the range on the pingers is about two miles. so finding that -- >> even if it's not within a range of 5 miles, it's still a very difficult chore. >> exactly. i wouldn't put a lot of hope in finding that black box. with fair france they had luck two years later. it was found at the top of a trench and that was helpful to them. >> did you get a clear understanding today, tom, from the malaysia government or airlines why, if there's anything beyond the inmarsat reconstructed data, why they decided to end this whole situation as far as the families are concerned and tell all those people their loved ones are dead? >> no, i still don't understand. they had to have assumed that there's going to be an outcry, particularly from the families in china who are waiting for their loved ones. so why not -- i agree with peter, why wouldn't you have included international working group in the first place? the chinese have a robust space program. they have some of the top engineers, scientists, software technicians in the world. why wouldn't you

i have to agree finding the pingers with the pinger locater would be -- you've got better chances of winning tonight's lottery. >> is this an experience revealing we're not as advanced in technology as many of us thought we were? >> i think a lot of us watch too many science fiction, carried away blending hollywood fiction with reality. the reality is an awful lot of sea surface out there. thousands of meters, many thousands of feet deep. when you're searching in those locations, it's harder than it sounds. we would like to rely on technology to solve this for us. unfortunately it's not as easy as it looks. >> thanks so much. crews looking for flight 370 are about to get high-tech help. find out what device is on board that ship that could prove critical in the search. that is next. ♪ [ male announcer ] this man has an accomplished research and analytical group at his disposal. ♪ but even more impressive is how he puts it to work for his clients. ♪ morning. morning. thanks for meeting so early. oh, it's not a big deal at all. come on in. [ male announcer ] it's how edward jones makes

so they got rid of these pingers, they put all new pingers in the refrigerator while he was there. now he tells me after that, that that process is not being followed. he's seen countless times those pingers back in those rooms. >> the concern could be that a pinger would be put on board one of these planes without the full life. >> exactly. >> and there's no way to test the battery life of these devices before putting them on the aircraft? >> no, at the c-check, which is every thousand hours, they do check them to see if it pings. which it would. but there's no way to test like put a load on it, like you would test your car battery. so i'm concerned that if these others were at half life, if one of those bad ones were put into this aircraft at the last check, it's possible it could be done by now. >> so the idea is it wouldn't even last the 30 days. david, the pingers weren't going off in air france flight 447, so how complex a task is without pingers to locate these things? is it just searching a grid? >> as long as you have a place to start, running back and forth plowing the fi

it's the pinger locator, has a pinger locator on it. >> yep. >> there is concern time may have run out for that or it's either quickly rung out. how is this ship going to help you in this search? >> okay, well, look, that's a very good question, don. the university of western australia in fact tracks the currents in the indian ocean all the time. they have all that data stored on computer. so as soon as they identify a piece of debris from this airplane, say it's some time today, they get the coordinates of that, they can go through their computer modeling and track it right back to its original spot the bit of debris was on march 8th. and they'll send the ocean shield right to those coordinates, and it can launch its pinger. and if necessary, the autonomous underwater vehicle as well. so we have got excellent data on the currents, the eddies in the area. it's just a matter of confirming one piece of debris, and then we can go straight to the wreckage. >> all right. stand by, everyone. we're here for the next hour and a half. we're on until midnight eastern time here in the united stat

this is the pinger.of course, on the side of the ping per, you have the battery that will provide the source to keep going for 30 days. now, wolf, i would say that until we have some form of confirmation one way or the other, at worst this is a worrying possibility that those pingers may already have stopped transmitting if those batteries were improperly stored. >> and they would only have 12 or 13 or 14 days left if they were properly stored. what you're saying here and we have one of these flight data recorders here with the battery here, the pinger here, if it's not emitting any noise, any sound, any indication at all right now, even if they find the debris, it may not make much difference. is that what you're saying? >> yes. they found the black boxes on 447 two years after the pingers stopped, so it's not an open and shut scenario, but certainly, look, if these batteries were improperly stored by malaysian airlines and if it's proven that that degrades the operational performance, then frankly, the

even when you know roughly where the target is, it can be very tricky to ind infind the pinger.>> reporter: that's why "ocean shield" is headed to the area with a towed pinger on board. it can probe the ocean's depths down to 20,000 feet. >> here's the black box and you can see a pinger or beacon, as you call it, attached to the black box. when this gets wet, it triggers a signal in here. >> reporter: the pinger locator can detect the black box signal from as far as two nautical miles away but it has limitations. >> weather is a big factor. if the boat is doing this on the ocean waves, now you're attached to this thing and so this thing goes up and down and it's much less stable in the water. >> reporter: obstructions like hills and mountains on the ocean floor can also impede the pinger locator. the maker of the actual pinger offers hope that maybe the signal can expend beyond the 30-day battery life. >> we think that we can get an additional three to five days of life before the battery starts to diminish to the point where the output signal will be below te minimums required.

