have taken before this plane vanished and how the families of those on board are now dealing with this breaking news. good morning, everyone. good to see you. welcome to early start. i m john berman. and i m christine romans. it s monday, april 7th. it is 4:00 a.m. in the east. let s begin and welcome all of our viewers here in the u.s. and around the world beginning with this breaking news. up first, the most promising lead yet in the search for flight 370. overnight, a u.s. pinger locator picked up two separate signals that could be coming from the plane s so-called black boxes. one of them lasted for well over two hours. now a u.s. underwater drone is being brought in to find the source of those signals. it s not going to be easy, because if this is indeed coming from the missing jetliner, it s 2.8 miles below the surface of the ocean. erin mclaughlin live from perth, australia, this morning. erin, it s certainly promise but there s still a lot of work to do. bring us
search for flight 370. this morning, australia s prime minister says he s confident that the signals crews are hearing under water are from the plane s black boxes, and he says they could be within just a few miles of finding them. also this morning, the search zone has narrowed once again, just 18,000 square miles. this is so much smaller than the area they were looking in before, this as they race against time to find the flight recorders before their batteries run out, if, in fact, they haven t run out already. our senior international correspondent, matthew chance, live in perth with the latest this morning. what s going on there, matthew? reporter: well, there s been a lot of activity, of course, in the search zone, which as you mentioned has narrowed significantly over the past several days to an area which is much more manageable, i suppose, for the dozen or so aircraft and dozen or so ships that are currently scouring, including the australian vessel, the ocean shi
southern indian ocean ranging in size from 3 feet to 75 feet. it turned up on satellite images from a french defense firm on sunday. they re digging into that and every other new detail of the information with my experts. our big story remains flight 370. we re covering every ainngle. it s 9:00 a.m. in perth. tell me what the expectation is today. we ve seen again 122 new images potentially of plane wreckage. do they think they can get anywhere near where they think they were? reporter: well, they certainly are hoping to. they ve got 11 aircraft up in the air today. just about an hour ago the chinese jet took off. we re expecting another five civilian aircraft to take off in the next few hours. then the u.s. military planes will go out. it s critical that they try and get to this area. they re going to cover two sectors with about 78,000 square kilometers in all. it s critical they get low enough to see this debris and actually identify, to eyeball it and see what it is. wh
the single bluefin-21 sonar scanner has now covered about 95% of the area the investigators have called the most likely possible resting place for the boeing triple 7. when it is done we re just learning where the next focus position may be. remember, bluefins have been on more than a dozen missions. it has yet to find anything. we have yet to see anything, not one single image from the robot sub. and flight 370 took off with 390 people on board. several satellite connections and a handful of possible sonar pings, there were no signs of the airliner. the answers will come. this is for now the longest running aviation mystery of our time. tonight, we ll look at some of the new approaches that investigators may find. first, miguel marquez in perth, australia. the bluefin has nearly completed the first phase of the entire area, focused around the strongest ping they detected. what is the latest sign? no sign of the plane. at this point it is probably very likely that the bluef
plane. our bill story is of course flight 370. we are covering every angle with cnn reporters all over the globe. sara sidner in kuala lumpur, david mckenzie in beijing and richard quest with me. dramatic developments that happened during our show last night where the search moved suddenly at least 700 miles north. we ve got this photograph from new zealand air force from a plane, not a satellite. what is the significance of this picture potentially? reporter: well, it s a very promising lead. but at this point we don t know if it s actually debris from the plane. it is a floating object in the water. you could kind of see it s rectangular in shape. and the plane that spotted it was actually a p 3 orion from new zealand. the lieutenant that saw it gave some brief comments as soon as he landed here. take a listen. yes, it sounds like we re getting into an area of interest. obviously we don t know if these are associated with the aircraft yet but it certainly looks like we