the engines were pulled from the ocean floor. if it s small like that black boxes, you can put a little basket on the rov and the arms from the rov can pick it up and put in the the basket. but the remote underwater vehicles can only carry about 4,000 pounds so anything heavier, like a large piece of the fuselage will have to be attached to a cable and pulled to the surface by a crane on the ship. randi kaye cnn, new york. let s talk about the search for flight 8501 with sea operations specialist tim taylor also the president of tiburon subsea research, a company that specializes in rovs and auvs and underwater imagery. welcome back tim. the head of search and rescue says most of the passengers are probably still inside the plane strapped in their seats. how difficult will it be to get to those passengers? divers are going to probably be the choice tool of choice on this one once they low cot
water isn t so deep maybe 150 feet right? and the water is very clear, it s pretty warm but now it s monsoon season and that s a complicated facting. clear water may or not be there. if you get farther out into deeper water they may have clearer water, dirty water stays s on top. but you have rainy season. rainy and mud and things come into the ocean and it does knock it down. not very much debris was found floating on top of the water. should we read anything into that? it s a clue. unless more shows up it could be that it s more intact than it s not. i would assume with what you have right now you have to kind of go that way until proven otherwise. well i m sort of reading into into what the head of the rescue team said that most of the passengers are probably still inside the plane which says to my untrained eye that the plane probably fell it didn t explode in air or come
they bring all the assets to the two spot which is they think the aircraft could be where the aircraft could be i. season mean s andrew stevens is in surabaya where the victims will make their final journey home. hi, andrew. hi, carol. that s right, a very somber moment here when those first two coffins arrived bearing the first two victims of flight 8501. they are believed to be a man and woman. they have not been formally identified yet. that process continues. there are ten bodies now that have been retrieved but really the big issue at the moment is finding the primary wreckage, the fuselage which the authorities here do believe cok still contain many if not most of the bodies still, perhaps, buckled into their seats inside the plane. but that search as you were say saying there is being hampered
recorder we re still somewhat in the dark. i think the good news is that we know generally where it is and we re going to get it but we just don t know until we get the facts. of course we always try to read between the lines, mary. the head of the search and rescue says he expects that many of the passengers will be found inside the plane still with their seat belts strapped. what does that tell you? well i think that s a pretty good assumption because the weather was so terrible the pilots would have told the passengers to strap down and give it an extra tug. i would have anticipated that the flight attendants would have been in their seats as well so because everybody was battened down because of the bad weather, it s logical to assume most people would still be in their seats. that has occurred in prior accidents like twa 800 people were still in their seats. swissair 111, west caribbean
flight 8501 with peter goals, a former ntsb managing director. i ll also joined by former inspector general of the u.s. department of transportation mary schiavo. good morning to both of you. peter, an official says sonar may have detected the plane s wreckage but there s been no confirmation the plane has been found. how close are they do you think? well i think the indonesians have done an outstanding job in pinpointing the crash site. i mean, they obviously had good radar information, they ve sent their assets to the right location. it s going to take a little time to zero in on the wreckage because the sonar as we saw in flight 370, you pick up false signals. but i think they re getting to it. they ll get to it fairly quickly. we re on the final days of this terrible tragedy. mary we know there s terrible weather out there. it s monsoon season it s