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There now looking? >> it does the same thing as far as collecting sonar images. but it is a towed array. meaning you have to let it out on a cable. and if it's three miles deep, it's going to have to let over ten miles of cable out to get to the bottom and tow it. >> so it can get stuck on things? >> if the terrain down there is rough, it doesn't view the bottom as well. it doesn't contour to the bottom where the auv will stay with the bottom and get you much better imagery. and it does have trade-offs. everybody thinks because it's down there for 24 hours. >> sending up real-time data. >> it ...

Peter, they are two-thirds of the way through this relatively modest search for the bluefin-21. let's say in the next few days, two or three days it should be wrapped up. they come up with nothing. no piece of wreckage, no black box, nothing. what do they do then? >> they go back to the drawing boards to see if their initial calculations identifying this area were correct and secondly they start to reach out for different equipment. probably a towed array that will help them monitor and look at the ocean floor over great distances. >> we heard a navy spokesperson say a while ago that they are ...

Length, you have to do it with a towed array. you have to do it with a new vehicle. and you better start lining that up now. >> i assume they've searched a much wider area on the surface with the planes and the ships, right? >> that's proven negative, so they found nothing from doing that. again with looking at a wider area of search, they're assuming that it's in this area, not just on the pings, but also the fact of how much fuel they think that plane consumed based on their guess at altitude, their guess at air speed, you know, so really they're going by the pings in the water and that's th...

Looked at them, they've tried to tune them so they can detect the frequency of what the pinger should emit. the first thing. the second thing is they operate deep enough. almost 300 meters, maybe deeper, and are able to provide that good link to a better acoustic channel away from the noise of the surface. the only problem with them is they really are a narrow area search tool. when you think about it, you've got to drop sonobuoys near something you're interested, you think exists in the water. right now, they're looking at an 18,000 square mile search area. that would take between 40 and 80 d...

>> like a drone, or towed along on a sled. we call that a towed array. and we haven't gone to that phase yet, because we haven't had that initial starting point. >> what happens when the batteries for those flight data recorders, the cockpit voice recorder, are dead, and the pingers -- the pinging is no longer going? where do the investigators, the search operation go from there? >> well, you see each day that the search area is shifting around. and that's because data that's being gathered from the aerial process, from the satellite process, and from reinterpreting the handshake data is being...