to phase two. >> and that's why finding debris is so important. tom foreman, thank you so much. follow me on twitter @jaketapper. i turn you over to wolf blitzer. he is in "the situation room." mr. blitzer? >> all right, jake, thank you. happening now, the mystery of flight 370. a new twist in the airliner investigation as passengers' relatives are outraged at a new map of the radar track. the airliner's turn is being treated as a, quote, criminal act. air crews are getting ready to resume the search for flight 370 but so far the objects that they have spotted have turned out to be dead jellyfish and old fishing gear. are they looking in the right place? and a race against time. a u.s. black box finder is headed to the search zone but the batteries powering the signal beacons may die within days. can the device get there in time? i'm wolf blitzer.

you're in "the situation room." searchers race against time to find traces of flight 370. here are the latest developments. questions are now being raised about a new map said to show the airliner's radar track and shows a much different flight track. the airliner's turn is being viewed as a criminal act. malaysian officials now say the last words from the cockpit were "good night, malaysian 370." the earlier version was "all right, good night." the change raises questions about the handling of the investigation. and as planes get ready to resume searches of the airliner, pinger locators are on the way to the search zone but the batteries powering the black box signals will likely die within days. our analysts and our reporters are standing by in washington as well as around the world with the kind of special coverage that only cnn can deliver.

let's begin with our senior international correspondent nick roberson. he's joining us with the very latest from kuala lumpur. nic? >> reporter: wolf, we've been hearing increasing frustration from families unable to get answers to key questions about the investigation, frustrated with the small bits of information that they've been handed. they've been frustrated because they wanted to know more about where the plane flew, more from malaysian officials. today, we began to get a better understanding of precisely what they've been asking and and now their questions are being finally put to officials. this is what we've learned. this map of flight 370's radar track was much of the reason for upset by survivor families last week. the image captured by still photographers in the family briefing. it shows a very different route

from the left turn until now and raises more questions about what exactly happened to flight 370, questions the family members were unable to ask at the time. >> the family briefings were -- >> chinese officials of flight 370 passengers say they created the map from publicly available data. a source with knowledge of the investigation tells cnn that beyond doubt the new map, if accurate, shows that someone with excellent flying skills was at the control of the aircraft, that no one on board would have felt the turn. it's a claim that's getting heavy pushback from malaysian officials. >> as regards to the issue of information as we revealed outside the press conference and speculation and diagrams and google or anything else in the

internet, i cannot confirm or discount. i can only explain what i informed you in my piece. >> reporter: investigation officials insist privately this new map is not theirs and does not match malaysian radar readings. despite refusing to comment publicly, officials did say that all of the radar data is central to their investigation. >> the manner of the air traffic control at a time of the aircraft made the turn back is one of the very important information for the investigators to look at. >> reporter: at a background briefing given to cnn, they believe flight 370 was, quote, flown by someone with good flying skills. and now a government source says they consider the turn a criminal act committed by one of

the pilots or someone else on board. >> oh, this is great. these are the controls of the aircraft here? >> yes. >> reporter: wow. cap pen zaharie's friends refuse to believe that he could be the criminal controlling the plane. >> i think you will come to stage when people think he's a hero. when things come out, i think they will see that he's a hero. >> reporter: they rallied to his defense, showing me pictures of a young captain zaharie at flight school. but for some, the new map is casting a shadow over captain zaharie's memory. now, the source who has knowledge of the investigation is also a friend of captain zaharie but he told us that emotionally he doesn't want to believe it but logically has

nowhere else to turn with his conclusions. the question for him, was the plane being flown on this arc on the last hours of its flight, was it being flown on an arc towards the sunrise, was the person at the controls, who was controlling the aircraft trying to land it on water so that it would sink without trace, make it so much harder to find? wolf? >> so nic, based on this source that you have there, my sense is that what he's suggesting is that it was a criminal act as opposed to a catastrophic mechanical failure on the plane. is that right? >> reporter: this source has a lot of knowledge, a lot of information about this specific aircraft, about operations with malaysian airlines and a lot of knowledge about the way that the -- this captain zaharie flew

his aircraft. he's a man who has a lot of information. he has a lot of information about the region, the popping to gra fee, and these are the questions that he's coming to, putting together all of the information that he now has available to him and for him it very much does seem -- and it's an inescapable deduction of logic, he says. he cannot get away from the fact that whoever was flying the aircraft towards the dawn on saturday morning was somebody that knew how to fly the aircraft, knew how to fly it well, had excellent control of it and it leaves him with a very inescapable logical conclusion, wolf, one that he finds painful. >> yeah, i can understand that. nic robertson doing excellent reporting for us. thank you. let's bring in evan perez and miles o'brien and cnn law enforcement analyst, former assistant fbi director, tom fuentes.

