about six hours. >> you'll be on that flight, this ten-hour round trip mission, is that right, kyung? >> that's right. we are told it's going to be about ten hours. it's a four-hour flight down to the search area, two hours to take a look, then four hours back. we are told, though, that this is very much touch and go, wolf. >> well hopefully you guys will go. it will be safe. you'll be back and do a full report for us here in "the situation room." kyung lah on the ground in perth, australia, getting ready to make that journey on the p-8 poseidon surveillance plane. the vast majority of the panes on the flight are chinese. after nearly three weeks of dread and uncertainty, members of the families are grieving. so many of them remain in denial, many of them are very, very angry. totally understandably. we're joined once again from beijing where it's early friday morning. very smoggy where you are, lots of pollution, as we all know. so what is the very latest on

that front, david? >> wolf, the very latest is, i mean, yes, you call it denial, but they see it as clinging on to hope. they say they haven't seen any direct evidence that this plane went down. so still they believe their loved ones might be alive. the trauma of waiting. for weeks hundreds of family members of those on board flight 370 have been stuck in a hotel in beijing, a pressure cooker of grief and emotion. when they were told the plane went down, some via text message, it was overwhelming. then grief boiled over into anger. these families have banded together and leaders like steve

wang have emerged. without physical evidence, he believes his mother could still be alive. but the wait is weighing on them all. >> well, it is a hard time. all of us are exhausted, both mental and physical. but we just have to wait. >> reporter: retired u.s. air force colonel gordon peters has deep experience helping families deal with trauma. he calls the situation terrible. >> they have no closure. they're not able to say let's deal with this, let's discuss it. they still have confliction of is my loved one alive, are they really dead? those sense of loss just keep perpetuating. >> reporter: often family members are stuck inside this conference room for hours each day. many tell me they still believe their family members are still alive, even if logically the chances seem quite remote.

>> they go to bed at night and they probably logically know it's happening, but they don't want to give up. they want to have the good moments with their life. they want to continue to hope for the best. >> reporter: and in a culture where family is everything, they are the refusing to give up because the consequences are just too great. >> well, my mom used to say that where there are people there are family. but one is lost. >> reporter: wolf, i'm told these families get this hard evidence, they tell me that they won't believe it, so they'll be stuck in this cycle of trauma. >> such a sad, sad story. david mckenzie in beijing, thank you very much. just ahead, we're going to ask our own richard quest about what seems to be some increased optimism that searchers will find something in the indian

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for our north american viewers, "crossfire" won't be seen tonight so we can bring you special coverage of the missing flight 370 mystery. we're also right now following this breaking news. the search for flight 370 is resuming after a break in the weather. let's talk things over with our own richard quest who is joining us from new york. richard, these families, they are going through hell right now. what's your gut tell you? how much longer before we know for sure that some wreckage from this plane has been spotted and has been brought to the surface,

if you will? >> if you look over the last few days, whether it was the chinese pictures from satellite or the french pictures or overnight the thai pictures where 300 objects have been seen in the water, you start to conclude that actually it can't be much longer because we're now talking about many hundreds of objects that are now swirling about. of course, the distances are large, but the assets being flown out there, seven, eight, nine, ten planes, several ships, does lead, i think, to greater encouragement from those i've spoken to that they will not only manage to locate the objects from the satellite, that the satellite saw, they'll be able to get a buoy down to mark them and the ships will be able to pick something up, wolf. >> we heard from athena jones and others that the batteries on the so-called black boxes that

send out the ping -- and there's only a few days left for that ping to be going out -- that ping may not even be in existence any more, the batteries may not have been stored properly. tell our viewers what you're hearing about this because they really need to retrieve the flight data and the cockpit voice recorder. >> yes, they're absolutely stuffed without them, frankly, in terms of trying to work out properly what happened. so they do need them. but if these batteries, as has been alleged by one person who did an audit of malaysia airlines storage capacity in kuala lumpur, if these batteries on the pingers were stored in hot and humid conditions, then that may have degraded their operation capacity. so we may already be looking at batteries that have not actually got the full charge. if that's the case, which would be extremely serious, malaysia airlines hasn't commented on this. the manufacturers of the pingers

