polled today say they opposed the tea party. if you look at all the big issues that animated the political debates over the last couple months whether it was cultural wars like abortion or the government shutdown, we see a very strong reaction to this electorate against the conservative side on those issues. one out of five voters, i think this was a high number, said they thought abortion was their top issue in this election. and of those people and the evidence is that they re pro-choice. 61-40 percent. we have to keep reminding ourselves that virginia is so important because it is exactly the bellwether state for the union. just about exactly what the nation is. i would say virginia has become the new ohio in many ways. richard nixon used to say it s all about ohio. it s all about virginia now. and the fact that women turned out in overwhelming numbers apparently in support of terry mcauliffe is big. let s look at that number. the nbc news exit poll shows women in virginia breaking for terry mcauliffe in a big way while men are split. women give mcauliffe is 16-point edge. that is something. david corn. it goes back to what i was just saying. the issue of abortion which often doesn t motivate voters, doesn t turn elections. we know that. we ve been studying this for decades now. seems to be a key fight. and that s, of course, cuccinelli, he was the conservative poster boy on all these cultural issues. abortions being top amongst them. here we ve had this argument in washington. ted cruz and others saying the republican party has to go to the right, has to get out the traditionalist voters. that s not working for cuccinelli who otherwise was an attractive candidate. in many ways he was unsuited to go after the career women, the professional women, the working women of northern virginia who are part of the orbit of metropolitan washington and aren t going to stand for what joe biden in the last day of the campaign called sinking from another era. think about that for a second. we re all three white guys here by coincidence, but it s a fact. and i m looking at these numbers. it tells you that the white men in this country are not calling the shots. look at these numbers. cuccinelli in the exit poll, he sweeps him by 26 points. yet it looks like mcauliffe is going to win comfortably. yet the white men say we re going for cuccinelli who s gotten some of the worst press, he s made one bad day after another. now look at this. white women. we ve been saying around this table that the white women all women i should say. across the state of virginia are very pro-choice and inclined to give a big number to mcauliffe. 48 to 43 white women went. it s so different than the way white men vote in their own households. i would divide it, chris, between northern virginia which as i said is part of metropolitan washington at this point. from richmond north, it s a mixed swing state. and rural southern virginia which is where i think it s fair to say the split by gender is still much more. if you look at the numbers of, say, black men and women. black women, 95 to 5 for mcauliffe over cuccinelli. obviously if you re a minority in this country we know you have other issues besides gender driving your vote. exactly. but after the last election, the gop did an internal autopsy and said, listen, we can t win national elections. and this kind of looks like a national election. if we keep losing all latinos, all african-americans. that s the point i made a minute ago. we can t close the gap. the point i m making here is white men are not a leading indicator of anything. the other thing the other dividing point, chris, is often between married with children, church going. married with children church going whites tend to be conservative and there s a lot of them in virginia. let s look at the latest we have. there s a lot of exit polling information to give you. cuccinelli s positions on social issues worked against him. six in ten virginia voters support legal abortion in all or most cases. i think that s a particularly high percentage. it s usually in the low 50s. if you look at the turnout, you ll see the democrats 39%, republicans 30%, a big gap there. i think when it comes to women who care about abortion, which happen to be democrats, they were motivated to go to the polls. but the turnout was from ken cuccinelli. he drove them to the polls. that was terry mcauliffe s strategy from the beginning to hammer on women s issues especially on abortion and health. and even on divorce. especially in northern virginia in the washington media market. he hammered cuccinelli who as david said was ill suited to defend. because of his record. let me point out something that s fascinating. i don t want to generalize. if you went to college, you got more liberal. look at the percentage of voters turning out today. 63% of the voters today finished college. not just started. full four year college. that s a very educated electorate. the other part is if you look at who supported, the poorest people and the least educated supported terry mcauliffe, but also the wealthiest and most educated supported terry mcauliffe. and that fed into terry mcauliffe s argument that ken cuccinelli was anti-science. that ken cuccinelli sued the university of virginia s attorney general for its research on climate change. now, that may sound like an obtuse issue. but that was an appeal that really stuck. and i also think we re looking now i don t know whether president clinton or the former secretary state hillary clinton will show up tonight, but clearly they are identified very much with this victory if he wins. the exit poll also asked voters throughout virginia how they feel about the tea party. this is fascinating. 30% of voters in virginia say they support the tea party. 43% say they are opposed. david, this is interesting. let s take another point here. the poll also asked voters who they think is more to blame nfo the federal shutdown. 49% blame republicans in congress. joining me now right across the potomac is nbc political director chuck todd. we were looking at movies of the clintons joining mcauliffe in what looked like a victory performance. obviously that hasn t happened yet. we re getting good numbers from our nbc experts. your thoughts. well, here s the best way to look at who voted today. this looks a lot more like 2012 than 2009 here in virginia. remember, 2009 was a more conservative electorate. it was an electorate that did not look very democratic and we had the republican bob macdonald landslide. you put up those numbers on abortion at 61% essentially the pro-choice position. in 2012 in virginia, it was 63%. so within margin of error. so you re seeing the national, the type of voter that came out in 2013 looks a lot more like 2012 which would be good news for terry mcauliffe which is why we re comfortable characterizing it as a mcauliffe lead right now. the other thing that strikes me right now is given the president we have exit polled virginia now every time we talked about the president s job approval rating. as virginia goes, so goes the nation. this is the lowest approval rating we ve recorded on election day in virginia since he s been in office. he had a 48% approval rating in 2009. down to 46% tonight. when the health care law has a higher approval rating in virginia than the president himself, the folks in the white house got a realize here in virginia, if they got a problem here they got a problem nationally. isn t it interesting and i ve watched it on this program every night. although the president is down, there s no doubt the morale of his people is down right now because of the relentless assault on his program, health care, and the other issues that have bugged him like syria and the rest of it. there hasn t been a happy cloud scene in months now. his enemies are much less popular than him. in fact, they re growing in the unpopularity. that s what s so fascinating. what i find is what people are reacting to on the moderate side is not so much their enthusiasm for the president right now as much as their antipathy towards attackers. and not only that, chris, this is a huge if you re the national republicans and you re looking at this exit poll, you should potentially be in full panic mode if it turns out that this is what the electorate looks like and mcauliffe does win. because the president s at a 46% approval rating. normally you would say that s bad news for the democrats. but mcauliffe still was able to win. it shows what you just said is absolutely right. it s where the republicans position themselves here. outside of where virginia believes the republican party should be. so this is if you re a republican party strategist, this is a very scary moment for you because the president s not does not have a good approval rating here in virginia tonight. and guess what. it still looks like it s potentially good news for democrats. that is a nightmare scenario in 2014. here s another factor, chris. even though the public in virginia was split on whom to blame for the shutdown, if you were affected by the shutdown and according to this exit poll one out of three families was affected in virginia by the federal government shutdown, you voted almost two to one for terry mcauliffe. you rejected the strategy of shutdown that the republicans put forth. so even though you were divided in terms of theoretically who you blamed, if it affected you, you voted for mcauliffe. that becomes a voting issue for the people who are working for the government and got screwed around and played with and mocked a lot of that time. all this goes to the larger point that this election is not about barack obama. it s not even about health care. he s lucky it s not. if you look at the exit poll he s lucky it s not, but he s not running for anything. his enemies are on trial. the republicans are unlucky because it s about issues they ve been pressing that the public has turned on. and so it s about the shape of the electorate. later tonight we re going to get to the other look at this country from the northeastern look where a relatively moderate republican, non-tea party conservative is up for re-election. looks like he might well win it. yet here we re getting early in the evening a look. chuck, last word. chuck? yeah, go ahead, chris. i just wanted you to throw a little thought here about new jersey so we don t get understa unbalanced here. we re getting a hard look at virginia here. what will we get to maybe back that up in new jersey where they say, you know, we like this more moderate republican. and that s going to be the contrast tonight, right? to me this election day has been about not cuccinelli versus mcauliffe or obama care and all that. to me it s about the republican party and cuccinelli versus christie. christie went one way with his campaign. i was on the trail with him yesterday and everything was talking about the bipartisan way that he governs. he called himself a conservative, in fact he says it a lot. i ve noticed, by the way, the more someone calls themselves a progressive or conservative, it means people question whether they re really a progressive or conservative. he would say that. he would talk about governing in a bipartisan way. the messaging here among republicans is look at the last days of cuccinelli. send a message to the president. this is about health care. he s with rubio, with rand paul. so it s two different campaigns. and i tell you, one looks like it s headed to a landslide in favor of the republicans. and one could be responsible for what in virginia could be an historic defeat. remember, if mcauliffe does win, first time in 40 years that virginia will vote the same will not elect a governor opposite of the party in the white house, but elect a governor of the same party in the white house. chuck, great reporting. we ll be back to you again and again tonight. thank you howard fineman, expertise at the table and david corn. couldn t think of better guys to have here. coming up, terry mcauliffe keyed in on women s issues to win votes. it s a strategy they will try to use against republicans. the gender gap, a big plus for democrats. we ll see if it pays off tonight. the virginia governors race, too early to call by the experts. but msnbc mcauliffe with the lead. this is hardball, the place for politics. when we made our commitment to the gulf, bp had two big goals: help the gulf recover and learn from what happened so we could be a better, safer energy company. i can tell you - safety is at the heart of everything we do. we ve added cutting-edge technology, like a new deepwater well cap and a state-of-the-art monitoring center, where experts watch over all drilling activity twenty-four-seven. and we re sharing what we ve learned, so we can all produce energy more safely. our commitment has never been stronger. we continue to watch the numbers come in down in virginia where nbc news is characterizing the governors race there as too early to call. but democrat terry mcauliffe is leading. back with more results in a minute. customer erin swenson ordered shoes from us online
their theories. the big question, and i think, jeff, you said this, a reward would be pennies on the dollars. exactly. why isn t there a reward posted? a reward would be pennies on the dollar for what this search is costing. thanks for joining us. good evening. it s 11:00 on the east coast. 11:00 a.m. in malaysia. we begin with several pieces of information. item one, the search zone is focusing on the southwest coast of australia. item two, investigators tell us the path it took, the path caught on radar suggests the rout was preprogrammed to hit certain navigational points. item three, the fbi is examining data from the captain s home flight simulator. we have a lot to get to. first, because these developments have been stacking up day after day, i just want to take a moment tonight to try to get everyone back on the same page with what we know so far. it begins on the morning of the 8th, flight 370 takes off from kuala lumpur bound for beijing. the final stream from the acars data reporting system is received on the ground at 1:07. then at 1:19, the first officer utters first round, leaving malaysian air space, telling controllers, good night. two minutes later, the radar transponder cuts out or is turned off. thai military radar is following it and between 1:21 and 1:28 a.m. detects that left turn back toward the west and south. at 1:30 a.m., air traffic controllers lose contact with the plane. acars transmission does not happen. this what is believed to be flight 370 is tracked way off course. from there there s no solid information. we only know according to a satellite ping received at 8:11 in the morning, investigators say the jet turned north or south and flew into those two huge arcs of territory in open ocean. investigators now are focusing closer on that southern route. we ll talk to a u.s. navy commander involved in that. a major development, one that everyone hopes will bring badly needed answers. more now from kuala lumpur. [ speaking foreign language ] reporter: a mother s grief and frustration finally boiling over. relatives of the missing passengers today storming into a normally subdued briefing room, demanding answers. after about five chaotic minutes, she and others are dragged out by malaysian officials. the malaysian government says they regret the incident, but the reality is neither they nor anyone seems much closer to solving the mystery of what happened to flight 370. could a clue be found in the pilot s home flight simulator? malaysian authorities say data from the simulator was deleted on february 3rd, more than a month before the plane went missing. the fbi today saying it has sent a copy of the simulator s hard drive to its forensics lab in quantico, virginia, hoping to recover the deleted files. the malaysian authorities also disclosed a tantalizing detail. they have new radar information about the plane s path, provided by another country. what exactly it shows the malaysians aren t saying. meanwhile, operational crews are beginning to narrow their search, believing it s more likely the missing jet traveled along the southern corridor, away from the heavily pop populated asian continent. investigators say they re focusing on an area roughly the size of new mexico, about 1600 miles off their southwest coast, using what information they know about currents and the plane s possible last position to make an educated guess on just where it might be. we are going to talk to a u.s. navy commander in that region. kyung lah joins us. you were in the room with heart-breaking pleas from relatives of the missing passengers. are they feeling that same frustration, that sense of just kind of anger? reporter: that anger and anguish, yes. that s felt across all nationalities, all the families here. and while it is a mystery for the rest of the world, for them it s very much about the loss of human life. this mystery about what s happened to fathers, sons, mothers, daughters. but as far as what that other woman said, calling the malaysian government liars, we haven t heard that from the people who are malaysian citizens. because frankly we haven t had any access to them. as far as the chinese families, they absolutely feel that across the board, we re hearing it out of beijing and here. they don t believe the malaysian government has been transparent at all. they feel they have botched this investigation. the government for its part, anderson, saying that the best way that they can help these families is to simply find the plane. kyung, appreciate the reporting from kuala lumpur. later on in the program i m going to speak to the family of paul weeks who was on the plane and was on the way to a new job in mongolia. he s an engineer. he actually gave his wedding ring and watch to his wife in case something happened. i m going to talk to his brother and sister about that. i want to bring in evan perez breaking the navigation story for us tonight. some of this can get