back now to the developing news we have here on cnn. military and civilian planes closing in on the search area in the southern indian ocean,

looking for any trace of flight 370. here with me now, aviation experts to analyze all this and ready to answer your questions, make sure you use the hash tag 370 q. jeff, you were offering a theory saying the southern arc and the northern arc was much narrower than previously learned. mary schiavo, you want to respond to that? >> yes, they also said they had provided coordinates, more exact coordinates where they believed that something happened the day the plane went missing and provided those coordinates two days later to the malaysian authorities and it was close to where they were looking but they knew this two days after the accident. >> arthur rosenberg? >> that would be inconsistent with the theory that jeff is trying to advance here, which takes you to the northern route.

i think there's a lot of credence to that. the route over myanmar and bangladesh and nepal, that's an area of substantial interest. >> jeff beatty? >> well, i don't disagree, because early on we were looking at the northern route. i think it just has to stay on the table. >> you don't necessarily agree? >> i still -- the southern route still seems to be the most preferable one. and i'm still looking for the experts to be drilling down on those pings. they're already at the extremity of what these satellites were ever intended to be able to interpret. so we have a long way to go on that. >> speaking of satellites, this is from ken who says, can't we look at satellite photos from sunday, monday, et cetera, to see how far the objects have moved? no, yes, who can answer that for

me? mary, is that you? >> well, they can look at satellites -- >> go ahead, mary. >> okay, they can look at it, but they have to see the same object in the satellite photo. the problem is they appear in some and not others and it's difficult to track them when they don't always appear in the photos. that's why they gave them coordinates two days after the accident. so the suggestion was, look under those coordinates for the black boxes. >> jeff? >> nothing to add to that. >> here is another one from betty. why not make priority searching islands, land, instead of oceans. land could prove life. richard quest? >> because which land are you going to look for as you go out over the southern option. if you look over the northern option, yes, they have looked over land. kazakhstan confirmed they have

no evidence of any wreckage being found. there was no radar tracks from places like air thailand. i know jeff wise will disagree with me on a variety of these aspects. but once you've gone over malaysia and indonesia, you're talking about small islands. this is a boeing 777. yes, there are some landing spots that it could happen, but most of them have been checked. >> a lot of people have been asking about submarines. paul says, is it true that the u.s. has deployed submarines in the search for mh-370 in the indian ocean? are submarines potentially useful here? >> they do have acoustic listening and sonar abilities. i'm not a submarine expert, but they have to have the cutting edge technology if they're a warship to look out in front of them and look around them.

but they're a very expensive item to run, and you could do the same with autonomous vehicles. sound is very limited. you can only look -- unclassified, i guess, 1,000 meters on each side, maybe 2,000 meters, depending on your strength of your sonar and you have to be down close to the bottom. if these are 13,000 feet deep, even the best subs do not go that deep. >> this is from gale who says is there an aircraft carrier heading out to the search area? >> not as far as i'm aware. >> tim, do they need a floating runway out there? is that even possible with the seas? >> well, sure. an aircraft carrier can operate, and it would be paced that would give them an opportunity to spend more time on target. i'm excited about what we're hearing tonight about a

completely different set of coordinates to take this thing well away from where we're looking right now. >> don, on the floating runway thing, about the station time, there has been progress made today. i understand the reporting that malaysia is asking for u.s. refueling capability, so that should help the amount of time these aircraft are able to stay on station. >> p-8s can be refueled in flight, the p-3s cannot be refueled in flight. if you're sending an aircraft carrier, you're sending a lot more assets down there, because you're sending a carrier group. >> when we come back, we'll check in with cnn's martin savidge and keep your questions coming.

