early morning hours there in australia. 8:00 a.m. in perth. are search teams gearing up for another full day at sea? what kind of resources are we looking at? reporter: i think i m hearing it right now. i m about 500 yards i m told from where these planes are taking off. we can hear some turboprops starting up. these are the p-3 orions. one is scheduled to take off right now. they will be leaving from this air base and heading four hours away to that remote area. at daybreak, there was one that took off and then those two civilian long-range planes. there will be more today, a total of six planes in all heading to that remote area four hours away. australian officials saying they re going to focus more
update times. just two flights a day. 4 a.m. and 4 p.m. the turbo props. each flight is 8 hours long. very lengthy flights. these planes which are basically 4 to 5 flying tanks. you can barely even see the fact that you are going through the eye wall. bumpiness. they crisscross and zigzag all through the storm, all through the tropical send all this data back to national hurricane center. drop cylinders down the tubes which pass out through the wing and parachute literally down through the storm and swirl and swirl and swirl and send back critical information. temperature, humidity, humidity and wind characteristics. those will go right into the center models. help true up where is the storm, what is the pressure field. what are the winds doing? our photograph flew up on that
nose of a u.s. navy p-3 owe ryan. it was in international air space. it was on routine patrol and this lumbering strange looking chinese plane that looks like a big billboard on its back crossed right in front of the navy o ryan. the american pilots in the o ryan had to take a hard turn and alter their course abruptly in order to avoid a midair collision and came within 1,000 feet. there are a couple of weird things about this. the first, these are not the kind of planes that you expect to be involved in an incident like this. these are big both of them, big lumbering surveillance aircraft that have been flying for decades. they are both turbo props, right? the o ryan virtually unchanged since the 1960s. that chinese plane, it s actually a derivative of a
wreckage from this flight has been found. joy? a tragic situation. kelly kobe cobiella, thank you much. we ll check back in with you at a later time. an nbc aviation analyst. john, what can you tell us about this airline which is called trigana air services? trigana air services has been in production for a number of years. they have both turbo props and jet aircraft. they ve had some pretty serious incidents in the past from 1991 till today. and that s something that the investigators are certainly going to look at to see if there are organizational or cultural problems that may have contributed to this accident. of course, we ve seen two major crashes in indonesia in less than a year. can you talk a little bit about the country s safety record when it comes to air travel? well, indonesia is an area where there is a lot of growth in aviation but they also have