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Compatible with dragging the towed pinger locator through the water. the t.p.l. has to be constantly moving so it doesn't drop to the bottom, but the bluefin to deploy it and bring it back, you have to stop the ship and lower it into the water, then you have to stay nearby the bluefin so you don't completely lose contact with it, so you really have to stop using the t.p.l. before you move to the bluefin operations. >> assuming the pings were the real thing and assuming the batteries die out, they haven't found the black boxes, haven't found debris, they are basically still searching for a rela...

The pings coming from the black boxes. the tpl, the locator is a passive hydrophone system. essentially a very sensitive listening device. what we would like to do ideally is use these in sequence. so you have the tpl, get a decent triangulation on the lotion of the black boxes and then move in our sonar. that allows us to get a picture of the bottom of the ocean floor there. so ideally we would be able to use these in sequence, first with a triangulation and then our sonar. unless we get definitive reacquisition of that signal it's a big challenge for our sonar because the area is still prett...

That long. moving on to a look what is actually looking for the black box. you have a surface ship, in this case an australian ship, towing the t.p.l., the towed pinger locator. the depth that it is being towed at, about two miles from two miles underneath the surface, that's how far this thing is underwater, under the surface of the water. and it will sweep back and forth, the surface ship will, in paths that are approximately two miles apart. it is an incredibly slow process and it's so far not yielded an exact fix on where those black boxes might be sitting. with more on the search, let's b...

Other countries. anything that we can do to narrow this search area to a more defined field will help us tremendously because the next -- so the shift will be from listening to the active search with the sonar. it's much harder to search with a sonar, it's very slow, methodical and deliberate and takes a lot of time. so, you know, we're just happy to have any leads and, you know, this two hours of detection time is something that was encouraging and at least if we don't reacquire it that's okay it's something we can build off. >> thank you so much. let's bring back our panel to understand the ...

Search, at least they're searching, and there seems to be a very good reason, they're a little bit noisy. is that primarily the problem? >> well, the auvs would go in the water not to necessarily find the pinger but to stop mapping the bottom. they use a side-scan sonar system and they build a map. they're very efficient at that. the problem is, the search time, the search methodology is going to basically take everything out by ten times as long. so if you're not in the right spot, you're going to be doing the search for a long time. >> but they don't -- they don't sger fe interfere, do they?...