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This tow fish that we're deploying off the "fort worth," they basically can do the job of a, the a tpo. >> you think they'll be able to detect the ping from the so-called black boxes -- >> the tow fish is capable of detecting the ping from the black boxes, absolutely. it's also a side-scan sonar. so it does two things. it can map the ocean floor to help us locate wreckage and find it. >> but so far, no pings detected? >> nothing. >> as far as you know? >> no. >> let's say there is a ping that's detected. who will be responsible for going down there and actually collecting these black boxes? wi...

Purchased a bluefin-21. so you know quite a bit about this. what are the advantages and disadvantages of this technology? >>. >> well, one of the primary advantages is the system is not connected to the ship. if you are in really rough weather, the auv is close to the bottom, it's unaffected by the ship's motion, riding over the big waves. with a towed system, there's a direct connection to the tow fish. as the ship travels over big waves the motion would be transmitted back to the tow fish. in this search, the vehicle is disconnected. the quality of the data should be very good. >> good. i he...

Capability. the bluefin is a capable system but it just has a lot to cover. and there are not many systems out there that can do this job. >> so tim, your company purchased a bluefin-21, so you know quite a bit about this. what are the advantages and disadvantages of this technology? >> well, one of the primary advantages is the system is not connected to the ship. so if you're in really rough weather, the auv is close to the bottom. it is unaffected by the ship's motion riding over the big waves. so with the towed system, there is a direct connection to the tow fish, so as the ship travels ov...

Layperson it sounds like a man made noise. do you share the optimism? >> i do not share the optimism. >> all right. explain why. >> well, there is a bunch of problems. one is that the sheer unlikelihood that they would find something on the first try. normally the way you would do it is you find the floating debris and you track it backwards to find the point of entry and then you search on the bottom of the ocean. here we just -- we were running out of time. we thought, well, the pinger is about to die. let's just throw in the tow fish and see what we can find. >> and which they did along the...

These four pings. the first one was longer. the second one was shorter and the last two were pretty short. they're far from each other. they're too far from each other. the tow fish only has a range of two and a half miles. these things are more like 12 miles apart. at least half of them by logic have to be false positives. i sense richard's disagreement with me here. but thing is a number of reasons why there is holes on this. i would love to hear his reasons for that, rather than just the confidence that he is sharing -- >> you're talking about commander marks, all right, richard, what did...