really technical, evan. just to start with explain exactly what a way-point is and what is significant about this information we re getting. think about your gps. you can enter longitude and latitude in your gps to try to direct you, navigate you to a particular place. now in the sky for pilots, they also have to include altitude. so essentially it s a place in the sky where a pilot can direct to direct an aircraft and the computer system on board the aircraft to take the aircraft. and so the navigational systems on the plane essentially uses these five digit codes to direct where to take the aircraft, anderson. so explain the breaking news on this tonight. what is new that we now know? well, one of the things that we ve been wondering is how the investigators know that the aircraft deviated from its course. we know there is some radar. but how can they know with certainty? we know that the investigators have discovered that the aircraft went to two specific way-points away from the course thought was scheduled to go towards beijing. so what they believe this indicates is that whoever was doing this, whoever moved the aircraft off its scheduled course, specifically was directing it to these particular way-points. again, away from its scheduled course. if it was being manually flown it probably would not have headed to these way-points, is that correct? that s the understanding the investigators are looking at. now when a pilot normally turns an aircraft using the yoke, they feel if somebody was manually turning the aircraft it wouldn t specifically go to these particular way-points. so they believe this indicates perhaps that someone with some skill, someone who had some knowledge, entered these way-points for the aircraft to go to these particular places. and then of course it disappears. it doesn t answer the final question that we all have which is who did this, why and where did the aircraft go after it disappeared, anderson. and when were these entered in. evan perez, appreciate it. this seems like evidence pointing towards human intervention. the question was it pilots doing their jobs or someone up to no good? with us former cia counterintelligence expert and others. i m confused by these way-points and what the significance of the idea of having these two way-points is. can you try to explain it? a way-point really is a definition of the route in the sky. that s something that somebody would enter in. absolutely. but two particular different ones? we keep going back to there were two particular way-points. i don t see where those way-points came into play on this. i see the airplane might have been directed toward them. as a matter of fact, i looked on an en route chart to try to find the way-points that allegedly they turned toward. i still contend that the way-point they were headed for was a diversionary airport and specifically entered in by the captain. that s conjecture. i may fall on my sword on that one. but i don t see where the acars machine could actually i know through our dispatch process where they would know exactly what was put into that machine. they just don t know. that s not information they utilize or is helpful to them specifically. and jeff, the fact that this pilot deleted information from his simulator, you can look at it with a nefarious interpretation of that or he s an organized guy. he s cleaning up his files. what do you make of it? we only have part of the information on that. in order to determine whether it was nefarious or not or benign we need to know the other part. that is were there other flights on that simulator that he didn t delete. so in other words, what s left on the hard drive of that simulator and what is absent on the hard drive of that simulator. if only selective routes have been taken out of it, only a portion of his experience on the simulator has been deleted, then that makes me raise my eyebrow and says i find it difficult to find a benign explanation for that. les? i understand your point, jeff. but the way i m looking at it is from the standpoint of maybe there was a flight that pilots are organized people. and they feel that maybe the hard drive is going to take too much room and they delete a particular flight. but on a humorous note it might have been a profile he might have been practicing for his recurrent training and just a profile because this is not the kind of thing you can really do. but he may have deleted it because he was embarrassed it didn t go well or something to that effect. it s open to interpretation. mary, you ve been involved with the fbi in these investigations. are there circumstances where they couldn t retrieve the data because now the fbi and quantico willing be looking at it? yes. in circumstances where they can t retrieve the data is in instances where someone has erased it and knows how to do it effectively. you don t just erase you overwrite it or destroy certain things. you have to not just erase it but take extra pains. that too might be very interesting to show how they have overwritten it or erased it or deleted certain things. when i was inspector general we worked aviation crimes with the fbi s aviation crimes unit. and we many times had to recover computer data. they were pretty good. so i would bet on the fbi. i think they will be able to get whatever was on there. i just have to believe they re going to be able to see what those files were. unless and i would be surprised to learn this unless this erasure was so good and competent it wasn t just erased but overwritten. how complex an operation is this? might it take weeks or months? i don t think so, anderson. you re talking about hours and days rather than weeks and months. they ve got a tremendous capability. but remember just as in this case we ve had countries who have been reluctant to share with us their radar information because it shows what their true capabilities are, the united states if they have information that tells us well no good will come of it, we can t help those missing by releasing this in such a way and show our capability, they may not do so. i would hope that they would err on the side of getting that information out there. but we too have to protect our capabilities. mary, you raise an interesting point. that even if they can t find what the information that s been overwritten, the mere fact that information was intentionally overwritten can be meaningful. it depends what the erasure is. i guess i have to confess this. all of us who have flight simulators, you want to land, try to see if you can land. most of us don t do it successfully. but you want to try to see if you can land at the weirdest places on earth. you want to see if you re really good. so just flying around the earth and seeing different places might not tell us much of anything. that s what you do with like a microsoft flight simulator. where they went, what was there, what wasn t there, what s missing, the pains taken to take it away, if anyone else was on the flight simulator. all those things. i m pretty confident if it s there to be gotten that the fbi will get it. they re just so good at it. jeff, the fbi is also we re told analyzing the copilot s computer. you see a number of sort of cumulative acts, operational acts. what do you mean by that? what i mean by that, anderson, is nothing significant in the crime or terrorism world happens without some planning, casing and the act itself if you re going to be successful. those are the operational acts that lead up to a major incident or terrorism crime. rehearsals on the flight simulator might be interesting to go back and see what other routes had this chap captain flown in the months and weeks prior to this particular incident. on the simulator you mean. or in real life. what other trips has he taken. why as a senior captain did he bid the airline people will know what i m speaking about that he bid this trip. was this a good trip for a captain with his seniority or was this kind of a dog of a trip but he bid it? that could raise questions about okay, there s not a good reason for him to take this trip. there must be something else afoot. mary, do you agree with that? yeah. but there s a really important point, too. he makes a great point. because just flying on the simulator we can all fly weird places on the simulator. but you would have had to have gone there to make the contacts. because what s the point of knowing how to land someplace if once you get there you can t do anything with yourself, with the plane, with the plot. so there has to be more than that on the computer. there has to be additional contacts. by the way, since it was the copilot who spoke last and whose voice sounds normal, what we also want to know is much more information about him and is this how he spoke to air traffic controllers? other people who fly with him need to provide a lot of information about him. he s the only one we know that s living and talking when the turn is made. again, though, mechanical anomalies is still very much at play for investigators. that s something we re going to look at tonight as well. jeff beaty, good to have you on. mary schiavo as well. les abend will stick around. two of his colleagues will join us. we ll run through all the evolving scenarios investigators are looking at now, including some you ve been tweeting us about. tweet us using #ac360. follow me @andersoncooper. next intensifying focus off australia. we re going to hear from a commander in the u.s. navy s seventh fleet which has planes and vessels in the area. later we ll dig deeper into the possibility of a fire on board and parallels to the crash of swiss air flight 15 years ago. what can we learn from that flight that might be applicable to this? we ll be right back. ameriprise asked people a simple question: in retirement, will you outlive your money? 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[ meows ] the internet of everything is changing everything. cisco. tomorrow starts here. or it s pittsville, brah. it s never too late to learn a foreign language! go and smell the roses! president obama weighed in today on the search for flight 370 and america s role in the search. listen. we have put every resource we have available at the disposal of the search process. there has been close cooperation with the malaysian government. and so not just ntsb but fbi. anybody who typically deals with anything related to our aviation system is available. and so our thoughts and prayers are with the families, but i want them to be assured that we consider this a top priority and we re going to keep on working. and chief among the hardest working people on the planet tonight members of the u.s. navy s seventh fleet in that southern search area off australia on the ocean and above it using aircraft that can detect almost anything. 26 countries involved. cooperation according to the commander is mostly good. though indonesia has refused to allow a number of search planes to go through the air space. commander marks joins us now. commander marks, i know you can t comment on reports about indonesia not allowing u.s. aircraft to fly over air space today. but i want to ask you on this southern route, to you is that the most hopeful? is that the most important area to search now? i think you just have to look at the areas that have been least searched. so we first covered the gulf of thailand. we completely saturated that. we moved to the andeman sea. we completely saturated that. flying from kuala lumpur, we penetrated deeply into the bay of bengal. that s from our side because the indians were flying over there, too. i think really it s simply a matter of this southern area has been searched the least. so we re out here and australia is out here. and at this point that s all you can do. you find the areas where you haven t looked, where there may have been information that came from satellites whether that s military or governmental or commercial, and you go to those. and so that s what we re doing. if you are able to find debris, does that automatically mean that you would be able to figure out where the plane went down if in fact the plane did go down in the water? would you be able to automatically figure out based on tides and time? great question. and the currents and the wind and the sea state plays such a huge factor. being so long from that initial flight takeoff, it s such a huge variable. so what we normally do in the u.s. navy, when we come upon this situation we immediately launch a helicopter and we establish a central point where we think the last known contact was. that s called a datum. so from this datum we calculate the currents and the winds. and that is why these search areas slowly expand. and so for what we usually do for a search and rescue you look at that first 72 hours. it can grow fairly big but within your helicopter range. well, now that is completely a different scenario. and the current and the winds and the set and drift on there play a huge factor. we can track that slightly we can drop a sonar buoy and get a kind of a gps position that tracks the environmentals, but it s such a long period of time it is certainly a huge factor. and really no one can say if a piece of debris started in one area where it is ten days later. this may be a dumb question, but are you still hopeful? are you losing hope? with each day that passes by this gets more and more difficult. you know, this what is we train for. and our pilots, our air crews, even our maintainers on the ground, our mission is to fly these planes and to search. and the way i think of it personally is, each of those people on that aircraft, they have families associated with them and friends. and i know they want closure no matter what happens. and i know if it were me and my family i d want the u.s. navy out here looking and that s what we re doing. commander marks, i m glad you re out there. thank you. you re welcome. thank you. incredibly difficult task right now. digging deeper, i want to bring in a veteran of these kinds of things, david gallo co-leader of the search for air france flight 447 also retired airline pilot ron brown. david, you heard the commander there saying they re searching off the coast of australia because they ve already basically thoroughly searched the northern part of the indian ocean. do you basically just keep on expanding out until they ve searched the entire area the plane could possibly have reached given the amount of fuel it had? anderson, we need to find some clue about where that aircraft is. we can t be mapping the entire indian ocean. and if that plane impacted the water, even came down gently there s going to be some clue. and the navy is well suited to be able to find those bits of that plane. i m hoping still with the families that it s sitting on land someplace. but this is the way to exclude the ocean. david, it s interesting though what the commander said which was that given the amount of time that has gone by, even if they find some debris on the water, that doesn t guarantee that they ll be able to pinpoint where the plane entered the water if in fact it did, correct? right. well, air france 447 it was five days. i thought that was a long time after the tragedy before the first wreckage was found. but it was two years, not continuously at sea but giving mobilizations and the like, two years before we found that aircraft on the bottom. so you re right. it s no guarantee. but you know what, there s some very talented modelers out there that can look at wind currents with models and then backtrack that information to try to find the location. and even if it s not exactly right or if there s a lot of error in it it cuts down the search area. could cut it down dramatically. it s important stuff. ron i ve been getting a lot of questions on twitter about this new search area. maria asks, how busy is the flight path? did the plane have enough fuel to get that far? as far as we know it had enough fuel. hello, we have breaking news now on the search for malaysia airlines flight 370. the australian broadcasting corporation is reporting that authorities may have found objects related to the missing plane, and they are citing the prime minister tony abbott. australia has been leading the search in the far southern reaches of the plane s possible path. we re also hearing that the prime minister may in fact address parliament say thing is new and credible information. it s come to light from satellite imagery. two possible objects related to the search have been dent tide. they have deployed an aircraft to inspect these objects. three more aircraft will follow. once those extra aircraft arrive, they will conduct an extensive search. we re being told that the task of locating these objects is extremely difficult right now. australia s search operations centered in the city of perth. andrew stevens joins us from there now live. andrew, what are the details that you have on what they may or may not have found. my mistake, we do not have andrew. but he has been covering this. what we have been hearing over the last few hours is that this search area has dramatically narrowed from an area of almost 3 million square miles, now down to an area about the size of the state of colorado, about 110,000 square miles. still, a massive area, but we know that the focus has been on the southern arc, right at the extreme end of that southern arc off the coast of western australia. and apparently the officials managed to narrow down the scope of the search area, because they yielded a lot more information from the satellite pings, which the plane had been giving off every hour for about seven our eight hours or so. so what we know right now is that we re hearing from australian authorities that there is possible debris related to this plane. 