They are all boston strong and we salute them. Im anderson cooper. Good night. I hope you were with us during the last hour and you were inspired as watching adrianne hasletdavis story. She is truly boston strong. One thing she wanted to get across to everyone watching is something her grandmother said to her as a kid it is okay to not be okay sometimes. But adrien is doing okay. And she has a long road ahead of her as do many of the survivors but we will root for her along the way. If you are just joining us, we expect a News Conference any moment from Australian Authorities on the search for flight 370. It is 11 00 a. M. In the search area. The newly refined and somewhat
smaller search area. You see it in the red near the top of the screen. The gray is former search areas. The question right now is will it change yet again when Angus Houston, whos coordinating the search effort, steps to the make phone in perth. Will he make bigger news. We will find out shortly and we expect the Press Conference any moment now. You can you can see it live on the screen. They are preparing the podium and such. As we wait for him i want to go to aar erin mclaughlin. They refined the search area. What do we know about the search going on right now . Thats right, anderson. They managed to reduce the search area by some 1300 square miles, which believe it or not, is a relatively minor adjustment, compared to the adjustment they made on sunday when they reduced the search
area to roughly a third of what it used to be. Still, were talking about some 33,000 square miles. A very, very large area, which is why authorities have been stressing that it is critical they get more information to be able to reduce it even further. As you said, it will be interesting to see if mr. Houston has any comments on that in the Press Conference that were expecting just minutes from now. When i last talked to authorities in our 8 00 hour, people involved in the search, they were saying they were going to give it many more days, perhaps more than a week of continuing to try to just focus on hearing anymore pings that might occur. The assets that are now being used in the search, do we know how many ships and planes are out there looking . Well, today, according to the joint Agency Coordination center, Press Statements this morning, there are some 15
planes and 14 aircraft out scouring those waters, but it has sob said in some 23 days of the operation we have had no reported findings of any kind of debris. As you mentioned, all eyes right now focused on the australian vessel, The Ocean Shield with the american ping locater on board scouring the waters in a ladderlike formation, trying to redetect that signal that gave so many people hope here on sunday. Again, it will be interesting to see if mr. Houston has any comments, any updates on that. The past few Press Conferences of this kind that we have experienced over the past few days there have been dramatic announcements. Anderson. Erin mclaughlin, we appreciate that. We will check in with erin and as i said if you are just joining us we are waiting to hear from authorities. We do not know what they will be announcing at this Press Conference. It is a little past 11 00 a. M. In australia and in the search area. Obviously the search is already
underway. We dont know if there are new developments, though, beyond the refining the search area. We anticipate some sort of announcement being made. We will bring it to you live. We want to bring in our panel. Author of why planes crash, Investigator Fights for safe skies and doing calculations on the search. Boeing trip 777 captain and miles obrien, former Department Of Transportation Inspector who represents Accident Victims and their families. Richard, lets start with you. You were with me in the 8 00 hour. You heard from Captain Mark Math thi mathies from the u. S. Navy. He said the life of the pinger is 30 days and may go up to 45 days and may allow that much time to focus the search on trying to get another ping. Yes. Last night, Angus Houston said im just keeping an eye forgive me, im keeping an eye to see if he will stop me. He said they will go several more days. Heres Angus Houston. Okay. Good morning. Im accompanied by the same team as on previous occasions. Im pleased to be here to brief you today. Today i can report some further encouraging information regarding the search for missing flight mh370. On monday, i advised the Pinger Locater deployed by The Ocean Shield had detected signals consistent with those emitted by aircraft black boxes on two separate occasions. I can now tell you that ocean shield has been able to reacquire the signals on two more occasions. Like yesterday afternoon, and late last night perth time. The detection yesterday afternoon was held for approximately five minutes and 32 seconds. The detection late last night was held for approximately seven minutes. Ocean shield has now detected four transmissions in the same broad area. Yesterdays signals will assist in better defining a reduced and much more manageable search area on the ocean floor. I believe we are searching in the right area, but we need to visually identify Aircraft Wreckage before we can confirm
