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Co-pilot. >> malaysia's prime minister has said, somebody deliberately s r steered the plane off course. john lucic is here with us. there is flipping and flopping and this claim being made. it gets shot down. where are you today at this hour looking at this investigation? >> i think because of all this flipping and flopping, that everybody has been doing, i think the malaysian government is making the right decision in slowing things down before they release the information. by releasing information and having to retract it, it is a very embarrassing situation and really confuses this investi...

Probable? unlikely. >> peter, what bothers me is this boeing 77 apparently flew over very populated areas of malaysia and the malaysian air force didn't scramble jet fighters, didn't do anything as far as we know, right? >> that's the question. they were tracking it on primary radar which can occasionally, particularly at the outer limits, be unreliable, but naes the question. how did it come back over the island without anyone being alerted. >> when you've had those incidents where a private pilot takes a left turn anywhere near washington, d.c. and everything lights up like a red alert. you ...

Are parts of the indian ocean that go deeper than that. are there blind spots in effect in the deep water? >> i can't comment on the blind spots necessarily, but it has been tested successfully to the 20,000 -- to the depth of 20,000 feet. so that's what it's certified to. but as far as the ocean floor, you really can't comment on that necessarily. >> okay. you did mention earlier i want to remind our viewers on land, that ping from the flight data recorders does not go off. it only goes off when it touches water. tom, i want to bring you in here. one of the key revelations over the last 24 ho...

Now, without data connection or connection to a cell tower your gps chip in your phone is not going to be as functional as it would be on the ground. >> okay. and the radar, the fact that radar is not as effective, i mean, it's because if you're going to be out over a vast body of water, right, you need the towers on which to bounce off signals. right? >> that's right. you can't put a radar tower in the middle of the ocean which makes it really hard to pick up a plane when it's flying both low or over a vast body of water. and, you know, what typically happens in that situation is that air-tra...

To people involved in the transportation industry, you can do some of that and get some red flags but it is not -- in most cases it's not repeated. it's only at the entry into duty. i think trying to this do these before the fact is quite difficult. i completely defer to tom on his knowledge of the 777. my point was not only that someone knew how to fly this plane or force the pilots to but the person was quite smart about shutting down the pilots or the plane's ability to communicate with the outside world once it left its normal route. >> how difficult is that to do, tom, to shut down that c...