miles, let's start with you. what do you make of this information that they are making out? >> a 270-degree turn right all the way down to left, it's very difficult, wolf, to come up with a scenario where that is some sort of a mechanical failure or malfunction. if a pilot was in a bad way, rapid decompression, fire, whatever you want to say, he or she would not take that long way around to gain that direction. it would be a sharp turn to the left. and so it's very difficult -- i've talked to a lot of pilots about this, it's very difficult to look at that diagram and not say that it was an intentional act of some kind. that jives with what nic robertson's sources have been telling him. the one thing i might quibble with on his sources, that could have very well have been flown by autopilot. it could have been flown

automatically and in a gentle way that the passengers would have had no idea. >> tom, i know you have good sources over there in malaysia as well, that they are coming to the conclusion that it was a criminal act responsible for the disappearance of this plane? >> no, i've heard nothing new today as far as this issue. my question would be, what is the source that the plane made that right-hand turn instead of the previously believed left-hand turns? what about all of the radars and experts that have been looking at the radars from the civil radar of malaysian aviation as well as malaysian defense force radars that were supposedly analyzed the first couple of days of this incident? i'm questioning just how do we know that this new information is even true in the first place? >> that's a good question. and i guess we'll only know once this investigation really comes to some sort of conclusion. but evan, i know that you've got good sources with the fbi. tell us the latest on what they have discovered as far as the

captain, the pilot of this plane, the hard drives that they were investigating to see if there were any indications there of wrongdoing. >> wolf, one of the more puzzling parts of this whole thing is that it's natural, according to u.s. officials, it's natural to suspect that whatever was happening was happenings inside the cockpit and for to you bring full attention to the two pilots and the captain in particular. but they found nothing. they've looked at the hard drives, they are still going through it, they haven't turned over everything to the malaysian authorities but they have been sending some regular reports of what they found. and so far, they have found nothing incriminating. they've even recovered some of the deleted data that we have talked about here on "the situation room" and they've found the deleted data was actually overwritten data and doesn't indicate that the pilot was trying to cover his tracks, per se, nothing to indicate that he was trying to hide anything. so they are left puzzled.

still here 24 days later, they don't know anything more about what these two pilots were up to before flight 370 took off. wolf? >> miles, we learned that the malaysian authorities have new information on the final words coming from the cockpit back to ground control. originally we heard the co-pilot supposedly said, all right, good night. now they've put out a press release, the ministry of transport malaysia saying that the final words to air traffic controller was "good night malaysian flight 370." what, if anything, does that say to you other than the fact that the malaysian authorities can't seem to get their act straight four weeks into this. they now finally have the final words correct as opposed to earlier when we thought it was "all right, good night"? >> i think that's the most important takeaway, wolf. that is standard procedure to do that. so that means that that response was closer to a standard

response. the pilot is expected in that case to repeat the frequency that he or she was assigned. in this case, that apparently isn't what happened, although, we haven't seen a complete transcript 25 days in. we have not even see a transcript of air traffic control to the crew. i looked it up in the case of the asiana crash in san francisco, international airport, a transcript was released within two days. we actually heard the communications within two days. the faa released it. there's no reason why we shouldn't be able to hear all of this to hear what the malaysian authority controllers were saying to that crew and, for that matter, what were they saying in ho chi migh city. >> i hope they change their minds better late than ever. then we can move on a little bit. guys, stand by. up next, aircraft are getting ready to resume the search for flight 370. we'll go live to perth, us a

