satellites. >> nbc news aviation correspondent tom costello joins me now. tom, can you first explain where this data comes from and why it's so important? then explain to us why the imagery is being treated differently than that satellite imagery we got last week which turned out to be a false lead. >> good point. okay. let's go to the telestrator. it is as you mentioned in the south indian ocean. one piece of this debris is said to be about 79 feet. 79 feet long. another piece said to be about 16 feet long. those are two very large pieces. but the 79 foot one in particular, the wingspan of a triple 777 is about 200 feet or so. so it is possible. the tail is about 60 feet. it is possible that one of these images could be something that would come from a plane. but it's only possible. we're not saying it is. the australians believe there's enough to go on here. and their analysis of the

satellite data would suggest that. where is this exactly? let's go to the map here. this -- if this is, in fact, debris, it would be all the way down here at the south indian ocean. this would literally be at the end of the -- the expected fuel range for that plane. it could not have gone any farther according to all the fuel expectations. that means the plane would have maintained 500 miles per hour, more or less, traveling at 30,000 feet on this flight. 30,000 feet, 500 miles per hour. that would put you right here if the plane never deviated from its course. and if this wreckage is, in fact, wreckage from the plane, then that would suggest perhaps that this plane was on autopilot. so why would the plane possibly be on autopilot? why would it land? why would it end up right here? 1,500 miles off of perth? that's about three to four hours' flight off of perth. you can start to come up with your own scenarios here.

would it suggest the cockpit crew was incapacitated? were they dead? did somebody on board have a death wish and fly this plane to the limits -- to its limits, the plane's limits, and then run out of fuel and crash it in the indian ocean? did the people onboard know there was a problem or did they sleep through much of this and then wake up wondering why they're not in beijing? a lot of questions this morning. not a lot of answers. so back to the telestrator, the australians are in the morning sending more planes into the area to search the zone. they're sending in p-3 and p-8 aircraft. these are the advanced sub hunters that can use advanced radar looking for any sign of debris on the water. and under the water as well. if they find it, then hopefully that will give them a better location to begin a more thorough search. as you mentioned, the australian royal ship, the success, is en route. last point, an important point. there is a cargo ship from norway that is in that area.

it is already looking and so far hasn't seen anything. it's entirely possible that whatever debris is there has already drifted off some place else. back to you. >> of course, this satellite imagery being essentially four days old. that is an excellent point. great information. toms can tell l greg, hopefully you were able to hear what tom was saying. if, in fact, what we're looking at is a plane that may have been -- with an incapacitated crew or for some other reason flew to the limits of its fuel supply all the way down, at 30,000 feet, 500 miles an hour, if that is, in fact, what happened and this turns out to be remnants of flight 370, what could that tell us about causation. >> i think the actual truckture of the airplane and how it broke up will only give us technical information as to whether it was

a high speed impact or a slower speed impact like someone was trying to intentionally land the airplane on the water. the wreckage itself is not really going to give us a lot of usable information as to the basis or the cause of the event. what's going to give us a lot of background, of course, will be the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder. especially now the flight data recorder since we may have lost the initial parts of the -- the flight because the cockpit voice recorder is limited to only two hours of recording time. >> i want to ask you a question. a little bit about radar. the systems that we're using to track these flights are really, like, 70-year-old systems. there has been talk, including in the united states after the air france disaster, there was a lot of talk about switching to a gps form of tracking planes rather than relying on radar. can you talk about whether or not the technology in place, just to track planes, period, is part of what's impeding being able to find this one? >> you bring up a good point. there is currently systems that are out there that are in

implementation process. it's called adsb. automated dependent surveillance broadcast. it is gps based. it does update every second. it's good for basically ground to ground. we can always track the movement of the airplane. it is intended to replace radar under this nextgen program. it's just slow in implementation. had this airplane had that system on it, as long as it wasn't disabled, because it does use parts of the transponder for sending information out, as long as the system wasn't disabled, then we would have definitely had better tracking of this information -- or this aircraft rather than using ground based radar that once you go out of its line of sight or view, we lose the airplane. >> yeah. once it's not actually having any sort of signal contact with the ground. just let's talk about the size of this search area now. we're talking about 14,000 and potentially 117,000 square

