information, but i am hopeful, as i am sure that all of the families are, and everybody wants to get to the bottom of this and understand what happened. so finding the recorders is a very important piece of that, and we need to know what was heard, how long it was heard and what type of signal to better understand if it is the locator beacons themselves. and sure. and the analysts are saying perhaps, and also expressing some hope as you are. renee, you are learning new information about the chinese equipment, right? i mean, if the folks had been following this, they know that the big pinger locator was the u.s. piece of equipment that was lent to the australians and the tpl-25, the giant underwater microphone, but this is something different, and what do we know about it? it is also an underwater mic microphone, hydrophone, but it is not the same capabilities as the tow pinger, so we talked to
information we had with 447. the acars messages were sent in realtime. we knew the general location, we knew the emergency the pilots were facing, the inconsistent information they were getting. so there was a great deal of information that was readily available at that time. unfortunately here, we don t about whether the information was unavailable because it was disabled or turned off or due to some other cause. we don t have that kind of information and that will make it more difficult. let s talk about the assets out there. right now, it s incredible state of the art technology being used in the search. the british ship echo is searching for sonic transmissions and the australian ship, the ocean shield, has a giant underwater microphone that will listen for the pings. and the blue fin 21, under water robot, will scour the ocean bed. obviously, it s a lot of equipment. you said they could use more,
rod mccallum has extensive experience searching under water. rob is here with us right now. so how difficult of a mission is this, since they re not even sure, as i ve been saying, they re looking in the right place? but now all of this high-tech underwater equipment has been put in place, and it s moving around. trying to hear that pinger. yeah. it is a long shot. but although it s a long shot, it s the best shot. you know, there s no sense in having those assets in that part of the world and not having them in the water actually searching. so, you know, they re using the best data they can from the last known tracker, and they are deploying the assets along that track. and it s a shot in the dark, but it s an informed one. and it s basically, you know it includes a lot of luck. because that equipment can only move in a relatively tiny area every day. that s right. it s essentially a microphone, an underwater microphone, hydro phone, with very limited range, perhaps a couple o
making good progress, expected to arrive in the search zone, we are told by the australian defense force, either late thursday evening, or by the latest, on friday, poppy. and they made that decision to send the pinger locator out there, even if they don t have any idea if this is the correct search zone, but they re going to do the best they can. give us a sense of how challenging it is, will, because i know i had heard some fact like it can only go sort of 3 miles an hour and only cover about 150-square-mile area in about an hour s time, or in a day s time, is that correct? reporter: you re absolutely correct. in a day s time? reporter: yeah. yeah, absolutely right. you know, this is what s interesting about this technology. a lot of people are pinning so much hope on the ocean shield because it has these two high-tech tools. the underwater microphone can detect the ping from a data recorder. and it has an underwater drone that can scan the ocean floor. but as great as this
wanted to see for ourselves what the weather conditions are like. and before i tell you how we were thrown around, because we were thrown around quite a bit on the boat, this was a clear day here. the conditions were considered calm. but you can see from the video just how not calm it was. i feel sorry for the guys on the shield heading out to the wreck zone because we re at idle. we re running along about 5 knots. those guys are punching this at 15 knots, so every wave is straight over the top. reporter: even for a large ship like the ocean shield ? large ship, it will just be over the top at three times the speed we re doing. reporter: john, you know, we talked, too, about this equipment, this high-tech equipment that is on the ocean shield. we ve been telling you all about it how this underwater microphone can detect the ping from a black box. but here s the problem, the radius that it can detect is relatively small, and we re heading to a search area that, as you know,