Page 4 - Up 8 News Today

They are well into that day. will ripley joins us now, live on a boat off the coast of western australia. looking behind you, the weather looks pretty decent. is this almost the best they can get? >> reporter: yeah, you know, its pretty close to that, poppy, although one thing we have learned covering this story and covering the weather conditions out in the indian ocean, about 1,000 miles from where we are right now, is that its highly unpredictable and can change quickly. but the word we are g...

The prime minister of malaysia. hell be coming here. hell be meeting the very teams that have been taking to the sky, have been taking to the sea, shaking their hands. hes doing all of this in front of cameras. also later today hes scheduled to meet with the prime minister of australia. part of this is to try to bring the malaysian authorities as well as the australian authorities together to show that there are people in charge here. but whats happened here as far as the search, as you point ou...

Window has really held nicely. the next 24 hours look good. really start to deteriorate as we go late in the day on sunday. here is the approximate area they are searching. yes, just right to the northwest of that, thats where we are watching another area where potentially some of that moisture moves in. the winds kick up. we start to see the lower visibility. now, these airplanes that they have in the skies, the p-3 and p-8, they can fly at fairly low altitude and now they have the extra window...

Results almost immediately. our own kyung lah went up into one of the search planes to look for the debris from flight 370. shows joining us live now from perth, australia, where its nearing 5:00 a.m. kyung, whats their level of hope? they spotted stuff pretty quickly yesterday. do they think that now they are starting to look at pieces from this airplane? >> reporter: they dont know. they need to verify what these pieces that were spotted on the ocean actually are. on the p-8 that i was on, wha...

From all different places. it could be commercial, could be military, could be other government agencies. and then the second is it is timely. you never know where it may be if that indeed was debris. and then the third thing was, if you look at it, theyre just little specks on the screen. so without visual confirmation you really dont know if it is debris or not. and so i encourage the flights to keep flying, we moved our second p-8 into the theater. and in my opinion, the -- it is critical to ...

And everybodys assigned certain areas so depending on what area were assigned, well do our little search pattern in the search box that we have and report back if, in fact, we see anything. >> so we know two american planes up in the air, a p-8 and the navy p-3. theyve covered an amazing area, 220,000 nautical square miles. how much more ground do you have to cover? >> well, it depends on where we get assigned for the -- with the air tasking order from the australians who are leading the search....

Planes to head out today, six military aircraft, five civilian. theyve got a lot of area covered but of course the most important will be these new images from the french satellite. its about 154 square miles that theyre focused on with 122 objects that they see. some of them as big as 24 meters. so what were talking about is potentially the debris, but we really need those planes to get up in the air, get down low, and take some picture os to identify what these ones actually are. and they have...

Taken off from perth. what the u.s. navy plane, the poseidon that is there, the p-8, as it is called? >> yes, our p-8 is scheduled to fly a search mission today in the southern indian ocean in the potential area of the debris field. so i have here on my list just listen to this amazing list. china, south korea, japan, india, australia, and the u.s. and others all flying missions in this southern sector under the lead of australia but out of perth here. thats simply incredible. if you look at the...

Plane as part of this operation. the p-8. any other u.s. assets, ships deployed in the region right now to try to help? >> i think the big news for the u.s. navy and its support, were moving in two very advanced pieces of equipment. one is called a tpl, or a toad pinger located and another is called a blue fin. when we think we have a good point where we want to search, we will deploy those, once again, on an australian vessel under the lead through their coordination. but those pieces of equipm...

Plane went down definitively in the ocean and everybody died. >> well, look, it may be a little premature, but lets go to the next slide very quickly. we have got some of the most sophisticated assets out there at the moment. we have the p-3 orion, we have this chinese aircraft, this is the p-8, the premium up surveillance aircraft. and they all have very sophisticated equipment. there are limitations to technology and what has been spotted so far has been from the human eye. janice already spok...