aircraft actually under went some type of structural failure during its decent or whether it began losing pieces during an attempted water landing or an attempted, quote/unquote crash. so it really depends on what the circumstances were at the time this aircraft is lost. clearly there will be a debris field. that debris field will extend could be hundreds, could be thousands of miles. but all of the models show, particularly the latest models, which included not only wind drift but current drift and when they added in the wave action, it brought all of the modelling towards reunion island and its sister islands. so it is very important and i think greg is right on point here, that we begin searching the waters directly around reunion island.
projects at the graphics institution. how far is the debris field from the last known location of the plane, chad? and what are the conditions like in the java sea? somewhere what i ve heard today and has been the major number, somewhere around six miles, ten kilometers. six miles away from the last known location on the radar to where they found it. that s likely due to a wind drift. there s not much current in this area. i ll get to that in a second. the weather is okay tonight. and this is going to be one of these things that we have to hope for, the weather is good during the day. we don t need weather good at night because planes don t see much at night. storms are building to the south. but watch what happens, almost the exact opposite of what happens in america as storms build at 4:00 or 5:00 in the afternoon. here in the java sea, the storms build at 5:00, 6:00 a.m. so here s where we are right now. a few showers but not much. by tomorrow morning, when they want to get back i
likelihood, if they find debris that s related to the plane that the remains of the plane would be close by? yeah, as every day goes by, the spread of anything that would have been in the water gets further and further away. so at least in this area, it s a little less strong of currents as it was in the previous search area. but it s still currents can carry objects from five miles per day to 30 miles per day in this area, depending on whether an eddy goes by and picks it up. so every day, it s probably about ten miles per day spread. and in this case, it s not in one direction. but it s kind of all the way out. there is also the factor of winds wind drift winds pushing on anything sticking up out of the water. winds can push objects along. and in this area, the winds aren t as strong as they were in the more south area. but they re still fairly strong, 15, 20 miles per hour.
the right area? remember where we got this information in the first place where to search was from the ntsb and faa calculating currents and fuel and that location and then from the currents and wind drift. so we re there. we re at the extrapolated location? absolutely. yes. so if it really is something and let s just say at that length, 79 feet long sounds an awful lot like a shipping container which fall off of freighters all the time. yes. if it is a shipping container, will we find that based on the extrapolation, the science and math? i think so. because, again, these aircraft can find that. they re designed to find things like that. of course ships are bigger than that, but they re capable, very capable of finding something smaller. whatever s on that satellite photograph. i think we re going to find it, yes. god hope it is what we re looking for in particular and particularly those people. jennifer, just weigh-in if you would on that particular issue of wea
awareness, of course, understand where they are relative to the crowd line, understand if there s any wind drift that s pushing them along, so they are busy processing a lot of information in a very short amount of time, as well as trying to keep the flow of the air show, the flow of their sequence of maneuvers, and remembering what s next. it s a very intense environment. the maintenance we do on the airplane is far beyond what the normal airport is subjected to. i mean, we go over these airplanes with a fine-toothed comb. we replace parts earlier than we normally would, and in our training, we train, we train, we train. before an air show pilots ever flies, he s like leg flown several thousand hours, practiced repeatedly and frequently at very low altitudes to make sure he is that good, that he can perform without incidence. they are the best of the best.