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for when you get married, move into a new house, or add a car to your policy. personalized coverage and savings. all the things humans need to make our world a little less imperfect. call... and ask about all the ways you could save. liberty mutual insurance. responsibility. what's your policy? i want to check in now with cnn's martin savidge, in a 777 flight simulator. he's answering a question about zombie flights from eckstein who asks, if the theory is true, what would the condition of the passengers be, would they be overcome by fumes, as well. martin, what do you have for us? >> reporter: the short answer to that is yes, they would be overcome by that.

let me show how this could happen. this is not necessarily, nor do we say this is what happened, it's what could have happened. you would have just got to cruise altitude. we're on the way to beijing and this would have happened. that's the sound everybody knows. you can unfasten your seat belt, get comfortable. but in the cockpit, maybe this happens. the first sign that you've got a problem. this is a fire. this is the fire warnings that are going off and we're being told now that there is a fire burning say in the cargo hold and we can now maybe start to sense smoke. immediately the pilots go into action as mitchell is doing here. we're descending because that is the protocol and the plane begins a turn to the left. maybe we're heading back to where we came from or to an emergency airport. at the same time, i would be firing off what is the fire system here, that's designed to dump fire extinguishers into the cargo area in the hopes of

extinguishing the fire. we would have oxygen masks on and maybe at times be struggling to control the airplane due to the fire or whatever else is going on. flight could become erratic. but eventually the theory would be that we do regain control of the aircraft, that we are able to level it off. and then, most important, we are able to engage the automatic pilot again. and then what happens is either due to a lack of oxygen or maybe due to too much smoke, we're knocked out. not only are we knocked out, but everybody in the airplane. but because we left with seven hours of plane, and this plane is so sophisticated, it flies and flies and flies until it runs out of fuel. that's the zombie theory. richard? >> got a question for you, mitchell. and martin.

in that theory, does the fire do serious damage to the structure of the aircraft? because if the smoke and fumes are so bad, surely there could be structural -- the structural integrity of the plane could be at risk and the comms box, which we can you earlier in the week, wouldn't they be affected, too? >> yeah, of course. if you're talking about a fire like that, structural damage is going to factor into this equation. >> reporter: you want a fire that knocks out the crew, knocks out apparently the transponder and the acars system but stops short of destroying the aircraft or the autopilot. so you have to have the perfect fire. >> fascinating. thank you. i want to get back now to my

panel. this one is for you, tim tilmon from derek. he says do pilots know their flight schedule out a month or it is a routine schedule for the pilots? >> every airline is a little different, but most airlines give you a bid sheet a month in advance, and you just use your seniority to achieve a line of flying that you want to fly for that following month. if you're senior enough, you can get that flying and it's pretty well scheduled, so you know where you're going to be and when you're going to be there. >> that's what happens most of the time. >> that's what happens with u.s. carriers. malaysian airlines doesn't work on the bid schedule, they do it by rotation. so pilots will do a certain number of beijings, a certain number of londons, et cetera. >> lisa says, we are so quick to blame the pilots but could the plane still have been taken over

by a passenger or passengers? >> yes, it certainly could have, lisa. but we're looking at so many different theories. i would like to use a point that was made at the beginning of the show about the flight recorder. the damning thing would have been had the pilot taken the hard drive with him. if he took the hard drive with him and the simulator information was only local there, that would have been really damning looking at the crew. >> mary, pam says does malaysian airlines have air marshals like we do in the u.s.? >> i don't know if they have air marshals like we do, but in the united states, no, they don't go into the cockpit. >> thank you very much. stand by, everyone. next, our lightning round with as many of your questions as we can answer.

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all right. time now for our lightning round with as many tweets as possible. this one i thought was important. this is for captain taylor. this one says, don, if there are -- if they have any survivors, what is the average

temperature of the water and how far is the site from the antarctic lands? thanks. >> yeah, this is cold water. it's high 50s, low -- mid 50s, maybe 40s. exposure is hours, not days. so unless there's something floating and they're protected, it's not good. >> this one is from clay, specifically for you, mary schiavo. he said, did we totally abandon all efforts on the northern route while searching debris? >> i didn't hear that. i think you said should they abandon -- >> did we totally abandon the northern routes? >> i believe they did, while searching in the south they abandoned the north. >> this one is from martha. why is no one looking on land? why not request countries from malaysia to mongolia to search their own territories? jeff beatty?