>> i think the hope is rapidly fading the pinger will be affected. after all you've got to, as one of the naval people said, you've got to find the impact point. debris is the starting point, the endpoint. the key part is to find impact. it's only there where you'll have any chance at all of finding crucial information. >> captain darby, help us understand how this technology would work. you were describing to me you're talking about technology that can detect this pinger if it's 20,000 feet away. however, you've got to be right on top of it. it's not the idea ofette has to be in the vicinity and direct it and hopefully somewhere along the way you can detect the pinger. have you to know where the impact is, black box is. you've got to be on top of it. >> the sound, we're trying to listen basically. we're under water. obviously it can be suppressed by layers of different temperatures of water. certainly suppressed by the depth. we don't know where it is, now deep it is. about 20,000 feet would be the limit at full capacity. some of the waters are that

and it can be with the pinger locator. the distance of being about a mile to pick up the ping from the black boxes. you've got, again, be very lucky to get it. >> let's talk about the search, how long this could possibly go on. no one knows for sure. but certainly the australian prime minister tony abbott addressed that at a press conference not long ago. let's listen. >> i'm certainly not putting a time limit on it. i think as i said, we owe to it the families. we owe it to everyone who travels by air. we owe to it the governments of the countries who had citizens on that aircraft. we owe it to the wider world, which has been transfixed by this mystery for three weeks now. we owe it to everyone to do whatever we reasonably can. and we can keep searching for quite some time to come. and we will keep searching for quite some time to come. and as i said, the intensity of our search and the magnitude of our operations is increasing, not decreasing. >> what the families have wanted, obviously, besides getting their family memb

we supported with a towed pinger locator search. the pingers were nonfunctional on that aircraft due to the damage it received when it hit the water. it then took over two years conducting side-scan sonar searches with autonomous vehicles to locate the debris. so it can be a very long search effort. >> very long search effort. you know two years to find air france flight 447 and had better information than we do now. so what is the best strategy to find this malaysian airliner and to give answers to the families of the missing? here with me again is colleen keller and geoffrey thomas, les abend. and michael kay are both here. colleen, you were first. you were instrumental in finding air france flight, and you did. tell me what you would do here at this particular juncture. >> well, what we should be doing, don, what we're doing now is trying to keep track of all the different areas where the aircraft could potentially have gone down. we still have possibilities that it could be farther north, it could have crashed farther south. you

also, the sonar pingers. we'll show you what they sound like and have a then administration of how they work. we'll be right back. hey there, i just got my bill, and i see that it includes my fico® credit score. yup, you get it free each month to help you avoid surprises with your credit. good. i hate surprises. surprise! at discover, we treat you like you'd treat you. get the it card and see your fico® credit score. did you run into traffic? no, just had to stop by the house to grab a few things. you stopped by the house? uh-huh. yea. alright, whenever you get your stuff, run upstairs, get cleaned up for dinner. you leave the house in good shape? yea. yea, of course. ♪ [ sportscaster talking on tv ] last-second field go-- yea, sure ya did. [ male announcer ] introducing at&t digital life. personalized home security and automation. get professionally monitored security for just $29.99 a month. with limited availability in select markets. ♪ the way we see it, after a heavy snowfall, you have two options... you

you are reporting on the towed pinger locater. not the only high tech device that they are using even on that ship, right? >> reporter: that's right. the vessel, the ocean shield is equipped with another piece of equipment. if a piece of wreckage is found they will deploy the locater. an auv looks like a torpedo. it will scan the ocean floor and take still pictures, transmit them to ships on the surface. that is looking for debris and looking for the black box once the pinger locater locates the audio for the box. we have high tech and expensive equipment. >> they are just looking in the right place. thank you. >>> another major mistake by malaysian officials. has the government botched this investigation. >>> general motors recalls millions more vehicles. new details showing government ignored warnings. what's your function? ♪uthen ♪ hooking up the country helping business run ♪ ♪ build! we're investing big to keep our country in the lead. ♪ load! we keep moving to deliver what you need. and that means growth, lots of cargo going

