the globe hoping to pull off the impossible and discover missing malaysian flight 370. the first plane to reach the possible debris area returned to australia empty handed. four other planes those the region today, too. so far no news to report. in this case no news, not good news. one of those planes is the u.s. p-8, a commander of the seven fleet which is coordinating these flights called into msnbc's chris jansing and explained why this is being called the human eyeball operation and an exhausting one at that. >> the tremendous length and distance out in this search area. so, you know, a typical flight will be about nine hours and three hours is just to get out there. and then i'll have another another three hours on station time and then three hours back. so quite a long distance out there in the range of 14, 1500 nautical miles. >> as you just heard from the commander, one of the complicating factors is it's at

best a four-hour flight each way, leaving only about two-hours of actual search time. these crews are under the gun to comb an area that habaneroed but is still the size of italy. even the cautiously optimistic australians say it's like finding a need until a haystack. >> it's an extremely remote part of the southern indian ocean, it's about the most inaccessible spot that you could imagine on the face of the earth. if there is anything down there, we will find it. >> that assessment is upbeat compared to what we're getting from the malaysian government which has negated any and every potential development since this unprecedented investigation began two weeks ago tonight. >> we are still awaiting information from the australian search-and-rescue operation as to whether the objects shown in the satellite images released by australia yesterday are indeed related to nh-270. >> we'll have more on the strange dynamic between these

two countries coming up later on but first let's start with the desperate search to find something, anything. remember, it's 16 days and counting until those black boxes stop pinging, then we're talking about a whole other search. we begin our breaking coverage with nbc's bill neely at the hub for search activity in perth, australia. >> reporter: well, another day of frustration here in perth in western us a zwral where there's been a search 1400 miles that you have coastline but, again, it has come up with nothing. five planes went out today from australia, from the united states, and five came back having seen no debris and having seen no signs of anything unusual. the australian flight crews said actually visibility was quite good. they could see for about six miles, unlike yesterday when visibility was very poor, indeed. but they reported strong winds and they weren't actually able to stay at the site as long as they wanted. the crew of the u.s. navy surveillance plane came back again reporting that they had

seen nothing. they fly over the site for about three hours. it's a bit more of a sophisticated plane, they can fly it 5,000 feet then go down to 1,000 feet if they see anything but again they came back with nothing. tonight here, it is nighttime, the search has been suspended but a norwegian cargo vessel is actually out on the seas using search lights to try and spot any debris and today the crew of that ship were on deck using binoculars. so you've got this curious thing of very high-tech plane, satellites of course, 22,000 miles above the earth and very low-tech men on deck with binoculars. but, sadly , all coming up with the same thing, that is nothing. the australian prime minister tony abbot a little bit defensive today saying "this is just about the most inhospitable, inaccessible place on toert conduct a search like this." and he was also linting that this area can be where shipping containers can be be n the ocean

having fallen off ships so it is a difficult area, it is a difficult search. the search will resume tomorrow but sadly today another frustrating day, not found. >> thanks, bill. let's turn to nbc's tom kos sell low. tom, what have search crews found throughout? >> conditions have really varied, right? because yesterday they were rough seas, ten-foot waves or so. they had rain, white caps. today considerably better. but this is a part of the world where they can get waves up to 50 feet high, a hundred feet high, really terrible winds, eddies and spitting rain that makes it very difficult to operate. it is very inhospitable. let's start with some maps of the ocean surface current analysis from the earth and space research institute. this is really some fascinating stuff here. they have used satellite data to analyze surface current winds around the world and the brighter the color -- look here around the equator -- the brighter the color the faster the current speed.

so you've got two vibrant lines of currents here. one near the equator. look at the other one down here south of africa and down here around australia. that one is called the atlantic sir couple polar current. here 's what's fascinating. we have a closeup to show you and we'll move one screen over here. look how vibrant that one is there. you can see the southwest tip of australia is right here and the location of the debris on the satellite would be in this general area more or less right at the edge of this current. it's a very strong current that is moving through here. so there's a lot of potential to move the debris around. so after running some analysis, the folks at oscar, that's the seattle research group, specifically kathleen doe han, told us today that she thinks it's realistic that the location of the debris that we saw in the satellite images on sunday, that that now could be 40 miles east and 20 miles north, go back to the map, of the start point. so it's already moved rather dramatically. so then if you look at what is