>> i think, and richard talked to this earlier also, those searches have gone on, and those are populated areas for the most part. that will continue on a low level, but i think for the most part they've been eliminated. >> question for arthur rosenberg. if the wreckage were found in years to come, would the black box still be readable? in other words, even though the pinging stops after 30 days, what is the life of the data on the solid state inside? >> the answer is yes, and it depends on how much damage there was to the black box. but data can be retrieved. >> there was one, i forget which flight it was, the recorders were unusable. >> 447, they extracted the cvr, the fdr. they got a full range of information on that. >> there was a flight recently that recorders were found that were damaged and not usable.

>> question for -- hold on one second. question for jim tilmon. if it takes this long every time to find missing planes, shouldn't black boxes be modernized with better technology, jim? >> i don't think there's anything wrong with the technology. it may be something that we want to think about in terms of their accessibility in ditching or a crash. some have suggested maybe we should have something to give you a better chance. >> jeff wise, how much of our minds are conditioned to confusion and seeking blame as the plane rests on the bottom of china sea where it crashed? this is really how preconditioned are question to what is in our minds of what might have happened? >> well, you know, it's a stressful time. when we're under stress, when

we're in a fearful situation, it can be difficult to think rationally sometimes. we need to remember to keep a clear head. >> okay. we've got to run. i would love to answer more of these questions and we will when we get back. we have time for more questions for you at home when we come right back. g for families you get 4 lines on at&t's network... including unlimited talk unlimited text ...and 10 gigs of data to share. 10 gigs? 10 gigs. all for $160 dollars a month. you know, i think our family really needed this. it's really gonna bring us closer together. yep. yep. yep. yep. yep. yep. introducing our best-ever family pricing for instance, a family of four gets 10 gigs of data with unlimited talk and text for 160 dollars a month. only from at&t.

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back now with our experts. i want to ask you guys this, we've been looking for answers, so many answers and theories. i want to get what we've learned this week and what we've learned over the past two weeks. one fundamental question here, was this incident an accident or something willed by humans, a plane missing either way. what have we learned over the past two weeks on the working theorys? let's do it in order with jeff wise. >> in terms of whether it's an accident or will to action? >> yes. and what have you learned? >> the route of the plane has been much reduced and the preponderance of evidence is it was a willed action, not an accident. >> mary schiavo? >> we've learned there's an absolute absence of any evidence of crime, terrorism, pilot suicide and sometimes no evidence is evidence. looks like an accident. >> arthur rosenberg? >> i have to disagree with mary. human intervention is very high

on the list. >> jeff beatty? >> human intervention i think edges out accident at the moment. we also learned realtime position reporting of aircraft needs to be improved. >> jim tilmon? >> we need to recognize the fact we must be patient. we should keep an open mind and never stop looking. >> captain tim taylor? >> more importantly, this is a big, big ocean. we cannot map it all in a short period. it's very deep and expansive and if anything, we've taught the world that it's not as easy as it sounds. >> richard quest? >> what we have learned this week is just that no matter how safe we think flies has become, there are risks involved and people are working exceptionally hard to try and find out what the cause was for this and why. and that they will not stop until they have the reason.

because every one of us who gets on a plane needs to know. >> and there was one from someone i can't find the tweet here, what can they do to help, to send money or cards, let's ask our attorneys there, is there anything that they can do, mary? >> well, yes, ordinarily there are funds set up for the families and that's one thing that we can look for and try to find if there have been funds set up for these families. >> listen, you guys, it's been amazing. we have to remember every time we cover this, there are still 239 people missing and possibly alive. the chances are, if it did go over the southern indian ocean, we know what the possibilities are. but the australian government is still looking to rescue people. this is still a rescue operation. we must keep that in mind. thank you very much. it's been a fascinating week having you here. i'm don lemon. join our special report saturday

at 8:00 and 10:00 on sunday. that's it for now. "ac 360" starts right now. with the first officer signing off. 54 minutes in all, 54 minutes of conversation we did not have before. that said, we want to be careful to label it for what it is. this is a transcript obtained by a news source that has been translated from the original