13 days now or 12 days now they have been searching for this missing flight. and now we have what could be credible evidence of debris floating in the water. of course, there are still many unanswered questions, what is that debris, how far has it floated. richard quest is standing by in new york with more on this. and so richard, could this be the break that everyone has been waiting for? oh, absolutely. you have to put it in terms that it s unlikely that the australian prime minister would be holding a news conference if there wasn t a high degree no one is going to say, and i suspect he s not going to come out and specifically say because there would have they have have to retrieve the debris and ensure that there is a very high degree of certainty about it, but bearing in mind the aus t l australians in the last 48 hours took over the searching down in the south china sea sorry, the south indian ocean. enormous number of assets have been deployed, including the uss kidd which sent its planes to the western coast of australia for that very purpose, john. they said it would be easier for long-range search to search out of perth rather than being stuck on a ship in the middle of the ocean. so it s fascinating tonight that the australian prime minister is going to make this press statement, floating debris believed to be potentially from malaysian airlines flight 370. we have had this sort of news before, just a week ago with the chinese photographs, the satellite photographs. but i m supposing that there must be a fair degree of certainty or at least confidence in what they re finding. we understand that prime minister tony abbott of australia has spoken to his malaysian counterpart about this news which we are now getting to us here at cnn. that two possible objects have been found. richard, sorry to interrupt, but this does not mean that this is where the plane went down because this debris could have floated quite a distance. in the number of days since the incident happened, absolutely. but one thing i do know is that the oceanographers will not only have done the models of where debris would have floated but they would have gone further and written specific models for this area. so they will now be thinking the, we know the time, we know the water temperature, we know the winds, we know the prevailing weather during the last week. they will be factoring that in, the oceanographers, and they are extremely experienced at being able to take that information and work out roughly where the debris will be. now how far, if you re asking me how far could that debris have moved over the last ten days, i don t know. but if you look at the map that we re seeing at the moment and you interpret where the route of the aircraft was, and what could have happened in the last 10, 12 days, then you start to see why the australians believe that there is a strong level of confidence. and on one other point, in the last days or so, more and more people have come to the conclusion that it is the south china sorry, the south indian ocean, i beg your pardon, the south indian ocean which was the more realistic of the two paths, not the northern path or western path up towards india and kazakhstan. richard, what we are hearing is that the debris was detected by satellite imagery. a very similar situation to what we had with the chinese satellites about a week or so ago, detecting that debris off the coast of vietnam. that turned out to be a false start. but a lot of people were talking back then this was very large debris to be spotted by a satellite. so i know we re speculating here, but is that going to be a similar situation now, that this will be large pieces of debris because it has been seen by a satellite. the problem with the chinese pictures, almost from the moment there were many of us, myself included, that hoped it was correct. but quite quickly, experts on the 777 said because the chinese last friday the chinese put out a statement which they actually said how big the pieces of debris were. they said they were 70 x 70. quickly, experts of the 777 said there is no single piece of the aircraft that measures those dimensions. so that hugely assisted them in discounting that relatively quickly. i m assuming whoever s satellite they have used in this situation, they ve done exactly the same process. they ve locked up the debris. they measured it with a high degree of certainty. we have had debris from the moment this incident happened. we had a table drum richard, sorry if i may interrupt. we have andrew teastevens on th line now. he s covering this story for us from perth where the search on the australian end has been based from, perth is the state capital of western australia. andrew, very early stages but it is coming from the prime minister s office. they are deploying assets to try and inspect this debris from flight 370. what else can you tell us? that s right, john. at this point we have to be very cautious. what we can tell you is that the australian state-owned media operation here is saying that tony abbott, the australian prime minister is telling the house that two pieces of debris have been spotted in the southern indian ocean. he says that they could possibly be related to mh-370. certainly at this stage, not saying definitely. a plane has been diverted from its earlier search area to the destination where this debris is believed to be floating. that is due to be on the scene around about now, john. and we understand another three aircraft have already been dispatched to that same area. at the moment, what we can see is tony abbott is being reported by the australian broadcasting corporation, those two pieces of objects have been found, and the possibility is that they are from mh-370. andrew, we ve had this situation over the last 24 hours or so that there s been this new radar information coming from the pings which were given off hourly by flight 370 and with that satellite information they have managed to narrow down this search area. so describe the area that they have been looking at, which is where it appears that these objects are. yes, that s right. i mean, it has been narrowed down significantly, given the fact that the malaysians only 24 hours ago saying they are putting equal emphasis on the northern and southern corridors, which is a combined area, roughly the size of the australian land mass. the southern corridor, they have narrowed their search down to that. so within that, there is a zone of 300,000, which they are focusing on at the moment, john. we don t know why specifically they are focusing on this area. it is being reported that they have satellite intelligence from the u.s. and also from australian satellite sources, as well. obviously, satellites and radar is an important instrument. [ indiscernible ] more so there is a satellite surveillance facility in the center of australia, which is jointly operated but effectively run by the americans. we don t know what satellite information is coming from there. certainly it s been established from our u.s. sources the southern corridor has been a more likely search target based as well on the simple process of elimination, given that the northern corridor where it consists of at least 11 countries, some of which have very significant radar and technology, such as china, nothing has been seen or reported certainly from the northern corridor. so the u.s. has been deploying assets along the southern corridor and helping australia with the search. andrew, stand by. for anybody just joining us, this is the breaking new. the australian broadcasting news is quoting that the prime minister is saying two possible objects related to the search for flight 370 have been identified by satellite in the southern indian ocean and right now a royal australian air force plane is heading to excuse me is heading to that area to try and find establish exactly what this debris may be. other planes are heading there, as well. we know that the meshes are there, new zealand also has planes and assets in the region. but it is the australians who are taking the lead in all of this. i would like to go back to richard quest right now. richard, we had a very similar situation to this about a week or so ago. we were just talking about it just a short moment ago when they did find debris on the satellite image by the chinese. turned out to be nothing. this seems a lot more substantive. okay, do we have richard? okay. i m sorry, richard has gone to work the phones to try to find out more about what we re dealing with. we still have andrew stevens on the line with us right now. okay, one moment, please. so andrew, we were talking about this area. we re also looking at a situation that this is a very remote part of the world and it s also a very deep ocean. so if there is debris on the surface, there s the possibility there could be a lot of debris below the service with a lot of challenges trying to get there. absolutely, and also we need to take into account the currents and tidals, so any debris that s on the surface will have moved significant distances, perhaps hundreds of kilometers from the zone where that debris may have been found. so a lot facing the searchers, again the fact that some places in the indian ocean is 7,000 meters deep and the average depths is around 4,000 meters. so there is enormous problems and challenges still facing the searches. it s also key to note that the devices which are triggered when a plane crashes into the sea, will send out distress signals for about one month. so we re about halfway into that one month. so there is a time limit on locating this aircraft. [ indiscernible ] so huge amounts of challenges for the search parties, but we can t rule out how significant this latest news is, because we have gone from an area of 2.2 million square kilometers down to what could be a significant sighting in the southern ocean. resources are now being focused in the southern ocean, in this area of the southern ocean. so just to recap, we do know that an orion aircraft is expected to be on the scene where the satellite images picked up two pieces of debris. we don t know with any degree of certainty if they are related to the plane, but an orion is due there about now. it is 11:45 in the morning here in perth and three more planes dispatched. so we should get some better understanding of exactly what is there. we have andrew stevens on the line with us in perth. we have richard quest on the line in new york. i would like both of you to stay with us. we do have i would like to read that statement once more in case you are joining us that we have from the australian prime minister. this is what he told parliament a short time ago. new and credible information has come to light for the search of flight 370 in the southern india ocean. information based on satellite imagery of two possible objects related to the search have been identified. a royal australian aircraft has been diverted to inspect the object and due to arrive about now. the statement reads, three more aircraft will also follow and conduct a more expensive search. the task of locating these objects is extremely difficult. the prime minister has spoken to his malaysian counterpart. that is what we re being told. the prime minister has said to the house just a short time ago in the australian capital. richard quest is on the line with us right now. we know, richard, there are a lot of assets in this region, including the most advanced sub hunter that the americans have, the p-8. no doubt that will be deployed in some manner to look at this debris? oh, absolutely. they will be sending everything they ve got and a great deal more over to find this. the fact that the prime minister now, look, john, you re much more of a student of australian politics than i am. but the fact that the pm chose to make a statement in the house, new and credible information is the phrase he uses. not just we found some debris, but credible information. based on satellite imagery of objects possibly related to the search. and listen to this, following specialist analysis of this imagery, two possible objects have been identified. now, i m guessing the phraseology there was, he doesn t say we found two objects and we re looking to identify them. he says the objects have been identified. so i m starting to come to the conclusion that the prime minister wouldn t make such a statement to the house if he didn t have a very strong view that this was not only credible, but had been interpreted and accepted. okay. so we re now at the stage where after 12 days of what has been a very frustrating search, possibly the biggest search ever for a missing civilian for a missing airliner. we now are at the position where the australian aircraft is over the area where two objects have been identified and we are awaiting official word. it is pretty much my understanding, that that plane is there and that it is due to arrive back in australia, on australian soil in about four hours from now. no doubt if there is any information to come from, this it will be radioed back. so we should find out exactly what may or may not have taken place or been found rather in that search. but at this stage, as you said, richard, this is looking to be by far the most promising lead that we have had since this began. and it is also a reflection, i think, as andrew stevens was just reporting from perth a moment ago, of the number of assets being deployed. when the royal australian air force were given the job of searching the south indian ocean, they took at it with gusto in the sense they were very honest about it. they made it quite clear that this was a huge task. adding to australia s own very sophisticated ability, remember, it was the australian air investigation that investigated the engine explosion out of singapore. they have enormous experience in their own right doing searches. you know this better than i will, john. as a maritime nation, as an island, albeit a continent, australian has exceptionally good maritime searching abilities. so what the prime minister says, look, i can t say it is and i can t say it isn t. but having done this long enough, you get a feeling of what might be happening and the pm speaking to the house in that way is very strong, credible evidence. absolutely. richard, stand by for us. i would like to go back to andrew stevens. andrew, it was just yesterday that the australians were saying that this search of this area could take up to weeks and now they have narrowed it down to what could be a matter of hours. in fact, we are expecting some kind of statement from prime minister tony abbott maybe in about 25 minutes from now. i think the key here is the information and where it s coming from. this is satellite information, so the physical search in the absence of any specific information about pin pointing areas by satellite, which have taken several weeks, even though it has been significantly refined as we now know, it still would have been several weeks to comb that area. now, though, satellite information, we don t know where that s come from, but it is very sophisticated satellite operations, operated jointly by the australians and the u.s. in central australia. so the information obviously coming from satellites, that allows them to pinpoint this area and as richard said, given the number of false starts here and the fact that the malaysian government has taken so much criticism, tony abbott is going to be very hesitant to say anything that he may have to backtrack on. so at this stage, what he s telling the house is very significant. remember that there are currents, we are 13 days into the search. so whatever debris seen there, it will have moved considerable distances from a crash site. so there s still a lot of work to do. we just need to underline we don t know whether this debris is linked. it was a false start with the chinese last week, which turned out to be nothing. s okay. if you are just joining us, the news is now coming from the australian prime minister that significant objects have been identified in the southern indian ocean. he released this information just a short time ago to the australian parliament. this is what he said. the australian maritime safety authority has received information based on satellite imagery of objects possibly related to the search. following specialist analysis of this satellite imagery, two possible objects related to the search have been identified. we must keep this in mind, the task of locating these objects will be extremely difficult, and it may turn out that they are not related to the search for flight mh-370. nevertheless, i did want to update the house on this potentially important development. okay, that was the australian prime minister tony abbott addressing the lower house of the house of parliament just a short time ago. richard, what was notable there, and understandable is that word of caution coming from tony abbott that this may not actually turn out to be anything, but it seems at this stage that it might just be. indeed. tony abbott, now we heard a little bit more. he has given a caveat to it, that it might not be 370. so he s i don t use the word, i would never say this about a prime minister, that he s hedging his bets, but the fact that he made the statement, he didn t have to make a statement, john. he could have just simply put out a press release. the royal australian air force could have put out a statement. the maritime search authority could have just put out a statement. he says it s credible. he says it s confirmed or satellite has confirmed the objects. i m guessing and assuming having looked at this for some time that they have very they have got a very realistic view that this is what they ve been searching for. let us be clear, it would be a blessing that they have found something in the south indian ocean. but this would really just be the beginning of the next part of the whole process. so in other words, we find more debris, work out the back workout where the debris may have come from using currents and temperatures and slowly start to see if you can find the bigger debris field. what we know, john, is the debris field, and there s always something on a plane that floats. the life rafts, the