that sound is the sound of a sonar pinger.'re looking at the distinctive shape the pinging makes on sonar screens, a spike that stands out from other ocean noises. we've been talk about the black boxes and pingers and how they're activated almost from day one. tonight we have a demonstration with cnn safety analyst david soucie and david gallo co-leader of the search for air france flight 447. and david soucie, how does this work? explain what you have here. >> a duquesne tester. inside we have -- that's the pinger. $750 unit. doesn't look very dramatic, does it? >> that would be in the so-called black box? >> yes. both in the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder. there's two of them in here. every sea check on the aircraft, which is every 1,000 hours, this is removed and rebolted back in and replaced. the pinger includes the battery and signal transducer. inside of it if you look at this end, i don't know if you can get close enough to see that, but there's a plastic lip or plastic ring that separates the case

we have the towed pinger locater.nd we have both the autonomous underwater vehicle on the ship which also has the towed pinger locater. and the autonomous underwater vehicle is a side scan sonar that we would use. once the pinger battery wears out, then we would use the auv to search with the side scan sonar for the debris field. but, again, we need a much smaller area to start searching with. and then there's also a towed side scan sonar that would be towed behind the ship just like the towed pinger locater is towed behind the ship. and that also has a side scan sonar on it that would be used. >> all right. bobbie, thank you very much. miles as well. mary, thank you. we'll see you in a bit. >>> coming up, how the united states is helping into the investigation of missing flight 370. >>> first, more than a week after a massive landslide, washington's governor says he's still holding out hope for a miracle. make sure you stay with us. so our business can be on at&t's network for $175 a month? yup. all 5 of you for $175

navy towed pinger locator.looking for wreckage. >> reporter: it won't do any good unless the field can be narrowed. u.s. navy commander, mark matthews, is leading the team that will deploy the locator that needs to come within a mile. >> i can search approximately 50 square miles a day. if we are searching for a beacon and we are living on borrowed time, i need something that's less than 1,000 square miles. >> reporter: right now, we are dealing with 100,000 square miles. >> yes. >> reporter: very low probability of detection if that is our search area. >> reporter: that's a sobering thought for the families of those missing. as we board "ocean shield" those working to deploy her are mindful every minute counts. the pinger signal will last little more than a week and any wreckage has been dragged by wind and currents for weeks now. you know, carol, we can tell you that the "ocean shield" is now deployed. it will take two or three days to get to the search zone. everyone aboard that ship including three key aust

another piece of equipment elled a pinger locator has been sent from the u.s. to try to find the plane's black boxes. it can't be used till april 5, three days before the black boxes' batteries run out. >> reporter: holly, thanks. chip reid has been looking into the pinger locator holly mentioned and other high-tech gear the u.s. has sent to the search. >> reporter: curt newport is urying to find flight 370. what is this exactly? >> a small tow vehicle and htsigned to detect the acoustic beacons attached to the flight data recorders from commercial airliners. >> reporter: to detect the pinger. >> the pinger attached to the >>ack box. >> reporter: how do you find that on the bottom of the ocean? mershe way it works is, when this is immersed in fresh or saltwater, it puts out a sound at a very specific frequency at one pulse a second. >> reporter: but a pinger only emits a signal 30 to 40 days, so they are sending an autonomous underwater vehicle, an auv, is sent to search for debris underwater. paul nelson is a project manager at phoenix. days, er the pinger loc

the swath of the pinger locater detector is not that wide. we're not talking miles, we're talking literally hundreds of feet. so, you've got to tow it all the way across. remember she said earlier we have to get it down by 100, 100 miles finding debris and might have had the impact of a scatter point. we're talking about a technical operation. ten miles of cables and has to go ten miles past to make the turn to come back to do another swath on it. very technical operation and very time consuming. >> it's not as if they have narrowed this search area down any more than they had five days ago, ten days ago. they're guessing now it would have been a guess a week ago. >> i wouldn't say guess, it's more about hypothesis and taking information about where the aircraft most probably have ended its flight. so, i think that the data is correct. i think they're in the right area, just a large, large area. we had, as was said earlier, there's no information. no one really has anything. we're going with what the best there is. that's all they have to go

pinger on board might mott get to that new search area until thursday.at's the case, then there are maybe two, three days of battery life for that pinger that would be on that flight data recorder. it doesn't seem conceivable that they would just happen to be in the right place because, again, it's the collection of debris watching the difficult pat northwestern which to know where the impact point is, and you can't do that in a matter of hours. >> no. it's a now search area, that type of search is very slow, 4 to 5 knots, not going the move fast, not going to cover much area. the area is huge. we would be fantastically look lucky to put that thing in the water where it could hear the pinger. >> what's your outlook on this week's potential developments, talking about the kind of air and sea outfits being provided that might arrive at that location, i guess the more optimal search location right now this week? >> you know, the assets are everything we have and we're put everything out there, but the area is so large and the information so huge, we haven't