say they're designed to work in all sorts of extreme circumstances, but the truth is we don't know. malaysia airlines has to come up and say these pingers with these batteries were properly stored. if there is any question, wolf, that they were not properly stored and that impinged on their operational performance, well, that would be a very, very disappointing news indeed. for the moment, we're jumping ahead of ourselves. we still need that first piece of debris which will lead to a debris field which will then take us down to where the final wreckage is. >> as you know, there is technology out there. there are devices where they could stream all that information on those recorders so that you wouldn't even need to search for the bottom of the sea for any wreckage for those recorders, but they haven't been installed in a lot of these planes. why is that? >> two reasons, firstly, air regulatory hasn't been approved

yet. the correct dots on the is and the ts haven't been crossed. the regulators haven't come to an agreement fully on what the mode will be. and secondly, cost. not only do you have to put the equipment on the planes, to stream it you have to buy the data. and these -- look, i can't even believe i'm talking about cost when you're talking about losing an aircraft with hundreds of people on board, but if you take one of the big u.s. carriers with, say, six, seven, 800 aircraft, you're talking about a vast amount of data because these recorders do take thousands of parameters and churn out the data. now, if you've got to put that out like you did with the space shuttle, like you do with spacecraft, you're talking about starting to talk about a sizable cost to the operation. i know, wolf, how can you compare that with the loss of 240 lives and the loss of a

major aircraft? i guarantee you one thing from this. this particular incident will become the case study and will bring about major changes in aviation. you can take that to the bank. >> they'll need to learn the lessons from this so they don't repeat this down the road. we're standing by for new development. stand by with us. also a cnn crew has arrived now at ukraine's border with russia and sources now say as many as 40,000 russian troops are massing on the other side. our karl penhaul is live from the area. we're going there. also a dramatic story how one man survived the devastating landslide in washington state. ♪ oh-oh, oh, oh, la, la-la, la-la, la-la ♪ ♪ na-na-na, na-na-na-na-na

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we continue watching developments in the search for flight 370 but there's other important news you need to know. two other officials tell cnn russia now may have as many as 40,000 troops at its border with ukraine. karl penhaul is joining us live from the ukrainian side of the border. karl, tell us what's going on. >> well, we're hearing the village and if you look around it's not much more than a collection of a few houses and a few shack. the russian board ser that way, literally just a few hundred yards. we came here already dark and we really don't know what is going on on the other side of the border. what the pentagon is telling us is right now on that eastern border of ukraine and russia up to 40,000 russian troops have massed. the ukrainian government's assessment is even more alarming. they say that their intelligence report show 88,000 russian

troops are digging in their on the other side. they say in just the last two days to a city about 20 miles away from here, the russians have brought in railway trains packed with troops, packed with tanks as well. they say there are tank units there. they say there are helicopter, attack helicopters across there, and they also say that there are some of those elite parachute units there as well. worringly both say the troop buildup has increased over the last few days and they also say that some of those russian units are now so close to the border that if they did decide to roll into ukraine, there would be zero warning. that means there would be no heads up, those tanks, those attack helicopters and those troops could be inside of ukraine proper before either the pentagon or the ukrainian government had any prior warning, wolf. >> any ukrainian military on the ukrainian side of the border, would there be, in other words,

any resistance? >> well, what we have seen as we came up to this border area, a number of beefed-up border patrols. they were checking our after dark, we did have a chance to talk to a couple of the border patrol agents here and he says there are more people, more agents that have been brought in from kiev and other parts of the country. also, some of the local villages here say that in the last few days, members of self-defense militias, civilian groups have come here, although those in the last few hours have withdrawn. but look at crimea and look what happened there. the ukrainian troops just folded in the face of the russian advance. one by one they surrendered and, in fact, now the defense ministry says 75% of the ukrainian troops who were in crimea defected to the russians. very much in the balance as to

