up here. we have all the food and support we need for now. until things open up we won t go trekking down to lower valley to fly out of here. you re a good man to stick around and help people the best you can. absolute tragedy amidst absolute beauty. thank you so much for calling in from mt. everest base camp. i appreciate you at the moment 17 lives as we mention ad second ago, 17 lives have been lost on the everest. across the himalayas, others are still missing. nice to have you on sir, welcome. i hope this has a happy ending for you and your family. my fingers are crossed for your dad. what s the latest you ve heard, any news no we haven t heard anything. he s in a very remote area so he s with a very expert guide. and one porter.
haven t heard anything. of course as they pointed out earlier, they will be doing this search in the next several days particularly once the weather subsides a little bit and at night they re going to have pingers out there looking. i m not suggesting that they re on land. i m simply saying that s one possibility that we can t eliminate when you ve done this for several decades or 40 years like i have you never make any assumptions about where the wreckage has to be in an in-flight breakup and stormy weather condition. you already touched on this next question and i want to ask you and dig deeper. we know there are local reports suggesting a couple of the bodies have already been identified. you mentioned the flight attendant and believed to be a teenage boy among victims which hopefully is providing closure to the families but the fact that officials are already able to identify people and that s happening so quickly, does that tell us anything about the crash
to life when a pilot or some other human has already made a mistake and prevent a catastrophe. there hasn t bean mid-air collision with a u.s. airliner since 1978. they have technology on the planes and radars on the ground sponsorship automation is a huge boom to safety. we re talking about technology and we haven t talked about the important thing that most people who are lay people like myself would understand the black box. what do we know? have we gotten any pings. is it too early? do we have any sense from that? i think it may not be too early other than we haven t heard anything. the question here is how much information is being put out in terms love indicating any kind of a beacon or ping coming from the aircraft. one other point on the technology there are some crashes where the auto pilot, the computer system has acted up if you will and it s not worked correctly and confused the pilots. sometimes the pilots have made a mistake based on getting
it is. i couldn t believe it was actually happening. he d been in contact with you by text has he? i received a message about 3:00 and he said mom, i m in the lindt cafe in sydney. and my heart just drops. sent back a text message and he said okay. just sent back said okay can t talk and left it at that and i haven t heard anything since then. updating on your top story. negotiations continue at this hour with a gunman holding several people hostage in a cafe. we are now about 15 1/2 hours into the standoff. cnbc s mandy drury from australia. she s been covering this from
since the hostage situation arised earlier this morning. there s been a movement but there s a heavy police presence. hundreds of officers around the street was sydney. there s dozens of emergency vehicles ambulances on standby any case my other hostages manage to leave the cafe. so very heavy police presence around. i don t think i ll be going anywhere soon. freya noble with the daily mail in australia. thank you very much. ayman mog zonehyeldin joins me live. good morning. we see the situation unfolding and the black flag being put up in australia. apparently some of the requests that this gunman has made even though we haven t been able to confirm what they were. jim was saying among the request a new flag. tell me what you see when you see this situation well, know we know a little