altitudes and not be picked up by primary radar. that s not a surprise. it s been around for years. so that doesn t surprise me in the least. the range of the aircraft changes dramatically at those low altitudes, though, so you don t have as much range as you did before. but fact is that that aircraft, i ve got credible evidence that aircraft was at those altitudes. i m going to accept that. i m going to call that an apple. look at that apple and that s what it is. i can t see it s anything else. talking apples, if i had an iphone, pretty certain if i dropped it in new york then i could probably have it found by somebody in europe. and what people again if you re watching this all week will say how is it in the modern ages with all the incredible technology we have that the world s greatest aviation experts have no apparent clue really where this plane is? you have to understand the investigative process in the first place. they re trying to keep the information here. they want to
plane, the actual equipment that is used to speak to the ground and to identify the aircraft, et cetera, et cetera, went down. after it went down, a primary radar kept tracking this plane. this does not have the same level of sophistication, but it can actually track the plane itself. and it tracked the flight back in a big u-turn back across the country of malaysia on to the other side of the kcountry. the last known whereabouts of this aircraft before it disappeared, before that actual radar image disappeared from the screens, was more like a lump of rock than anything, roughly halfway between malaysia and indonesia. we don t know any details. this raises a whole host of questions. what actually happened to those transponders. but coming back to your point, this is a massive operation now,
working. we don t know why. it was then tracked on what s known as a primary radar. but the primary radar does not have the same level of sophisticati sophistication, cannot pick up what plane it is. but they continued to monitor this plane, which they consider they thought to be flight a-370. it did a u-turn. it flew back across malaysia, as i said, across into the straits of malacca. that was about for about one hour or so. and that radar image they were looking at disappeared around this very small island, pretty much in the middle of the straits of malacca, between malaysia and indonesian. this does join the dots in some ways, because it s been two or three days. the malaysian air force has been saying there is a possibility that it may have turned around. that s all they said. they haven t elaborated on that possibility at all. this now looks like that s exactly what happened. we re getting that information from a very senior source in the
that plane down, they could have turned off the transponder and just taken that plane down. why would they fly an extra hour if their intention was to destroy the aircraft and kill everyone on board. i agree. i certainly agree. that s an important point to make. brian todd is with us, as well. brian, you have been doing some reporting on the search techniques that are under way right now. what are you learning? reporter: well, wolf, you know, we focus a lot today on the technology. as you have been reporting in the breaking news, at some point we now know the plane s transponder stop working, might have been turned off. radar lost all contact with the aircraft and now we know that was near that island of pul pulau puraq in the strait of malacca. the transponder could have been turned off or destroyed. all planes have gps and can be tracked with satellites. again, if something is destroyed or turned off, those devices obviously can t work. now, as for the technologies being used,
search operation. they have been focusing on the flight path the plane was intended to take. they have been looking, expanding, expanding the search zone, because they found absolutely nothing, a few false leads, but nothing else in the area where the plane should have gone down according to its flight path. so they re now focusing on this other area. just one more thing, wolf, is that this does tie in with earlier reports where the malaysian air force has been very cagey, saying that we believe the plane could have turned around. there was the possibility it may have turned around. there was some radar tracks to suggest it did. but they never confirmed that. now it looks like we ve got confirmation of this. it actually turned around. it flew back across the country on to the other side and then disappeared. hundreds of miles, not just turned around, but then flew hundreds of miles across malaysia. that s a very, very dramatic development. andrew, stand by. tom fuentes is cnn s law