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have been sea trash. time is quickly running out to find the black boxes. kyung lah is in perth, australia, which is the staging ground for the planes. what is the very latest, kyung? how does it look there? >> reporter: well, we're expecting the very first planes in the air in the next hour or so and the pressure is mounting here as the clock continues to tick. the race begins now in the electronic hunt for flight 370. this giant australian navy ship now heading for the indian ocean carrying america's towed pinger locator. it can hear the satellite pings from the black box. the batteries expected to last only about another week. travel time to the search area, three to four days. but even if they arrive in time, the current search zone may be too big for the device to be useful. >> i can search approximately 50

square miles a day. so really, if we're searching for a beacon and we're living on borrowed time, i need something that is less than 1,000 square miles. >> reporter: the search zone is 100 times that. the clock winding down, the search so far has been a frustrating chase of objects spotted from the sky. but when hunted down at sea, the objects turn out to be either fishing equipment or jellyfish. planes touched down again with little news. more than 100 personnel and search planes like that one in the air, 1,000 sailors at sea, those numbers, the prime minister says, will only increase as the search operation intensifies. >> thank you so much. thank you. >> reporter: australia's prime minister thanked the search teams working around the clock, saying this is about more than just finding one jet, it's about anyone who flies on a plane. after dramatically moving the

search zone last week, the prime minister says they are now looking in the right spot. >> it's the best information we have. it's the best analysis that we can get. and it's the most professional search that can be mustered. we are giving it the very best shot we can. and if anyone can find this aircraft, it's us. >> reporter: in malaysia where families have loudly protested the government's handling of the investigation, a change in an important detail. for weeks, the government said that this was the time and last words from the cockpit. >> we got the last conversation from the cockpit that says, "all right, good night". >> reporter: and now in a statement it says the last spoken words were "good night malaysian 370." it's not the words that are so much the issue. it's a fairly standard signoff. the question is, why didn't the

malaysian authorities know sooner? why are they releasing it now and how are they handling this investigation? wolf? >> and the weather is getting ready -- sunlight on tuesday morning in perth. the weather is okay? it looks like it's going to be a good day to fly? >> reporter: well, there is some weather in the search area. there's a system coming through. it's not expected to be terrible but weather is always a factor. the waves expected to be a little higher, wolf. >> kyung lah, thank you. joining me now is a member of the new zealand air force. commander, thanks very much for coming in. do you have any reason to believe all of you guys -- and i don't mean just new england. is the entire multinational effort any closer to finding this plane? >> at the moment, wolf, it's a fairly intensive search going on

in that particular area and what we're going off is, of course, that weight of evidence pointing to the current area being the correct location. obviously, as you've alluded to earlier in the bulletin, as of yet there's been no sightings that can be directly linked to flight 370. it can become at times frustrating but we certainly believe it's just a matter of time. >> how confident are you, commander, that you're even searching in the right area? >> again, it just comes down to that weight of evidence that is there. of course, if we knew exactly where it was, we would go there. but the search area that's being covered every day is comparable to the size of new zealand. so as much as we have a lot of access that is in the area, both in the air and on the surface, it's still a very large amount of ocean that we have to cover and the key to obviously doing this sort of thing is maintaining that search integrity, making sure that the

area that you cover, you do cover properly and that way it's almost as important as finding the actual evidence of mh-370 is discounting areas so we can then move on to others. >> commander, you don't have to share the classified information, your sensitive information with us, but as a general principle, do you have access to secret information that leads you to believe that you are searching in the right area other than the public information that's been released? >> with the information involved and the large degree of spotlight that you can see, we're going off the same information that has been given to the media. >> so there's nothing confidential, u.s. satellites or sub submarines, information that they are sharing with you that is pointing this specific area? >> certainly no information that's been shared with me,

wolf. >> okay. let's talk about the frustration. a lot of men and women are involved in this search. it's been going on now -- we're in the fourth week. how frustrating is it to your men and women who go out there and come out with jellyfish or garbage and junk and nothing to do with the plane. how frustrating is that, commander? >> it's one of the realities of any evidence, there are always highs and lows. if i can speak about the aircraft yesterday, we identified 14 objects of interest throughout four hours on station conducting the search there. that's some 1200 miles due west of perth. during that time, each of those contacts is then reacquired, investigated, photographed so they can tell whether they are objects of interest. and out of those 14, there was only two objects that we thought were worthy of further investigation, which then were passed back through to the us a

