has to have been some of the most stressful and incredible times of your career. let me just start with the pings. an american official says those pings did not come from the plane, is that true? we re still not sure what those pings were, what we do know is we have searched the whole sea floor associated with them. and not found the wreckage of mh 370. so we have discounted those pings as a clue for the search. so when wlyou say the plane s not there, is it possible the search equipment could have missed it in any way, do you feel the search was exhaustive or the bottom line, the plane isn t there and now you re going to have to broadening where you re looking by a huge, huge margin? the search was exhaustive, we re absolutely sure that the plane is not in that area and so, yes, we are going to have to
this story. admitting the plane isn t at the search location. they re essentially confirming what we told you just 24 hours ago. flight 370 is not where they thought it was. they searched a 329-square-foot zone where the four underwater pings were detected, and it simply is not there. a u.s. navy official told cnn the very same thing yesterday. we now know that because they didn t find anything, the search area expands to about 23,000 square miles. that s a lot of ground to cover. a much larger area to focus on. we re talking about hundreds of miles elsewhere along that inmarsat arc. and we do know that that search won t resume until months from now. erin? are they giving up on the pings altogether? well, again, we know that the u.s. navy official said in very plain language yesterday that those signals are most likely not from the black boxes. we should note, though, hours after that interview aired, the navy tried to walk back that comment a little bit, calling it
of going into people s cabins and turning off radios. they wanted that ship as quiet as it possibly could be to hear it. now, we re not hearing just one ping here or something. we re hearing a repeatable series of pings over two hours at the correct representation rate, at the correct pulse length, at the correct peaked amplitude. you cannot reproduce this stuff. you can t reproduce it by natural means or the earth isn t doing it, the ocean isn t doing it. the animals are not doing it. and their ship is not doing it. and a broken towed pinger locator would be the last thing to do it. if it is broken, how could it even work to hear these things? interesting argument. all the reasons that michael dean gave, frankly, showed to me that that s not a credible explanation for what happened here. all right. well, thanks very much to all three of you. and please, all of you weigh. in. still to come, another near mid-air collision. two airliners coming within a
we know about the ocean floor. if the plane isn t in big pieces, if it crashed and that flight data recorder separated from the plane, as they often do in a crash, and that data recorder plunged to the bottom of the sea there, what also is suspected down there, it could be as much as 20 meters of silt. now, if that box has gone down there and buried itself how many feet down, we don t know, in the silt and all you ve got are the four pings to work on, can you imagine going down there and basically searching around in the dark, looking for a box this big that could be meters under the silt, no matter what sort of narrowed area we ve got, it s still a massive area and when they get to any kind of recovery, attempt to go down there and dig around for that box, they might not ever find it. it s certainly a consideration and ties into our lack of knowledge about the ocean floor.
give more information. because what they appear to be doing is moving this box around and not really explaining why. so they have to explain why to us. that s an interesting question. david gallo, i want to bring you in here. as they re moving these assets around and changing the search area, now they have the towed pinger locater out there. how confident are you that the batteries in the black box are even still working, even still pinging? that s anyone s guess, john. here s the thing about that. going over an area and not hearing the pinger doesn t mean that the aircraft is not there. the tpl is useful if you do hear something. if you don t hear something not that useful. i think at this point, knowing where the plane isn t is important information, too. and the tpl won t exclude any place. doesn t really narrow it down very much then necessarily. mary go ahead. john, i like what i see. for air france 447, something