with certainty that this is the final Resting Place of mh370. For the sake of the 239 families, this is absolutely imperative. Today The Ocean Shield is continuing the slow, pain staking and methodical work to refine the location around the four acoustic detections. We are not yet at the point of deploying the Autonomous Underwater Vehicle. The Better Ocean Shield can define the area the easier it will be for the Autonomous Underwater Vehicle to subsequently search for Aircraft Wreckage. It is important to note that ocean shield can search six times the amount of area with the towed Pinger Locater than can be done with the sonar on the autonomous underwater
vehicle. Searching underwater is an extremely laborious task. So the more work we can do on the surface with the towed ping er locater to affix the position of the transmission the less work we will have to do below the surface, scouring the sea floor. Given the guaranteed shelf life hoe pinger batteries is 30 days and its now 33 days since the aircraft went missing its important that we gather as much information to fix the possible location of the aircraft while the pingers are still transmitting. In further promising information, we have received the results of the Data Analysis conducted on the signals detected by ocean shield on the first two occasions. This Data Analysis was conducted
by the Australia Center based at albatross in new south wales. It is the Australian Defense forces center of excellence for acoustic analysis. The analysis determined that a very stable, distinct and clear signal was detected at 33. 331 kilohertz and that it consistently pulsed at a 1. 106 second interval. They, therefore, assess the transmission was not of natural origin and was likely sourced from specific electronic equipment. They believe the signals to be consistent with the specification and description of a Flight Data Recorder. Up to 11 military aircraft, four civil aircraft and up to 40 ships will assist in todays search. A modified apc3 will coordinate with ocean shield in conducting a sonar search in the same vicinity. Today a weak front is moving in from the southeast, and is expected to bring scattered showers. The Planned Search Area is about 75,000 square kilometers. You may have noticed the size of the search area has significantly reduced over the last couple of days. Based on ocean shields detections we are now searching a much more concentrated area based on The Drift Pred cases made possible by ocean
shields detections. A smaller area has allowed much tighter Search Patterns based entirely on Visual Search principles. In other words, we have intensified our search in the Visual Search area. Just a bit of housekeeping, at my last Press Conference i said i could come back to you with the precise timing of when the signals were detected by The Ocean Shield. The first detection took place on saturday, the 5th of april at 4 45 p. M. Perth time. The Second Detection took place on saturday, the 5th of april at 9 27 p. M. Perth time. The third detection took place on tuesday the 8th of april at 4 27 p. M. Perth time. The fourth detection took place
on tuesday, 8th of april at 10 17 p. M. Perth time. Im now happy to take your questions, but before i do that i would refer you to the diagram there which shows you where all of the detections were made. I would also highlight to you the Satellite Hand Shake Calculation number seven. That was the hand shake, which was a partial ping. Where the experts in kuala lumpur access the planes engines might have flamed out and its probably significant in terms of the end of power flight. What does your data show . Du it give you any indication of how far they have traveled . We have no idea at this
stage. We are continuing the i have yul search, a intense Visual Search in the hope of picking something up because what we are dealing with with the Visual Search is an area of search which has been adapted consistent with the amount of Oceanic Drift that has been at play during the period. Okay. So thats the first point. The second point is, the only thing we have got at the moment in terms of this location here is the detection of the transmissions. We have no idea at this stage what is under the water. Of course, as soon as we finish the towed Pinger Locater work, hopefully we will get more transmissions to better refine the point on the ocean floor where the transmissions are
emanating from. Once we have that, and theres probably no more hope of picking up anymore transmissions, we will put the Autonomous Underwater Vehicle down to have a look. Now, hopefully with a lot of transmissions, well have a tight, small area, and hopefully in a matter of days we will be able to find something on the bottom that might confirm that this is the last Resting Place of mh370. I stress and i cant stress enough the families have to be considered when you report on awl of this. Because they want a bit of certainty. We dont get certainty until we have a visual sighting of the wreckage. That will probably come with the work the Autonomous Vehicle does. The other thing about the bottom there, im informed by experts,
that theres a lot of silt down there. That could complicate the search because the silt on the bottom of the ocean can be very thick and things disappear in to it and it makes a Visual Search underwater very difficult. On monday, you thought there was possibly two pingers. To you think you are dealing with two or one device at this point . Well, we have the evidence. The assessment was made that we thought there might be two pingers there. This has not been confirmed in further detections that we picked up. Now, whether thats because, you know one ping er has Run Out Of Battery Life and theres one running, or we just havent got close to it, i dont know. But the fact of the matter is we havent had any further evidence of two pingers going off in the
