beginning of this investigation. but still the malaysians have not put in a formal request with the state department to send over an fbi team to malaysia to help with this investigation. so they're still limited in what they can do but this is certainly progress that they're able to analyze the hard drive. >> should have done this from the beginning, but you live and learn. pamela brown, tom fuentes, thanks to you as well. heartbreaking scenes in kuala lumpur where some passengers are enduring an excruciating wait for any information about the plane's fate. today some just couldn't take it any longer and their emotions boiled over. [ speaking foreign language ]

>> heartbreaking scene. cnn's atika shubert is in the malaysian capital. you were right in the middle of those emotional scenes today. tell us what you saw, what it was like. >> well, it was utter chaos, frankly. what happened was these family members came here specifically to address the press briefing. they unfurled this white banner and they gan began to speak to press. at that point security came in and literally dragged these

women out. you could hear that heart-rending scream of one of the mothers. it was very badly handled by malaysian officials. and the fact that you had these hoards of press following them didn't help it either. and what family members have told me essentially is that what they need is just some sort of consistent story, some sort of closure, this drip, drip of information and conflicting narratives is just heartbreaking for them. one day their hopes are up that their relatives might be alive. the next they're utterly crushed when they're told they're looking for the plane in the indian ocean. so these kinds of conflicting stories is what's causing such distress and anguish. >> total anguish. you're there, you're on the ground in cakuala lumpur. what's the latest as far as their efforts? >> well, in terms of the investigation, they are looking

at that flight simulation, what was on the deleted data. no indication that there was anything significant. but they're looking at that. the other thing is whether or not this diverted flight plan was preprogrammed into the computer before communication was cut off. this is something that they're looking at but they've not had any concrete details at this point. in terms of the search they now seem to be focusing on a very specific area off the west coast of australia. and looking at 600 square kilometers. that seems to indicate that they believe that perhaps the flight came over there and crashed into the indian ocean. the problem is it's been 12 days. in that time currents have probably taken the debris anywhere across the indian ocean. looking for it at this point is going to be very difficult, wolf. >> atika shubert in equal kual r

lumpur. david is joining us from beijing. that's where flight 370 was originally headed. never made it, obviously. what's the latest there in china? >> well, the latest is the military here in china saying that their satellites and the other military assets including radar didn't pick up any sign of that flight going over that northern corridor. you know, china and kazakhstan were put in charge, in a way of searching that land route that the plane could have taken. this kind of meshes with what investigators have been telling cnn that they believe it's more likely the plane went south because of all the military assets in this region. china has also put out more boats into the andaman sea and southwest of sumatra to search for this missing plane. so certainly no effort spared from the chinese side to try to find this vanished plane.

>> david, as you know, two-thirds of the passengers aboard that airliner were chinese. and now the government in beijing, china's really slamming the malaysian government for its handling of this situation. what's the latest? what are they saying? >> well, wolf, though they are saying they're coordinating search efforts and working closely with the malaysians, on the state media side they seem to be continually slamming malaysia, as you say. another state editorial coming out today basically calling the malaysians an underdeveloped country, a system of government that's wracked by corruption and proven by the fact the way they're handling this mystery and the search for mh-370. this is important because it all plays into the reaction of these families. of course it would be terrible to wait through these days and hours to figure out what happened to your loved one, but it's almost like a ticking

timebomb, the people stuck in that hotel in beijing and in kuala lumpur. all these chindz peopese people getting for information is from the chinese media, which is heavily controlled by the government here and censors. they'll believe everything mostly that they're reading, that it's the malaysian's fault. that's a very bad scenario because if this plane is found in the ocean, in pla it could be a bad situation because malaysia they think is to blame. >> thanks very much, david mckenzie for that report from beijing. just ahead, flight 370 may have stopped verbal communications but crucial data was still being transmitted. our own tom foreman is standing by to explain how the plane kept relaying information even with key systems shut down. we'll take a close look why so many leads in this case of flight 370 are turning out to be bogus.