miles. if this debris field turns out not to be the plane, is this still the best lead in terms of the geographic area, is this still the best lead for where searchers should be looking? >> i think it is because, really, it helps us start at the very limits of how far this airplane could go. we can actually work backwards while there are still assets in the north that are working south. and we can converge at some point. at least we will have swept the area. because of the constant sea state, because of the large waves, and of course the continuous high winds, that wreckage is going to be distributed over thousands of miles by now. we're almost 13 days into this process. that wreckage will have moved. and so maybe if we work our way backwards at the farthest point of how far the airplane could have gone, we may be able to at least box things in and try and focus this search area. so, yes, that, i think, right now the current search area by the australians and the united

states, that's a great place to continue looking. >> all right. former ntsb investigator, thanks very much. >> you're welcome. up next, we separate fact from fiction about the missing plane. lots of theories out there. but which ones are actually viable? later we'll have a live report from australia on where the search is now. then we'll take you live to valencia college in orlando, florida, where president obama is getting ready to make a speech about women, the economy and education. before leaving washington today, president obama announced a new round of sanctions against russia in response to its annexation of crimea. >> we're imposing sanctions on more senior officials of the russian government. in addition, we are today sanctioning a number of other individuals with substantial resources and influence who provide material support to the russian leadership. as well as a bank that provides material support to these individuals. >> president obama, who visits

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at 10:00 this morning, the prime minister received a call from the prime minister of australia informing him that two possible objects related to the search for mh-370 has been identified in the southern indian ocean. >> in a few hours light will appear on australian's western coast. and the search for debris spotted some 1,500 miles offshore will resume. that's bringing hope we may be

nearing an answer to the mystery of where flight 370 is. still, if this evidence is, indeed, as credible as malaysian and australian officials say, it may require a recalibration of the theories surrounding what happened just after takeoff. tom casey is a flight instructor and former commercial pilot. evie pomporos. tom, i want to start with you. i want to play you something malaysian officials said today about the search for the black box. take a listen. >> the next step is to actually find the black box. and with the air france crash, it took two years. so now we are preparing for a possible operation, a multinational operation, to recover that black box. >> tom, why is it so important to find that black box? >> the black box has all of the data necessary to understand, number one, what -- what mechanical aspects were taking place to lead the plane to come off its flight plane and divert.

was it an act of -- did the flight crew activate it on computer? did they hit the heading select and turn it to a random heading and fly off into oblivion. secondly, the voice recorder records all of the voice contacts in the cockpit. it's a very -- it records everything. every little sound. you'd know if there was an intervention. if there was an intervention, we have a whole new mystery as to why. if it wasn't an intervention, then the pilots went rogue. why did they do that. >> let's say we get to the point, god forbid, where we don't find the black box or we find it outside the 30 -- i believe 30 day window in which it doesn't lose power. in which it's useful. if we do find just the debris, how would investigators proceed at that point? >> okay. well, they still can recover the black box even if its signal does go off after the 30 days they have done that in the past. that's still plausible. but as far as investigating

goes, it's back to doing the forensic analysis of the pilot simulator. hopefully they grabbed his printers, computers, anything with a hard drive. you obviously want to do a thorough interviewing of the family members and whatnot. again the passengers. i know they came back and said we did a cursory check of everybody. what that means to me as a former investigator, they took the names, ran them through some data bases, everybody cleared. that's fine. then you got to go another level deeper. start interviewing the family members of the victims and friends and start working in reverse and doing a true assessment of each individual on that plane. >> right. just in case the pilots acted but under duress from potentially a hijacker who would have been onboard. i want to go through the actual working theories that we have. there are a few of them. there's hijacking. there's mechanical error. there's some sort of act of god. high l pilot suicide. terrorism. i want to ask each of you, based on what we know now, obviously not a tremendous amount, which of those theories seems the most plausible at this point. >> we have the possible, the probable and the crazy. i think -- i think we've pretty

much ruled out any problem with the airplane, per se. think we're in a human factors issue here. and the human factor goes to the analysis of passengers and crew. background check on them. but also what reference to reality would have anyone fly an airplane for seven hours to their doom. are we going to have a cocktail en route? what is it? it's certain doom. you run out of fuel over the south indian ocean, one of the roughest bodies of water on earth, it's not a happy landing. >> as a pilot is there ever any circumstance where you might change the course of the flight. >> sure. >> and not say anything to ground control? >> not really. you fly within pretty narrow parameters when you're flying an airliner. especially across the north american track routes. you certainly divert for weather. but you're always in communication with somebody. you're either requesting permission to divert or you're announcing that you have diverted. one of the things that brings this -- that in my view as a

