>> jim clancey live in kuala lumpur, thank you. as jim said, it seems almost impossible for a large jet to vanish regardless of the circumstances but now that it has happened, there is talk in the u.s. about improving trafficking mechanisms for commercial aircraft. cnn's athee that jones looked into that. >> reporter: the future of tracking flights could already be here. this is boeing corporation's 787 command center near seattle where technicians track air born 787s in realtime, mapping their location and monitoring maintenance and technical issues throughout the center as they happen. if a plane has a tire pressure problem flying over the atlantic, they'll know. >> in fact, it's a little more extensive than that because there are several of us that get the messages to our blackberries and so wherever we are, whether we're in the room or off on a picnic somewhere, we'll find out about it immediately. >> reporter: but command center this is sophisticated don't exist for 777s and other smaller and older aircraft. and tracking every

let's bring in jim clancey. jim?: well, last hour, you know, i told you that they had basically backed up what cnn's source told us about this that indeed the plane was headed toward the indian ocean and it was far north of the destination heading away from malaysia. well, they halfway came out and confirmed that, but they say because these are not active transponder readings, they are only radar readings, they want the faa and ntsb to come in and help them analyze the data. it appears it was last seen 200 miles northwest and heading towards the indian ocean. back to you, brooke. >> thank you so much. let's talk about this further with the host of "quest means business." i know you've been up around the clock trying to make sense of this. let's start with the conflicting information about whether the plane turns, whether it didn't. >> we've got two new developments this morning. the first is this quite dramatic increase in the size of the search area. >> how big? >> well, it's 27,000 nautical miles, which roughly equ

we heard that from jim clancey. right now they simply dent know the answer. martin savage shows us what the acars does and how it works. >> reporter: with this particular airline mystery, a lot of people are learning a lot about technology that up until now most of us knew nothing about. case in point, the acars system. let me kind of try and walk and talk you through it. first of all, i can bring it up on this screen down here, watch, i'll push a bus on the. this is a simple menu and it works very much kind of like your own home computer. there's a built-in mouse, i should be able to pull up the little cursor, you can see right here. and then by clicking on those various menus it's possible to send a text message down to somebody on the ground or for flight operations on the ground to message me. that's one way acars can work. here's another way the system can work over here. this is really the brains of the whole aircraft here. the computer. and it's been programs before we took off with everything of our flight information, everything you need to know abou

jim clancey, tell me what you know. >> you know, i know that malaysian airlines officials say we must find this plane. all of the malaysians repeat that. they know that this mystery cannot be unravelled unless they locate just where this jet -- liner is now. take a look. this morning, search and rescue teams are expanding their scope looking beyond malaysian airlines flight path. as the search enters its fourth day -- >> these are the areas we're going to search. >> -- officials are including the strait of malacca. radar data leading some to believe the flight may have reversed course to return to malaysia in its final moments. also saying pilots from hong kong spotted large, solid debris in the waters off vietnam. >> we have not received any confirmation or verification of the debris that they're from the aircraft or not. >> u.s. intelligence sources telling cnn they are less inclined to think that the disappearance had a terror link. the sources say the two men who boarded the flight with foreign passports were more likely trying to gain illegal entry into europe. families of missin