the satellite imagery, what can we expect then over the course of the next couple days or so, we've had a slight break in the poor visibility but we have only a two-day window before the storm season picks up again. this is in here a very active season. this is the location that the debris may have been spotted in. again, what we don't know is where -- is this, in fact, wreckage debris or something else? but if it is wreckage debris it is possible it has already traveled, according to her, hundreds of miles or even a thousand miles because of how strong the currents are, the eddies are, everything around that part of the world. and the last point, we've talked about specifically how remote this location is. we are talking about an area that is 1,500 miles southwest of perth, australia, right? right there. that means it would be like flying from new york to oklahoma or new york to denver just to get out there. that takes you four hours. then you only have two hours on

station before you have to fly back. so when they've talked about today encountering tough winds that therefore cut their flying time down, that's why. they've got not a lot of time on station to do the work that they need do. we're expecting more planes in the region to resume the search tomorrow, however, that p-8 plane you may have heard bill neely talked about that, advanced american subhunter, it won't be flying tomorrow because it's down for regularly scheduled maintenance on saturday. the world's most advanced long-range anti-submarine aircraft as you see there. back to you. >> nbc's tom costello, thank you very much. joining us now, two experts who have intimate experience with these times of investigations. former ntsb investigator greg fife, and captain timothy taylor who is currently the president of tiburon subsea services.

gentlemen, thank you for joining us. greg, starting with you. five planes have come and gone from this area and still we have nothing. >> we still have nothing, toure, that's the problem and there was a lot of confidence put in that satellite photo yesterday by the prime minister. he's backed off that today. and, of course, when we send those airplanes out there, we put them in the area that we thought that that -- whatever that debris was was there, they come back empty handed and as tom just said, this wreckage, this debris is moving continuously and that's why time is of essence here because the longer we go on in this process the more disperse that wreckage may become. >> and, tim, when you have an aerial search like this, what happens if you do find something? how do you get down to the surface of the ocean or deeper to check out what it is? >> if you find something floating on the surface, you find something floating on the surface obviously you have to get a boat there. a helicopter might be able to but they're still going to be --

have to be based off a vessel. 1400 miles is way too far to maintain helicopters unless you're refuelling them the air. >> and assuming that they're able to tighten the search area, part of the search will be the bottom of the ocean. we're talking two to three miles deep if they're looking for other objects or potential pieces of evidence. talk to us about underwater robotics. what are they capable of doing? >> exactly. so once they find an object, it progresses to looking for the black box. and the first technology they'll apply is the acoustic hydro phones to listen for it. and i've read -- i heard that they might be applying those now, which doesn't make sense to me. and i think it makes more sense that if they think that section might be the tail cone. if it is the tail of a ship, the acoustic beacon isn't on the bottom, but say they find it, it's a ship. they entrack back to where with w all the wreckage that they have of sea state and they go

underwater and they have to go looking for this and they'll use autonomous underwater vehicles, basically robots that they can send down on their own to look for it. >> like a drone sort of. >> a drone. a drone that's not -- but you can't fly an uuv. because it's underwater, you can't get radio waves so it has to have its own thinking logic or program and it has to make decisions on its own underwater unlike a drone controlled by pilots. >> while we have this that very sophisticated technology to search underneath the ocean, what we're talking about now in looking for this debris we heard that commander describe it as a human eyeball operation. i mean, this is literally just people looking out of an airplane trying to spot something, right? >> that's all you can do. that's the problem is that they have all this sophisticated equipment but if this wreckage starts to disperse it's really going to take human eyeballs to see it and right now they don't see but four, five, six miles. and when you're moving at a

speed of 150 to 200 knots, you know, at altitude, i mean, you're trying to cover a lot of area but it's going to take a trained eye and i'll tell you what, it's fatiguing. i know folks that have done in the the past on accidents that i've worked and it is very fatiguing, you have to stay mentally engaged and when you're just running the lines for as long as they run lines over just open ocean, that unfortunately there's a lot of things that run through one's mind and you're just looking into the abyss, if you will. >> yeah. and that theme has gone throughout, tim, right? this idea that we have tremendous technology but as those of us look at this and learn about the process there is a lot of human error and luck involved. i want to read from "sea technology" magazine which wrote about a survey you did in 2012 and they say that even after a target of interest is located, "the time consuming process of making high frequency short range classification passes with

