Page 14 - Acar System News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

>> trying to figure out how long and how far this plane flew before it stopped responding completely. that could be incredibly obviously hard to determine. we want to go to cnn's jim clancy who is in kuala lumpur, malaysia. investigators have vastly widened where they're looking. how is this determined, do you know? >> this was determined by a satellite that reaches out and handshakes, looks for that aircraft, tries to plot where it's going to be, one time every hour. now, the acar system that sends back data from the plane about, you know, it's bearing, its airspeed, its s altitude, all those...

Does it point more to mechanical failure, pilot suicide, hijacking? what's your sense? >> it's hard to speculate. i mean, we have so few data points to go by that you can draw the lines of possibilities in just about any direction you want to go. but the -- you know, to turn off the transponder is quite easy for somebody to disable the acars data if in fact that is much more sophisticated and requires much deeper knowledge of the airplane to be able to do that. if that was done intentionally, it would not be a trivial bit of information to accomplish. it would be key to know if there is any da...

We hear a lot of talk about the flight data recorder. they have an enormous amount of information about everything that is happening to this plane about the angle of the plane, where all of the flats are, every system on board is being recorded there. tremendous amount of information and voices from the cockpit so you can hear what is going on there. the problem is these do not transmit. they carry that information. they can be collected later to review an incident but they don't send out any information which brings us to one of the last systems we have to talk about because this is the reall...

>> how reliable are those pings that would enable investigators to now determine it may have flown for hours towards the indian ocean? >> well, i don't think the movements we seen are from the acars data. what the malaysian government said this morning is based on information from looking at the primary radar they are now expanding the search area. i think the team has gotten together, they've gotten all of the radar data from both the military and from the civilian side, they've broken the code on it and they can finally look at the primary data and they've come out with a plot that is starti...

Time they had real contact with the aircraft. this all is now leading to the expansion of the search west of malaysia into the indian ocean to see what they can find. it is uncertain, wolf, u.s. officials have been down this road many times with leads over the last several days. nothing is 100%, they're cautioning us, but now they'll start to look in the indian ocean. vast amounts of water. the question is how do you find potentially bits of wreckage floating around in such a large area? wolf? >> barbara starr, thanks very much. i want to go right to our chief national security correspondent j...