Page 21 - Pinger News Today

On the search for malaysia airlines flight 370. >> actually, a lot of news coming from the prime minister this morning, who seems to be very confident, saying that four signals detected by a u.s. pinger locator are coming, he says, from one of the planes black boxes. hes that confident. >> right now at least ten planes, 14 ships are scouring the smallest search zone to date. crews are focused on an area in the indian ocean about the size of massachusetts and connecticut combined. you may recall ...

Thats barely a fifth the size a week ago and still very large. and listening area, some distance away, is even smaller still. if you think that means searchers are much closer to finding the black boxes the usa navy agrees. the spokesman for the navys seventh fleet operating the pinger locater telling cnn that he says he agrees with the australian prime minister who seems almost certain that the pings in the water are coming from the flights black boxes. >> numerous transmissions recorded which ...

Possibility of the pinger being located, then what they would normally do is basically try to develop from the surface ships, a 3-d map of the topography to get a real good understanding of what the terrain is. after that, they would be able to put down the underwater vehicles and be able to create missions based on whatever the underlying bottom topography would be in the area. >> anish patel and fred hegg, you added value. thank you so much. my next guest says despite headlines around the wo...

Fascinating i was asking the researchers how does the sound travel because weve been hearing that the ping has a two-mile radius and heres the easiest way to explain it. heres how they put it, low-pitched sounds travel very far in the ocean. high-pitched sounds dont travel as far. and this pinger, jim, is a high-pitched sound and so they say thats why it has this two-mile radius and then, of course, i had to follow up with this question. i said because one of the complicating things about the se...

Than some assumed. >> a skilled pilot might have been able to pull that off. i looked at the sea that morning. it was docile day. weather pattern was clear. the winds were light. sea state was pretty manageable. now, it wasnt like glass on the hudson river which sully sullenberger had the good fortune to have. nonetheless, one of the things that pilots train for is this idea of how you would ditch. you either go parallel to the swells or at the very least you go on the back end. you never fly in...

On top of it, maybe a few days. if not and they have to search up and down the possible paths, 17 miles at this point, thats a long time. they will be looking at weeks to months. >> air prance, the pinger was not working. here you have data. i wonder if could you explain the urgency here. you are a pilot. one of the key driving forces here you need to know what brought that plane down because if it is mechanical you want to correct that so it doesnt happen again. >> over 990 777s flying. im sure...

Fact they are man made, but the person on this show believes it is the pinger, what else could it be? >> well, there are scientific reasons that there would be pingers there, but shame on the scientific who has a pinger there and is doing this and saying hey, this is mine. that probably would have happened. so i tend to believe theyre marching down the right road. but this is so extraordinary without a shred of debris, with all of a sudden out of the blue, seen -- seemingly out of the blue, the ...

Size of -- maybe a little smaller than new mexico now. then the prime minister seemed to intimate that the search area for the black boxes themselves is much smaller than that. is that what he meant, rob? >> hes saying -- hes implying that the pinger location is an area of high probability within the overall search area. again, were not dealing in an exact environment. when youre dealing with acoustics or sound under water, sound can bend, it can bounce, it can be inflinsed by a lot of factors. ...

Weve got no clues. we dont know why this was done, really even who did it or why. its just one huge question mark. and maybe people are getting frustrated. oh, and to mention -- dont forget to mention that now the pingers probably dead. and so our odds are getting worse by the minute. our only hope -- listen, a few days ago, they werent even going to deploy these towed pinger locator equipment until they found some wreckage that would let them narrow down the search. they didnt have any wreckage...

Looked at them, theyve tried to tune them so they can detect the frequency of what the pinger should emit. the first thing. the second thing is they operate deep enough. almost 300 meters, maybe deeper, and are able to provide that good link to a better acoustic channel away from the noise of the surface. the only problem with them is they really are a narrow area search tool. when you think about it, youve got to drop sonobuoys near something youre interested, you think exists in the water. rig...