pilot takes away the idea of the plane had problems was that we didn't get a mayday. we got no voice communication of distress from the cockpit crew. and we had a beautiful plane. we assume it continued to fly because we have picked up skin paints on the radar. it makes no sense. >> yeah. evy, back to you. if we take mechanical error off the table as tom just did and we're left with hijacking, act of god, pilot suicide, terrorism, which seems the most plausible to you at this point. >> again, i wouldn't take mechanical error right off the bat. my perspective as far as when i've worked investigations. the problem is we don't have facts. i feel that you should take things off the table when you have facts. a lot of this is we're surmising a lot of things. it's very difficult to make an assessment. i think although it's probably low on the scale, we should still kind of keep it there. as far as, you know, what happened on the plane, we do know somebody put in these new coordinates and the plane continued to go. but if it were a suicide mission

per se, i don't see the logic in flying all those hours then letting it go. >> right. >> it seems to me that for whatever reason the plane somewhat went on autopilot and it just went for that time. and it sounds like it held a certain altitude and it kept a certain consistent speed. so, to me, it almost -- it seems as if everyone was somewhat incapacitated for some reason and the plane continued to fly. i can't imagine passengers in this day and age being on a flight for seven hours or how many hours and just riding it out without trying to break the door down, trying to do something. i mean, it just seems highly unlikely that people today would just sit back and be, well, sheep. i think we've changeded. we're more aggressive. i think of the pennsylvania flight from 9/11. what those people did on that plane. the acts of heroism. if, it is, in fact some type of hijacking or terrorism. >> no one even trying -- even though they'd probably not be able to mechanically operate it. let's go back and see if there's

some sort of incapacitation. what in theory can cause people, especially pilots, to be incapacitated? >> hypoxy. the scenario you're talking about of pilot incapacitation, it's not that it couldn't happen. it might have happened. but what we know happened was that the plane went off its course. so that's something we know. now would the passengers be aware of that? not necessarily. they're just sitting there in the dark probably most of them asleep. it's a red eye to beijing. they may not know what their fate was. that might have been part of the plan. >> that's probably the scariest of all. the constant not knowing is nagging at the families and all of us. >> it's scary. >> thank you. up next, a special we the

tweetple on how you are using social media. the republican controlled wisconsin state assembly is expected to give final legislative approval today to a bill limiting early voting in the swing state. voting would no longer be allowed after 7:00 p.m. or on weekends. opponents say it would make it more difficult for minorities in wisconsin's largest cities of milwaukee and madison to vote. translation. it would make voting harder in areas that lean democratic. supporters say it's not fair that large cities can offer extended hours while voters who live in more rural areas without the resources, translation, areas that tend to vote republican, don't get that opportunity. we'll certainly stay on this story and bring you more as it develops. meanwhile, a follow-up to a story we brought you exclusively yesterday. florida's controversial stand your ground law back in the spotlight as the florida legislature considers some revisions. one is the so-called warning shot bill which makes it legal to avoid retreat and instead fire a warning shot if threatened. it's inspired in part by the case of marissa alexander, the jacksonville mother who faces 60 years in prison for firing what

she said was a warning shot at her estranged husband after he allegedly attacked her. her conviction and 20 year sentence were overturned by an appeals court. she's now under house arrest awaiting a new trial. also today, the national advocacy group color of change is urging florida's governor to remove prosecutor angela corey from office over what the group calls cory's targeting of marissa alexander to score political points. the group has reportedly collected about 50,000 signatures on a petition for governor rick scott. members say they'll deliver the petitions to the state house when they reach 100,000 signatures. the governor's office responded to our request for comment, saying, quote, angela corey, as well as all state attorneys in florida, are answerable to the voters in their districts. we also reached out to attorney corey for comment and got this response. state attorney angela corey's 32 year record of seeking justice for all victims, regardless of genter or race, speaks for itself. ms. corey will continue to