str australian maritime safety authority. that's also due to the sea state as well. if i can compare that to a previous mission, there was around 70 contacts. as you can tell from such a dense area, although it's frustrating, there's a lot of -- it does generate a lot of excitement each time something is seen to go around and have a look again. with the crews that we have there at the moment, this is the second screw. we swapped those guys out last week as the first crew was reaching its maximum hours that it could actually fly legally in a month. so again, that fresh set of people that go over there that reinj reinvigorates the enthusiasm and the crew is highly focused. >> commander, what happens if they don't locate the black boxes, the data recorder and cockpit voice recorder, the

pingers, the batteries run out and they are no longer pinging. where does that put this search? >> at the end of the day, what we're doing at the moment is still trying to find any system of debris. although there is clearly an imperative to try to locate any items to try and hone the search area down to the black box to be found, fundamentally it doesn't change the focus right now as to where mh-370 last week. >> commander, thanks very much for joining us. please thank all of the men and women involved in this search. they are doing important work right now. we appreciate you joining us very much. thank you. >> i'll pass that on. thank you. let's bring in cnn's richard quest, peter goelz, former ntsb managing director, former fbi assistant director tom fuentes.

guys, thanks for joining us. richard, the frustration level must be so enormous. >> yes. on the search front, absolutely. on the question of the wording and the change in the last words, it is infuriating and it is frustrating. for one simple reason. the malaysians had numerous opportunities to put the record straight on this one. most recently, when the telegraph in the uk, you'll remember, printed what they said was a transcript and all malaysia said is it's incorrect in parts. that's the moment they could have scotched this. why is it important? because "all right, good night," became a touchstone of nefarious activity in the cockpit. >> here is something that is even more frustrating, in my mind, and i'm going to let you all weigh in on this. i want to play for you what the prime minister of malaysia said basically suggesting the plane wound up in the indian ocean and the acting transport minister who, over the past couple of

days has now revised that. listen to this. >> it is, therefore, with deep sadness and regret that i must inform you that, according to this new data flight mh-370 ended in the southern indian ocean. >> they want me to not give up hope in looking for survivors. i said they have all been in my prayers. >> peter, you've worked with families involved in these kinds of investigations. how difficult is is it to hear two different information, one saying it's over and the other saying, well, there's always hope? >> well , it is frustrating and

the idea that it can do nothing but drive family members into greater hysterity, they have been waiting for three weeks for a clear picture of what happened. and if the malaysian government made a decision a week ago that they were going to say that the plane and everyone agreed that the plane had come down in the indian ocean, then that ought to be the position. you can't sugar coat it. and that's what the transportation minister was trying to do. >> stand by. we're going to continue this analysis. coming up, a u.s. black box finder is on its way to the indian ocean but will it get there too late? and is the search area just too vast for the technology? we'll hear from experts. stay with us. you're in "the situation room."

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u.s. equipment to help find the airliner's crucial data is

on a ship heading to the search zone but the batteries are about to die and it's a race against the clock. brian todd has been looking into this for us and he's got more of what is going on. brian? >> wolf, the tension is building as the clock winds down just a few days until the batteries on that pinger die out. the technology to help find it won't get there for at least three more days and it can't even start probing unless wreckage is found. the malaysian transportation chief expresses everyone's sense of urgency. >> a lot of these answers will not be answered unless we find the black box. >> reporter: less than a wing before the batteries on the pingers run out. >> the odds are very slim. even when you know roughly where the target is, it can be very tricky to ind infind the pinger. they have a very limited range. >> reporter: that's why "ocean shield" is headed to the area

with a towed pinger on board. it can probe the ocean's depths down to 20,000 feet. >> here's the black box and you can see a pinger or beacon, as you call it, attached to the black box. when this gets wet, it triggers a signal in here. >> reporter: the pinger locator can detect the black box signal from as far as two nautical miles away but it has limitations. >> weather is a big factor. if the boat is doing this on the ocean waves, now you're attached to this thing and so this thing goes up and down and it's much less stable in the water. >> reporter: obstructions like hills and mountains on the ocean floor can also impede the pinger locator. the maker of the actual pinger offers hope that maybe the signal can expend beyond the 30-day battery life. >> we think that we can get an additional three to five days of

