area to roughly a third of what it used to be. still, we re talking about some 33,000 square miles. a very, very large area, which is why authorities have been stressing that it is critical they get more information to be able to reduce it even further. as you said, it will be interesting to see if mr. houston has any comments on that in the press conference that we re expecting just minutes from now. when i last talked to authorities in our 8:00 hour, people involved in the search, they were saying they were going to give it many more days, perhaps more than a week of continuing to try to just focus on hearing anymore pings that might occur. the assets that are now being used in the search, do we know how many ships and planes are out there looking? well, today, according to the joint agency coordination center, press statements this morning, there are some 15
smaller search area. you see it in the red near the top of the screen. the gray is former search areas. the question right now is will it change yet again when angus houston, who s coordinating the search effort, steps to the make phone in perth. will he make bigger news. we will find out shortly and we expect the press conference any moment now. you can you can see it live on the screen. they are preparing the podium and such. as we wait for him i want to go to aar erin mclaughlin. they refined the search area. what do we know about the search going on right now? that s right, anderson. they managed to reduce the search area by some 1300 square miles, which believe it or not, is a relatively minor adjustment, compared to the adjustment they made on sunday when they reduced the search
i just like to have that hard evidence, a photograph evidence that there s pieces of aircraft down there to know that actually this is the final resting place of mh-370. based on this diagram, will you can see the scale on the bottom. the scale on the bottom is on the left at 01020 kilometers. you can see it is a relatively small area. again, i narrowed it down to 25 kilometers. i m confident that we have an area there which provides a promising area to exploit. note the satellite hand shake
positional data, we will be able to come up with a much more sharply defined search area, a much smaller search area under water. caution again what we re picking up is a great lead. okay? we ve got to visually acquire before we can say this is theñi final resting place. so there is still a way to go. but if you had asked me let s say when i arrived last sunday night, i would have been probably more pessimistic than i am now. i m now optimistic that we will find the aircraft or what is left of the aircraft in the not too distant future.
with certainty that this is the final resting place of mh-370. for the sake of the 239 families, this is absolutely imperative. today the ocean shield is continuing the slow, pain staking and methodical work to refine the location around the four acoustic detections. we are not yet at the point of deploying the autonomous underwater vehicle. the better ocean shield can define the area the easier it will be for the autonomous underwater vehicle to subsequently search for aircraft wreckage. it is important to note that ocean shield can search six times the amount of area with the towed pinger locater than can be done with the sonar on the autonomous underwater