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missing malaysian airline flight 370 is a mystery. one many of you are following on air, online and in the papers. we're taking a look at how people are using social media to grapple with unanswered questions and search for answers. this satellite image of the water surrounding australia shows the object authorities say might be linked to the missing passenger plane. it was tweeted in the wee hours of the morning today, sparking a viral reaction. the image was retweeted over 2,000 times. some of you use twitter to voice your dismay over to continuing lack of answers. even with new possible evidence this case remains baffling. one person asked, the question remains, how the heck did mh-370 end up all the way down south and why? even if foul play it defies

explanation. others took their theories into the stratosphere. could mh-370 have flown up and out of the earth? is that even a possibility. folks online were quick to let mark know the answer is no. questions like that one have streamed side by side on social media with sometimes dark conspiracy theories. people need explanation for the pain seen in images like this one. this much shared photo of the mother of one of the passengers onboard the missing flight has become the iconic face of the tragedy. and you are offering your sympathy. after 13 days waiting and praying, today i accept any possibilities. even though it's going to be the worst day for the world, one person offered. no matter what they say, tweeted another, please continue to pray for mh-370. especially since nothing is confirmed yet. as we continue to wait and wonder what happened to the missing plane, our online connections are keeping us grounded with supportive messages like this one. lights will guide you home. we will be waiting for you,

mh-370. you can offer your prayers and support by joining the mh370 hashtag on twitter. keep telling us what's important to you. next, more on what's being done to help families who are still waiting to find out what happened to their loved ones who were onboard that missing malaysian airlines plane. and we'll take you live to orlando where we're awaiting president obama.

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and higher mortgage rates. it's a problem waiting to happen. check your credit score, check your credit report at experian.com. live pictures now from orlando, florida, where president obama is expected to speak at any minute. he's at valencia college to talk about how women can improve their economic potential. the president is making the case that women need more access to higher education to bring them on level with their male counterparts in the workplace. now back to the malaysia air mystery. where the mother and girlfriend of one of the three american passengers on flight 370 are reacting to news that a

potential debris field has been spotted in the indian ocean. >> we just finally settled into a normal routine of waiting, unhappy waiting, but at least, you know, we were going back to normal sleeping cycles and getting in. and i've continued to teach at work. now this just throws it all -- you know, all up in the air again. >> i want to know. one way or the other, i want to know. because this -- you can only imagine how it feels, the not knowing. so i empathize with the people that are so hurting, you know, the other families. >> phillip wood, an ibm employee from texas, had recently visited his mother and two sons in keller, texas. he'd been in kuala lumpur looking for an apartment for himself and his girlfriend. wood's brother told msnbc today,

quote, there's trepidation, there is nervousness. that's a big piece of wreckage they would be finding. and if it turns out to be the fuselage, there are all kinds of things that are going through your mind. and you don't want to entertain thoughts for too long. we just want to be sure that what we are dealing with is really the airplane, and if not, it's just another roller coaster, up and down, and we just can't handle it. for the wood family and loved ones of the other passengers on the missing plane, the long wait for news has been made worse by what they say is a lack of communication and credible information from malaysian government officials and airline officials. yesterday their frustrations erupted into a tense confrontation when some family members stormed a news briefing room. three women, all relatives of passengers, stage ad a protest. they were also quickly shut down by security. another grief stricken mother was dragged from the room as she begged for help and answers about what happened to her missing son.

>> nbc's keir simmons was there when family members met with malaysian officials for nearly two hours today. >> reporter: hey, joy. we're hearing now from families after a two hour meeting tonight with officials. they say that they do not plan, the ones we've spoken to, say they do not plan to go to australia. that they were given the same message as is being given to people publicly here. it's not clear yet what this debris is, whether it is connected to flight 370. until it is, making any move to australia for the relatives would not be the right thing to do. many of the relatives after that two-hour meeting expressing frustration, saying they really have been given just the same old information. nothing new. no more detail than anyone else has been given. perhaps kind of stunningly, they were asked to fill in a form to say what their contact details were. whether or not they wanted to be

contacted if there were urgent information to hand out. you really do wonder why it has taken until now for the authorities to offer that service to the relatives and why they aren't being told in person individually. so real difficult times for these relatives, as you can understand. they have waited for days. now they are left waiting again. and watching the news and listening to anything in order to find out what exactly this debris is off the coast of australia. joy? >> nbc's keir simmons, thank you. huffington post writer, the reverend earl johnson, joins me now as the spiritual care manager for the american red cross. he deployed teams to console victims and family members of victims of tornadoes, mass shootings, or deadly airplane crashes. what's the first thing, i want to start by asking you, reverend, what is the first thing that you would do or say to those families who are at that briefing and are so frustrated right now in malaysia? >> well, first of all, it -- it might not be actual words.

