Where the aircraft might have entered the water. He also said theyre looking underwater, using the locators and acoustic year. The search area is being adjusted on what he called a semiregular basis. He vowed it would keep going as long as there is hope in finding the missing plane. Want to go straight to cnn reporters, Nic Robertson and kuala pour. And first to you, teams will be searching. Tell us about the conditions right now. You hurt and is used unmentioned the whitecaps. It can pose problems doing a visual search. Take a look at the ocean, these conditions are similar to what is being described right now. You are not seeing white caps, that is the good news. The clouds are lower right now, 1,000 feet above sea level. These plans are well equipped to fly as low as 300 feet above the water doing the visual search. The last cloud cover, the better when you talk about visibility. Down around six miles. The conditions are fair today. You have been with the families, you reacted with them, telling their stories. How do family and members react and how do you think they will react from hearing on this News Conference beginning in the smaller area, will that give them home . It will. What they have been looking for is professional effort on all of this. They are encouraged there is a Strong International effort in australia off the coast of australia. To hear briefing like this it will encourage them. They want on that very fundamental simple thing. They want to know what happened to the aircraft. Want to have the first piece of wreckage to identify. That is the information theyre not getting right now, incredibly frustrated. The head of civil lineation last my was not able to tell them even if the plane had crashed. Very painful for them. And this sort of press conference will give them hope. They have heard this sort of thing many times before. It may get their hopes up briefly. We will see in the coming days. Thank you. I want to bring and jeffrey thomas. Also a safety analyst, david soucie. Angus houston said they had some data that arrived only recently. Did it sound to you they add new information and new line analysis on this old data . It does. Like the other experts on the panel, great confidence in what we had. It was very measured, it was of beet and from what i am hearing, they are getting new data, being refined. And there seems to be an air of confidence that it is a big notion but were getting closer and closer to where the airplane might be. Im interested, you keep saying it is a real milestone in the investigation. Specifically what bank is used in said to make you be so optimistic. You talk about the planning and everything going into this and we have been suffering through that. Families suffering through that. I want people to know when you are in an investigation is the planning that is painful. Everything in place, a breath of fresh air at this point. Everything is in place, all the tools and equipment. Could there be more there . The fact that everything is there and what encouraged me is the teams are working closely together. We have heard this as rhetoric before. He is believing this is happening. You can never underestimate the power of synchronous city. When this is all put together and people are doing their jobs, they can focus on that. I feel like we are there and this is now moving to a place where the possibilities are there and i am very hopeful about it. He talked about a lot of apparatus out there. There is a malaysian frigate, also an apparatus from the chinese with helicopter docks. The ship and the painter locator will be searching into backtracks converging on each other. It appears to be a more targeted search and more refined and perhaps we will give the families and the searchers and everyone around the world watching war optimism about this. Yes, indeed. They should be getting far more optimistic about this. It does really appear as though all the best resources in the world, if you like, are now focused on this search. The assets are out there, the location is closer to the coast and far more time to be spent out there by the increasing number of airplanes. The time over the search area is dramatically increased and this is all positive for a good outcome, hopefully sooner than later. Stick around. And want to bring in my other aspirates. Mary schiavo is a former Inspector General and she is now on aviation attorney for victims of transportation accidents. Les abend, and michael k. Jim tillman a retired American Airlines pilot and steven marks representing families of air flight 404 go 7. You have blank the resumes and that is why were here. It is clear and is used in was to stop people from saying theyre not being transparent in this investigation. I feel like i was seeing a completely different presentation from some of the other panelists here tonight. Keep going. I feel like there was no news, nothing new was said. The thing he made clear was i will come at you regularly, i am going to download this information on you and an ongoing basis and youll never again be able to complain you are not getting information. I would have to disagree with you. There was some new information there, the apparatus going in the water and what was out there, he clarified that. Also said we have concerns, maybe they dont know what they are doing because they keep shifting the search area. He said that is what happens, you refine the information and the day you get and you repine the search area. That was new information. You can also interpret him to say we have squeezed the lemon and of all the information we can out of this tiny data set and now were moving the search box around. No new information you can get out of it and you can have all of these assets and you can have the best analysts in the world working on this but if the data set has nothing left in it, you are searching blindly and they did not be a great feeling about the fact there telling these around. Desperation. They dont have a search degree field on the surface and they dont know what theyre looking for under the water. Your reaction to this press conference . My reaction is like david soucie. One of the rose colored glasses dies. I was energized by this from the standpoint of an organizational standpoint. It looks as though they are organizing it as though it is an ntsb situation. Getting all of the experts and power plants from everywhere they can putting them together. That is a great thing to happen. I dont know how many people listened to the process but it is wonderful to see. I was encouraged by the fact theyre utilizing every aspect of the data making their assumptions. They are going out lower and higher altitudes. They are looking at every aspect and i was very encouraged by it and i am sure this makes him very happy. Talking about the information theyre getting because he likes to crunch numbers. Were you optimistic about him talking about the data in this press conference . Optimistic but guarded. This is the first time we have talked about two converging 240kilometerlong tracks. This means the locators have a box to go to with a line in it. Now guarded because again, coming from the air is the most likely scenario where you will pick up anything. 