out that there is a radar trail? that s information you have right away. this is, again, i think another measure of how much uncertainty there is about this, not that there is certainty of a western route. all right, tom foreman, thanks so much. so, let s bring in our experts to try to answer some of these questions. tom fuentes and tom flores. before we dive in, gentlemen. at 1:07 the plane s data reporting system shuts down. just 14 minutes later at 1:21 a.m. the transsponder sent its last signal. now, authorities believe they were turned off separately and deliberately. i ll start with you, bob, does that mean we can rule out some kind of catastrophic event happened? i don t think we can rule out anything. this is so complicated and so much unknown.
area for flight 370. it has now expanded into the indian ocean. tom foreman is here with a virtual look. good morning, tom. this mystery is getting messier by the day. it is a great tragedy. we can t get any answers. let s bring in the map and talk about what that has done to the search for this plane. remember the basics here. if we go into the closer vision, you see where the plane took off. it flu few for less than an hou and then it disappeared here. this is what we know. look what has followed. the pattern of searches has grown and grown and grown. now, there has been this shift towards the westmore so because of this idea there is some kind of tracing there. the andaman islands over here is
happened. they can t say that. all we know is that they stopped transmitting data. there is no way to know if they were turned off in the cockpit or not. what we really have is six data points. we have the point where they turned, the island just past malaysia where they think they got a radio or a radar tracing hit. then, the four data points that were sent from the plane to the satellite. that s all we have. we can t speculate. that s how we help to solve the problem. we can guess. there is no evidence that goes in that transmission that says this was shut off or it just stopped transmitting. it is a very big mystery. frankly, there is no evidence that it is hijacking or terrorism or sabotaged yet. everything is just a theory. another theory out there is that the plane went off course and flew for four hours with no
communications. that s one of the reasons why this u.s. ship is going out to the indian ocean to search. so what do we make of that. there are several scenarios where things like that have happened in the past. the payne stewart situation where the plane literally crossed the united states. the pilots were not alive or responsive. we were able to track that pl p plane. the united states of america did not have to shoot that plane down. we knew the way it was headed and we knew its capabilities. we knew it would fly along on course until it ran out of fuel. we knew where it was going to come down and no one had to shoot it down t was comi. it was coming down in an unpopulated area. this can travel along on the same course even after it has suffered some catastrophic event, such as a depressurization or a fuselage crack or some kind of an
the problem, carol, is that you have all these unnamed sources being quoted by various news services and we don t know if they re getting those sources are getting information from people third hand that are not immediately involved in this thing or closely involved. we just don t know the qualifications of the sources themselves and then the services put the information out and everybody runs around in circles based on source information that may or may not be true. i think the biggest issue with this of whether it was hijacked or whether it was terrorist or whether it was turned off by the pilots on purpose, all of that hinges on the route that plane took. that s as much of a clue as anything and there s still uncertainty about that. did that plane, in fact, make the turn and start heading for the indian ocean or is it still possible that it s down over the indian ocean or the south choina sea, i should say or the gulf of thailand or over land in vietnam