same area or at the same time. Isnt it curious that two pingers, the frequency to be 3. 3 on both of them . Well, i wont get in to that because basically the analysis on that i dont think has revealed anything unusual. I might ask mr. Levy if he has any information on that. No. Okay. Do you plan to move more pinger locate canners in the area to cover more territory . No, we dont. Because as i have said previously, one of the important things about this sort of search is the need for complete, completely noiseless environment. Ocean shield is minimizing all of its systems and really the only thing that is operating are the two thrusters at the back of the vessel. Everything else is turned off. So that we have the best search environment possible. If you have other ships there, you would end up with a very noisy environment and you wouldnt get the sort of search that we have at the moment. I mean, we are looking at this stage for transmissions that are probably weaker than they would have been early on because the batteries of both devices are past their use by date, and they were very shortly found. I think we are very fortunate, in fact, to get some transmissions on day 33. Just one person. Is it possible you could release a section of the Audio Recording so we can hear it . Well look at that. I dont see why not. How many detections do you
think The Ocean Shield needs to refine the location. You already have four detections and you say you need more detections to refine the location and second, do you have more information regarding the detection we received about the chinese ship and do you think it is a reliable one . In terms of ocean shield, the more detections we get, the better. The other thing that comes in to it is the quality of the transmission and the detection. What we are after is the best return that we can get. By triening a La Triangulating data we will come up with a more sharply defined, much smaller search area underwater. Bear in mind, that the time
spent on the surface cover six times more area than any given time than we will be able to do when we go under water. With the batteries likely to fade or fail very shortly, we need to get as much positional data as we can so that we can define a very small search area. Bear in mind, with the air france disaster several years ago, it took them 20 days. They had a very good they thought they had a good fix and it took the underwater vehicle 20 days to get to the wreckage. Yes. [ inaudible ] is it worthwhile to send a manned submarine to have a look at whats down there . Have you considered that . Well, im not running the search. Weve got weve got the Australian Maritime Safety Authority running and coordinating the operational search. Of course the Defense Force providing a lot of the assets, along with many other nations. Theres a lot of Military Assets out there at the moment. Of course there is one submarine. I might just get Commodore Levy to comment on that particular aspect of your question. The short answer is, the utility of submarines has been evaluated and it was when we first started to commence the search. It you determined that they would not, the submarine would not be optimized for this particular search. What we do have today is Royal Australian aircraft p3 aircraft deploying in the field. That provides more sensors in the vicinity of ocean shield without having a ship there to proreduce the background noise. Some very good work that was only started after the mh370 aircraft was lost, very good work by the Australian Defense work, in particular the air force have modified the acoustic processor to pick up the 37. 5 kilohertz frequency. We expect anytime now the aircraft, the first aircraft, The Ocean Shield will coordinate to lay a sonar buoy. It is a Package Parachuted out of the aircraft, floats on the surface of the ocean and will deploy a hydrophone, 1,000 feet below the surface of the ocean and it has a radio that transmits the data back to the aircraft. Hp3 is capable of carrying 30 on each mission and that will provide a range of sensors, a number of sensors, 1,000 feet
below the surface. The towed Pinger Locater is deeper than that. It provides a range of sensors 1,000 feet down. The other point i would make is the silt cover on the bottom as well as potentially hiding debris. Now we have an analysis that shows there is silt down there. That is an absorbing material. So we are at risk of a lot of the sound energy being absorbed by the silt rather than if it was a rock seabed. A lot of that would be reflected to the surface or towards the surface. The fact there is silt there also hindered to a certain extent the sound provocation. Have you analyzed the signal. [ inaudible ] i understand theres been no further detections in the area where the chinese vessel assisted by hms echo, which is an oceanographic vessel from the royal navy. I believe they havent made any further detections. In terms of the analysis of the signals that it picked up, ill come back to you on that. Im not sure where we are at with that. I havent had any advice that the analysis is complete at this stage. When you began this search and looking at the