life before the battery starts to diminish to the point where the output signal will be below te minimums required. >> reporter: but it's also possible that the signal could run out before the 30 days. david soucie cites that malaysia stored the pingers in a hotter location than recommended and could have already zapped this battery's power. but malaysia airlines said, quote, we are unaware of any issue with the underwater locator beacon or its batteries. wolf? >> brian, thank you. richard quest is still with us. we're also joined by former navy oceanography van gurley. this towed pinger locator that will get there on thursday , thy don't have any wreckage yet, is this, for all practical purposes, a waste of time? >> no. because the moment they do have a debris or debris field, which could happen at any time, as

you've heard people say, they will put that into the water. it is just not useful to do it willy-nilly at such a vast space. >> van, i want to play for you a clip. this is chuck hagel speaking about this entire operation. listen to this. >> just a reminder, that area is the size of new mexico and this very sophisticated equipment that we have provided and we have provided, as far as i know, everything that the malaysian government has requested of us, is really reliant totally on defined search areas. it's got tremendous capability but we're going to have to narrow the search area. >> so can they do it without actually finding -- they need really a piece of that plane before they can narrow it significantly, right? >> yes, wolf. there's two problems here. first is, getting the pinger

locator close enough to where the debris may be to be able to hear it and for that you need blind luck or surface debris. right now, both are on short supply. the other issue is, if in fact they are not able to hear the pingers, we find ourselves back in the situation with air france 447, which requires a different type of search technique but requires a lot of time. >> and it took two years to find that. those black boxes from air france 447. richard, the batteries, they say 30 days but sometimes they last longer, right? >> yes. it's an art and a science. previous incidents i've heard them talk about flight 447, they went back, 34, 35 days. it's not like a timer that after 30 days it just switches off. beyond 30 days, it will degrade. >> so far, erik, everything that they have found has turned out to be garbage or jellyfish. talk about what floats in that

area. how much garbage is there out there in the indian ocean? >> well, the ocean -- the indian ocean and most of the other oceans are really filthy. everything that is plastic, that is built to last and gets into the ocean just won't really decompose there. so you get something like a piece of fishing gear that can stay in the ocean for decades, easily, and everything gets accumulated. it gets swiped up in these areas called the garbage fetches. where they are searching now is really close to one of those. so you see a lot of garbage there. it comes from any coastline around the world, mostly in the indian ocean, of course, and it's really hard to find this plane in between all of the other junk. >> there's a lot of junk out there. van, let's talk about the currents. let's say they found a piece of the plane today or tomorrow or whatever. how far could that have moved, given the currents in the indian ocean? >> well, wolf, the currents in

this part of the world are very complex. we are actually doing some modeling at my company this morning looking at what would happen in a -- if there was a debris field in the general vicinity of where the australians are currently searching. and it looks like the debris field would stay in the same location where it starts. it moves around in what is called rotational currents but it doesn't go moving out quickly like if something was caught up in the gulf stream and starts moving off at 3 to 5 knots quickly. so the currents seem to be very complex in this region, sort of similar to what we saw in the air france 447 case. so if they can get to a debris field, at least the simulations that we were looking at this morning said that there's a chance that it's still located where the plane would have entered the water. but with the am of time transpired, that field is dispersing. it grows bigger every day. as it grows bigger, one, it gives you more uncertainty in where the impact area would have been and also makes it harder and harder to find a

concentrated area of debris -- you know, that you can trace back to the aircraft. >> let me get a final thought from richard. your bottom line assessment right now, are we back to square one? are we moving ahead? is there any progress here at all in. >> there is progress but i'm slightly less optimistic than i have been because i heard one person speak overnight, one of the inventors of the black boxes who said it's basically now getting almost very difficult that they will ever find it. and wolf, they will keep on looking for many years. they'll refine the search area to try and find it. but i think the reality is that they are doing -- the prime minister of australia summed it up on this program a few moments ago. if the best lead we've got is the only lead we've got, we're going to give it everything we've got. that's all they can do. >> richard quest, thanks very much. van gurley, erik, thanks to you