the side scan sonar that was more luck than skill." explain that. >> even with side scan sonar when you're looking out it's taking pictures of a thousand meters on each side or 500 meters on each side depending on what you have it programmed for, a plane would show up as a shiny object dot which could be geology. it could be a rock. so you have to have a trained eye and look at these objects. then you have to go back again and get a higher frequency lower pass over that object. we'll get a little resolution. then you go back with a camera. then you can salvage if it is what it is and that's -- you know, if it's a plane that's wrecked with pieces scattered all over the place and trash falls to the bottom you could hit something somebody threw overboard years ago. so it's -- there's a lot out there. >> greg, right before the show, anthony roman, one of our guests told me there was a 6.7 earthquake nearby there making the search that much harder. so what's going to happen h

weekend given the already difficult conditions of this search in. >> i think that really now it's a race against the weather because once the weather moves in high winds again, if you remember the last couple days we had nine, ten-foot seas, we had low ceilings, clouds. the airplanes can't fly that low. technically they're usually at about 1,000 to 3,000, some 5,000 feet. you have low clouds like that they don't get a good view. so it's a race against the weather, if you will, and i'm hoping that they can get back on stage and probably they'll move that search a little bit based on flow rate of the ocean down there and see if they can't pick up those targets that were identified in that satellite photo. >> how much longer do you put this level of manpower and woman power to this sort of search. how long until they say "we can't keep going with this many people"? >> you just asked probably the most expensive question that's been posed right now. the malaysians are going to basically commit themselves with the help of their partners --

and right now we've got over 26 different countries participating. they're going try and keep this going until they actually find something. is that realistic? no. but at some point they are going to have to bring all of the parties together, talk about what the chances are of finding anything and at some point they're going to have to scale this back. it doesn't mean they're going to finish it completely but they're going to have to scale it back. they can not keep up this level of intensity for that long because every country is responsible for their own assets that are on station right now. >> greg feith, captain timothy taylor, thank you so much for that. that is the latest on this search. we're going to have more all this hour. up next, the latest on the fbi's probe into a possibly motive. was the flight deck hacked? the investigation, the politics, and why the story is so big coming up as "the cycle" rolls on. it's friday, the 21st of march.

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we are back with breaking coverage of the malaysia air mystery as search planes scour the ocean for possible wreckage. the fbi is right now sifting through files from the captain's home computer and attempting to retrieve deleted data from the flight simulator in his home obtained by the malaysian government. and likely investigating another theory -- cold the flight deck have been hacked? sean henry is the former executive assistant director for the fbi and currently the chief security office for crowd strike. sean, thank you so much for joining us. >> thank you. >> so what of that? is it possible that the rerouting of the plane and the turning off of the transponders was because the flight deck was

hacked? is that possible? >> well, when you talk about "hacked" i think you're referring to some type of remote access into the cockpit. i don't know that that would have been possible in that particular part of the world with the connectivity there that there would have been the ability to do that. although hackers often times access computer networks using some type of a peripheral like a usb device that they might be able to put into a computer system. there are devices and there has been some discussions in the past about the fact that those systems could potentially be vulnerable where the entertainment systems, for example, have been connected to other components within the aircraft. i think that all is highly speculative at this point. i don't know that that's really a -- i know people certainly searching for answers. i don't know that that's something that is reasonable at this point but it's certainly something people will be considering going forward. >> and, sean, as kristal just

mentioned, authorities have found that some of the data that was on the flight simulator that was owned by the captain was deleted on february 3. so now they're looking into see what was actually deleted. what would they be looking for? >> so there really are four competing theories in this issue. one, terrorism. hijacking, pilot actions and some type of mechanical failure. with three of those things, the first three, there are human beings that are involved in this. and until you actually find physical evidence like that wreckage or the actual aircraft you've got to focus on what people may have done, what people -- who they may have talked to, the types of activities they were involved in in advance of the plane going missing. in this particular case, what investigators would be looking for is to see if the pilots had flown certain types of routes that are consistent with where the aircraft is now or certain types of procedures, certain types of actions that a pilot might have taken, they would

have run it on the simulator ostensibly to then do it while they're behind the -- in the cockpit. i think that investigators have loo-to-look at the human beings in this case. again, you either have physical evidence or you're going to have to find somebody who knows something that occurred. that's the only way to get to the bottom of what happened in this disappearance. >> shawn, yesterday we had a guest on the show who's a former fbi, very interesting theory that she laid out for us. roll that a little bit. >> this whole idea of switching off the acars system, it almost seems as if somebody intentionally wanted to cause malaysian airlines these problems or make the government look bad to make this plane pretty much try to disappear or make it as hard as possible. >> what do you think about that idea of somebody trying to embarrass the malaysian government and if you were going to take that theory, where would you look? how would you proceed with that idea? >> again, i think all theories are on the table.