so it's going to be very, very difficult to find those pingers. and we don't have too many days left before they will stop transmitting. >> do you believe the reports today, from a very reputable organization in the u.k, the satellite images showing debris that could possibly be associated with this missing plane? >> oh, i do. i believe that there is debris that possibly could come from that airplane. but again until we have parts and pieces of that in our hands, we simply aren't going to know that what they have been seeing has come from the missing aircraft. >> so tell me how the p-3 aircraft can be really helpful in this effort. >> well, the p-3 has quite a bit of time on station. the crews are trained to do searches both above and below the surface. so these are probably the best experts in the world who are flying throws aircraft. >> is it true that it -- those aircraft. >> sit true that it can fly as low as 200 feet to the ocean surface? >> yes, we used to do that frequently. we could fly by ships and almost recognize people on the bridge. >

among that audit was the handling of the pinger, of the little battery in the pinger.and pingers need to be stored either in refrigerated area or room temperature area. as you know, malaysia is not a cool country in the summertime, especially the humidity and the heat. we're talking a storage area they were stored in over 100 degrees, well over 100 degrees, plus high humidity. that tells us he wrote that up as a finding, said we need to change this, so those batteries that were in there were retired because what happens at that temperature is they go to about half-life. those were all retired and subsequently they said we will keep these batteries in refrigerated storage, which he said they did. now he tells me that practice is not always practiced. there's a lot of complacency around it. the batteries are constantly being stored in the wrong place. occasionally they're put in the refrigerator, occasionally they're not. again, if it's in that hot temperature and one of these batteries which get changed every thousand hours was placed into this aircraft, i'm very concer

so they got rid of these pingers, they put all new pingers in the refrigerator while he was there. now he tells me after that, that that process is not being followed. he's seen countless times those pingers back in those rooms. >> the concern could be that a pinger would be put on board one of these planes without the full life. >> exactly. >> and there's no way to test the battery life of these devices before putting them on the aircraft? >> no, at the c-check, which is every thousand hours, they do check them to see if it pings. which it would. but there's no way to test like put a load on it, like you would test your car battery. so i'm concerned that if these others were at half life, if one of those bad ones were put into this aircraft at the last check, it's possible it could be done by now. >> so the idea is it wouldn't even last the 30 days. david, the pingers weren't going off in air france flight 447, so how complex a task is without pingers to locate these things? is it just searching a grid? >> as long as you have a place to start, running back and forth plowing the fi

its sole mission is to listen for the pinger. analogy of how it works. >> think of your cell phone ringer. if you lose your cell phone, you can call it and you hear the phone ringing so you narrowed down your search. >> the pinger locator does not tell you which direction to look in but it does give you signals that vary in intensity telling you if you are hotter or colder to the black box. >> here is a question that i think makes a whole lot of sense. why not just deploy a whole bunch of these into the area and let them do their thing. >> we've asked the manufacturer's that question. they say, for one, there are only a few of these in the world, maybe four or five. the u.s. navy has only two of them. one is being lent to the australians for that ship. they say these are very expensive to deploy. you have to have some kind of confirmed sighting to get into area and use it that way. >> there was a great deal of excitement as we saw that vessel leave port with these amazing devices on board. this is really a hail mary. when they do

. >> a toad pinger and its mission, to find the black box before the pingers stop. >> all of it in the size of denver, colorado. are we any closer to finding flight 370. you're live in the cnn "newsroom." . >>> good morning. i'm carol costello. thank you so much for joining me this morning. breaking news and a significant headline in the search for flight 370. a very large possible debris field has been spotted. with clear weather today, more planes and ships are joining the search. here's what we know. this latest lead comes from french satellite images taken on sunday. 122 objects spotted. some are three feet in length. some almost 75 feet, about the same size as the wing of a boeing 777. now, they're scattered across an area the size of denver, colorado. almost 1600 miles off the coast of australia. it is a new glimmer of hope on this 19th day of the search but the urgency only grows as the batteries on those flight recorders slowly die. just over ten days from now the pings designed to help search crews locate them will start fading away. for more on where this new debris field was