whether the ukrainian armed forces would be able to resist a russian advance much more advanced military force, wolf. >> carl penhall, be very over there on the border between ukraine and russia. here in the united states and washington state, searchers are digging down through the equivalent of several stories of mud and debris and trying to reach. at least 24 people are dead and 90 others remain unaccounted for. let's go to george howl who is on the scene with the very latest. george? >> wolf, our cnn camera today got a first-hand tour of the mudslide there. the damage, the devastation. officials describe it as beyond imagination. those search and rescue teams are still on the ground sifting through the mud and we continue to hear these incredible stories of survival and painful realities of loss. >> the road here spreads out into these areas. >> reporter: these are the latest pictures from the disaster zone.

the mud in many places some three to four stories high that came crashing down from the hillside and within a matter of seconds, one square mile of what once was a community now coated and covered. gary mcpherson remembers it felt like being in a blender. >> instead of making a margarita, you just kept mixing it and mixing it and when it got going fast enough you took the top off. >> reporter: gary is among the many rescued saturday when the wall of mud hit his farm. he says he and his wife, linda, were sitting in their reclining chairs and before he knew it, he was in the fight for his and her life. his air force training kicked in. stay calm, try to find a way out. he grabbed a stick. >> stick to the north until i don't have any more stick there and i kept waving it. >> reporter: a rescuer saw that stick and pulled him to safety. all gary could think about was trying to save linda. she didn't make it.

there are so many stories of heartbreaking loss in the oso mudslide. the rising number of those who died. the missing and those who survived. the search and rescue effort continues in this area, but the outlook for finding anyone alive is grim. >> they're digging through the different piles. there's guys looking in holes. as you notice out here, there's lumber. there are trees, actually, trees, mud, dirt, residences, cars, motor homes, boats. everything that everyone would have in a neighborhood is now strewn out here. >> reporter: mcpherson said the mudslide threw his home more than 100 yard away. >> obviously, losing linda. >> reporter: changed forever. at that point, we are expect agnews conference here in the next couple of hours to get the latest information, but the

numbers that we understand, at least 24 people, wolf, died in this mudslide and the number of missing and unaccounted for remains at 90. of course, as we get any new information we'll update it and pass it along. >> what a heartbreaking story that is, george howell, thank you. president obama announced that his administration is getting closer to its goal of enrolling 7 million people for the affordable health care act. enrollment is past 6 million, something of a moral victory and later the obamacare website massive problems when it first went online last october. monday, by the way, is the deadline to enroll for this year. the latest on the hunt for flight 370. thanks to a break in the weather, the search is now resuming.

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breaking developments in the mystery of flight 370. right now we're told planes were supposed to take off shortly in the search for the missing jet. it's not clear, though, that they will. we're told they have not left yet. search efforts have been grounded for hours because of bad weather in the southern indian ocean. a u.s. navy commander tells me the seventh fleet is sending a second patrol aircraft to aid in the search effort. new satellite images from thailand and japan, they're raising hopes that the plane debris may be found soon. hundreds of objects have been detected by various satellites in the area. nothing has been found yet. once again, so far flights were supposed to take off within the past hour, but the u.s. navy

commander says no flights have yet taken off. we're standing by, stay with cnn for complete information on all the latest developments. that's it for me, thanks very much for watching. our coverage continues. erin burnett "outfront" starts right now. next breaking news. search planes taking off in search of missing flight 370. new satellite images show more than 300 objects floating in the indian ocean. new information about the captain and his son speaks out for the first time. plus, more breaking news. tens of thousands of russian troops on high alert tonight on the border with ukraine. those numbers are surging. why the united states says vladimir putin could be about to invade. let's go "outfront." good evening, everyone. i'm aarerin burnett. the latest breaking news. search plane