seat cushions. part of the wing, part of the tail. the moment they find a sizable debris field, and there should still be something there, they are very much closer to finding the aircraft itself. and let s just look at some of the politics of how this played out. this is cnn breaking news. i m don lemon in new york. and the breaking news is that new information is coming from australia being reported by the australian broadcasting company that two objects possibly belonging to that missing flight 370, two objects have been found off the coast of australia. david suchi, who is a former faa safety investigator, this appears to be a significant development, the most significant development we ve had so far. very much so, don. the report says, credible information. how long has it been since we heard that? this is verbatim, the prime minister of australia says, new and credible information has come to light in relation to the search for malaysia airlines flight mh-370 in the southern indian ocean. the australian maritime safety authority has received information based on satellite imagery of objects possibly related to the search. following specialist analysis of the satellite imagery, two possible objects related to the search have been identified. i can inform the house that a royal australian air force orion has been diverted to attempt to locate the objects. this orion is expected to arrive in the area about this time. three more aircraft will follow this orion. they are tasked for more intensive followup search. we re also hearing there will be a press conference coming from sho shortly. the information is coming from the prime minister. it is almost midnight here in the united states eastern time, and it s almost noon in perth, australia. i want to go now to mary schiavo. she is standing by now. again, this is a very significant development. i don t think australia would be doing this if they didn t think there was some importance to this, mary. oh, i agree. i am sure they realize how important, even if this is the wreckage, even if it s the very first piece, the clue also tumble forth, was there a fire, an explosion, do they have the pitting p pitting patterns. the evidence can finally start, and most important they can take where the pieces are, reverse the current track, find out where the currents have led over the past 12 days, and then start in earnest the search for the block boxes. australia now saying that they believe they have found two objects that are significant here that may be related to the missing malaysian airline mh-370. that plane vanished on march 8. it s been missing now for 13 days without a clue. they found two objects in the southern indian ocean. a p-3 ship has been directed to this new destination and three other aircraft are being dispatched, as well. again, it is almost midnight here in the u.s. eastern time and noon in perth, australia, where this is very close. m let s go to cnn s richard quest. australia released information saying they were going to expand their search off their coast and now we re finding this. let s remember what the prime minister of australia said in the house of parliament. he said the australian maritime safety authority has received satellite imagery of objects. now, listen to this. he says he calls this credible, tony abbott says it s credible, and he says, two possible objects have been identified? does he have stronger evidence that they are from 370? we know now that aircraft are heading over in that direction. the pm has warned that retrieving those objects will not be easy. but this, don, is you don t get a prime minister standing up in the house of commons or the houses of parliament in australia and using words like that. he caveated it by saying it may not be anything, but this is the best we ve had so far, don. this is the strongest lead. and richard quest, we want to hear from the prime minister just a short time ago. listen. the australian maritime safety authority has received information based on satellite imagery of objects possibly related to the search. following specialist analysis of this satellite imagery, two possible objects related to the search have been identified. that s the australian prime minister speaking there at the house of representatives just a short time ago. richard quest, stand by. mary schiavo, stand by. everyone stand by.
they are all boston strong and we salute them. i m anderson cooper. good night. i hope you were with us during the last hour and you were inspired as watching adrianne haslet-davis 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, who s 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? that s 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, we re 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 we re 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 ladder-like 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 don t 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 o brien, former department of transportation inspector who represents accident victims and their families. richard, let s 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 i m just keeping an eye forgive me, i m keeping an eye to see if he will stop me. he said they will go several more days. here s angus houston. okay. good morning. i m accompanied by the same team as on previous occasions. i m pleased to be here to brief you today. today i can report some further encouraging information regarding the search for missing flight mh-370. 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. yesterday s 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 mh-370. 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 it s now 33 days since the aircraft went missing it s 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 today s search. a modified apc-3 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 shield s 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. i m 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 plane s engines might have flamed out and it s 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 that s 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 there s 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, we ll 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 mh-370. i stress and i can t stress enough the families have to be considered when you report on awl of this. because they want a bit of certainty. we don t 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, i m informed by experts, that there s 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 that s because, you know one ping er has run out of battery life and there s one running, or we just haven t got close to it, i don t know. but the fact of the matter is we haven t had any further evidence of two pingers going off in the same area or at the same time. isn t it curious that two pingers, the frequency to be 3.3 on both of them? well, i won t get in to that because basically the analysis on that i don t 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 don t. 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 wouldn t 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? we ll look at that. i don t 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 what s down there? have you considered that? well, i m not running the search. we ve got we ve 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. there s 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 p-3 aircraft deploying in the field. that provides more sensors in the vicinity of ocean shield without having a ship there to pro-reduce the background noise. some very good work that was only started after the mh-370 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. hp-3 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 there s 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 haven t made any further detections. in terms of the analysis of the signals that it picked up, i ll come back to you on that. i m not sure where we are at with that. i haven t had any advice that the analysis is complete at this stage. when you began this search and looking at the odds, the size of the ocean, the size of the search area, what do you think the chances are that you would make an announcement like this today? well, i would say very quickly caution again what we are picking up is a great lead. we have to caution before we say this is the final resting place. there s still a ways to go. if you asked me when i arrived last sunday night, i would have been probably more pessimistic than i am now. i m now optimistic we will find the aircraft, or what is left of the aircraft in the not too distant future, but we haven t found it yet because this is a very challenging business. we re relying on transmissions that have come and gone. i just like to have that hard evidence, a photograph evidence that there s pieces of aircraft down there to know that actually this is the final resting place of mh-370. based on this diagram, will you can see the scale on the bottom. the scale on the bottom is on the left at 01020 kilometers. you can see it is a relatively small area. again, i narrowed it down to 25 kilometers. i m confident that we have an area there which provides a promising area to exploit. note the satellite hand shake calculation and ping seven. that s another source of evidence. so i think that we re looking in the right area. but i m not prepared to say, to confirm anything until such time as somebody lays eyes on the wreckage. are you being cautious for the families and the sake of precision, but we are looking at a case where we have frequencies, which are consistent with a black box. that s been verified by the black box. by acoustic analysis. they have been consistent, they have been sustain td and they are where the science suggests the plane is. yep. can you give a percentage, without holding you to it, 80%, 90%. i understand you have to express caution but how confident are you? i have confidence we re in the right area. but i m not going to give the final confirmation until somebody has seen wreckage. okay. i m not prepared to go this percentage or that percentage. you said you were to wait to get more transitions from ocean shield. for how many days do you want to keep the pinger locater working? the reason we want to do that is that there s no second chances. it looks like the signals we have picked up recently have been much weaker than the original signals we picked up. the batteries are starting to fade and as a consequence the signal is becoming weaker. we need to, as we say in australia, make hay while the sun shines. we need to get all of the data we can. by getting more data, we will be able to compress this area in to a much smaller area where we do the very difficult and challenging search with the autonomous underwater vehicle. bear in mind, we heard about the silt. the silt on the bottom will complicate that search. sometimes silt can be, you know, tens of meters thick. it s a very difficult environment. so, you know, the more effort we put in to location of where the transmission is coming from, the more certainty we will have that we will find something on the bottom of the ocean. what are they doing in the search area? what we are doing, we are not putting all of our eggs in one basket. we are continuing with all of the activities. we are continuing to look where 01 is and we are also doing a much more intense visual search. where the track spacing f you understand that. what an aircraft does. it s assigned to an area to search and then it will design a pattern with small spacing and it will cover the area very extensively and very intensively. that s what is happening now. that s what is happening in the wreckage in the area here would have moved with the ocean drift, the currents and waves and so on we are now searching the area where after 33 days the scientists, the analysts assess where the wreckage might be now. we hope we will ools also find something on the surface of the ocean that confirms that the aircraft basically entered the water at this location.submarin limitation in how deep they can dive. that s a classified area. all nations they don t declare how deep their submarines can go. the environment down here is around, we said previously 4500 meters. so what we re talking about, specialists underwater, autonomous vehicles and specialists other vehicles that could be used for recovery. so this is the domain in which you use those sorts of vehicles. so from here we will be looking further downstream for other vehicles that might be able to operate in the environment, if we find, if we find obviously the aircraft. mr. houston sorry. just one at a time. you first and then you. the difference between the points on the map is about 25 meters maximum. in the class we were told it could only pick up sounds a mile away from the black box. are you reassessing of how the sounds travel underwater at this point because you are detecting things that are much further apart. again, you heard the commodore say the bottom is a silt bottom. that absorbs sound. funny things happen depending on temperature, temperature layer answer so on and so forth. the characteristics of the water, the characteristics of the ocean floor all come in to play here. the other thing is that in terms of this area the ocean shield went there on the 5th of april. it is pulling the towed pinger locater since then. that s four or five days. it has searched that area continuously through that period of time. this is what we picked up at the moment. you ll note that the most recent detections are all down in the southern part of the area. on tuesday, the two signal were acquired. okay. it was around 1,000 matters above the seabed, 3,500 deployed. is that experts say that is consistent with what happened [ inaudible ] it is quite possible that there s currents down there which could have disturbed the debre and also as it was falling from the surface it would have dispersed over a large area, as well. it has been said we know more about the surface of the moon than the seabed of the ocean floor. that s probably right. we don t have accurate sampling of the currents in that particular area. the indication we have that silt is on the seabed is taken from samples taken some years ago and 130 miles away from the current position. they are in a database that we can access but gives an understanding of how little topography we have of the seabed. the concept of water movements an flows down there is one we have to take in to account. the families must take encouragement from what you have announced today. but as you said that confirmation must be visual from the autonomous sub. when is your understanding of when the sub could go down? do you have a time frame in mind, five to ten, 20 days. you mean the autonomous underwater vehicle? yes. we will send it down when we have exhaust ed the possibilities in terms of the surface search. this is a personal opinion. i don t think that time is very far away at all because i think the last signal we got was a very weak signal. if we continue to get signals, though, we will continue to search. for the simple reason that the underwater vehicle it operates at walking pace. okay. it has a relatively narrow swath and it takes days and days and days to cover even an area like this. in fact, this area you see here would take it we d be talking in terms of weeks, not just days. so the more time we spend getting the locational data the better off we will be when we come to the underwater search. remember what i said in my brief. essentially, it takes six times longer to cover the same area with the underwater submersible as it does with towed pinger on the surface. how long will you wait from the last ping you receive, or the last signal you receive, which as you said you last night, if you hear nothing more how many hours or days will you wait before deploying the autonomous vehicle? well with, i think those judgments have yet to be made. this is a very dynamic process. judgments are made on the basis of a lot of factors. and clearly we are not at that point yet. i can t give you any information at this time. i would imagine, though, it s not far away before we deploy something to go down and have a look. today? [ inaudible ] none of the debris we with found, thus far, has had a connection to mh-370. but we are now in a search area, and we are working very intensely and we are hopeful, we are hopeful that we might find something that has a connection to the aircraft. so we ll just have to wait and see how that goes. if we find anything of significance, we ll obviously let the media know. have you already been over that before in a broader pattern? i think we have probably been over on a broader pattern, but we haven t done it the way we are doing it now. you may remember over the last week we have been covering areas of 220,000 kilometers, areas the size of island or one of the largest provinces in china. we re now sending the same number of aircraft out to a search area which is much smaller. consequently we can do a much more intense, thorough search, visual search. before we were doing, if you like, an all sensor-type search, using radar and eyes, but what we are focus canned on right now is a i have yul search. visual range. i think the the range is two miles an i think that is visual search 101. we are searching 75,000 square kilometer cans. we keep going from nautical miles to kilometers. given the debris that was previous you believe has nothing to do with mh-370. is there any chance the frequencies have nothing to do with the transmission devices you were looking for? you said they match up to the frequencies and you don t believe them to be anything natural but could they be something unrelated? we think well, we have had the analysis done. it s nothing natural. it comes from a manmade device. and it s consistent with the locater on a black box. that s why we are more confident than we were before, but we have to lay eyes on