Seventh Ping News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Aviation correspondent richard quest and on the phone david gallo, who co-led the search for air france flight 447. how big, richard, how big a blow is this. >> reporter: enormous. given the fact they searched for weeks, let's push it out to the future. they didn't just search it by accident. they searched it because it was the right location for the seventh ping, it was at the endurance of the aircraft. all the evidence pointed to this being the particular place where the plane went into the water. >> right, they said the pings were consistent with the black box. >> i have the quote here from...

More than just for the explosion itself. they're listening for activity in certain areas. and this area may just have been lucky enough to be near an area where the aircraft crashed. >> mary, we talked to richard quest a moment ago talking about the fact they're essentially going back to the drawing board, back to that seventh handshake, that partial handshake, that seventh ping. again, reassess the data and go from there. you said this is normal in the course of an investigation. >> it is. you follow a lot of leads. i mean, there have just been many times -- even with the wreckage -- where yo...

He's definitely trying to manage expectations but everyone who has been involved in the search and those following closely, you guys have been analyzing it wondering, when is it time to go under water and to call off the search. >> when you go back and recap all of the data, the inmarsat data, all of the things that were involved to bring us to this point, having the towed pinger locators bring up those signals at that very point of approximately where the seventh ping was and now one of the significant things there was an oil slick. so maybe far-fetched but i'd like to look on the positive

Quite a large underwater search area was determined on the basis of the exchanges between the satellite, the inmarsat satellite and the aircraft, the handshakes. and you might remember, we had the seventh ping. this area that we're in is under where the seventh ping occurred. now, after that analysis was done, that enabled the deployment of "ocean shield" with the pinger, pinger locator and she went into that area and she received transmissions from the deep. that is the basis, the four transmissions taken together are the basis for the underwater search area. okay? >> what more do we know abo...