i hadn't heard that previously. again, it comes back to human beings. if there was a human being involved in this, if there's not a mechanical failure and you revert back to one of those other three theories that there's a human being involved than there has to be investigation done. interviews of people that were associated with the passengers. the flight crew. the ground crew. perhaps other vendors that were doing business with that airline. you'd have to go back and interview people to make that determination. and this is going to be a long, compl complexings investigation until they find the actual aircraft. >> and, shawn, when you look at a flight like this with three americans on board and plenty of international security interests, it goes to part of the fbi's set of priorities, which we'll put up on the screen. the fbi has several -- protect the u.s. from terrorist attacks, cyber based attack, espionage, also to combat transnational

criminal enterprise or violent crime and, of course, this incident could be several of those or none of those. walk us through your from your fbi experience how the fbi looks at a question mark event like this and prioritizes its investigation. >> yeah, well, in this particular case the malaysians have primacy in terms of the investigation. the fbi has legal attitaaches t are distributed around the world. they're in about 70 different embassies around the globe. there's an agent who's assigned in the embassy in kuala lumpur and i'm certain is coordinating with the malaysian authorities. in this particular case, the fbi will provide guidance. they may provide expertise as in the situation where they're looking at analyzing using their subject matter experts to do forensic evaluation on that flight simulator, the recording device. so the fbi in this particular case will be providing supporting capabilities. but, again there's two ways to come up with an answer here. someone to evaluate physical

evidence and in this case that resides with the aircraft and the other case is to find a human being that has information or somebody who's stored something somewhere. that's going to require this comprehensive interview and investigation made more complex by the fact that you've got a dozen or more citizens from different countries, or citizens from a dozen or more countries and agencies, law enforcement and intelligence agencies from around the globe who are part of this. it's got to be well coordinated. you've got to follow the facts, take the evidence to where it leads you. speculation is causing a lot of concern for the family members, understandably. but investigators will be looking at all of those aspects, terrorism, hijacking, a violent struggle or pilot action. and they'll have to follow the evidence to come up to that conclusion. >> and, shawn, how does the fbi when they're sort of tricky international politics involved, how does the fbi relate to those international political dynamics? >> that's a great question. so one of the things i was

involved with was the international operations division. the fbi has taken great efforts to build relationships with foreign partners. in these types of investigations and many other investigations that you listed off of that list, it really requires close collaboration, a sense of trust, a sense of mutual shared is responsibility. in a case like this everybody -- all the good people, all the good guys are trying to work together to bring closure to the families and to try to understand what happened to prevent it from happening again potentially if there was a human nexus. everybody's trying to work together in a shared way. and the fbi does that through these partnership and the attaches that are distributed around the world working hand in hand with their law enforcement and intelligence community partners in those nations. >> shawn henry, thank you very much. >> thank you. >> up next, the other fast-moving international story, ukraine's standoff. plus, the played di's overseas spring break trip and president obama heads to europe.

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let's get you caught up on other stories in the news cycle. russia's lower house of parliament today overwhelmingly approved that treaty to take control of crimea. also russian president vladimir putin banned nine american politicians from traveling to the country, including senator john mccain who said "there goes my spring break in siberia." funny stuff. president obama thursday announced additional sanctions against russia, both visa and mastercard saying they will no longer service a russian bank used by senior government officials. first lady michelle obama began her tour of china today with a calligraphy lesson and a game of table tennis. accompanied by the first lady, mrs. obama's mother and the first daughters also made the trip on china's version of twitter there were a number of tweets thanking the first lady for bringing blue skies and sunshine with her. that, of course, is a reference to the noticeable absence of air pollution upon her arrival.