it. one more question we are working. that s one of my roles to coordinate that. this week is very busy in perth because there s a big conference. that is true right now. we have thousands of people here at the moment. thousands of visitors. from the end of this week, we will have adequate accommodation to cater to the families and we will be keeping a very close eye on that. we are working very closely with the chinese ambassador and his staff, the malaysian high commissioner and hi staff, malaysian airlines and the west australian government, the city of perth and the city of free mantle to ensure that we can do everything possible to ensure the families are looked after and taken care of when they come to australia. we want them to we know it s a very sad time for them. but when they come, they will be looked after. we are very know cussed on that. and i must say the west australian government, the federal government both see this as a very, very high priority. thank you very much. thank you. perhaps the most significant information we have heard in a very long time. air chief marshall angus houston saying a number of important things. he described the new confirmation of pings as a great lead. he said heed quote now optimistic we will find what s left of the aircraft in the not too distant future. he s not confirming the aircraft has been found, but they have the sounds they have now heard again are consistent with flight data recorders. he says, quote, they are stable, distinct, clear signals that have been detected. the transmission is not of natural origin, which eliminates that it could be a whale or something natural on the seabed. they said it is a silty bottom of the ocean here in this area which has been complicating the sound, the transmission of sound. this is truly a significant evening. we are back with our panel. he didn t say they found the plane without saying it. it is as close as he will say without physical evidence. when he says i m optimistic we will find the aircraft in the not too distant future. i believe we re searching in the right area, not of natural origin, electrical equipment, equipment with an being a military man he s not going to go that final step until he has physical evidence. this is pretty much telling us he s got it. i agree. when the families are in consideration and that s what he is considering you can t give anything other than facts. they are handling this like a professional investigation now opposed to earlier on when announcements were coming out all over the place. this guy knows what he is doing and taking control of the investigation and being considerate of the families and very well done. the fact that new pings were heard is clearly a huge, huge step forward. i you confident they were going to reacquire it. i kept that to to myself. you could see the marshall had a more relaxed demeanor than i have seen him before. that would be confidence as far as i m concerned. the interesting thing, earlier in his conversation, he indicated not only did they have the pings from the flight data recorder opposed to the cockpit voice recorder. interesting. mary? same thing. i think that angus houston and the team there, they certainly expressed that they thought they had the pingers, they had the black box, they had the right site. it was all right there. they didn t put the crowning achievement on it. they didn t say we have the plane but i think everybody reads between the lines that they are saying that and so very important. i concur that they should use those black boxes and pingers, as long as they last. they might be in their final dying pulses, but it would simplify the length of the search because this is the first step in a long process. miles o brien, angus houston also saying the autonomous underwater vehicles will not be sent down until they have exhausted all possibilities in the search on the surface both for debris on the surface and for the pingers. houston also said that he did not anticipate that would be very far off. because of the weakening what he believes is the weakening of the signal that they are likely to go to those autonomous underwater vehicles relatively shortly. i think as the confident dense grows that this is grows that this is the location and more returns from the pingers, you can say with certainty when you stop hearing them what happened. where s we didn t know if it you a fluke before or not. with four or five and if we get to six and seven and they get less and less you can say with certainty the batteries are died. let s get the auv in the water and get busy with that. i m flabbergasted, not a single shred of debris has been found and they are on the pingers quite evidently. i d like to know what assets in the nonpublic realm, the secret realm were used to pinpoint this location. this can t be just luck. do you believe there s more information they are not giving out? i think they have a higher level of credibility on the information. i think they have one level deeper. they have got the experts who know this backwards basically. this is my supposition, but the experts are saying this is it but he s the last level of caution. you don t come out and do a press conference and make the sort of comments you quoted it, anderson. we will find the aircraft in the not too distant future. they know where that plane is now. david gallo, you coled the search for air france flight 447. so much has been made that it took two years to get the black box up but as you and i have talked the last several weeks a lot of time was eaten up by red tape, getting approvals to get to the site. once you are out there and have an idea where the wreckage is, i mean, when you look at the conditions under the water even with the silt, how confident are you they will be able to find the black boxes and in a relatively short order? i m confident they can find the black boxes. i have no doubt about that. i m not saying it is easy. that s a fairly tricky topographic area, on the north side of an undersea plateau that is about two miles high off the sea floor and the north side might have canyons, gullies and all sorts of stuff. it won t be easy but can still help on a survey. last thing you want are boulder and rocks scattered around on the sea floor. if silt is covering the sea floor it may help the sonar source. if you are just joining us a significant press conference from angus houston. coming as close as possible to saying they have, with a lot of confidence very close to finding this aircraft underneath the water. they said they will not confirm anything until they have a visual on wreckage. they obviously want to continue to search for debris, as well, on the surface of the water. none of which they have found thus far. they point out again, this is the significant part. the transmissions they have heard are not of natural origin. they are consistent with they are from man made objects and consistent with the flight data recorders. a lot more to talk about. we ll be right back. aflac. aflac, aflac, aflac! 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[ meows ] the internet of everything is changing everything. cisco. tomorrow starts here. the internet of everything is changing everything. disturbing the pantry. ortho crime files. a house, under siege. say helto home defense max. kills bugs inside and prevents new ones for up to a year. ortho home defense max. get order. get ortho®. meet your biggest competitor: philips slimstyle led bulb. beautiful quality light with a slim design, at a slim price. anybody have occasional constipation, diarrhea, gas, bloating? one phillips colon health probiotic cap each day helps defend against these digestive issues with three types of good bacteria. i should probably take this. live the regular life. phillips . good evening, everyone. major development in the flight 370 investigation. today i can report further encouraging information regarding the search for missing flight mh-370. on monday, ied a vied the towed 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. late yesterday afternoon and late last night perth time. confirming based on their analysis that those are not of natural origin, the sounds are not of natural origin. they are consistent with a flight data recorder. a great lead angus houston has called it. he said he is optimistic we will find what is left of the aircraft in the not too distant fuchlt saying a week ago he was not that optimistic but now he is saying this is a great lead. i believe we have searching in the right area, he went on to say a short time ago. i want to bring back our panel. david gallo, angus houston is saying now it s just probably not far off before they actually deploy the autonomous underwater vehicle to go down once they have exhausted the possibilities of finding more sound on the surface of the water. how will that work? what is that process? can you tell us? well, they are going to have to well, you have to retrieve the ppl on the end of the cable and then launch and recover using a crane. a torpedo-shaped object and means setting up a navigational grid on the bottom but a you can t use gps. the rhythm of the ship will change to the op-sec to allow them to launch and recover the vehicle. so a totally different ball game for the vessel. how does the autonomous vehicle work? is it like mowing the lawn, it just goes along a grid back and forth? yeah. they will tell it what grid they want it to run and then they will launch it off. it will go to the bottom and take an hour or two to get down to the bottom and then it will start to move along its path. every time it runs from north to south, the next time it comes back, it will move over 100 yards or something like that and come back on the next track. like cutting the grass, you want to overlap every path so you don t miss any spots. is it sending imagery back in realtime? sadly, no. that s world of sonar discover what sort of data is it? it is images? is it sonar? what is it? it is images made with sound and like an ultrasound looking at a baby s ultrasound. it is made with sound on the sea floor. anything on or above the sea floor that contrasts with the background will show up on that. a lot of this will depend not just on the technology but on the operators of the system. if you have a very good sonar operator they will be able to pick out something natural against something man made against natural background, like this is a plane against a land slope. they talked in the press conference about the silt on the sea floor kauing a problem in terms of the transmission of problem. would this cause problem in terms of getting sonar images. nothing sonar discovergraph. any kind of coding, volcanic rock is tough, reflectings sound easily. it is cy to get lost in the rubble. a little sediment would be good. i don t think it will affect the sound much at all. everyone stay with us. we want the take another break. we will return at the top of the hour. if you missed the press conference we will replay the key moments for you. live coverage in the search for flight 370 continues after this. this is the first power plant in the country to combine solar and natural gas at the same location. during the day, we generate as much electricity as we can using solar. at night and when it s cloudy, we use more natural gas. this ensures we can produce clean electricity whenever our customers need it. they don t know it yet, but they re gonna fall in love, get married, have a couple of kids, [ children laughing ] move to the country, and live a long, happy life together where they almost never fight about money. 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the situation room. always watch us live or dvr the show so you won t miss a moment. that s it for me. thanks very much for watching. i m wolf blitzer in the situation room. now let s step into the crossfire with paul begala and s.e. cupp. christmas eve for me. tingling with anticipation. i m going to be up all night because if we re good little boys and girls tomorrow morning we can finally open the most wonderful gift of all, my friend hillary clinton s new book. wow. i hate to be the grinch here, but i ve seen an advanced copy and your christmas morning is going to be a real downer. the debate starts right now. tonight on crossfire hillary clinton facing attacks on the eve of her book release. clinton s account of the low salt, low fat, low-calorie offering with vanilla pudding as dessert. is america ready for hillary? on the left, paul begala. on the right, s.e. cupp. in the crossfire, tracy sefel, a clinton supporter, and tim miller, co-author of failed choices. should democrats place all bets on clinton? will republican attacks on her backfire? tonight on crossfire. welcome to crossfire. i am paul begala on the left. i m s.e. cupp on the right. guests with different opinions of hillary clinton. her new book comes out tomorrow and starting a high-profile campaign swing. i minean, promotional tour. she s getting lost in translation. for one, she doesn t speak progressive. just ask one. for another, she doesn t speak millennial which she learned the hard way in 2008. as you clearly see in her interview with abc s diane sawyer, unlike her husband, she hasn t figured out how to speak regular person. we came out of the white house not only dead broke, but in debt. we had no money when we got there, and we struggled to, you know, piece together the resources for mortgages, for houses, for chelsea s education. you know, it was not easy. we had to make double the money because of obviously taxes and then pay off the debts and get us houses and take care of family members. dead broke. get us houses. plural. as in these houses in two of the most expensive neighborhoods you can find. so the two most recognizable politicians in america for two decades couldn t budget their money the way americans have to? paul, even you have to admit, this one is not going to go over well in our land. we only found the only millionaires in america who the republicans don t like. come on. in fact, she understates when she says dead broke, they were $12 million in debt for legal bills, from ken starr and the right ring machine that tried to drive them into bankruptcy. thank god we live in a country where they can thrive. hillary had an $8 billion book advance before she even left the white house. you can t budget the mortgage on that, come on. worth every penny. in the crossfire, tracy, first, who advises the ready for hillary pac, and tim miller, - co-author of the new perfectly timed anti-clinton e-book cal d cleverly failed choices. i ve known hillary now 23 years. i love her. i want her to run for president. i deeply hope she does. you should also know i advise priorities usa action which is a superpac that helped re-elect president obama and i dearly hope will elect president hilla hillary. now with that disclosure set, mr. miller, first welcome. thank you for coming. thanks for having us, paul. i hear this canard from my friends on the right, particularly your organization. hillary hasn t done anything as secretary of state, not an important accomplishment. let me give you the top ten. the toughest sanctions in our generation on iran. cease-fire. she backed the mission we ll get to this. backed the mission to kill osama bin laden. i go on and on and on. i hope we cover all ten of these then maybe we ll do a special edition to cover ten more. let me start with number 3. which is the cease-fire in gaza. hamas terrorists were bombing israel. shooting rockets into israel. hillary clinton stepped in and negotiated a cease-fire. now, i think, of course, good for america, good for israel, good for peace. more importantly, here s what the prime minister of israel says about my friend, hillary. take a look. i just had the opportunity to work with her to achieve a cease-fire between israel and hamas. hillary clinton is a strong and determined leader. she s both principled and pragmat pragmatic. knows how to get the job done. i m sure that s going to be in your book. i haven t had time to read your e-book yet. the prime minister of israel. tell me you know more about israel s security than prime minister netanyahu. i m certainly not going to do that, paul. i will tell you when it comes to israel, on the campaign trail in 2008, hillary promised she was going to support an undivided jerusalem. then she goes to the state department. what does she do? she tries to support negotiations where she points fingers at israel, say israel is the problem. and says in order to come to a negotiation, we need to not have a undivided jerusalem. also on the iran sanctions which was the top thing on your list, when congress tried to past the toughest iran sanctions that brought iran to the table, that got us to this deal, hillary clinton and the state department were over in the senate talking to your buddy, bob menendez saying don t pass these, these are too harsh, these are too harsh. nonsense. bob menendez she got the russian, chinese, french, to sign on to the sanctions that delivered the nicolas sarkozy said it was toothless. to the table. i think it s a little early to say how those sanctions have worked out yet, but tracy, i m really glad that paul brought up israel because i ve read the chapter in her book on israel and let me tell you, there is a doozy in there. let me just read. she writes of her first visit to israel i got my first glimpse of life under occupation for palestinians who were denied the dignity and self-determination that americans take for granted. now, i m sure i don t have to remind anyone at this table contra chris christie had to apologize for using similar language. is hillary clinton going to apologize to israel for using that same language? i hope chris christie is going to write a book. that s the one i should read. let me first say, you quoted from the book and i think tim spent all weekend reading it. i haven t read it yet. it s not out. the answer i will give you is about a bigger issue when it comes to hillary clinton