reporter: obviously, we are dealing with a much smaller area here. we have a relatively good idea meaning in the scope of tens of hundreds of miles in the year that we are searching. this is an indonesian-led search. so the u.s. navy is just supporting. we will go wherever the ind notion government asks us to go and support. with mh-370 there wasn t whole lot of fidellty or certainty where that plane can go down. you use sonar that can handle much larger areas. have you been able to detect any of the penging from the plane s black boxes. so far, there haven t been detection of penging. how do we explain that? i don t have a good answer for you on that yuan one. as far as what our divers are using, it s precise scan sonar, not specifically designed to map the bottom of the oaks floor. so that s where our efforts are concentrated right now. we still have the helicopters
absolutely. we have a variety of capabilities available, ranging from ships to aircraft to specialized divers to advanced donors. the uss ft. worth is on that list and we are working at the request of the indonesian government to make sure any of these capabilities that might be helpful in the search are ready to go if the indonesian government requests them. so they are ready to go. it s really a matter of when they are requested. is the u.s. supplying sonar technology at this point? we saw back in march devices that are certainly larger some are smaller, but will any of them be on site? reporter: so uss sampson has sonar on board and they ve been using that in the stare ch effort. one of the assets we have is a sign scan sonar. this is also available
detecting it. what complicates matters is the signal dies down as the battery stops. it could die august together. it could happen april 6th, if it hasn t already. event b, in the event it stopped emitting that signal. they have equipment that will map the ocean floor. take a look what they believe it will be able to do in assisting them in finding these black boxes. we do have maybe a week or two left on this pinger on the black box. if that runs out, you then have to use a site scan sonar. we ve put one of those on an australian ship. those two pieces of equipment can work sequentially there on that on the australian ship. but like i said, without good visual confirmation of debris, which we really have not had
be where you saw it. and i don t mean by a little bit. it may be five miles, six miles, seven miles away. big change. and once you go below the surface, then it really gets complicated. we keep talking about the underwater technology. undeniably important in terms of locating the details once you get there. for example, you could go down here with the side scan s.o.n.a.r.,t terrific device tht sends a ping signal and creates by doing this an underwater topographical map. this is what comes out of that. you get images like this which would emerge and show you basically contours under the water which you can then look at physically and say does that look like part of a plane or not. but again, just like the hydrophones, like everything else, you have to get in the ballpark to make this happen. you have to get fairly close, because if you don t do that, you simply cannot get a reading. so when you talk about a crime scene, yeah, it s a crime scene, but it s a crime scene that is