president obama is also back at the white house this afternoon preparing for next week's european trip. now, stops include the netherlands and belgium where he will meet with members of the e.u., arguably the most anticipated stop is italy where the president will meet with pope francis. that happens on thursday and the two are expected to discuss ways to combat poverty and inequality. it will be a big week at the supreme court as well. justices on tuesday hear arguments related to the question of whether businesses should be required to cover birth control for their workers under the affordable care act. two corporations claim that covering birth control violates the religious freedom restoration act and the first amendment. it's also the first full day of spring right now and it doesn't always feel like it al over the country. winter is not done with us just yet. a coastal storm is brewing for early next week and it could bring more snow from the midwest all the way to the northeast and mid-atlantic states. more areas that don't need it. while west remains bone dry. california is facing its third

consecutive year of drought, increasing concerns about the upcoming wildfire season and when it does warm up here on the east coast, all the melting ice and snow is raising real concerns about spring flooding. in fact, nearly half of the country is at a minor to moderate risk. forecasters say a sudden and dramatic warmup could increase the risk level further. >>. blackberry could use a rain maker right about now. [ laughter ] the once-dominant device may be losing its most famous customer. pentagon officials are reportedly testing a number of new smart phones for the commander-in-chief. androids from samsung and lg are said to be on the short list. it remains a government secret why there has been no mention of the iphone. >> i still use a blackberry. >> what's up with the iphone? smart phones have made us more productive but this time of year we heard that march madness makes us less productive. especially at the office, checking those brackets, streaming those games. it turns out your boss may not mind.

nbc's kerry sanders explains. >> many companies embrace the tournament saying march madness helps morale. >> people maybe get a little more work done in april than in march? that's possible. but this is fun. >> reporter: in fact, one study found that only 11% of managers believe march madness has a negative impact on workers. conflicting studies like this are as meaningful as a guy in a business suit who stands 5'5" throwing a buzzer beater from half court. yes! believe what you want to believe. kerry sanders, nbc news, washington. >> [ laughter ] >> yeah, there's the real shot. nowhere near the basket! let me tell you something, one boss who doesn't care how much we pay attention to march madness, our boss, so thank you for that, steve. back to the story that has ka captivated that world, the

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today marks two weeks since flight 370 disappeared without a trace and this means 14 days without answers for loved ones and the 239 passengers and crew members aboard. over the past several days we've seen heartbreaking images of frustrated family members begs for informing. andrea mitchell spoke with the partner of missing american phillip wood about her frustrations with authorities. >> it seems like at least at the beginning of this search effort it was really misdirected, you know? people just started to run in lots of directions instead of stopping and thinking and looking at the data and deciding what the most logical path would be. >> the officials have given you up dates. how timely are these updates? >> there's really not official updates. malaysian airlines has given the occasional piece of document out, but it's usually something

that's several days delayed from what's already been in the press. i'm getting my news from the contacts in the media in beijing. if they're hiding the plane someplace on land, why we not doing any searching on land? and there's got to be intel available to us that maybe is being explored but we just haven't seen any of it. so maybe we don't know about it on purpose. the search for the missing plan remains largely a mystery and that's fed not only worry and fascination around the world but also confusion, conspiracies and rumors. the psychological literature reveals that many reasons why we rush to rumors from comparing different pieces of information which people want to do to simply trying to cope with our own discomfort with the unknown. we want to bring in an expert on the psychology at play here. nicholas stefanzo wrote a book about this "the water cooler effect to rumors."

thanks for joining us. >> my pleasure. >> you talk about the attributes of these rumors. you give four examples, information states that people share, considered of interest to others that are not verified and, perhaps most importantly, that help people deal with ambiguity or threat. talk to us about that and the idea that rumoring is at some level a coping mechanism for us. >> sure. people are interactive, social creatures. we don't like things that are unexplained. we like events that make sense to us. and it's a very natural coping mechanism that we have to try and figure things out and to make sense of things. so we're sense makers. and secondly human beings are naturally social and so we put those things together and we have social sense making and this's essentially what rumor is. we're all in this together and we're trying to collectively

make sense of events that might be problematic, might be threatening or, i think in this case for most of the population of the world, are just simply intriguing. they're tragic, they have this pathos to them. it's difficult not to be interested in this story. >> nick, in these conversations, these water cooler conversations, it seems there's at least always one persons who wants to play the role of "i am more cynical than everyone." why is that such a seductive position for so many people? >> well, i think level of cynicism or skepticism varies quite a bit. i think there's many theories that have arisen out of this whole story and this episode. many of them are somewhat plausible. i think the gentleman you had on before listed four types of theories that sounded relatively plausible to the average person.

