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Because the tpl is behind it. sorry, not sonobuoy. >> they found that they didn't have it. >> they came over there and ruled it out. so is that good or bad? what it says now is it's not over here. it's not over here. >> so now they can at least start focusing somewhere. >> now you look at this two-hour run and this is looking more and more and more like that is the three-mile area, six-mile radius. >> they say they're going to take a couple more days, as many days as needed to let the batteries run out on the ping because they want to see if they can get another ping somewhere in here to help ...

Those governments. and it's a very tight-knit, close, collaborative process. we talk to each other every single day. and everything we do is in sync. >> commander, talk to us more about that coordination. it's not just the u.s., australia, china, british vessels there as well. do you collect the information and then send it to perth, or do you allow the working group to make sense of it? >> on the ocean shield, that's the vessel carrying the tpl and the bluefin, those folks see video. they're actively looking at the sensors. it's a continuous, 24-hour operation. active duty u.s. navy civilians...

But then how many days of no signal? no pings do you think would be appropriate before you can say all right, it's over, it's done, let's get it down there? >> yeah, that is really the question. and me here on seventh fleet, you know it is not my decision. but what is encouraging is the second set of hits on the black boxes were really only 10, 15 kilometers away from the first set. so -- that is still a big search area. so if we can narrow that down i think that is the best course of action. so you know, i can't answer you definitively. you know, maybe a day or two but i still think there is ...

You deploy a canister from a moving aircraft and it releases a little microphone when it hits the water and the microphone goes down about 1,000 feet and it has a surface float that can send the sound signals to the plane that it was launched from so we're actually getting the sonic information from below. but we're getting it in realtime to the aircraft above. >> is this method as accurate as the tpl, the towed pinger locater? >> yeah, i think so. they are all very high fidelity microphones. it's actually pretty astounding that it actually works. because if the pinger was actually on the bott...

>> are there rovers that can do that? >> yeah, the bluefin-21 can do that. if they're read at that operating depth they probably don't want to chance losing the vehicle. phoenix international is very capable of figuring this out so i am sure they have other things, plan b in the back of their mind. that is the team out there operating the tpl and the bluefin-21. >> and these are private teams that are contracted? >> yeah, it is a company out of largo. >> how deep can an unmanned vehicle go? >> we have vehicles that can go to 6,000 meters, 95% of the sea floor. just on the other side of austral...