s diplomatic agenda. and that is the way that she has expanded the notion of diplomacy in the state department to include an incredibly important set of issues which have to do with women and girls. tracy, let me just stop you before you education and health. don t answer my question. let s take for granted that the quote i read is actually in the book. does she owe israel an apology for using the same language that chris christie used then had to apologize to pro-israel voters and pro-israel groups? hillary clinton is going to stand by the words in her book. she is not going to apologize for something she need not apologize for. she believes she will be making that point as she, herself, should. so then you think that she believes the palestinian territory is occupied? she s not going to apologize for that and she asserted that on purpose? i m sure that when we all actually read the book and listen to her give these interviews, her words will stand for themselves. she said it twice in the book. yeah, she said it, but i ll take your word for it that she s unapologetic. i m unapologetically pro-israel and hillary is very, very strong on this. if that s the tree you want to bark up, i wish you luck. let s move on to another hillary accomplishment which is i think strategically very, very important. the pivot to asia. particularly a couple of things, first off, she was the one in the united states, but she was our secretary of state stood up against chinese expansionism in the south china sea. vietnam. old enemy of america. hillary sided with the vietnamese, helped back off the chinese. she in beijing freed the dissident civil rights activist and lawyer chen guan dang. were those bad things or can you at least admit certainly in asia she s helped strengthen america, opening up to burma, checking chinese territorial expansionism, standing for human rights. i think she worked with mitch mcconnell on efforts in burma. i think obviously she tried to at least give lip service and make some progress in the pivot to asia. here s the thing, paul. what are the tangible results she s going to talk about? i mean, you have this list of ten things you ve talked about. first thing on your list is something she opposed. not true. i m not going to let you get away with that. she is the reason we have sanctions on iran. now we re talking rhetorical. she freed that dissident. should we give him back? should we give him back? no, i don t think so. can you say that was a good thing? sure, but this is yes! two do you think voters are going to go to the polls they will go to the polls about the pivot to asia represents her understanding of workers and what the asian economy specifically in china means for the american economy. if that is something she s been unapologetic about and was also forward thinking with the very pivot that professor begala is talking about. but, again, none of these things when you look at the big issues that faced her, the arab spring, when you look at what happened in iran asia s not a big issue? the green movement, syria, russia, libya, overthrowing gadhafi. where are these tangible results that she s going to take to voters? saying i pivoted to asia does not count. we have to take a quick break. we can get through all those specifics, believe me. i have a long list. i want to point something out as a political strategist is this. my republican friends are looking at the prospect of a hillary campaign and have plan a and a plan b. i ll let you know their secret strategy next. first, this question. how long did hillary clinton s first memoir, living history spend on the new york times bestseller list? was it 12 weeks? 34 weeks? or 55 weeks? we ll have the answer when we return. are the largest targets in the world, for every hacker, crook and nuisance in the world. but systems policed by hp s cyber security team are constantly monitored for threats. outside and in. that s why hp reports and helps neutralize more intrusions than anyone. in the world. if hp security solutions can help keep the world s largest organizations safe, they can keep yours safe, too. make it matter. 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(anncr vo) innovations that work for you. that s health in numbers. unitedhealthcare. welcome back to crossfire. hillary clinton s new memoir comes out tomorrow. i cannot wait. book sellers have preordered a million copies. actually should not be any great surprise. the marketplace works. her first memoir living history spent 34 weeks on the new york times bestseller list. if you guessed 34 weeks, you got it right. winner. i have known hillary clinton for a very long time. i don t know for sure whether she s going to run for president. i m wearing my knees out praying. i know this. my republican friends have two friends for that eventuality. plan a try to keep her from running, while they re launching all these crazy attacks. plan b if that doesn t work out, republicans lose to hillary and she doesn t become president. republicans, if you want to avoid plan b, keep up the attacks like the one abc s diane sawyer asked hillary clinton about. mitch mcconnell said at one point, 2016 will be the return of the golden girl. that was a very popular long-running tv series. yeah. i speak hillary, tim, and here is what she means when she says that. that was popular in the long-running, she s saying bring it on. i will point out mitch mcconnell who attacked her apparently for that little snide comment is six years older. he s 72 running for a six-year term. hillary is 66 hopefully going to run for a four-year term. this is counterproductive for your side, isn t it? let s talk about two of the other questions that happened in that interview. isn t mitch mcconnell you can get to your shots. you have a whole book attacking hillary. isn t it stupid and sexist for mitch mcconnell by the way, again, who s six years older than hillary to be raising these kind of snide comments? i certainly think there are lots more credible way you can attack hillary clinton and if you look at the interview she did with diane sawyer, only seen two clips. one of them, she talked about how she struggled so much to pay the mortgage when getting an $8 million advance and her husband was selling access to himself and the white house to the highest bidder not true. it was driven. $12 million in the camp by ken starr and right wing attack. worth $1 million to $2 million. what is this, russia? we re not allowed to get rich anymore? they haven t developed a widget. they sold themselves. here s another we re going to talk numbers. 40% of the speeches that hillary clinton is giving are for free. it s for charitable causes. she is raising money. she is out there. she can get paid over $1 million for excellent causes. she s a woman of the people. tracy, now, we know you are ready for hillary. that s is true. not vimeveryone in the di democratic party is. a recent poll wants other democrats to run against her. here s what former governor of montana said about her. he said you can t be a candidate that shakes down more money on wall street than anybody since i don t know, woodrow wilson, and be a populist. now, he sounds a lot more like today s democrats than hillary does, to me. is he wrong about her? well, governor schweitzer, it s an interesting line for him to go to and isn t the first line he said something like this. what we re talking about when we look biographically, issues involving the inequality. as secretary of state, the notion of inequality for her was a guiding principle in why we needed to stabilize in certain countries, that growing inequalities are actually a grave danger for societies. this is something that has guided her as first lady, as a senator, as the secretary of state. it s been her principle. so inequality, hillary clinton, go back and look at her words to the new america foundation recently i just think this is going to be a tough sell for her. hillary clinton is going to have the closest ties to wall street out of he candidate in either party. she was getting paid $200,000 per speech by the biggest wall street firm. the idea she s going to be able to tap into this elizabeth warren movement is pretty ridiculous and doesn t help when she s lamenting her $100 million as having trouble putting food on the table. if we re interesting in talking about people who dared to make a living and been successful, it s also worth noting that for her, the charitable events that they re doing is just a part of the story. both bill and hillary clinton have given upwards of 10% of their entire income to charity. a figure that so did mitt romney. that absolutely goes beyond mitt romney bought companies and laid the workers off, took their pensions and health benefits. those workers didn t much like him so they made not talking about here s the problem with the theory. it ain t working. let me show you some polls. okay, you guys have been on this now banging hillary for 20 years and especially the last two. not you personally, but the right. here s where she stands according to the abc news/ washington post poll. 59% approve of the job she has done as secretary of state. 67% say she s a strong leader. look at this. 6 o% say she s honest. if you got her down so if you ve got her down to 59% after only 20 years, you ll get her down to zero in 200 more. you need a new strategy. hillary polls the worst when she s in the middle of a campaign, when there s a partisan fight going on, because she doesn t wear well. she didn t in 2008. who polls better in the middle of the campaign? i was on your website today, and i noticed all the amazing merchandise you guys have for sale. those are water bottles, there s a dog collar, there s a hillary clinton cell phone case. aren t you afraid all this stuff will turn off average american voters, who are concerned that hillary is seen more as a brand and less as an actual problem solver, who s down in the gritty dirt trying to solve the real problems of the american people? the supply and demand issue is a interesting one with ready for hillary. they can t keep the merchandise in stock. there is a clambering by her supporters growing every day. the deficit isn t with her admirers, it s with average americans the idea of hillary as a brand is certainly been an exciting one that people for her supporters, tracy. there s ready for hillary bus that s going to be going around the country that s what i m talking about. that branding of hillary did not turn on enough voters in the democratic primary. i m glad that you re giving me the opportunity to say something that i have said many times. if there was an inevitability about hillary clinton, ready for hillary would not exist and i don t know how much more plainly to make that case, so every time that word comes up, that is going to be my answer. i think this whole notion of my party of inevitability is damaging. jim messina the answer to it is, when you right wingers attack her, it boosts her. this talented woman is being attacked. it s great for hillary. stay here. we want you at home to weigh in. was hillary clinton an effective secretary of state? we ll have the results after the break, also the outrages of the day. i m outraged because of some narrow-minded music fans taking the fun out of rock and roll. with centurylink as your trusted it partner, you ll experience reliable uptime for the network and services you depend on. multi-layered security solutions keep your information safe, and secure. and responsive dedicated support meets your needs, and eases your mind. centurylink. your link to what s next. that would be my daughter hi dad. she s a dietitian. and back when i wasn t eating right, she got me drinking boost. it s got a great taste, and it helps give me the nutrition i was missing. helping me stay more like me. 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[ female announcer ] stay strong, stay active with boost. grandpa! humans. even when we cross our ts and dot our i s , we still run into problems. that s why liberty mutual insurance offers accident forgiveness with our auto policies. if you qualify, your rates won t go up due to your first accident. because making mistakes is only human, and so are we. we also offer new car replacement, so if you total your new car, we ll give you the money for a new one. call liberty mutual insurance at. and ask us all about our auto features, like guaranteed repairs, where if you get into an accident and use one of our certified repair shops, the repairs are guaranteed for life. so call. to talk with an insurance expert about everything that comes standard with our base auto policy. and if you switch, you could save up to $423. liberty mutual insurance responsibility. what s your policy? welcome back to crossfire. now it s time for the outrages of the day. thousands of freedom haters have signed an online petition to remove the band metallica from the music festival in england this year. why? because frontman james hatfield is a big-time hunter and nra member and that s, quote, incompatible with the spirit of the music festival, according to one facebook page demanding the band be kicked out. i m not outraged that fans hate hunters. music has always attracted sank moan yous and self righteous people and they are free to be misinformed about our lifestyle. i m outraged rock and roll has gotten boring. what s rebellious with the idea everyone has to think alike and support the same causes? what s cool about putting trendy bumper sticker pieties before one of the greatest guitar riffs of all time? when did young rock fans get so prudish and establishment? good news, all this has helped plug hatfield s new show the hunt. i m one fan who hopes he kills it. see what i did there? as a hunter, i m willie nelson and lyle lovett. my outrage comes from my beloved lone star state. the republican party of texas voted to include support for conversion therapy in their state party platform. the idea is this, being gay is somehow bad, so through counseling and some believe prayer, gay people can be made straight. now, interesting, of course, i disagree with it, but it s more interesting new jersey governor chris christie disagrees with that. he signed a law banning such treatments in the garden state, citing reparative therapy can, pose critical health risks including depression, substance abuse, social withdraw, decreased self esteem, and even suicidal thoughts. if chris christie runs for president, he s going to have to deal with those who believe you can pray away the gay, but i intend to ask god to bless texas, including texas republicans. that will be my effort to pray away the hate. very nice. let s check back on our fire back results. was hillary clinton an effective secretary of state? right now, 56% say yes, 44% say no. quickly, guys, what do you think about those results? i think it s heartening and just wait until everyone s actually reading the book and not just tim and you. 56% need to go to americanrisingeffect.org. for everyone who does, of course, he s making money off it. god forbid. it all comes back to that. thanks to tim and tracy. the debate continues online at
us along with our panel as we watch this, the idea this search might have to be stopped for a given length of time, it s not something we certainly have never heard of. we heard that before with air france flight 447, that the flight had already been found. but we re way early on that. we re not i don t think for a moment we re going to be talking about stopping at any time soon. remembering the southern hemisphere winter, it s coming into fall now, then winter will be coming along shortly. i think we re some way off. i d be very surprised if he s going to announce he s bringing friends home tomorrow. absolutely once winter arrives in the southern hemisphere and depths of winter, you won t find them going out. it would be too dangerous with the planes and it would be fruitless. they will do what they did with 447, regroup and look at the evidence and set up a new plan for where they re going to start. david, i mean, can this debris amei mean, some of it would sink after a certain amount of time. what is floating will stay floating for longer than you might expect. the bottom of the cargo compartment, which is a green zinc chromate color. one part of debris is said to be green? yes, which is fairly unique to that aircraft. typically they re painted white and have a different color inside. this aircraft doesn t, it s green. it s a honeycomb structure, it has a sealed epoxyed together, which has sealed air compartments inside it. if it s floating, it s likely to continue to float but certainly not through the winter. and we re anticipating this press conference getting started any time soon. at this point, there are no assets now on scene in terms of the search, even obviously aircraft are not flying given the bad weather, but even ships on the surface that were in the region, had they left the search area? it was ordered out of the search area. there was one ship in the area and it was ordered out because of the waves. the australian military saying the wave length has been extreme, 6 1/2 waves and the swells have been doubled that. the conditions have not been ideal. it is foggy. this is an air known to pilots as a roaring 40s, right at 40 latitude and longitude and you toss in bad weather and it makes it too dangerous to be there on the water or in the air. the press conference that you re seeing, as we show you a split screen here, that press conference is quite unusual. it s actually just right over my right shoulder. it s a bit of a walk but that press conference is nothing that we ve seen here since we arrived. you don t have the defense minister simply fly in and gather the reporters. we haven t had the military come over to us and say, okay, everybody, gather up, it s time to make some sort of announcement. we re guessing at this point it must be something significant. the first highest level minister we ve heard from through all this and we were called