but then there are another set of theories that sound relatively implausible and i think that for a certain portion of people -- and it's a good thing that they do -- they like to express their skepticism about it, especially these more implausible sorts of theories. >> nicholas, you talk about how we love playing detective in situations like this, but many of us also can't help putting ourselves in the place of the passengers, thinking about what it might be like to board a plane where moments later something terrible happens or thinking about all the possibilities that could have taken place, whether that's dying instantly or the plane traveling for hours without actually knowing what's going on. why do we put ourselves in people's shoes in situations like this. >> well, it's a very natural human den densy to take the other person's perspective. people by and large have a lot of empathy for one other and i

think we all share this sense of remorse and suspense and anxiety that the families of the people who were in this airline feel. i think also that this story is eminently relatable. it's eminently comprehendible. so as we talk with one another, the idea of a plane going down in a remote part of the earth and it has -- excuse me, not necessarily going down, a plane disappearing in a remote part of the earth is a well-known narrative. it's a well-known story. you know, there used to be the television series "lost" that was very popular. and when i first heard this story, that television series narrative leapt to my mind. >> and, nick, i think the reality is even if we find the plane and we find the black box and we figure out exactly what happened and what took place and

what the series of events were, there's still going to be a lot of people who aren't convinced by that, who still want to believe their own version of what took place. >> well, that's right. just remember the jfk conspiracy theories. there are still many people -- possibly the majority of americans -- who disbelieve the warren report, who disbelieve the formal informational authorities or the formal even media authorities and possess a great deal of distrust in whatever information is given to them and that's not necessarily because there's a mental illness out there, it's just that especially with the outpouring or the growth of the internet it's allowed people to form into these echo chambers or these factions where they get to talk with other people who are very similar to them. and then they rely less upon the official information sources.

when i was a kid we had three news outlets, three tv stations. today there are many more than three and it has become -- it's become a way to plug into a news source that can sort of fit into my frame of reference. >> yeah. and it goes to the fact that when people think something is repeated enough, that feels like verification even though it has nothing to do with fact checking. nicholas difonzo, thank you for your time today. australia versus malaysia, what we'll look at next is whether the accents we're hearing are affecting the credibility we assign to information.

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if we want to be ready for a longer retirement. ♪ . >> it'ses about the most inaccessible spot that you could imagine on the face of the earth. >> australian prime minister tony abbot vowing not to give up the search even after four of his military planes failed to spot the flight wreckage off of the coast. crews are seventh set to go back out the the search zone in just a few hours to look for what they have called "the best lead yet." and while they appear to be publicly hopeful despite the daunting circumstances, malaysian authorities seem not to be very open and honest when talking about the plane and the investigation into its disappearance. it's any wonder then that family

members and the world have grown increasingly frustrated with the malaysian government and are turning to australia for answers. the "washington post" diplomatic correspondent is here to help sort out the international politics at work. great to have you, ann. what they are now calling the biggest lead yet is not even coming from the malaysian government, it's coming from australian -- we've seen malaysia is being very, very cautious about this lead. what role does politics play in all of this? >> it does play a role, abby. for the united states there are long, long, long historical both diplomatic and military ties with australia. and a fairly good but much more recent relationship with the malaysian government. the military would tell you that the malaysians really actually have tried and have gotten out there and tried to provide information and also certainly have fielded a large number of

military and other assets in the search for the plane. but the perception remains that the malaysian government has either been less than forthcoming with information or had bungled the initial days of the search. that's certainly the way the chinese feel about it. a majority of passengers on the plane were chinese and the chinese government has not hidden its displeasure with the malaysians, its frustration and is now sending quite a large number of aircraft and ships to assist the australians in the search. >> ann, one thing that caught my attention is it's not just the families of the victims or the chinese government that are skeptical of the malaysian government, the people of malaysia seem to have a lot of skepticism about what the government is saying right now. the "new york times" is reporting that the most popular theory on malaysian social media was that the plane had been hijacked, the malaysian government knew where it was, they were negotiating the release and that's why they weren't saying anything but they were essentially hiding the facts while they were