you have to stop the circus that's occurring 12 days after the first news of this crash. the primary disaster needs, and we know this because we've responded to twa-800, egypt air, numerous aviation incidents, and we have some kind of sense of what these families may be going through for these unique, unprecedented events. they need accurate information. and they need reassurance. they need their physical, emotional and spiritual needs taken care of. but now the government and everyone is playing catchup because we really are in the search and rescue or search and recovery phase of this operation until we know for sure. those families need their dignity. they need their privacy. they need to be protected from well wishers who may be trying to help them. the media. lawyers, et cetera.

they need to be in a safe place. so a family assistance center needs to be set up where they'd have their privacy. where the government is able to set up regularly scheduled briefings. they need to re-establish trust. >> reverend johnson, talk about how different it is to counsel families when you have loved ones who are missing versus loved ones who are known to be deceased. >> well, i'm a former health care and hospice chaplain. that transfers into disaster. in a hospice setting, we know about anticipated grief. you know that there's a time when -- when the patient's demise. and you can prepare folks for that. oftentimes, their faith is their primary coping mechanism. but unanticipated grief, when planes fall out of the sky, when there's a shooter, when you're not prepared for this, the families are really vulnerable. and you can't really expect them

to operate on 100%. they're reacting normally to a really abnormal event. so you have this different set of grief dynamics. and then you have ambiguous grief. which was synonymous with what we found a little bit after 9/11. because there may not be families found if this scenario of the plane actually going down is verified. and we know that to be true. the cultural and ethnic practices and -- and recovery and the rich chtuals of returni receiving the bodies if there actually will be bodies to be recovered, you know, there's a lot of preparation that needs to be done. because ambiguous grief is another dynamic altogether. >> just very quickly, if you could talk thabt. you mentioned cultural practices

and religious differences. we're talking about 239 people. many different religions probably. how are the government officials coordinating, dealing with the families, do they need to make sure there's spiritual guidance on an individual basis based on all the different cultures and all the different religious beliefs? >> well, i'm a board certified chaplain. i have had 1,600 hours of clinical training. i respect all faith traditions as well as those who don't claim a faith tradition. we know how to be with people. we know how to support them. we also know how to work in referrals. but it's a team approach. we're not doing this by ourself. and between the malaysian government and their allies and folks -- nations that are cooperating on this as well as so many partners in the faith and mental health communities, they don't have to do it all by themselves. but they need folks that have disaster training, that are grief professionals, that know about rituals, to support people. because you have to anticipate.

because there may be a time in the future when you will have more information. and then that's really a team approach of professionals, disaster trained professionals, that can step in. and really protect these people and give them the dignity. it should not be the circus like that iconic picture of the grieving mother. that should not be the visual that we have. because we all put ourselves in the place of that mother. and we feel her pain. and we all are exposed to that trauma. and we really want, you know, this never to happen to us. so, you know, there are people out here who knows how to be with those people. but not just any counselor. not just any priest or imam or rabbi. you really need folks that understand disaster and the unique emotional, spiritual and

physical needs of those that have just experienced catastrophic disasters. >> absolutely. the reverend earl johnson, thank you. excruciating is the right word for it. thank thanks. >> thank you, joy. all right. next we'll take you live to australia where military search planes are scouring the south pacific for signs of the missing jet. but first, republican congressman and former vice presidential nominee paul ryan is getting heat from constituents over comments he made on poverty last week. during a radio interview, ryan blamed poverty on the, quote, culture of the inner city. at a town hall yesterday the congressman got an ear full from this man. >> the next day you said that statement was inarticulate. well, i don't believe that. you said what you meant. fine. the bottom line is this. this statement was not true. i'm going to point it out to you why it wasn't true. >> there is nothing whatsoever about race in my comments at all. it had nothing to do with race. sometimes when you're on radio

you try to take a bunch of ideas and collapse it into a couple sentences and you oversimplify. you can be misinterpreted. that's what's happened here. >> congressman ryan is holding three more town hams today including one right now in kenosha, wisconsin. so far no confrontations with constituents. [ dennis ] it's always the same dilemma -- who gets the allstate safe driving bonus check. rock beats scissors! [ chuckles ] wife beats rock. and with two checks a year, everyone wins. [ female announcer ] switch today and get two safe driving bonus checks a year for driving safely. only from allstate. call 866-906-8500 now. [ dennis ] zach really loves his new camera. problem is...this isn't zach. it's a friend of a friend who was at zach's party and stole his camera. but zach's got it covered... with allstate renters insurance. [ female announcer ] protect your valuables for as low as $4 a month when you add renters insurance to your allstate auto policy. call 866-906-8500 now. what are you doing? we're switching car insurance. why? because these guys are the cheapest. why? good question. because a cut-rate price could mean cut-rate protection.