we do know that it will be much harder to find the black boxes without the pingers.t took two years to find the recorders from air france flight 447 after it crashed off the coast of brazil in 2009. search teams told pinger locators near the debris field just days after the crash and heard nothing, suggesting the pingers had stopped working or the signal was somehow blocked by rugged underwater terrain or other obstacles. >> even plant life, seaweed, plant life, coral, any of those things can detract from the signal and even temperature changes in the water, if you have a thermal layer, it can hide that pinging. it can hide any kind of detection that you might have. >> reporter: oceanographer david gallo helped find the recorders in the air france crash with the help of sonar, high-resolution cameras and deep-sea drones. >> we took 85,000 still images of the wreck site, handed those over to a company phoenix international and they took it from there and found the black box boxes. >> reporter: if the boxes are found investigators can still retrieve the vital informati

navy tweeted this sound of a pinger. once an approximate location of the wreckage is found, the device will be lowered into the sea to listen to pings from the flight recorder. it sounds something like this. the device will not reach the area until april 5th, three days before the battery in the device will likely go dead. the malaysian transportation secretary praised the international teams aiding in this investigation. >> with such strong cooperation from our international partners, the challenge is no longer diplomatic. it is now primarily technical and logistical. >> joining me now is pentagon press secretary. thank you for taking the time. >> thanks, jim. glad to be here. >> appreciate it. >> a lot of frustration over the last 18, 19 days. are we, the team, is the coalition any stronger to finding the plane than it was a few days ago? >> no, not really. the weather has made it even harder to do. i don't think we're any closer than we were. >> it's a sobering thought. i know the u.s. has thrown the most advanced air

and the pingers and pingers and finally now we know what we are referring to. and that audio is exactly what the pingers aboard flight 370 would look like if it was detected by underwater technology and normally you can't hear it with the human ear, but the manufacturer helped us to convert it to an audible pi pinger. they are, as you know, associated with the flight recorders, and those flight recorders are so critical, because it will help the investigator to know what happened or what went wrong, and the pingers are attached to the black boxes and likely emitting the sound that is heard, but here is the problem, the battery life on them, probably 50% drained by this point, and when that battery dies around april 6th, the job of finding the so-called data recorders or the black boxes will get extremely hard. what they use is something called the hydrophone to locate them. they simply drop this equipment down into the water, and so that they can detect that sound that we we just heard within a two-mile radius, and just on friday, the malaysian a authorities sa

pinger locator has been put on the ship. it has big ocean shield on the side. >> they have a few minutes, a few days left to listen for that pinger and everything they can do, they're going to try to do. so getting that pinger, that acoustic hydrophone and listening. even if they're in the wrong area, at least they're trying. >> and there is the shift that we're looking at. let's talk about this. as we await, we want to tell everyone, we're awaiting a news conference from the australian prime minister. tony abbott expected to speak there. as we talk about the pingers, there are some who feel that maybe the time has passed. if not, then it is rapidly deteriorating to find the pingers. >> yeah. i think we mentioned the cockpit voice recorder in the sully flight, the one that handed in the hudson river, which was of course exposed to water and of course was recovered with no problem, never pinged. so they don't always ping. there's a lot of reason to believe the air france 447 devices never pinged because they sent the hydro fo

we also have this pinger locater. it is listening for the pinger. you have literally got to be on top of this black box. you have to be on top of it to hear the pinger. it is going to be distorted by the different thermal layers in the ocean. they have cold layers and different layers in the ocean. this is a huge challenge and they make the point, if we are talking about the size of denver you can't run a pinger locater over the entire metropolitan depths of denver. talk about a needle in the hay stack they don't have the hay stack yet. and then the same thing with the submersibles. they need to isolate the area they need to focus on and then bring in the submersibles and the pinger locater. >> let's get back to the pilot. the fbi director has been analyzing that simulator that we have been talking about for the last 2 1/2 weeks. what will we learn from the simulator and the deletions from it? >> the fbi is assisting malaysians on the forensic analysis on the computer hard drives. some files were deleted. that may have been normal house keeping. the

you can hear those pingers up to 20,000 feet down.his is very deep water in the southern indian ocean and apparently there are a couple of very deep crevasses there as well. so they want to get some vessels out there and start listening once they track back the debris, if it is in fact the plane debris. >> we are still talking about three hours or so off the coast, right? so the process is, take the pictures, then bring them back to australia. meaning they can't do this sort of analysis on the planes themselves. >> it wouldn't surprise me if the australians are already getting some of their vessels headed that way. i mean, they seem very interested in this. as they said, it may not be related. but as we heard in david wright's report, they're getting some pings back as the p-8 is getting close. so it wouldn't surprise -- there are some surface vessels in the area, australians have a navy, it wouldn't be surprising at all if they're moving something toward these coordinates. >> tentatively what you're saying, this is likely the result

