as you know now the plane vanished seven days ago. pentagon correspondent barbara starr joins me with that side of the story. good morning. good morning, carol. the ship has hit the northern end, essentially the entrance to the indian ocean and use its helicopters to conduct aerial searches for any evidence of debris field, any evidence of the plane. but earlier today, actually, a u.s. navy surveillance aircraft conducted its first air sweep of the region flying about 1,000 miles out into the indian ocean. didn t find anything and came back. but they re going to keep at it. so, it s worth thinking about why they re looking in this specific area and that s because about 48 hours ago, u.s. and malaysian officials came to understand that they had a number of pings from an aircraft flying out over the indian ocean about four to five hours from the flight path of the airliner.
let s rule that out. i think everything i have heard is it is truly just an accident. china has these new rules for the south china sea. we have had planes shot down in that area of the world before. this could have been a plane that has been shot down because it was violating some chinese air space rule. it could have been hijacked and landed in pakistan. i have heard all of these different kinds of theories. that s why you really need to, one, not rule anything out. at the same time make certain that the search efforts are being coordinated with our intelligence communities and vice versa so we can find out what really took place. it is a huge coordination effort. on top of that, you have the malaysian government that is being kind of fickle at this point. michael brown, thanks so much. i appreciate it. we re back in a minute.
a new report from reuters suggests that malaysian airlines flight 370 was deliberately flown towards the indian ocean. reuters cited radar data and unnamed sources. malaysian officials say the plane s communication systems were shut off separately. for a look at what might have happened inside the cockpit, cnn s martin savidge joins us from inside a boeing 777 simulator. take it away, martin. good morning, carol. even though it is a simulator, it does feel when you re sitting here very much like the real thing. let me tell you what we have done. we set up the simulation as close to what we know as was going on with flight 370. we took off from kuala lumpur 45
ground and broke 19 bones. oh, my goodness. turns out if you eat a samona or ta tagalong congratulations, young ladies. i will take five boxes of the tagalongs. let s head up to the newsroom with carol costello. have a great weekend. newsroom starts now. happening now in the newsroom breaking overnight, the search turns west. we went from a chessboard to a football field. the hunt for flight 370 now focusing on a small group of islands almost 1,000 miles from takeoff. there seems to be a real trail that leads to something taking that aircraft, that doesn t just happen by accident. a new report just out that says the plane was deliberately
need to correlate all this day that that s coming in related to the accident. we need to make sure that we go back to the point where we have the highest level of confidence in where that plane last was and that s where we need to start. there is plenty of theories out there. there is very little correlated and verified data. correlated data. richard, i m sure the investigators on the ground wish there was such a thing but it does not appear there is such a thing right now. a voice of sanity from the captain. thank you, captain. going back to the last point of reliable information, that last point of reliable information was when the plane handed over from malaysian air space to vietnamese air space within all right, good night. at that point, the transponder loses. everything else is conjecture. good conjecture, it has to be