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the night, even as more ships and high-tech aircraft rush to the scene to resume the search at first daylight. nbc's sarah james joins me live from melbourne, australia. sarah, what's the latest you're hearing on the search? >> the latest is that in just a couple of hours, the planes are going to head out from this air base, the royal australian air force base, pearce, just north of perth. they're going to head out 1,500 miles offshore southwest of perth looking for any sign of the debris that was spotted by the satellite. and what's really important to understand here is just how vast the indian ocean is. so how hard it's going to be to find anything. particularly when the weather conditions are so treacherous. and we're talking about high seas and rain and cloud cover. it is not easy. and the area is absolutely vast. it takes about four hours flying time offshore just to get to the location. then they have enough fuel to

search for two hours. and then they have to fly back. nevertheless, as difficult as it is, they are very much committed to doing this. and they have some pretty sophisticated planes with which to do this. not only the o ryans, but a poseidon. those are the kinds of equipment they're going to use in the area to try to find this debris. it's also important to note that they have some degree of confidence or at least interest in this. it was quite striking how the announcement came out. you know, there are these regular briefings that are held by the regular safety authority that does these kinds of searches. and that wasn't how we learned. we learned from the prime minister in parliament speaking out about this. and that says to me that they really do think they might have something. and that's why they're giving it a full court press, trying to

find any sign of that debris. again, it gets under way right away. >> all right. nbc's sara james. great information. thank you. the object spotted a few days ago could have drifted hundreds of miles. and the search area is over a massive stretch of ocean. kathleen doh a,n is a research scientist whose specialty includes turbulence and ocean currents. she joins me from seattle. all right. let's get right into this question of the drift, kathleen. how does the oceanic drift and the weather factor into this search? >> it all depends on where you are in the ocean. looking at where the satellite images are suggesting the debris might be is quite close to an area that's -- that's part of this large circum polar current in the ocean. the currents there can get fairly strong relatively speaking and could push any debris up to around 50 miles a day. but it's really hard to define that because the current -- the

currents are turbulent. there's eddies that interact. it could go north or south. east or west. it really -- it really depends on what path it takes and what eddy it gets into. if it gets pushed into another eddy it would go in a completely different direction. so it could be several hundred miles of a search area. and on top of that, you have these winds. so we've been talking about how it's all stormy there. and there's these westerly winds there, are quite strong. right now i was just looking at the data from today. the winds are around 35 miles per hour. so depending on how much of the debris is sticking up out of the ocean, that could get pushed by the winds. so i think in general, there'll be a drift -- the drift should go in general to the east. but it's really -- it's -- there is a big question mark as to just how far east or north or south it could go. >> and how do you decide based on the fact, first of all, that these images are four days old.

we're also talking about something -- we're looking at images from essentially four days ago and trying to find this field. if you generally think east, how confident can researchers be that that's the direction to go? and is there a chance it could have drifted in a completely different direction? >> there's definitely a chance it could have drifted in a different direction. so before -- well, before making any final guesses, it would be good for me to go back to my office and do a statistical analysis where i put in par particles and just see where they go. then you can get some better numbers that 90% of the particles are going to go east. the occasional one could drift far off north or south. you get a better feel for it. looking at the currents right now, there's these eddies. depends on where you are in the eddy. you could get pushed quite a bit north or south rather than east or west. then that would push you out of these currents. although i think the winds are probably going to play a larger role than the currents

necessarily. and the winds are a nice steady always mostly east strong. so i would have right now a large confidence that it would drift east. how much is a different story. >> okay. kathleen doh a,n, obviously there's also what's under the ocean which is a whole other subject of what's going on underneath if some of that debris actually has gone down. thank you very much. we really appreciate the information. >> you're welcome. all right. next, reading between the lines as the families of the missing passengers hold out hope their loved ones could be found. ok, here's the way the system works. let's say you pay your guy around 2 percent to manage your money. that's not much, you think except it's 2 percent every year. does that make a difference? search "cost of financial advisors" ouch! over time it really adds up. then go to e*trade and find out how much our advice costs. spoiler alert. it's low. really? yes, really. e*trade offers investment advice and guidance from dedicated professional financial consultants. it's guidance on your terms not ours that's how our system works. e*trade. less for us, more for you.