>> even if the pinger is working, it's an incredibly difficult job.difficult. in the portion of the ocean, the only way you can find anything is with a device. you can't see anything. you're looking for electronic window trying to look at little portions at a time. that's the only way to do this. and you because of that, it's a much slower process. we talked earlier about 50 square miles a day towing something and you're trying to cover 100,000 square miles in one search area, jake. that means that simply searching that area, something that scans a mile to one side and a mile to another would hopefully cover everything, it's going to take a tremendous, tremendous amount of time, jake, well over a year to get to just one area. it's a big, big job when you get to phase two. >> and that's why finding debris is so important. tom foreman, thank you so much. follow me on twitter @jaketapper. i turn you over to wolf blitzer. he is in "the situation room." mr. blitzer? >> all right, jake, thank you. happening now, the mystery of flight 370. a new twist in the

i have concerns this pinger may not go as long as it was supposed to to.st not confident we're looking that the. >> how do we further refine the search? it was a big announcement, we moved closer to perth and more north in this refined search area. that was a better analysis of the existing data that was had, when more minds kind of came together in this big analysis group. how do we first refine the search area. is it. >> getting tweets from lead professors at columbia, at harvard, everywhere else in the world that are specialists saying let me provide my opinion to you the more information at nount, since you're lacking confidence in the data, let's get some more opinions, some more options. >> mary, do you have acheit on th that. >> it's hard for me to tell because i'm not on the australian sear australian ship. and also there are a couple of u.s. ships. if they think they've got it, they'll call in the "grapple" and the "grasp." we'll know if they think they've got it because that will be called in. >> hopefully they'll get that call soon. chris? >> no

those pingers would be required to have a range of six to 10 nautical miles.that's much further than the current two nautical miles and the minimum battery life would be extended to 90 days instead of 30. these rules would only apply to newly manufactured planes. rene marsh, cnn, washington. >>> pro-russian forces are tightening their grip on crimea. up next here, how ukraine is responding to the ongoing russian takeover. you're comfortable here, it's where you email, shop, even bank. but are you too comfortable? these days crime can happen in a few keystrokes. american express can help protect you with intelligent security that learns your spending patterns, and can alert you to an unusual charge instantly. so you can be a member of a more secure world. this is what membership is. this is what membership does. >>> updating you on the air and sea search now for malaysia airlines flight 370. the first five search planes is now returning to base after scanning remote waters of the southern indian ocean. it's been looking for any sign of the boeing 777 missing no

the pingers were nonfunctional. searches from autonomous vehicles to locate the debris. it can be a long effort. >> this could be long. that black box pinger could run out of battery for the next week. it could take three days to reach the search zone. much of the conversation is focussed on what needs to change in the airline industry and the way airline beings are invest gated. willi william mcghee is a contributor for attention all passengers and how to reclaim our chis. sir, welcome. >> thanks very much. i appreciate it. >> read the list you wrote up. the eight lessons you heard from the case and number one, you said focusing primarily on terrorism can ob cure other threats. it is actually pilot error half of the time. that's the cause of airline accidents. >> yes, it is. the biggest concern is pilot error. the piece that i wrote for yahoo news outlined eight operate lessons that we continued to learn. unfortunately in some cases over and over again. the next of kin, the family members of the passengers. we saw

we do know that it will be much harder to find the black box without the pinger. two years to find it from flight 447 after it crashed off the coast of brazil in 2009. search teams towed pingers near the debris field days after the crash and heard nothing, suggesting that pingers had stopped working or the signal was somehow blocked by rugged underwater terrain or other obstacles. >> even plant life, seaweed, coral, any of those things can detract from the signal and even temperature changes in the water. if you have a thermal layer, it can hide that ping and it can hide any kind of detection that you might have. >> reporter: oceanographer david gallo helped find it with the help of sonar, high-resolution cameras and deep-sea drones. >> we took 85,000 still images of the wreck site and handed that over to phoenix international and they found the black boxes. >> reporter: if the boxes are found, investigators can still retrieve the vital information inside. >> the battery running out will not preclude the authorities from being able to extract that data. it is embe

we're talking about the commercial aircraft pinger.et's talk about how they're hoping to find this. you're going to see a boat go by and it's going to look for the pinger at the right frequency, kind of acts like a microphone, searching at that exact frequency, going by just at several knots. notice that locator only goes up to about 20,000 feet. this is key because we need to talk about what that terrain is like underneath the water there, and not all of that terrain is at that 20,000-feet level. you're talking about some of these depths being about three to four miles or deeper. so, that's one of the concerns. the bulk of the terrain, of course, can be covered by 20,000 feet, but there will be some regions they still can't even locate with that method. now let's talk about what's going on in the air itself. you can actually see a system has been kind of pushing through the region. still looking over the next several days for another system to be out there. the key is, this is not a major system, but just enough that at times the weat