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welcome back. you're watching "the situation room" special report, mystery of flight 370. investigators now believe someone reprogrammed the flight to make a sharp turn to the west. the path was followed so perfectly, the pilots probably weren't steering that plane manually. but still a lot of confusion as to how this information was collected. tom foreman is joining us from our virtual studio to try to sort some of this out. >> the malaysian government keeps saying over and over again that a lot of the search right now is about data collection and analysis. so where is this data

originating? we don't have any real answers with all of this, but we have a lot of ideas that are worth talking about here because it is such a mystery. every plane that's in the sky is emanating a tremendous amount of information about itself. largely through the acars system. most of the time that's going out through vhf radio when it's over land it goes through a radio tower. if it moves out over the water, if it's further out where it can't quite reach those land stations, then this plane will connect through a satellite and that satellite in turn will send that signal down to a ground station of some sort. now, what sort of information are they collecting? it may be information about how the engines are performing, about how much fuel is being burned or a simple message from the captain. we've been flying and someone says they have gate information, that may come in through this same system. a simple readout. they may have information if something goes wrong with the

engines as happened with air france, there can be big bursts or packets of information coming out of the plane or the regular check-in with the satellites that we're talking about that happened after acars was turned off, or at least mainly turned off. no matter how this information gets there, though, it's then passed to the airline company because that airline company uses that on a normal basis to monitor things like whether or not an engine needs to be checked when it lands or a tire replaced or seat replaced or any of those bits of information. once that information gets to the airline, it may pass on to the maintenance department or gate agents or maybe the company that makes the engines, as we know rolls royce is monitoring the engines. one of the mysteries here is really do we know the extent of how much information is being passed on? because what investigators are now trying to do is make sure that they have all of the information that came down and all of the places it went and

pull it all together because only with all that information might they come up with that extra clue they need so badly now, wolf, to figure out where to focus the search for that missing plane. >> let's hope they do. tom foreman, thank you very much. just ahead, we'll have more of our "situation room" special report, the mystery of flight 370. there is new data that unfolds almost every day, unfortunately, they're almost all facilitilse . c'mon, you want heartburn? when your favorite food starts a fight, fight back fast, with tums. heartburn relief that neutralizes acid on contact. and goes to work in seconds. ♪ tum, tum tum tum... tums! ♪ ♪

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since flight 370 lost contact nearly two weeks ago, new leads about the plane's whereabouts have popped up almost daily. unfortunately, though, almost none of them have panned out. our senior washington correspondent joe johns has been following this story from the very start. so a lot of false alarms. >> that's for sure, wolf. for every big mystery, there are all these blind alleys, leads and tips that steer investigators in the wrong direction. in the case of the missing 777 could be the granddaddy of them all for false information. a satellite image appeared to show a plane above a jungle. it was spotted by a university student on a match search website that's being used by 3.6 million people, so-called crowd sourcing with map views trying to help find the missing plane. he said today this wasn't the plane authorities are looking for. epiphanies using images from space have turned out to be illusions more than once.

remember the chinese satellite picture that looked like for a day the clue that would solve the case. three suspected floating absence floating in the china sea. turned up nothing. all but forgotten now. >> we found nothing. >> an i.t. analyst in the andaman islands thought he may have seen the plane flying low in satellite pictures, but not so much. the new zealand oil rig worker who claimed in a letter he saw a plane go down. turned out to be more of nothing. and as you might expect, social media hasn't been able to get it right either. musician courtney love tweeted on facebook the coordinates of where she thought the plane was located but it turned out to be another apparently bad tip. at the end of the day, the question is whether all the public input into an investigation like this helps or hurts. a former investigator and atf official says >> what we say in a lot of cases

in law enforcement is we are one tip away from solving this case. >> reporter: mike bouchard helps supervise a massive investigation in the u.s., very different from the search for the plane. it was the beltway sniper case in 2002, with more than 100,000 leads coming in in just over 23 days. but he says rules on managing tips from the public are simple and clear. >> like a triage, wrapped you treat some more importance than others and others you put off till later on. >> reporter: the other thing law enforcement officials in the u.s. have found is that information at public briefings in an ongoing crisis has to be clear, consistent and coordinated. without that you get what's been called the theory of the day that can spread around the world before anyone comes forward to correct the record. wolf? >> good point, joe. stand by. don't go too far away. tom fuentes is here, our law enforcement analyst, former fbi says tant director. all these leads, falsely. are you surprises there hasn't

