lieutenant colonel michael kay, a retired military pilot with the british air force and anthony roman, ceo of roman and associates, karlene petitt, author of "fight for control" and "flight for safety," and jeffrey thomas, editor in chief of airlineratings.com. good to see all of you. welcome to the week, it's monday now. bluefin-21 has already scanned two-thirds of the search zone. if it continues to find nothing, what is plan "b"? >> well, it's a very good question, don, and a question that everybody here in perth, western australia, is asking. look, they may well extend to one of the other pinger locations. they may move it and do another 10k radius around one of the other spots, but they are also looking at a wider strategy of other vehicles that they can bring to bear and perhaps a wider search with slightly less definition than the bluefin-21 gives, more of a broad brush stroke, if you like. they are all the parties of this investigation, this search, are now looking at those options, and we do understand that there are a number of 747 freighters on standby in the united states

. >>> joining me on the phone, anthony roman, president of roman and associates. licensed commercial pilot and former corporal pilot. let's hear from you, sir, especially when the clock is ticking here and we know that the battery life of these black boxes should be ending any moment now. how significant is that when it comes to continuing and picking up the transmission from these pingers again? >> this is very exciting news. the best news we've had in the last 30 days since the aircraft has gone missing. now these pingers can last as long as 45 days, and often do last far more than 30 days. so we're hopeful since they've narrowed the search area to now to several mile area that they will be able to reacquire this signal. narrow it down with the side scan sonar and perhaps pick up some underwater wreckage. >> anthony, let's talk about this hypothetical. in the event the actual batteries of these transmissions of black boxes die, they're pretty confident about this search area here. will they be able to go ahead and continue on as far as other autonomous vehicles

greg fife, safety investigator, former pilot anthony roman is here.mya is an oceanographer who studied ocean acoustics, currently a professor with columbia university. mya, just looking at this on the map and starting to read about it, it seems to me this is the most remote area of the world. it's like 1,500 miles from perth, australia. we're talking about something that's three miles deep into the ocean. what is the ocean like on the surface there and when you start getting that deep into the ocean, what is it like? >> well, it is a very remote area there, but you have to remember two-thirds of the surface of our planet are covered with ocean, so there's a lot of remote ocean out there. the good news with this search is it's moved slightly further north. the area they were originally searching in the 40s is much worse seas so that e greatly hampers search efforts. so this area of the seas are a little better, although the winter is coming. in terms of the sea floor in that area, it's relatively flat and also relatively old so that's, again, good news

let's bring in rob mccollum and david soucie, why planes crash, and anthony roman, founder and ceo of you. potentially in the right haystack in finding the needle. how big is the haystack? >> well, as you heard, at the moment, it's around 560 square miles. but that could reduce quite quickly if we get another ping or two. every time we establish another contact with the pinger, that helps to reduce the area right down. and the smaller, the better. once we start deploying the bluefin, then you know it's a slow process indeed. >> david, how confident are you that these are pings from the plane? i mean, battery life seems to have held out somewhat miraculously given what you told us about the technology. fairly confident we're on the right track here? >> i'm very confident we're on the right track, simply put, there are other items out in the ocean that use this frequency, the commercial fishing equipment, that sort of thing. but it's important to point out none of them, that i'm aware of, that anybody i've talked to has told ming occur at one-second interval. that's very distinctive and