negotiating the release. >> yeah, that's a hard one for anyone certainly within the malaysian government to be able to answer, much less outside of it. but there are a million theorie possibilities here. and the longer the search goes on, the more likely it is that people come up with nefarious theories of what might have happened. the malaysians really -- did at the beginning seem to have a hard time getting out in front of the story. we're used -- in the west and in the western media to a much sort of slicker i guess presentation of facts. and certainly when there is a disaster there is sort of a -- an expected set response. which the malaysians didn't really do. and somewhat in their defense don't really fully have at hand. some of it came from the malaysian airline itself. some of it from the government. but the effect was to present a

bit of a muddled and sometimes conflicting picture of what was happening. certainly the chinese took notice of that. and long before this story moved to australia there were a lot of other countries including australia and the united states looking at the malaysians and really wondering what was going on. >> and in your experience, when we have these sort of multi-nation investigations, among countries that are not used to working together is this sort of squabbling and competition natural and normal? >> yeah, i mean, i don't know if it is -- normal or natural. but it definitely -- we've seen it before. after things like a terrorist attack in which there are multi-national victims or other disasters, in which you have people from a lot of different countries. you have a lot of potential leads and a lot of frankly just a lot of victims to sort through. it is complicated. here, i mean -- everyone on that

plane, passenger and crew is both a potential victim. and a potential suspect. so every government involved, it is -- it is then incumbent on them to either investigate the people or to help the malaysians do so. and that is a serious undertaking that involves law enforcement and intelligence and diplomacy. and it is parallel to the whole separate effort, which is partly military and partly civilian. which is to actually search for the plane. >> yeah, and now that australia has come out with the lead we are all very quick to want to listen to them, to see what comes of it. how much of that comes from it being something of hope? >> well, yeah, i mean, the australians said themselves this is the best lead anyone has seen. and they're right there. i mean, it is the first potential evidence that actually you know, comports with what we think we know here, where the

plane probably went and about how long it would have taken to get there. that is more or less where they found these bits of floating debris on satellite imagery. so i mean, that doesn't sound like much. but it is the best that has come so far. and certainly the optics of the way the australians have presented it make it seem as though there is some intelligence behind it. some reason to think that this might actually be for real. the u.s. appears to be treating it that way. >> thank you so much, we appreciate it. and up next, a plane vanishes without traces, launching a multi-nation search and confounding authorities, believe it or not it happened before. ♪ [ girl ] my mom, she makes underwater fans that are powered by the moon. ♪

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the mysterious disappearance of mh-370 has the globe captivated, because it has to be somewhere and we have to find it, right? well, the stories show that planes vanished, never to be seen again. like the cessna that had disappeared. >> two men elected probably will never take their seats, the house democratic leader, and representative nick begich in alaska that disappeared three weeks ago. >> no plane disappeared that has

carried as many passengers as flight 370, but there was one disappearance in 2003, in angola, at the country's largest airport there was a boeing 727 that had been parked for month, racking up $4 million in airport fees, which is four times the amount they paid for it after it was pushed out of circulation. one person, ben charles padilla, who was a certified air frame and power plant mechanic who was called a gifted mechanic and was able to fly small planes. also a father of two. minutes before sunset, padilla and another mechanic got on the boeing 727 that they were working on, tail number 8-44 aa and began to taxi. the highlights were off, the transponder was off. the men in the cockpit were never certified nor believed to

know how to fly such a plane. air traffic controllers tried to speak to them, you can imagine the terror that was in the tower as they watched them under the control of inexperienced amateurs move down the runway and then lift off, flying towards the atlantic ocean. that was the last time that plane was ever seen and the last time padilla was ever heard from. this was after 9/11, and the authorities worried it could be used for terrorists. so the agencies all went searching for it and they found nothing. some guessed that the plane crashed in the atlantic, others wondered if it landed in the jungle and was stripped for parts, others said maybe padilla had other families, no one asked if the plane was sucked into a black hole. in 2005, the fbi closed the case having never found a trace. is that huge plane at the bottom of the atlantic ocean?

was it part of a terrorist attack? did aliens snatch it? did the americans know what happened and just not saying? because the world is too complex to know everything. the human mind demands closure but we have to accept that sometimes unexplainable things happen and we'll never know why. for all we do know, sometimes huge planes disappear and sometimes mysteries are never solved. that does it for the cycle. "now" starts now. we have just entered the third week in the vanishing act of malaysian air flight 370. it is friday, march 21st and this is "now." >> it has now been almost two weeks. >> the most intensive search ever mounted. >> so far nothing. >> this is discouraging. >> it is about the most inaccessible spot on the face of the earth. >> it is hard to