Page 8 - Fire Area News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Goes in the water. you have rudimentary communication between the vehicle and the ship, giving the position where the vehicle is at you can command it to abort or start a certain pattern that you have programmed. >> are you seeing things? realtime from the vehicle or just data you get once it comes back up? >> so once you recover the vehicle you go through a four-hour process where you replace the batteries and download the data you collected. and you take two to four hours to go through the data and see what the vehicle observed. there's no live data link transmitting the information. >> do y...

You would have to be flying. they only have one side-scanning sonar right now. is this the right piece of equipment. i don't understand why not have multiple? >> you heard captain matthews say this is a tactical survey. they thought they could throw the dart a right at the bulls-eye. they got an area instead of a point to throw the dart at. we did things differently with air france. we said let's start to the west and sweep all the way to the east. >> and you had three? >> we had three vehicles at once. >> there's no reason you can't have multiple vehicles. >> they could do that. but he mentio...

We begin with the breaking news from the indian ocean. day one, using the underwater sonar scanning submersible bluefin-21. in a moment we'll take you down with it so you can see for yourself what it sees. first, though, the u.s. naval officer who is heading up bluefin operation. captain mark matthews. supervisor of salvage and diving. the bluefin spent six out of a possible 16 hours searching the seabed today. why was that? >> that's correct. it aborted its mission at about the six-hour point. what this vehicle was programmed to do was maintain an altitude of 30 meters while conducting a sigh...

Increase of signal strength as we drove into the area, gaining and losing the contact as we expect. and additional factor pointing us in that direction is the oil slick that was observed the other day. we are analyzing the water sample to see if it was a petroleum product related to the aircraft. and there's many possible sources of an oil sheen on the surface of the ocean. but it's -- you know, would be one explanation is that it was lubricating fluid or control oil from the aircraft. >> so just so i understand on the aborting the bluefin today, it's not manually controlled? it's just automat...

Maximum operating depth of 4500 meters. that's what happened in this case. the charted depth is between 4200 to 4400 meters in that rectangle that it is searching. we hit a deeper spot that when initially planned. we have to bring it up, reprogram it, shift away from that deeper area and adjust the search pattern. >> the bluefin is being used in the most-likely spot. what makes that the most-likely spot? is there other data that is pointing to that particular location? >> the information that tells us is the nature of the detection from the towed pinger locator we had in that area. it was the ...