Ctow Fish News Today

This tow fish that were deploying off the "fort worth," they basically can do the job of a, the a tpo. >> you think theyll be able to detect the ping from the so-called black boxes -- >> the tow fish is capable of detecting the ping from the black boxes, absolutely. its also a side-scan sonar. so it does two things. it can map the ocean floor to help us locate wreckage and find it. >> but so far, no pings detected? >> nothing. >> as far as you know? >> no. >> lets say there is a ping thats detec...

Purchased a bluefin-21. so you know quite a bit about this. what are the advantages and disadvantages of this technology? >>. >> well, one of the primary advantages is the system is not connected to the ship. if you are in really rough weather, the auv is close to the bottom, its unaffected by the ships motion, riding over the big waves. with a towed system, theres a direct connection to the tow fish. as the ship travels over big waves the motion would be transmitted back to the tow fish. in thi...

Capability. the bluefin is a capable system but it just has a lot to cover. and there are not many systems out there that can do this job. >> so tim, your company purchased a bluefin-21, so you know quite a bit about this. what are the advantages and disadvantages of this technology? >> well, one of the primary advantages is the system is not connected to the ship. so if youre in really rough weather, the auv is close to the bottom. it is unaffected by the ships motion riding over the big waves....

Layperson it sounds like a man made noise. do you share the optimism? >> i do not share the optimism. >> all right. explain why. >> well, there is a bunch of problems. one is that the sheer unlikelihood that they would find something on the first try. normally the way you would do it is you find the floating debris and you track it backwards to find the point of entry and then you search on the bottom of the ocean. here we just -- we were running out of time. we thought, well, the pinger is abou...

These four pings. the first one was longer. the second one was shorter and the last two were pretty short. theyre far from each other. theyre too far from each other. the tow fish only has a range of two and a half miles. these things are more like 12 miles apart. at least half of them by logic have to be false positives. i sense richards disagreement with me here. but thing is a number of reasons why there is holes on this. i would love to hear his reasons for that, rather than just the confi...

From what we can tell, it was not an in-flight breakup which is where you find scattered debris for many many miles. i mention before the ability for this aircraft to ditch without being totally broking in to thousand of small pieces is less likely in my mind. i think we will find substantial pieces of the aircraft that could be used for our investigation purposes. >> it is interesting we didnt talk about that but that is a possibility that the flight data recorders if there is something in t in...

The 33.3 megahertz frequency, thats a big problem. it may be explainable do to some of these factors that bill nye was talking about. it may not be. we have the fact that we had over false positives in recent days. and i want to bring us something that someone mentioned to me in an e-mail, but i havent heard mention on air. theres a simple math problem that if the ship is pulling the tow fish along at 3 knots and the tow fish can detect the signal within two miles, basically, you wouldnt expect ...

He just mentioned, we dont know about the dispersement of the pingers among various aircraft. thats the one on 370, effectively. looks small, but it is mighty. >> it is mighty. goes for a long time. obviously, better batteres would make it last longer or could actually be sending out other than just a ping, some type of other signal, as well. even at 12,000 feet, where we think this plane may be at the bottom of the ocean here. thats still a very deep depth to try to send anything out from there...

The navy commander that we spoke with last night said they do have a ship thats heading to scene that will be carrying the towed pinger locater, the tpl, which will be able to reach or can reach maximum depths of 20,000 feet. the hope would be that the seas are calm and they can deploy this ctow-fish as some call it, into the ocean, and drag it behind the ship, trying to pick up acould you say it particulars. hopefully this particular tow can go to 20,000 feet. this is a very deep ocean. ideally...

The mower hooked on to a cable. these vehicles being launched, recovered, download data, recharge the vehicles, and send them back out. that team worked tirelessly on that expedition. i cant say enough about the team and about the technology. it was suburb. >> its cool what a wide swath of the floor it can map at once. david, the malaysian defense minister tweeted a short time ago. he said we really need pinger locater hydrophones. not many countries have them. what are pinger locater hydrophone...