240 kilometers is new data. You have been pessimistic and you said you have been leery, not sure if theyre searching in the right place or the right track. Did that help you all come to some consensus they are searching in the right area . The thing i got was the impressive array of talent that has been lined up to work on this. This is a worldclass approach and the team i am getting more confidence and every single time i hear about that is impressed and they did not get the feeling this has been teased all day as a big announcement. We knew there were going to do under water surging and we knew they would do this and they would move this. It was not branding fascinating information so far as i am concerned. I am hoping it means more than it appears to be. Mary schiavo, will it be fair to say this is the new beginning to the investigation . Fees to whether coordination kick said people should start paying more attention . Not to steven coordination. The feeling i got out of it was comfort. Comfort with this gentleman leading the investigation, comfort that we would be given a full picture of what was going on. Comfort theyre throwing everything they know with the data points they have and when this is said and done, they find the answers, they find the black boxes, they find everything. I have comfort knowing when the day is done and they find it or not, this joint task force will have done everything they can. If that is a new beginning, i guess it is. It is appealing a have not had before him for that it gives me some reassurance that we wont have as many regrets as we would have had had the investigation been run like it was in the beginning. Lets hope it gives families comfort as well. When we come back the deep sea search for flight 370. How challenging can this be. Making moves that would put an adult in the emergency room. Yet all they really want to do is grow up. Its funny, everyone i know wishes they could go back and feel younger. Sound familiar . Then test drive one of these. Current nongm owners and lessees use your 1,500 allowance to lease the 2014 cadillac ats for around 359 a month with nothing due at signing. To prove to you that aleve is the better choice for him, hes agreed to give it up. Thats today . [ male announcer ] well be with him all day as he goes back to taking tylenol. I was okay, but after lunch my knee started to hurt again. And now ive got to take more pills. Yup. Another pill stop. Can i get my aleve back yet . For my pain, i want my aleve. [ male announcer ] look for the easyopen red arthritis cap. Its red lobsters lobsterfest all promotions the years Largest Selection of lobster entrees, like lobster lovers dream. Hurry in and sea food differently. Go to red lobster. Com for ten dollars off with purchase of two lobsterfest entrees. Add vanishing deductible from nationwide insurance and get 100 off for every year of safe driving. We put members first. Join the nation. Nationwide is on your side then a little time to kick back. Earn double Hilton Honors points with the 2x points package and be one step closer to a weekend break. Doubletree by hilton. Where the Little Things mean everything. Breaking news tonight the search for flight 370 has begun and to explain what is involved is an oceanographer at the university of New South Wales and he joins us now via skype. Along with david soucie. This is your area of expertise. What does it mean to you that they have been able to narrow an undersea search area to 240 kilometers. 100 could be miles. It is a good thing if they think it is down there. 240 kilometers or 150 miles is a vast area of motion to cover. And the thing about working in the ocean and i have been out on ships doing experiments for almost 10 years is it is painstakingly slow. Difficult to work in the ocean. Ships dont go that fast, all the ways and the wind. Not easy to work down there. Even at 240 kilometers, it is an undertaking. He said it is difficult especially and we dont know if the pings are going. What happens if the pings stop . What search tools are left to use . At that point there is a lot that can be done visually. As pain staking as this part it is more pain staking to find the black boxes. We are not just looking for two black boxes. We are looking for any debris from this aircraft. If you think about the visual aspect of that or the sonar i am optimistic about that because these are large debris fields. We will have time now because we are working 24 7. These machines that are under water and towed ping locaterers. We did see tonight that the seas arent too bad tonight. Hopefully they get Good Progress tonight. I think they will be able to toe it three or four knots. Not fantastic. What would you have them do . I am encouraged that the wheels are on the ground and moving forward for the first time i felt they are moving forward and working together. This converging track is important to note. It means they have pretty good information about where they are going to focus this investigation. Could they be wrong . Sure. Thai have wheels on the ground. What would you have them do . Sit around and do nothing . This is from patricia. Why havent any debris washed up if it crashed . The question is, the currents, the deep water currents work differently than the surface currents. Might the fuit not surface . It will stay there and the current wont be Strong Enough deep down to actually move everything. It is a