i think that s a really great point. that s where we need to be going. i sat on two boards of inquiry and everyone s zoned in on this area. if it were me, i d be looking to collaborate through some other means. what i mean is if we go back to the last known point of the transponder ping, which was right in the middle of the south china sea, if you draw a direct line all wait to the potential crash area, it is consistent in terms of being on the outer fringes of a boeing 777 endures. so that is a positive. what i would say is there has been many inconsistencies with the way the radar traces have been picked up from malaysia, indonesia and thailand. i would be on the indonesians saying get me some traces and let s corroborate what we re seeing. it sounds like you re skeptical. open to ideas. all right. that s what we re looking for today. not sold yet. thank you very much. parts of the indian ocean more than 24,000 feet deep.
is about two miles deep or 12,000 feet. that would be a little shallower out here. surrounding that, very deep water, 16, 400 feet deep. just heartbreaking here. we re looking at a storm system rolling through parts of the southern indian ocean. once that does move through, quieter conditions will follow. if this debris is the debris of the plane, the rest of the plane could be thousands of miles away. thank you, maria. that would explain why the australian military has got a c-130 hercules dropping marker buoys in the ocean so they can figure out where exactly to maria s point, where the currents are going. it does seem they are taking this quite seriously. meanwhile, this morning s breaking developments on the missing plane are shifting theories. the former ambassador to the united nations john bolton says you cannot rule out terror. the guardian is now reporting using their experts that for this
they re seeming to find here from satellite, is the debris here, the potential plane that, credible enough to discount the search areas that we were looking at prior to today? reporter: well, to the point that australian officials were asked a similar question said they are really shifting most of their focus to this area. so they seem relatively confident that there is a high likelihood this could be debris from the aircraft and a lot of that has to do with the perceived size. they think it s about 80 feet or so, which may be consistent with wreckage from an airliner the size of a boeing 777, and the location. this is really striking. this was kind of the extreme southern route of the possible path of that airliner based on the final satellite pings received. so it s kind of consistents with a possible position, at least. then the question is, if that s where the wreckage is, where would the actual airliner be? for that, they re going to have to figure out not just ocean currents, b
it says possible objects associated with the aircraft. possible objects. they re not saying these are definite objects. the prime minister was on tv, they re very careful to say it s possible object. that s why they re sending aircraft to eyeball them. i think at this point, it s very preliminary to say whether or not these things are part of the debris. exactly. one of the objects is about 80 feet long. the other is about 15 feet long, which would be consistent with perhaps part of a tail section or a wing. is that something you could depict from looking at these things? no. i don t think so. they re just large objects and another problem is this is almost on the very outside of the radius or the possible radius of the aircraft. it s pushing the very limits of
of where that search is going to move at this point, if they can get their hands on that wreckage. one of the things that everybody always asks about is the black box flight recorder. it can survive at the depths they re talking about here. maybe in excess of 10,000 feet. there is some precedent for this. air france flight 447 back in 2009. it took them a couple of years to find that black box, long after the battery here, which powers that pinging device, long after that battery had run out. they were still able to locate it. it s not easy. again, it took a couple of years. the good news in this situation is we still should have almost three weeks left in that battery, maybe closer to two weeks, to try to find this thing while it s still sending out the pinging signal. but they have to get within at least the ballpark of where that wreckage is before they can begin honing in on that signal. back to you. thank you very much. to hone in on that signal, we were told they would have to