it was expected to scour the ocean floor for deb british the whole journey lasting 20 hours but instead, the device resurfaced after officials say it exceeded its maximum operating depth of 14,800 feed feet. we just hit a deeper spot than we initially planned, just bring it up, reprogram it, shift a little bit away from that deeper area and adjust our search pattern. meanwhile, a new detail emerging, a u.s. official tells cnn the co-pilot s cell phone was on during the play and made contact with the malaysian cell tower. according to information shared by investigators. that cell phone signal reportedly detected about 30 minutes after the plane made that sharp westward turn, around the time the aircraft disappeared from radar. as far as we new york the bluefin 21 is on board the australian vessel, the ocean
yes or no whether it s related to mh-370. now to jeff wise here in new york. you know that bluefin it had to come up before it finished the job because it exceeded its depth. are searchers relying too heavily on technology in this part of the search, jeff? you know, when they used a similar technology to find air france 447. and at that time they had three of these devices working a search pattern together. it s not entirely clear to me why there are not more such submersibles available. it would seem this would be a fairly high priority task for them a be set upon. you know, hopefully if we don t get results soon, maybe they
come up before it finished the job today. six hours instead of 16 hours because it exceeded its depth. are searchers relying too heavily on one piece of technology in this part of the search, jeff? you know, when these, they use a similar technology to use air france 447 back in 2011, and at that time they had three of these devices working a search pattern together. it s not entirely clear to me, now that we re now several years later why there aren t more such submersibles available. i do understand these vehicles do exist. it would seem that this would be a fairly high priority task for them to be set upon. you know, hopefully, if we don t get results soon, maybe they ll be able to find more such devices to search the area. david, i m going to ask you because we have moved into this next phase now. but the information that we got about the pings. is that really the best
legitimate or not. if it goes away, unless they can reacquire it, they ll to have put the bigger brothers of this into the water and go looking, do some kind of search pattern. this scans the bottom with sound. it takes long range pictures, a mapping of the bottom, 1,000 meters on each side if it is the bigger vehicle and brings them back so we can locate the wreckage. what is that? this is where they will emanate the sound out. it was recorded on the internal hard drive and you recover the vehicle and you download that data. what is this here? this is its antenna. on the bigger versions, everything will have an antenna. it can talk to satellites, it will have gps over you can pick up gps. it brus all the navigation data
things, right? that s right, fredericka. when you re running a major crisis, you can set up tfansies grid, search, maps devised by investigators but if you receive new information that has a remote possibility of being credible or possible, you change, you make a change, you do something. the problem i m having with this flow of information is, you know, right now it s almost midnight in australia. if in fact they got this information in the middle of the day 12 hours ago, lunchtime, they had planes up in the air doing their regular search pattern. they had ships nearby. they certainly it looks like from the map they could have gotten a plane or two diverted from that other grid search area and been on-site of the debris within an hour, i would think, given the place they were already airborne and already at the nearby search area. you divert somebody over there. you don t wait and contemplate. this last statement makes no sense, we re thinking about it, we re contemplating, we re st