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200 adult, 17 children, seven crew members. as we heard from earlier reports, it's believed that they were returning from vacation in egypt. the airbus 321 has an operating range of about 3,000 miles. from the reports we have been getting it's a rather steady aircraft. we have gotten some reports there are now -- that the airplane actually had split in half and that it had a controlled air -- controlled landing. it lost contact about 23 minutes into the flight as it was leaving sharm el sheikh. right now we'll go to aviation analyst john cox to tell us more about what could have possibly happe...

Goes down and it's down there right now, but in the next few hours we learn that for a second time it has self aborted and started coming back to the surface because it wasn't capable of reaching that depth. where do they go from here if that were to happen? >> reporter: indeed. angus houston has suggested, in fact, if the depth is consistently greater than 4,500 meters, if it's beyond the operating range, they are already looking at bringing other assets in that can go far, far deeper. and that's, indeed, what we may have to do after a more analysis of the bottom, more detailed analysis of th...

Disparity between their operating range and the ranges at which we're hearing them, seems to be uninterpretable for me. unless, the possibility, we know there are two boxes and the other possibility is that maybe it's not sitting on the sea floor. maybe it's somewhere in the water column and it's being moved by currents. >> it's drifting around? >> these are possibilities. >> another point that you raise which we found very interesting, you're saying the weakening of the signals from the black boxes, if that's what it is, it's not necessarily an indication that it's the weakening of the batter...