Page 39 - Pinger News Today

That this notion that some people have survived on life rafts was knocked down by the defense minister today. >> some people really holding out hope that there will be survivors and you can kind of understand that, i think. nick robertson, thanks so much. if you are wondering how you can help the families of those missing, go to cnn.com/impact. there are many pieces on how the families deal with losing a loved one so unexpectedly. cnn.com/impact. coming up we will take an inside look at the ping...

Peter goals is analyst, former ntsb manager director and tom fuentes is our law enforcement analyst, former assistant director of the fbi. leapts go around the table. well start with you, mark. how serious is this? how optimistic would you be based on the information thats been released? >> particularly since a lot of that information came from the u.s. authorities and the navy, that i feel a lot more comfortable with it. still, theyre hedging their bet, wanting to make sure, trying to manage ex...

We dont know. probably not. les, lets have you answer this one. this is from jojo wants to know. can ocean shield also deploy men in small boats with portable pinger detectors like the chinese did? well, were not sure the chinese did anyway. but go ahead. >> listen, thats not my sorry of expertise. im not going to touch that one. ask me some pilot stuff and ill try to answer that. >> mary schiavo, mary, you answer this from joe? can ocean shield also deploy men in small boats with portable pinge...

Objects of interest. >> if i could just ask our director to pop up camera two for us over here, because i have this very rudimentary piece of cardboard. just imagine a pizza for a moment. this will explain why we could have two hours of searching, the boat turns back around and only gets 15 minutes of pinging at that point. because it didnt make much sense to me. im not sure if you can see the lines ive drawn in here. thomas, you can help me. lets do it on camera one and then you can point this ...

The problem is, even at two and a half hours, thats not enough. you want to get multiple contact and reacquire it, reacquire multiple times to triangulate down. >> you manufactured the original pingers here and they brought them in for inspection maintenance a couple of times, malaysia airlines, but stopped a few years ago. at this point, do you have any idea whether these pingers were even working or when they had been maintained or anything? >> well, weve been told they were due next for june ...

>> do you think its possible that the batteries may have run out during those 24 hours because we know they usually last for about 30 days and were now in day 31. >> yeah, thats certainly a big factor, the race against the clock. so a couple big challenges. one, like you said, the batteries at any point could die down and the second thing is, the effectiveness of our towed pinger locator really is only as good as the strength of the signal coming out of the pinger. so as the battery dies down or...

Breaking overnight in the search for flight 370, the signals detected by pinger locaters are those consistent with aircraft black boxes. what do we know about the pinger locaters used by the chinese and australian ship ocean shield. jeff weiss is here. youre here to discuss all these possibilities. >> right. >> the location these signals were detected, are you as optimistic as authorities in australia are that this could be what were looking for? >> i would say guardedly optimistic remember this...

>> reporter: well, if theyre able to find that third acoustic event and actually deploy this underwater autonomous vehicle that they have, depth certainly a factor. houston in that press conference saying that 2.8 miles down is at the very limits of the capabilities of this autonomous vehicle, and if for some reason it doesnt work, theyll have to bring more assets capable of handling that kind of depth, and of course, that will take more time. christine? >> more time. all right, erin mclaughlin ...

The signal was also sustained he says for up to two hours. what does that mean? can you explain? >> thats what you would think would happen. if youre relatively close to the pinger on the path of the locater theyre towing behind the vehicle, you would find you would be far away and moving at a knot, maybe two naughts. youre picking it up. you pass over the top or adjacent to it and you pull the sled past and start to lose the signal. at the speeds the ship is moving, at the ranges that the pinge...

There is is a south indian gyre that brings the current up something like this almost like our gulf stream that takes stuff off the shore. it goes up this way and up around this way. this debris could be in this gyre for years and years and years and even end up back towards malaysia where we think the plane came from, a big left hand turn. there is is a couple of showerers ashowerer s and fronts but winds are only 10 to 15 miles per hour. they can handle that. >> we are taking you in the water....