we re just hearing about it now. why is it taking so long? reporter: well, i think behind the scenes, u.s. officials will tell you that they have some frustration with this entire situation. it is the malaysians who are essentially running the show here, running the search operation. u.s. officials say it was only in the last 24 hours that the malaysian government shared this specific technical data with them. the u.s. has a number of very highly trained imagery and radar and satellite specialists out there looking at every scrap of information. but if the malaysians don t share what they know, they don t share what they have, it becomes very difficult. that s why they say there has been some delay. and really, as richard quest has been saying on cnn all week long, it is just an unprecedented situation all the way around, piers. barbara, stay with us.
is wall street journal reporter john stroud. thank you for joining me. you just heard barbara starr s report there. clearly what seems to now be indisputable is the fact that these pings were heard suggesting the plane carried on flying for four to five hours after we had been led to believe in the first few days. what is now conjecture or what the u.s. authorities believe is that it landed in the indian ocean. but you have a different theory. tell me what that is. well, we were reporting just moments ago the malaysian airlines boeing 777 missing since late last friday actually continued to ping. the satellites that are 22,000 miles above the surface of the earth for at least five hours. so that adds an additional hour onto the last known position of where the aircraft was. these pings in particular included very detailed information that investigators are now using to triangulate the aircraft s potential position
manufacturers, everybody to do with that aircraft they re obligated by annex 13 not to report to the public but to the civil authority in charge of that accident. they cannot release their names, any information we have now is probably being ill-gotten. because of the fact it s not really they can t report that information. let me ask you, david souci. you re very experienced in this field. but nobody however experienced can really fathom what has gone on here. what do you think is the most likely of all the theories you ve heard? well, to talk about probability of likelihood, let s assume that the pings, and i m referring to the ping as like an internet protocol ping when you are verifying an ip address you send a ping out to see if you have a response. that s what i m referring to when i say ping from the acars system. because it has to communicate, send that ping out and get the reinformation back. so let s assume there really
okay. let me turn now to david suse, former faa safety inspector. we don t have the answers here. this is one of the great mysteries in aviation history and gets more mysterious by the day. having said that we have more information than we seem to have had at any stage in this week. if you take the assumption that these pings it s interesting i thought what jim tillman just said, the pings themselves, is that correct? do you know when they are supposed to go off? do they go off when a plane is at normal altitude or are they supposed to just work when a plane hits the water? i m out of the acars system which is a data link which provides information from the aircraft continuously if the satellite as available, continuously from that aircraft. so it s intended to provide all the information that john mentioned before from wall street is the engine
basically these pings match the air frame, the type of engines that was this flight, and there is no correlating transponder information. and as we know now, the transponder for some reason turned off, was turned off, stopped working. so they have a flight out over the indian ocean correlates to this exact type of airplane with no transponder. that s where they believe the flight has come to rest. piers? barbara, why are they so convinced it may have gone to the bottom of the ocean when many other people are theorizing from this information about the pings that it could potentially have been hijacked or stolen to order and landed somewhere. why would they believe it has actually crashed into the sea? reporter: well, i think there s a couple of questions here. one is, what caused the plane to disappear if you will? was it a deliberate act? was it sabotage? was it espionage?