to it. we re very anxious what he s going to say. richard? i ve just been advised by one of our producers who says that the minister of defense will be joined by the vice chief of defense staff and the deputy chief of joint operations. so they re pulling in the big brass here. i m guessing we re going to get a very good operational overview and a road map, unless of course whether they re going to tell us they ve identified something. i think it s going to be more operational, this is where we re going, this is where we re going and where we expect to move it forward. most information which has come out, how does it come out from the military, from military authorities? there s not regular press conferences you said? no. we ve had to in some ways because they ve been so overwhelmed by our phone calls call and call and call and call or they released it via social media or on their web site. that s why all of us here on the base are really quite interested in what s going to be announced because richard may very well be right that this is just a plan of what it s going to look like now that we re into day six. but, you know, this is a high-level minister flying into this military base from a distance and, you know, wanting to talk to reporters. we think this might be something significant. when was the search called off for today? it s obviously just past midnight here, very early tuesday morning, very late monday night, however you want to look at it. it s tuesday afternoon in australia. at what point was the search called off? reporter: it was publicly announced about 55 minutes after the first plane was set to take off. in that vein of how do we get that information, it came via press release, it came via social media. it didn t come through an announcement. that s a pretty big deal to simply say we re not going to be searching to. you did notice this morning that the cars were arriving and the crews were arriving. it did sound like they were going to take off. we had been given no indication that today was not going to be a day that they fly. in fact, we had been told that they were going to again take to the air. but whether always is the determining factor of whether or not you can continue an operation like this. about 55 minutes, anderson, is when it was at least publicly told to us that it was not going to be happening today. and this press conference or statement should be any minute. we anticipated it about six minutes ago. in about 24 minutes from now, there s a press conference in kuala lumpur, in malaysia, that is supposed to take place. the fact that there are these two different press conferences, it does give you a sense of just on a very limited scale of the complexity and scale of this entire operation and investigation. i mean, the communication has got to be it s coordinated, it shows the difficulty and the breadth of we have this situation in china right now where you have family members heading toward the malaysian embassy, situations in kuala lumpur where they re preparing for this press conference, a conference in perth, australia. it involves so many different nationalities and personalities. the complexity is unbelievable. the thing about an accident investigation, i don t care how big or small it is, you never know what you did right, you only know what you did wrong. that s really a difficult position to be in. i really feel for these folks doing this investigation. i ve never done an investigation that after the fact want second guessed and even myself second guessed. that s part of getting the experience to do it and i just feel for them right now. they re going through a lot. in terms of the investigation, there are representatives from the ntsb, from british authorities in kuala lumpur working with malaysian authorities. how does something like that get coordinated? what we do is we have an inspector in charge, whether that s the ntsb or delegated to the faa in smaller cases. that gives you a single point of contact and that would be incredibly difficult with all these countries and varying levels of experience and what they can and cannot do. the ntsb is cautious not to go there and take over things. they re very experienced. but when they re not the inspector in charge, they re in a difficult position as well. they re in kind of a tender position of trying to build and contribute to the team without trying to take over and step on egos and everything else that s involved. we heard a short time ago family members in beijing are heading toward the malaysian embassy to protest. there has been a lot of criticism of malaysian authorities. fair or not fair, richard? it s not been a rolls-royce of an investigation. it s not ban gold standard investigation that you might have expected to see out of the ntsb or the double aib in the u.k. or b.e.a. in trafrance. i think the truth is it s been nowhere near as bad as people are saying. the reality is if you were to say how many facts have they got wrong, almost none. have they had to correct or tweak things? undoubtedly. that s the normal way to do things. but to start this mass i m sorry, let me just malaysian airline spokesman is telling cnn malaysian airlines is not sending family members anywhere until they find wreckage of the flight or receive emergency notification from the search and rescue operation in australia. just been given that word. earlier in the day there had been reporting they are looking to possibly flying family members once the debris was found to australia. it s going to depend on when actual debris from the plane is found. this has been unprecedented, everybody agrees. but two weeks ago i ll give you an example of what we re talking about here. everybody says why do they continue looking up in the north when clearly there was radar tracks and all this stuff showing the thing turned around. because it had to be verified it, had to be confirmed. we know it was sent backwards and forwards to the u.s. and k.l. they would have been excoriated if they sent ships all the way down to the south indian ocean, 2.5 thousand miles on a hunch. the malaysians know what they are doing, it s been messy. others may disagree. this is an overwhelming situation in its magnitude. the likes of which we have never seen. it s unprecedented absolutely. an accident investigation in and of itself is an overwhelming thing from the standpoint down right to emotion, as you understand. they probably withheld information as part of the investigation process because some of this has not is not for public knowledge because it s detrimental to the families, to the friends of the passengers. even national security issues are involved given military radar versus civilian radar in countries like malaysia and elsewhere. countries are loath to let their military information be known to enemies or even allies. and it got worse. the plane wasn t where it was expected to be. and suddenly not only do you not have a plane where you expect it to be but you re starting to hear rumors that it s actually gone in the opposite direction and you ve got no evidence. now, if there is a criticism, it goes to the malaysian criticism for not spotting the 370 going across on the night. and there s still a big question of how that could have happened, how could it have crossed malaysian airspace without the military realizing. but the core issue of expecting them to have known that the plane was two and a half thousand miles in the opposite direction, and even that inmarsat said you see a bunch of reporters waiting around where the australian defense minister is said to be making a statement or giving a press conference. it was supposed to take place 12 minutes ago. obviously we are waiting just as the reporters are waiting in the sun there just outside perth, australia. kyung, have officials given any word on what s gone on? we don t. we have a colleague at that press conference right now and ten minutes to 12 they were given ten-minute warning. it was scheduled to happen at noon. we don t know exactly what the delay is all about. we know he s traveling in, the defense minister is traveling in. perhaps there s a travel delay. we simply don t know. but if i could just add one thing to what you and richard were talking about, you know, you mentioned the criticism about malaysia airlines. i was told by a chinese journalist here that they re under the impression that the chinese families are coming here and coming very soon. we ve heard a number of reports of fathers of the passengers heading to the kuala lumpur airport because they were told by malaysia airlines they were going to be traveling to australia. so there is a lot of mixed messaging happening and it very frustrating for the families, it s very frustrating for the people who are emotionally and directly involved. so, yes, there is all this criticism out there but the effect of it is that it s making it much more painful for the parents and the children of the passengers. our david fitzpatrick is at the press conference awaiting it. david, what are you hearing? reporter: anderson, there have been two other members of the australian defense ministry staff joining david johnson here. so far there are about 50 or so members of the media here, there is a line or four orions here. we have to sit here and wait. as soon as we see people walk up, we ll certainly let you know. again, this is just a sign of the kind of coordination on a small scale taking place. malaysian officials are supposed to be giving a press conference 15 minutes from now. on something like this would i mean how much communication is there or would there be between the investigation taking place in malaysia and australian officials with the coordination of release of information? it goes back to the fact there s no singular person in charge of the investigation or controlling the information back and forth. as les pointed out, at some point you have to say what is real information, what s not and what s worth what do we need to spend resources investigating. you could go down all kinds of different routes but at some point you make up a priority mate tririx of the theories and philosophies and put weights on that to come up with mathematical figures to figure out the most likely scenario. i m sorry, go ahead. but to try to dilute that map with what s going on with all of the different participants has just got to be painstaking. we re told the press conference will begin shortly. we re going to take about a 90-second break and bring it to you live when we come back. frequent heartburn? 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[ male announcer ] it s how edward jones makes sense of investing. we are going to make some comments regarding the investigation and the australian and international efforts to hopefully find something regarding flight 370. ladies and gentlemen, thank you all for keeping everybody informed as to what is going on and what is most important event in terms of aviation and maritime safety. today i m here to speak to the crews and the maintainers of these magnificent aircraft that are behind me. i want to take the opportunity to publicly thank all of the crews and all of the teams that keep these planes flying. as you know, it is a four-hour trip down there, two hours on station and then four hours home. this is an extremely remote part of the world. it 3,500 meters deep, 2,500 kilometers from perth. eig it s a massive logistic exercise. there are four australian p-3s, a p-8 from the united states, two illusions from china, there s a p-3 coming from korea with a c-130h this afternoon. i want to thaake the opportunit to thank all of those countries for their assistant. i had lunch with the teams and they re keeping their aircrafts flying and keeping their teams up to the minute enthusiasm. hms success has had to deployed to the west to avoid major weather operations. visa fees will be waived for the families of the passengers and crew of this malaysian aircraft. we will be very pleased to welcome them here to give them some closure in what is an extreme tragedy for them. so for that i come back to the fact that this is an amazing example of international cooperation, particularly between militaries. and may i say as a western australian, we are very pleased to host the chinese, the japanese, koreans and americans into western certainly australians. reporter: are the chinese being flown here to be flown over the logistical area? i don t want to speculate because this is a major operation. this is probably one of the most remote parts of our planet. we want to get that right. we want to assist these families and friends to have some closure, but let s talk about that when we know how many are coming and when they re arriving. reporter: is it very clearly now a case of not looking for survivors but looking for debris and looking for the black boxes? to this point in time we have no successfully identified and recovered any debris from the aircraft in question. reporter: can you confirm this is the place that the plane crashed? reporter: in his view the plane was in the southern ocean. do you share that strength of view? i think if we re going to go on data and information giving us a hint as to what has actually happened, that s all we ve got to go on. the telemetry from the satellite, the inmarsat satellite and the performance of the aircraft is all we ve got to go on. i think we ve got to rely on that and that s what we ve been doing. this lady would like to ask a question. reporter: would you say you are confident with the prime minister assessment that the fate of flight 370 ended in the indian ocean. are you confident about that? i m confident about that because that s the best we ve got at this time. reporter: so you re not surprised they made the call last night, sending the messages to the families? i m not surprised about anything with respect to this. this is a mystery and until we recover and positively identify a piece of debris, everything is virtu virtually speculation. reporter: what s the idea with the search operation? when you have to suspend operations for 24 hours because of weather, these beautiful aircraft behind me are grounded. it is rough, there are 20, 30 meter waves, it is very, very dangerous, even for big ships. reporter: have you received further details from malaysia can support the conclusion delivered by malaysia premier? i will hand over to the vice minister of defense that will tell you everything we have you know about and that we are doing everything we can to, first of all, make a positive identification on a piece of debris. that will mean we re on the right track. that s not going to happen for at least another 24 hours because we ve had to redeploy our ship due to weather. reporter: can you verify the photos the chance provided? i have nothing to add on that. i think you ve seen all the information out there. reporter: were you informed before minister najib made his statement last night? i probably wasn t because i was traveling. the prime minister has been informed as event passed. reporter: do you understand hms success to be confident they re close to what was seen from the air yesterday? it very easy to speculate about being close. close in this part of the world could be several hundred kilometers. if you want to put it in some sore of analogous skipdescripti we are looking for an aircraft from perth in western australia. this is probably one of the largest efforts you ll ever see in terms of maritime surveillance, joint efforts between johnson, china, united states, new zealand, straaustra et cetera. reporter: how urgent is it to find the black box everything urgent. we have to deal with it the best we can. reporter: objects haven t been confirmed. the turning point will be when we pull some piece of debris from the surface of the ocean and positively identify it as being part of the aircraft. reporter: do you have any other details on the support that will be provided to families? at this stage i don t. but bear in mind the prime minister is very, very fixed on assisting malaysia, who is a very good friend of australia in dealing with the families of the crew and passengers on board this aircraft. we ll do what we can within reason. reporter: [ inaudible ]. i m going to hand over to vice chief of defense binskin, who is with the royal australian air force. if i can put the analogy of what we ve got at the moment. we re not searching for a needle in a haystack. we re still trying to find where the haystack is. you re seeing a multi-national effort going on. it is difficult for hms success to be able to find small bits of debris that is washing around in the southern indian ocean at the moment. as the minister said, for safety concerns today, we had to put success to the south. we re hoping for good weather in coming days where the search effort will be joined by a number of chinese ships. we ll have the korean b-3 and we ll have more ships and more aircraft and can refine the search. reporter: it becoming more of a recovery operation than it was before. there are no asset, including the ocean shield heading out there. what s its role, what can it do? it will be joining the search in a couple of days. it takes time to come down and around into the search area. the aim for her will be working to put specialist equipment on board so that as we further refine the search area, that we might be able to go out and look for the black boxes. reporter: has there been a 100% collaboration between the nations in terms of the search? is it under one specific umbrella? actually, the collaboration has been very, very good between nations. for the start of it, there s been a lot of cooperation between the u.s., u.k. and australia. it was the u.k. part of the team that first put us into the place we are now and that s been refined by more imagery from china that everyone is getting a chance to look at. that side of it is very, very collaborative. from the aircraft and ships, there s a lot of collaboration going on by the