completely different story at the surface of the ocean because if there were a debris field on the surface of the ocean just from the plane crashing in then by now almost four weeks in that debris field would have increased in size enormously. Thats because the ocean is very turbulent. The currents in the ocean are not a highway that move from a to b. Instead they mix everything up. There are these eddies. There are many versions of hurricanes mixing everything up. If you start with something relatively confined it spreads over and over. And i think that if the plane crashed somewhere where they are searching now within a few weeks to months we will start seeing debris turn up on beaches but it will be very limited. It might only be a few hundred pieces or so and will be hard to identify them as being part of the plane among all the other debris that washes on the beach every day. I want to get to my panel of experts. Can you answer this one thing for me, eric, and maybe david as well. The southern indian ocean, the weather is going to get worse. Winter is setting in. How long can the ships operate . Where they are searching now is the subtropical. It does get colder in winter but nott that bad. I dont think that is really a problem. Where they are searching now is actually a relatively easy place to search. My panel of experts are back with me now. Steven marx, you heard what he said, eric said this is a fairly easier place to search than the southern indian ocean. On flight 447 the data recorders took two years to find. If we dont find it soon are we in for a years long haul here . Certainly we could be. There is no guarantee it will be found quickly. It is encouraging. I agree that we have better assets, more assets and seem to have a team in place. That is all encouraging. The difference here between 447 and this particular crash or accident is the fact that we dont have some of the information we had with 447. The messages were sent to france at real time during the flight. We knew the general location. We knew what was happening and the emergency the pilots were placing and the inconsistent information they were getting. There was a great deal of information readily available. Here we dont know whether the information was unavailable because it was disabled or turned off or due to electrical failure or some other cost. We just dont have that kind of information. Lets talk about the apparatus or assets out there. Right now there is incredible stateoftheart technology being used searching for sonic transmissions and a giant under water microphone will listen for the pings and an under water robot will scour the ocean bed. Obviously it is a lot of equipment. You said they could use more but still there is it is a Glass Half Full i would imagine. You are absolutely right. This is the most equipmentt that we have actually seen employed at one time throughout the search. A nuclear submarine, its engine is nuclear based and carries normally missiles and used for reconnaissance to gather all sorts of information through signal intelligence. The great thing is it can lawsuiter in the area for as long as it needs and the constraint is Food Supplies for the crew. But potentially it can loiter for days. Lets rewind and look at the constraints on the search. The first thing is everything relies on the gps battery working. As soon as they turn off then we have to go back to the air search. Thats a big constraint. The other constraint is the weather. We need impeccable weather over the next five days. The weather isnt looking great on those two 240 kilometer tracks. There are potential hurdles that will impinge the search over the next couple of days, weather being one and gps batteries being the other. We have learned the navys pinger locater is searching for the black boxes. What happens if and when they are found . E when hes 153, which would be fine if bob were a vampire. But hes not. Hes an architect with two kids and a mortgage. Luckily, he found someone who gave him a fresh perspective on his portfolio. And with some planning and effort, hopefully bob can retire at a more appropriate age. Its not rocket science. Its just common sense. From td ameritrade. Breaking news. We have learned the navys pinger locater is in use now searching for emissions from the missing planes black boxes. What happens if and when they are located . Crash protected and shock mounted. Reporter this is what investigators will see once the black boxes are found and data from the memory downloaded for analysis. We pull the data up on the screen we will see the data in a tabular format and graphical. Reporter black boxes find hundreds of data points about the pilots maneuvers, speed and altitude all displayed. Every flight data recorderer records in binary values. In order for humans to understand it we need to convert it to engineering units meaning feet for altitude, air spot recorded in knots. Reporter through graphs like these will learn if someone on board knows if it was a mechanical error. In an engine error they would be able to tell which engine turned off first. This line represents the planes altitude. If flight mh370 suddenly fell to a lower altitude here is where we would see a change. If someone deliberately alterred the path we would see the line dip or rise. One of the things people will be looking at is who is in control of the aircraft. When we look at the data from the flight data recorder you can see if inputs were coming from auto pilot or left seat or right seat. Reporter technicians can pin point where the plane was located at any point during flight. Although memory chips are rarely damaged Airlines Need to perform regular maintenance and preflight testing to ensure the black boxes are up to par. The biggest challenge is to locate them before the batteries die. The pingers could already be dead. To find the pingers after they stop is going to be extremely difficult. I want to thank zain azure. We are assuming a lot about the black boxes. If and when they find the black boxes will the data be able to be extracted as we saw in the piece . The data will be able to be extracted. There are very few cases that i worked on where it hasnt been, most notably were the two planes that went into the World Trade Center on september 11. Those black boxes were destroyed. There was no