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Nothing to do with that. nbc's kerry sanders has been looking at where things stand with the search today. kerry, you know, how involved is the u.s.? it seems that there's still some uneasy balancing act between malaysian officials and u.s. officials. >> really, i think the question at this point is for all the countries that are involve sd how long will they continue to search this huge area where they're finding very little? in fact, what they're doing is ruling out areas but they're not finding anything in the areas that are still left. as you pointed out, more than 2 million square nautica...

And helicopters has moved north, about as far north as you can get by the southern tip of burma there. essentially we have covered that entire area. we are pretty certain there is nothing there. and when you're looking at expanding into the rest of the indian ocean, and south, that is such an incredibly huge area, using a destroyer really is our best asset. what we wanted to do was get our best asset able to be used the most, which is our p-3 and our p-8. what we're doing is sending a p-8 down to perse, australia. we'll have coverage out of the south out of australia and coverage to the north ...

Moved to perth, australia and repositioned it south to perth, australia. that will effectively double or search potential. right now we have the p-3 flying out of kuala lumpur and it will fly pretty deep into the bay of bengal. >> commander, is it one p-3 you're using and one p-8 or are there other aircraft that the u.s. is using? >> it's one of each. >> and tell us what the difference is. what can a p-3 do as opposed to the p-8? >> the p-8 is actually a brand new aircraft in the seventh fleet because of the region of the world that we are in, the region where we're rebalancing all u.s. forces...

I have flown on a p-8 recently. it's better communication, software, overall a world class airplane that will help out. >> as you know, commander, the flight data recorder, the voice recorder has a life span -- they emit some pings for 30 days. so maybe 20 days left or so. what are you doing, what can you do to see if you can hear any of those pings given the depth of the indian ocean, for example, nearly 13,000 feet. >> the black box still remains a mystery and where will it be if anyone even finds it. the indian ocean is an extremely deep body of water. so if it is submerged, who knows about...

Involved in this power struggle in the region as well with china and a lot of the assets that we're sending out there, that the u.s. is sending out there have to some degree china in mind, including that p-8, that poseidon aircraft that will be searching down in the southern part of the ocean here. there's a reason why that capability is in asia now and that's in fact to look at china. everybody is watching everybody else, what they have and don't have. >> and that u.s. aircraft will be based in perth, australia. looking for anything that could be debris or anything else. thanks very much, jim...