that and fairly close, within a couple of miles to three or four miles at most. if those black boxes are buried deep in mud at the bottom of the java sea, are we ever going to find hear those pingers or find those black boxes? i m confident they will find the black boxes. it s just going to take time and patience. what a horrible situation to be in for the families. certainly is. ken, what does it say to you that there were no mayday distress calls from the cockpit as this plane was going down?
sometimes the battery malfunctions. sometimes the pingers are damaged or knocked off in the accident sequence. and sometimes they re just positioned under wreckage such that they don t pick up the sound unless they re literally right on top of it. it could be a factor of any of those or they just haven t gotten to the part yet. but when they get to the big piece of the plane hopefully they ll still be there. but in many accidents they just don t work. and finding the bodies of course that is their first priority. but these black boxes, if that s the most important, david, outside of finding the bodies that s going to tell them what happened to this plane. that s right. and the combination of the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder together is what paints the whole picture because you see not only what happened to the aircraft but you get a glimpse into what was going on in the decision-making of the pilots and that can give you a real benefit as far as looking forward a
is a concern that as it drags on it will become difficult, parts will be dissipated and those ever-elusive black boxes could lose their pingers. so mary it turns out airasia was not licensed to fly on sunday. now, i don t think the day of the week matters here but they didding? that they were not allowed to do apparently. we had heard before this was an airline with a flawless record upstanding member of the aviation community doing very well in that part of the world. does this give you cause for concern that they weren t playing by the let over the law? oh absolutely. and this isn t the first that indonesia has been caught literally since 2007 both the united states federal aviation administration and icao has examined indonesia and found them sorely lacking and has been highly crate lyly critical. that s why the united states limited carriers into the u.s.
elsewhere, a life vest. safety cards and bodies recovered, a total 39 of the 162 people on board pulled from the java sea. muslim religious leaders on a search helicopter pray for the victims. indonesia s military chief now offering to take families to the crash zone for some closure. translator: i will prepare hercules and ships either tomorrow or anytime. i ll offer my help to the families of the victims. reporter: today, monsoons rainy weather hampered the underwater search for the plane s black boxes. the boxes have locater pingers that can be detected with sensors. but every day, the batteries come closer to running out. fresh batteries were installed just last year. they will fade in another three weeks. this document obtained by cnn