Bluefin-21 Robotic Sub Starts Search for MH370; Sea Conditions Bluefin-21 Will Work In
PEREIRA: Welcome back. So glad you've been getting in on the conversation, joining us with questions on Facebook and Twitter. Let's bring back our aviation analysts, Jeff Wise and Mary Schiavo. And you guys can tackle some of them. Mary, why don't we start with you? Let's start with the Bluefin unmanned sub that was dropped in the search area this morning. Question, why did they wait so long to deploy it?</s>MARY SCHIAVO, CNN AVIATION ANALYST: They waited so long to deploy the Bluefin 21 because they wanted to get every last ounce of intelligence out of those pingers. They didn't want to pass up the opportunity to narrow in the search zone by finding pinging whatsoever. They were delayed by both the Malaysian and civil military radar lost track of the plane. Whatever time they did have once they got the Inmarsat data, they had to make the best use of it possible. They wrung every ounce of battery juice they could.</s>PEREIRA: They certainly did. All right, Jeff, the next one to you. What's the difference between the Bluefin 21 SONAR and the submarine SONAR? Why can't a submarine do the work faster?</s>JEFF WISE, CNN AVIATION ANALYST: A submarine is a vessel filled with people and designed to travel through the open sea. A larger and more cumbersome piece of equipment. This Bluefin is an autonomous underwater vehicle. You can program it to follow closely the contours of the subsurface area. You don't have to worry so much about losing it if it runs into something underneath the water. It was likened to a Rumba earlier or to an automatic lawn mower. It is designed to go back and forth. It is suited to the task at hand than a large, cumbersome submarine.</s>PEREIRA: Another question coming in, this one's from Twitter. Mary, we will put it to you. Why don't cabin crews have a way to send distress call from outside the cockpit in case an incident occurs inside the cockpit?</s>SCHIAVO: What a great question. You know, we struggled with that. I worked on the 9/11 cases for 11 years. And one of the key pieces of information we had were phone calls from flight attendants who used the GTE air phones and their cell phones to get information out. But there was a lot of disagreement over what kind of communications they wanted to keep, the communications and really the command central, if you will, in the flight deck. But, oh, my goodness, those flight attendants worked mightily to get us intelligence on what they had. It's still that way, unfortunately.</s>PEREIRA: Do you think there will be a change because of this?</s>SCHIAVO: Well, probably not. I think they will still center the communications central in the flight deck, but I do think they will lengthen communications capability between the cabin and the flight deck. And I think that they will have streaming data. We must have streaming data from this point forward. There's just no excuse for this frantic search on the bottom of the ocean.</s>PEREIRA: Jeff, we'll put the last question to you. I think it's a question that many of us have considered. When will the search be considered a failure? This person who put this, Don Mont, said, I think this plane is lost forever.</s>WISE: That's really the million dollar question right now. I was surprised to hear they decide to call off the surface search. There's still a huge amount of ocean they haven't looked at. As for this underwater search, the area where the pings were found is actually itself rather small. Should be a matter of a day or two's work for this Bluefin to search that area and find out if anything's there. We heard that the Australians are preparing us to engage in a long drawn-out process. What that exactly would involve, it's not entirely clear. The search area will clearly be larger than the immediate area of the pings. But once that gets played out, once that's looked at and, if nothing is found, we'll really be left high and dry.</s>PEREIRA: We will. Jeff Wise, Mary Schiavo, and all our viewers, thank you so much for engaging in this question-and-answer period @ THIS HOUR. We really appreciate it. For those of you at home, why don't you like our new Facebook page? It's pretty nice. We're growing and we'd love for you to be a part of it. Go to facebook/@thishour. So easy. Lots of stuff, behind-the- scenes photos, some stories you'll only see on Facebook. And rumor is John Berman will share some of his favorite Crockpot recipes. That's all I'm hearing. All you have to do is like us on Facebook/@thishour. That is it for us @ THIS HOUR. You get one half of the team, not so bad. "LEGAL VIEW" with Pamela Brown, my friend, starts right now. Have a great day, everybody.