been a good lead yet? >> no this happens all the time. the more important or significant the case is, the nor happens. other case where a huge reward is aired, same thing. in this case, the reward would be fame, if the area of one that provides the lead that solves the case. but fwhau does lead to millions of pieces of information that come in that have to be gone through and in some case, you know, investigators reforethat as drinking through fire hose, that you're just getting too much to deal with too soon and it's very difficult to sift through that and narrow it down. >> joe, as you point out, all these leads, they do really overwhelming investigators, too, if they check out everything. >> it's very true. in the sniper case, 100,000 or more leads, just a traction of those were anything substantive at all the other thing i think is true, and we know in our own business, information self-correct. so you get a certain piece of information, maybe it's not quite right, the more time you massage it, try to figure it out, you will get to the kernel of the truth it takes a long time.

very frustrating and expensive. >> how much of this is because the malaysians early on weren't sharing the information? >> think the dilemma they had and the path they went down is we're not gonna put something out until we've corroborated it, verify it had through the experts and all that and so doing, they left a vacuum that appeared that they were not forthcoming, they were not cooperative, why respect they putting something out. so, it was really very poor job of media management. late, after taking that criticism, say right away, we are going to put stuff out and the then you've got, as joe mentioned, the theory of the day. it might not be true, we don't know if it's true, we are going to put that out so you don't think we are holding back information. really, this is what has created the confusion. >> one of the other problems, a lot of rivalries out in that region, you got the malaysians, the indonesians, singapore, china. everybody -- they are not really working together, are they? >> it's hard to tell. usually, would you think they are and commander marks has said that, you know, the militaitari

in the region train together and work together in the past through training. and yeah do military exercise that even include rescue and recovery operation. but you're trying to explain what happened today with indonesia saying don't fly over our war space. this could be the next war zone in the world, malaysia and indonesia going to war. >> pretty shocking. they got to fix that the indonesians. all right, joe, thank you. tom, thanks to you as well. just ahead, the fbi is working to recover deleted files from the pilot's personal flight simulate they're was in his home. could we -- could he have used it to practice flying in unfamiliar territory? more of cnn's special could have ram of the mystery of flight 370. that's coming up.

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we will get back to our breaking news could have ram of flight 370 in just a moment. but first, other urgent stories we are monitoring here in "the situation room." tensions on the crimean

peninsula are reaching a fever pitch. ukraine says it is prepared to evacuate military personnel and their families from crimea, hours after russian supporters stormed the ukrainian navy's head quarters there in crimea and kidnapped the navy chief. ukraine says russian security forces were involved. the markets are hurting after janet yellen's first meeting as fed chief. the dow fell more than 100 points, the s & p 500 and the nasdaq finished lower as well. the slump came as yellen announced the fed stimulus program would likely end this fall and interest rate does rise as early as 2015. the trial of the olympic star, oscar pistorius has taken a graphic turn. prosecutors and police debated the bloody details of the night the man nicknamed the blade runner shot and killed his girlfriend. as pistorius covered his face and put his fingers in his ears. the industrial adjourned until next week when pistorius may take the stand.

heed a notices shoot willing his girlfriend but has pleaded not guilty saying he mistook her for a burglar. rand paul is taking his criticism of the obamaed a minute station to an unlikely place, berkeley university. the republican senator is speaking at the famous liberal college campus in california, attacking the president for his continued support of the nsa and its phone meta data collection. paul says that as the first african-american president, president obama should know better, given the history of surveillance on civil rights leaders. quickly recapping what we have learned today in the mystery of flight 370, a federal official tells cnn, new clues suggest the dramatic route change that sent the plane heading west may have been programmed into the plane's computer to be executed automatically. also, maine officials say they have received new radar data from another country but they won't reveal who provided the data or what they show. and the fbi is now looking at the flight simulator seized from the pilot's home.

experts are trying to recover some deleted files that potentially, folksily could contain some critical clues. remember you can always follow us on twitter. you can tweet me at wolf blitzer. you can certainly tweet the show at cnn sit room. thanks very much for watching. i'm wolf blitzer in washington. erin burnett "out front "starts right now. next, breaking news. president obama speaking for the first time about flight 370 today. what he said about the investigation tonight. plus, why was information deleted from the pilot's homemade flight simulate center in fbi looking for answers tonight. and an "out front" investigation, how easy it for a 777 to disappear from radar? well, we went and found out. let's go "out front." and good evening to everyone, i'm erin