. >> and let me bring in the former ntsb investigate for greg fife, and should we be surprised that theyave not detected anymore of the pings? what is going on here? >> i don't think so, chris. it yesterday was hopeful and optimist optimistic, but you have to be real tick. they heard the pings, one for two hours and then went back and heard the second one for 13 minutes. now, either the boxes and the bat tri, itself, is starting to the wane at this pointer or it was a false positive if you will, which we have had in the pa past. so it is really hard to determine at this point. >> and i do wonder, though, and i tend to find myself identifying with the families, we have heard so many times that this is the latest best piece of information, and hopes keep getting raised and dash and then all of us hope that these are indeed the black boxes and leading to finding them, and you do wonder about these constant every few days pronouncements that something good has really happened here. >> and that is always my concern. hayed to deal with that and with value jet and a number of big accidents that

let's now turn to a friend of the show, pilot and former ntsb investigator, greg fife. thanks for coming on "the cycle." >> hello. >> i want to start out of with a "wall street journal" headline that reads poor coordination led to flawed search for missing malaysia airlines flight 370. the search area shifted abruptly on friday after authorities more fully merged two investigative strands. is this why australia has launched this joint effort for the search? and what does this mean for the search effort moving forward, that it's been bungled thus far so many times by those in charge of trying to find this flight? a lot of people put that fault upon those in the malaysian government. >> well, a lot of this came down to this recalculation of the data. as you remember, we had the first search area, then they went back and really got scrutiny with the data that was being forthcoming as far as latitude, longitude and then they re-evaluated that data for a third time and that kind of shifted that search area. whenever you have any kind of international activity like this, espe

greg fife is a former ntsb investigator.t feels like we've been here a number of times over the past month or so. is this another false alarm or are you optimistic this time? >> i'm not optimistic, craig. i work on fact. while we've seen this before with the chinese with the satellite photos and releasing information, we're back to it again, especially after the malaysians really put the australians in charge and said, you're going to handle this search. yet the chinese are releasing this information. there's got to be one unified voice i'm not sure why they felt compelled to release this information before it was verified. >> correct me if i'm wrong here, there are two of these so-called black boxes. you've got the flight data recorder, you've got the voice recorder. are those two -- are they kept together? >> there are combination boxes. typically they're separate. so you'll have two different pingers. one for each box. again, with this pinger, they're only mounted on the outside of the case. they're held on by brackets. i

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