or hoping to hear the pinger. this is the pinger right here. it gives off a constant, literally, a ping, it can be picked up by sonar. the challenge, however, it is not easy to hear unless you're right on top of it and specialically in the indian ocean or any ocean, for that matter, if this is lying underneath the wreckage of a plane or this is buried in the mud and you're talking two to three miles down, it's very difficult, if not impossible, for a sonar or hydrophone to pick up that pinger. we've talked about the fact there's only about another two weeks or so, maybe a little more, of battery life left in the pinger. the ocean conditions down here, and these are very, very difficult waters. we've talked to several experts who say it's like a constant moving and taking and moving back and forth with the water. it's very difficult to get a good sense of where things might have tracked. here's another statistic that kind of shocked me when i heard it, every year, at least a dozen or so cargo ships sink in the worl

certainly if the submarine can get within two miles of those pingers and do it quickly, these pingers have a 45 to 60-day life. so the clock is running here. >> fascinating the technology being brought to bear in all this. mark gordon, thanks for joining us. >> my pleasure. >>> turning to the crisis overseas in crimea. russian troops are en masse along the border. yet another sign russian president vladimir putin is not taking u.s. sanctions seriously. david gregory is moderator of "meet the press" and joins us this morning. >> good morning, erica. >> what more can the white house do? >> the economic sanctions become a big piece to ratchet up pressure on putin to change his calculation. they have to look beyond crimea and even beyond ukraine to get nato engaged and say to vladimir put tin and say this is going to be a larger regional western response where nato would draw oopsz a line and say you're not going to potentially move into those baltic countries that are nato allies. the difficulty is ukraine is not part of nato, the united states doesn't want to provide military aid which

or a cold storage pinger on flight 370. >> yeah., remember after he did this audit they came back and revised the procedures. so the procedure would be to say i put this particular serial number in refrigerator, i took it out and put it on this serial number aircraft. but as he said they are loosely following the actual place that they put them. i'm confident they're doing the rest of the procedure right because they have what we call the rii, the required double inspection. so at that point they're going to make sure it was done right. however, where it was stored at that time, i'm not sure that's very well documented considering what he said. >> that's very distressing to say the least. you find a problem, you think you fix the problem, especially when human lives are at stake. david soucie, thank you for making that call and letting us know that might be the new obstacle we're up against. >>> the search for the missing plane has revealed a lot of shortcomings. david just pointed out one, but how about this, the technology that we

that's only for new pingers. or mandating that those pinger that is are in existence now have to be upgraded. >> rick, we talked about the pingers, the length of time they run and the fact they need to be extended another 30 days. you feel in some cases, the technology we are using in general isn't what it needs to be. >> i pointed out the utilizization of surveillance that's pitched in the united states and the faa. there's a committee looking at it. they tend to spend a long time in committees and immediatings. i'd like to point out the transponder being shut off may or may not be factual. i have seen no previous track data of a radar to read transponders in that part of the ocean. that's not unusual. in addition, cards being turned off may be normal. it's a fee for service. that company is located in maryland, recently purchased. you spend, for every message, you uplink. having it turned off is not unusual. it would be nice to know if it was continuely used by malaysian airlines in this particular route. i see

they are quite capable and we need to start the big pinger hunt. a couple dozen aircraft are fine but we probably need a few more resources and the u.s. navy has large quantities. i mentioned 150. the japanese have 100. the australian have about 12. so we may have to go with the old-tech. it's still pretty good when you're looking for the pingers. >> how many do you think we would need out there? >> i'd call up the reserve unit and dispatching at least 50. i've done a back of the envelope calculation. if we could get 50 from our resources, maybe 25 from the japanese and another 25 from around the world, brazilians and so on, the indians have a few, we could put together a grid search. we've only got two weeks. if we don't find these things in the next two weeks, unlike air france where we knew exactly where it is, or south france 747, same thing, we knew roughly where it was. we still have a vast area to cover and i do think we needs lots of equipment out there, even if it is low-tech. when it comes to looking at pingers, those p-3s are still prett

the pingers were long past gone. but i went back and looked at some of the maps, anderson. they towed the pinger locater right over the top of the wreckage the first few days after the tragedy and didn't hear it. >> no kidding. >> it looks that way. i'll try to find the reference so we have it. >> explain how that could happen. >> it's not surprising to me. the oceans play games with sound all the time. a thermal layer, a mountain here and there, a valley, especially in that region it was extremely rugged underwater terrain. so it's easy to bend sound around. if you're not in the right place with the right gear with the right operators it might be easier to miss a signal. >> david soucie, after that air france crash, wasn't there a new mandate for the life of these devices? >> yes. the french civil aviation authority -- and i can't pronounce the name but it's a bar -- what they did they said look this was a horrible situation. they were racing against time trying to find this aircraft. so they recommended that it go to 90 days. everything manufactured be 90 days. what they