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live in orlando, president obama is expected to speak shortly on women and workplace equality. you can watch the whole speech streaming live on msnbc.com. meanwhile, the disappearance of malaysia airlines flight 370 and the fate of the 239 souls on board have captivated the world. and it's not hard to understand why. ever since aviator amelia

earhart vanished along with her navigator, fred noonan, after taking off from papua new guinea two days before fourth of july 1937, the latent unease that accompanies air travel turned her disappearance into the national obsession. the search lasted two weeks, which turned into decades of conspiracy theories, false sightings and even hollywood movies. culminating in a 2012 search by an historic aircraft recovery group on an island off the new guinea coast which included discoveries of human bone fragments and freckle cream. no plane. the star tiger jet carrying 31 passengers from portugal to bermuda in 1939 and another jet from the same airline, the star air yal, after takeoff from bermuda a year later helped put the bermuda triangle on the

global map of eerie, unsolved mystery. more eerie than a crash, the notion that a jetliner can just vanish triggers our ultimate fear and our enduring fascination with air travel and its small but ever present risks. on a human level we like the flight 370 families hold out just that last kernel of hope for a miracle that somehow the plane landed on some remote pacific island and the lost people are just that. lost. not gone. when a loved one dies, you bury them. when they disappear, you see them everywhere. across a crowded room for an instant. in every crowd, around every corner. they're neither living nor dead. it's very, very hard to move on. that's the agony the families of flight 370 are facing now. their hope is stoked by the presence of past miracles. sully sullenberger's miraculous water landing of us airways flight 1549 on the hudson river in 2009. even the return of missing children thought long dead like elizabeth smart on the three women plucked from a cleveland

basement after being snatched a decade earlier make it hard to argue that those families should just give up hope. even when our rational minds tell us there's little hope to be had. the world loves a mystery. but as we continue to cover flight 370, we should all keep in mind that at the end of this fascinating story are 239 families for whom this is a very real and very personal agony. that wraps things up for "the reid report." i'll see you back here tomorrow at 2:00 p.m. eastern. be sure to visit us online at "thereidreport.msnbc.com. coming up next, "the cycle." >> all our thoughts are with the families right now. we're spending the entire hour on new developments on this missing plane. we've got it offered from all angles, pilots, fbi folks, a psychologist to talk about what these families are going through. it's going to be a special edition of "the cycle" next. >> indeed. very important. "the cycle" comes up next. [ male announcer ] this is kevin.

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breaking coverage all this hour of a mystery none of us has ever encountered. on day 13 since malaysia airlines flight 370 vanished millions are hanging on to what investigators are calling their biggest lead yet. a short time from now the air search resumes about 1,500 miles off the australian coast where these satellite images suggest debris in the waters of the indian ocean, one piece measuring 79 feet, another about 16 feet. the u.s. and new zealand have now joined australia in the air search. poor visibility is making those efforts even harder. the nearest ship to the st., the st. petersburg, has gotten to the area. it is encountering the roughest seas in the world. australian investigators are well aware of the challenges they face. >> poor visibility has been reported. and this will hamper both air and satellite efforts. i must emphasize that these objects may be very difficult to locate. and they may not be related to

the search. >> that could very well be true. but today's breaking news is a glimmer of hope for the families of the 239 people onboard who have been on an emotional roller coaster for nearly two weeks now. that includes the families of three americans. one of the missing is 50-year-old phillip wood from north texas. seen here with his two sons. now, today phillip's mother reacted to the new developments with optimism and a healthy dose of skepticism. after all, she has been down this road before. >> until we get it from an official. so we're hopeful. we remain hopeful. of course, you know, this is another new twist. i want to know. one way or the other, i want to know. >> we begin now with nbc's sara james on the ground in melbourne, australia, where it is the wee hours of the morning. sara, the air search is set to resume very shortly, right? >> reporter: that's exaly