moment. it a relatively small operation and it growing by the day. is information being passed to malaysia? the answer is yes. do you have information or evidence that maybe there s still doubt that 370 did go down in the indian ocean? the best information we have and i haven t seen the report but the information from the british overnight seeps to indicate more sewurety that it went down in the southern indian nation. as we get more data, we continue to defined the search data. reporter: [ inaudible ]. i won t go into those details. we won t have time for that. but it is to get an indication where you re searching before you can define that. reporter: how long do you think the search will be delayed because of the weather? they are very, very good at measuring the currents. we ve dropped buoys to measure the water. they will keep a very good track on where the current debris field should be. as the weather clears, we ll go back in. at the moment it available by aircraft and we will send ships back in. we have to make sure anything we pick up we can possibly identify as wreckage and then further refine the search area. we re awaiting now a press conference from malaysian airlines scheduled to happen about two minutes from now in kuala lumpur, which is about 12:30 in the afternoon. we re going to bring you the scene of that press conference. frankly not a lot of news coming out of the australian press conference, which was more of an overview, defense minister saying he had flown there to thank all the crews involved in the search. he also thanks all the countries involved who have actually sent air assets and ships, australia, new zealand, japan, china, korea sending an asset later today. he talked about waiving visas for family members of the crews and the passengers and just talked about the rough conditions, the swells that are out in the search area which have forced officials to call off the search at least for today. no word on if the search will continue. let s listen in to kuala lumpur. i am the chairman of the malaysian airlines. as you will be aware, last night the prime minister of malaysia najib razak announced new evidence regarding the disappearance of ma 370 on the 8th of march. based on this evidence, the prime minister s message was that we must now accept the painful reality that the aircraft is now lost and that none of the passengers or crew on board survived. this is a tragic day for all of us at this airlines. while not entirely unexpected after an intensive multi-national search across 2.4 million square mile area, this news is clearly devastating for the families of those on board. they have waited over two weeks for even the smallest of hope of positive news about their loved ones. this has been an unprecedented event requiring an unprecedented response. the investigation under way may yet prove to be even longer and more complex. than it has been since march the 8th. but we will continue to support the families, as we have done throughout. and to support the authorities as the search for definite answers continues. i will now ask our group to provide you with fuller details of our support of the families. . i stand before you today as the group chief executive officer of malaysian airlines but also as a parent, as a brother and as a son. my heart breaks to think of the unimaginable pain suffered by all the family. there are no words which can ease that pain. everyone in malaysia airlines family is praying for the 239 souls on ma-370 and for their loved ones on this dark day. we extend our prayers and sincere condolences. we all feel enormous sorrow and pain. sorrow that all those who boarded flight mh-370 on saturday 8 of march would not see their families again. and those family will now have to live, they have to live on without their loved ones. it must be remembered that 13 of our own colleagues and fellows are also involved. let me be very clear on the events of yesterday evening. our sole motivation last night was to ensure that the incredibly short amount of time available to us, the families heard the tragic news before the world did. wherever humanly possible we did so in person with the families or by telephone using message as a last result of ensuring fully that nearly 1,000 family members heard the news from us and not from the media. ever since the disappearance of flight mh-370, this airline s focus has been to comfort and support the families of those involved and also to support the multi-national search effort. we will continue to do this while we also continue to support the work of the investigating authorities in the southern indian ocean. like everyone else, we are waiting for news from those authorities. we know that while there had been an increasing number of apparent leads, definitely identification of any piece of debris is still missing. but after 17 days, the announcement made last night and shared with the families is the reality that we must face and we now must accept. when we received approval from the investigating authorities, arrangement will be made to bring families to the recovery areas if they so wish. until that time we will continue to support the ongoing investigation. and may i express my thanks to the malaysian government and all those involved in this truly global search effort. in the meantime, our focus will be the same as it has been from the outset, to provide the families with a comprehensive support program. a network of over 700 dedicated care givers, care givers for each the loved ones of those on board have been provided with two dedicated care givers and they provide care, support and counsel to the families. we are now supporting over 900 people and with this program and in the last 72 hours alone, we have trained additional 40 care givers to ensure the families have access to round-the-clock support. in addition, hotel accommodation for up to five family members per passengers, transportation, meals and other expenses have been provided since 8 of march and that will continue. malaysia airlines have already provided initial financial assistance of $5,000 u.s. dollar per passenger to each next of kin. we recognize the financial support is not the only consideration, but the prolonged search is naturally placing financial strain on the relatives. we are, therefore, preparing to offer additional payment as the search continues. this unprecedented event in aviation history has made the past 18 days the greatest challenge to face our entire team at malaysia airlines. i ve been humbled by the hard work, by dedication, heart-felt messages of concern and offers of support from our remarkable team. we do not know why, we do not know how, we do not know how this terrible tragedy happened. but as this airline s family, we all are praying for the passengers and crew of mh-370. ladies and gentlemen, member of the media, i answer the floor for question-and-answer session. please state your name and media organization before you ask the question. i m from hong kong phoenix tv. my name is carol chong. just now you show your sorrow to the family members and we heard their shouts and screams, especially in beijing, the hotel. so up to now they said you delayed the investigations. did you? and actually what is the evidence, exact evidence that you show to get the result? and some of the family members told us they want to they went to australia, they want to go to australia so could you arrange the trip for them? thank you. you will appreciate the missing plane was reported to the authorities and since then it was a matter for the authorities to take over the searching and finding the plane. and it is since then the domain of the authorities. but as i mentioned earlier, our focus, our center of action throughout this period, painful period, was to provide care and assistance to our passengers. certainly this is a time of extreme emotions and we fully understand that impact people, our family. in terms in how they react is emotional, as you may understand. as regards to going to australia, as mentioned just now we have been informed by authorities that visa will be given or granted to those family members, once evidence has been establish established. next question. reporter: my question is so far you haven t found any evidence of wreckage of the missing plane. how are you so sure you are determined to believe that the plane has crashed. how do you believe that? and just based on the analysis of the images and the like? fair enough. i think that s a very fair question. but as you would also appreciate, especially last night as the prime minister came out himself to share that he has been given fairly credible leads that would point to where the plane ended its flight. and as he mentioned that position is very far away, very remote away from the nearest land mass and after 17 days we could on bring ourselves to reach the conclusion. yes, please. reporter: you talked in your statement a minute ago that this was unexpected. why wait so long for the families to be told that? and why such a hurry [ inaudible ]. as far as we take lead from the investigation that continues. and yesterday when the prime minister made the statement, it was very evident that the aircraft ended its flight in the middle of south indian ocean. so we will have to be we just have to follow those evidence as have been presented to us. and what we did yesterday was to share that as quickly as possible to the next of kin. and will i resign? it s a personal decision. reporter: [ inaudible ]. reporter: how the malaysian side provided information and evidence of the mh-370 flight ending in the indian ocean? the investigation is with the authorities and it is best to ask the authorities. okay, the next one, the lady. reporter: from china. i have a question, the first one i would like to rephrase. now we confirm that the plane is end in the south india ocean but is the survival chance totally avoided? the second question is now there are some reports about they find the mh [ inaudible ]. also that airplane and it happened a sharp turn around and very unstable altitude flying reports. so they have very similar so could these events caused by some failure i m sure that will be very important concentration to be taken by the investigators. thank you. reporter: but the first one, the survival chances at the moment, that s how we are looking at it because the plane ended at a place land mass. reporter: can you repeat that? this by the evidence given to us and by the ration deduction that we could only arrive at that conclusion, for malaysia airline to declare it lost the plane and by extension the people on the plane. reporter: thank you. i m from chinese news organization. during these several days i have interviewed some people in malaysia and crews and family members, most of them are not satisfied with the reaction to this emergency. what is your opinion about this? and why you isolate them to the outside world? thank you. they are saying they are dissatisfied with the opinion? could you repeat the question, please? reporter: during this several days i have interviewed some people in malaysia, including family members. most of them are not satisfied at your reaction to this emergency. so what is your opinion about this? and why you isolate them to the outside world? thank you. our first concern, particularly for the families from china, is for their safety and comfort and privacy. and that is the main concern to driver whatever we tried to offer the family members. and in terms of why we keep them hanging on is simply we all shared their hope as well. reporter: why you isolate them from the outside world? probably isolating them is not the correct impression. we certainly put them in a place where they re comfortable and also is where they could have privacy and they have given access to care givers with whatever they require, like visiting the places of worship and things like that. so they are not being closeted. reporter: my condolences. the police have now narrowed the investigation to the crew members and the pilot in particular, could you comment on that? have you had any problems in the past, any disciplinary issues with the pilots or the crew, anything that would point to anything? thank you. i appreciate that. i think it is a fair question. that brings us back to the purpose of this press conference is to share with other than the families of our affected passengers and crew about what we had done last night, that is to break the news. and what we do next, particularly in terms of continuing with our care giving to our passenger s families and what we do in terms of the normal process as you mentioned for events like this. so your question is correct but i think the direct for um is when we meet investigators. thank you. next question will be from the gentleman over there. reporter: you referred earlier to the information that led to last night s announcement but can you say exactly what the analysis was and what the new data was that gave you enough certainty to make that statement? the best is this afternoon proceed with the military, they will be there to explain. reporter: but do you know presumably what the analysis was? what was it? we had been given the indication that we should now arrive at this very sad conclusion. reporter: the questions are i said the best time is whether we have the ministry of transport this afternoon. thank you. the next question will be from the gentleman over here. reporter: in the spirit of helping the families understand what has happened and baring in mind you now do have more information which led you to the conclusion the prime minister announced, what is your best analysis of what actually happened, bearing in mind we have quite some hours before the next press conference. i don t want to speculate in terms of what happened to the aircraft. i think the investigation is ongoing. i think our focus is really for the family members, how to help them moving forward and that s really our focus here. otherwise we are just speculating and i think the investigation is not concluded, i don t want to speculate any more than that. we re spending our time now and the process going forward in terms of how we can meet our legal and moral obligations to the families. thank you. okay, the next question from the gentleman here. reporter: thank you. from cbs news, i want to ask a question about the perception. this has been dealt with a little bit so far at the news conference. some people, the family members, have not been happy with the way this all has come down as far as their isolation in some cases, whatever. some people have suggested or implied that malaysian airline officials have been heartless. have you been heartless? can you respond to that? we can appreciate that. [ inaudible ]. there are also in our numbers who have we really talked with them. so this question of limitation and practical limitation that we re looking at but coming from our bottom of our heart, we re really reaching forward because 13 of the missing passengers and crew and one passenger, member of our family, extremely closely knit, we feel for each other. and that sort of extends to our passengers as well. from the first day we started the family assistance places all over the place and dispatched the family care givers and we probably enabled them to provide whatever was, you know, which we can do. and certainly no amount of compensation or consolation will make up for any loss of life. and we appreciate that. reporter: and one follow-up. are you going to attempt or will your high ranking executives attempt to meet and talk to every family that has suffered a loss? it s being done all the time, sir. we do not display our names when we go. thank you. the next question from the gentleman in red shirt. reporter: global brazil. i know it s a difficult question but how do you see this position of australian government that on will grant the visas for the families when no evidence is found. maybe still there is hope in australia s opinion? well, actually, i can t speak on behalf of australian government. reporter: that s why i say it s a difficult position. do you agree with the position. whether i agree or don t agree, like i said, we are here to ensure that we support the family and to make sure we fulfill their wishes. in this time of human challenge, compassion will rise. so i think protocol notwithstanding, i m sure, as we say, this is unprecedented event and we may be looking at some un way to resolve this. i m sure that the issue will arise and i m sure it will be addressed. reporter: jason from the wall street journal. i understand you are stressed and your focus right now is to help the families, but malaysia airlines is also party to the investigation. so can you tell us after one or two weeks what is the most likely cause for this? can you tell us confidently that it s not a [ inaudible ]. i really appreciate your curiosity, as we are also, but we have to draw a line between what is, you know, should be in the formal domain and what we can do. our focus at the moment is more in terms watch we can do, which is outside the investigation area. reporter: [ inaudible ]. yeah, certainly we will not want to jeopardize or dissipate anything. can i have the last question from the local authority? reporter: from channel 8 asia, i would like to talk about future of how badly has it affected business and well, obviously it has affected the airline. but so far, like i said, we re doing our best to ensure that those that bought malaysia airline tickets, making sure they are being served, being flown safely, comfortably. moving forward is certainly we will look into. obviously it is something that we must basically share with the families of those on board. weep must empathize with them and i think this is a very painful period for the airline and something that we have to share this spirit with the families and passengers and the crew. reporter: [ inaudible ]. our procedures are we have ratchet up our procedures to the