but either of the pingers are 30-day pingers. they have 30-day batteries on them. >> okay. phaedra, we know that the pilot and the co-pilot, the pilot logged some 18,000 flying miles. so he was very, very experienced. this co-pilot, 27 years of age. pretty fresh out of flight school. and i'm just curious, as a pilot asking you in an emergency situation, if we don't know what kind of emergency happened onboard this particular plane, would you rather have someone who was a little more veteran, a little more experienced or younger and fresh out of school and fresh with procedure? >> this sounds like a trick question. >> not a trick question. >> i think everybody would go for the more experienced pilot. i think everybody would vote for the more experienced pilot. but actually, all airlines have safety procedure training. each aircraft has its own procedure for a crew, so this procedure isn't built for one pilot. the crew has a hand in it. each emergency activity has its own procedure list. and so pilots and co-pilots, no matter what they're training, they have trained extensive

it's a towed navy pinger. just arrived in perth. it will be outfitted on a ship and taken out to sea. it's kind of a bat wing. it swims. and it will swim down close to the bottom of the ocean. and it's a listening device. it will be listening for the pingers on the black boxes. >> if they're pulling it along, don't they have to know roughly where they're looking? >> yeah. the navy says they don't want to start until they do find some debris and can track it back on the currents to narrow the search area before you start going back and forth with this towed pinger locater. >> and 12 more days on the battery in the black box. >> we're talking about the pinger, which is in the front of this black box. and the battery is guaranteed to last 30 days. that's what they say. then, it will start to fade, kind of like a flashlight, when you turn it on and the batteries are going and the light dims. the beeping will dim a little bit. it will be fainter. >> david kerley, with the status of the search tonight. thank you, david. >>> and president

in the air france crash, there's a 90% chance both the pingers will work. neither pinger worked. the reason the air france mishap investigation went on so long is they didn't hear the pingers. right after they went over the area, it wasn't there, they said, oh, my gosh, we're in the wrong place and so they broadened the search and it got so broad they got twisted up in their own research and didn't go back to the basics and it wasn't until they went back and used this statistical analysis to get back to the basics that they found the air france miles from where they predicted. >> charlie: what questions are you asking bob today? >> one of the things i want to know is whether they're making progress on the police side of the investigation. without the crash wreckage and boxes there is only so much you can do on the airplane accident side of the investigation. the f.b.i. is still looking at the computers taken from the pilots' homes, the flight similar later they took from the captain's home. the inintel agencies have continued to go through the flight manifest and checking names a

>> those pingers, these are under water location pingers that are attached to the black boxes.as you know, has to have a black box. the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorderer. the under water pingers immediately start pinging so the sonar would pick them up if they are in the water. it has been 12 days now. the range on the pingers is really rather limited. depending on the maker and thermal conditions in the water, how cold it is, different layers in the water you can get from two miles to eight to ten miles of range. you really have to be almost on top of it to hear it. if you are in the search zone of 102,000 square miles you can see how this is becoming increasingly challenging for anybody to hear the pinger in a short period of time. >> great work on this story. thank you for your time. >> my pleasure. >>> it's the question the world is asking, where is the plane? today a new potential lead, several residents of ttold the l airport they saw a low flying airplane. the island is southwest of india. nearly 2,000 miles from kuala lumpur. and the timing would match t

navy's towed pinger locater.todd has seen one of these devices. >> very high-tech device, arriving in perth overnight. we visited the manufacturer of phoenix, international holdings today, they showed us how this pinger locater works. it is towed from a ship, very slowly, less than 10 miles per hour. looks leak like a fin, weighs 70 pounds. this can extend to 20,000 feet below the surface. it's towed very slowly, as we said and has to be two-thirds of the ocean depth so that it does not hit obstacles. paul nelson, the project manager for phoenix international, which did he deploys this device, explained it once it picks up a signal. >> this is a towed pinger locater, this gets pulled behind vessel "opportunity" and detects the ping or chirp of this pinger. this is attached to the black boxes on an airplane. there are two of these on the two black boxes. so this unit will get pulled through the ocean, and then it listens to a tiny little chirp at 37.5 kilohertz frequency. >> reporter: now from there, wolf, they ha