as well. we're going to continue watching for developments in the search for flight 370. it's getting close to tuesday morning and planes are going to be taking off momentarily for the search area. we'll have an hour-long situation room special report at the top of the hour. and we're looking into why the commander pilot's daughter is lashing out at a british newspaper right now. we asked people a question, how much money do you think you'll need when you retire? then we gave each person a ribbon to show how many years that amount might last. i was trying to, like, pull it a little further. [ woman ] got me to 70 years old. i'm going to have to rethink this thing. it's hard to imagine how much we'll need for a retirement that could last 30 years or more. so maybe we need to approach things differently, if we want to be ready for a longer retirement. ♪

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we'll continue to monitor developments in the search for

flight 370. we're also watching a troubling increase in tension off the coast of north corey and south korea. let's go to barbara starr. she has the very latest. barbara? >> wolf, in the morning, first thing, defense secretary chuck hagel takes off for a ten-day trip to asia and he's flying into this new round of tensions with north korea. in a three-hour barrage, north korea lobbed hundreds of arterial shells off their coast but south korea fired back. and seoul dispatched fighter jets as the tensions escalated. chuck hagel said he will talk to china about what north korea is up to. >> the provocation that the north koreans have, once again

engaged in, is dangerous and needs to stop. >> reporter: it came as 13,000 u.s. south korean and australian forces conducted their own long-planned exercises, including the type of assaults that would be staged to defend south korea in a real-world crisis. u.s. officials worry kim jong-un may now be on a new round of provocations and the u.s. could somehow be a target. >> it certainly follows on to a number of missile tests that they had been doing really for the past month ranging from ballistic missiles to scores of anti-ship missiles. when you see these are operating in the same area, the fact that they are live firing within close proximity is concerning. >> reporter: all of this after one day after north korean television had another disturbing warning.

>> translator: we will not rule out the new form of nuclear tests for bolstering up our nuclear deterrence. >> reporter: north korea was not clear on what kind of nuclear test it's talking about. the u.s. is worried that pyongyang is trying to make a uranium-based another worry? the north may have learned how to make a sophisticated miniaturized device that could be placed on a ballistic missile and delivered to a target. and that is the fundamental worry if north korea has and can develop a nuclear warhead and put it on the front end of a missile that changes the entire security calculus in the region. wolf? >> certainly does. all right, barbara, thank you very much. very disturbing situation. just ahead a "situation room" special report with all of today's developments in the mystery of flight 370.

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these past several months working to make sure it works, but today we're getting some new information. our white house correspondent michelle kosinski reports. >> reporter: the last day to sign up was a surge, a scramble to beat the deadline. lines at signup centers around

the country, the vice president op rachael ray's talk show pushing for young people to get on board. >> do it for mom. >> reporter: dozens of celebrities tweeted their reminders. zach braff there's nothing sexier than someone with health n. less sexy was the website. slammed in the morning and afternoon by more than 100,000 people accessing it at a time. but those problems telling people to wait were fixed fairly quickly and the administration did one sort of victory lap. >> looking at the numbers, it's just terrific. it means people are getting insurance. >> reporter: the white house says the number who have now registered is significantly above 6 million even more than the congressional budget office predicted because of those dark days, as jay carney, put them of october and november. they don't have exact numbers nor on how many of those signing up didn't have insurance before, how many are paying their premiums, how many are young and healthy sparking fierce republican criticism this

weekend. >> a lot of people are just changing from one insurance policy to the other to a more expensive one, i might add. i think they're cooking the books on this. >> reporter: to k which the administration responded -- >> when those numbers were low, they were willing to go around and tout the numbers. now that they aren't what they're saying they want to say they're cooked. no numbers are cooked. it's great. >> reporter: the numbers won't be in for a couple of weeks but if there is really greater enrollment than expected there's a question how this will shape politics going into midterms and beyond. will democrats embrace it more? and will republicans be able to criticize it much if pushing for a repeal would be then taking away the insurance that millions now have opted for? >> michelle kosinski at the white house, thanks. coming up at the top of the hour our special report, the mystery of flight 370. what you wear to bed is your business.

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