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239 People On Board Missing Airliner; Boeing 777 Has Stellar Safety Record; Flight 370 Passengers Included Painters, Others From Around The World; Piecing Together Missing Plane Puzzle

Aired March 10, 2014 - 14:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

RICHARD QUEST, CNN AIRLINE AND AVIATION CORRESPONDENT: You see, they should know where the plane is because they have the radar track. The radar showed this particular body of water is well and truly over radar. You have the Malaysian side. You've got the Vietnamese side and these Indonesians and the Singaporians. So there is plenty of radar coverage in that area.

And the unknown here and this is frankly it is the unknown is why this radar has not led them to what's closer if you are like analysis of where the plane is. Those messages Brian was talking about that were sent from Air France, this is a list of them. There are some 24 of them.

And what this basically had happened, as the plane started to degrade and the system started, the plane sent out these messages, auto off, key cast fault, a status fault, captain PFT fault, again and again, these faults were being told to the airline.

Long and short of it is. We don't have anything like this from this. That's the problem. It's not that it doesn't have the capacity to tell us, it is for some reason it didn't.

JIM SCIUTTO, CNN GUEST ANCHOR: You make a point. There is active and passive. The signal the plane is sending out and it's passive and a big plane. How can it not pick up an airliner and even as it came into pieces. That seems unprecedented. You wouldn't have had that coverage in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, right with the Air France crash, I assume.

QUEST: No. There is no radar coverage over the Atlantic or the Pacific. It's done by tracks. It's done by times upon which you go oceanic. It's a very sophisticated system. But in this part of the world, I was looking a moment, about a half hour ago, I was looking at the Malaysian air radar system and at the Vietnamese system. There is an overlapping area.

The Malaysians go for 200 miles and the Vietnamese go for 200 miles with the radar coverage. The Gulf of Thailand is less than 250 or so miles across. So there is plenty of radar coverage. In fact, we know from the track that we have seen that the planes were going because we've been told that it was turning. What we don't know is why all this information instantly came to an end.

The unpalatable truth of this, Jim, is that we won't know until we find the plane because the plane didn't send out a list of this is going wrong as it did with Air France 447. Just very quickly we knew with 447 what had happened. We didn't know why. Here we don't even know what happened.

SCIUTTO: That's incredible. Even with Air France, I saw it took five days to find the first piece of wreckage there. So more questions. In fact, no more questions than answers. All questions. No answers. Thanks very much to Richard Quest. Please stay with us.

When we come back, hundreds of flights today, the Boeing 777 is used across the globe and its safety record is well-documented. We look deep into its history and for 200 families, all they can do is wait as the search continues for Malaysia Flight 370. Loved ones are enduring an agonizing wait.

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SCIUTTO: Welcome back. I'm Jim Sciutto in Washington. Some debris, an Iranian middle man and a mysterious group claiming responsibility. These are the clues we have right now as the frantic search for Flight 370 intensifies. The huge commercial airliner vanishing literally in mid-air, in the skies over Southeast Asia. Was it terrorism or just a freak accident?'

A U.S. intelligence official telling me this morning, quote, "We have not seen anything so far that indicates this was an act of terrorism." Still a group calling itself the China Martyrs Brigade is now claiming responsibility. A different U.S. official telling me as well that this group has not been identified before now.

And the mystery deepens. CNN has also just learned that an Iranian man purchased the tickets for two contacts who boarded this flight with those stolen passports. The only other potential lead we have is some debris found near Hongkong. It is being examined to make sure it is actually tied to this plane and they've expanded the search area.

The U.S. is now sending a second warship to aid the dozens of ships and planes from 10 countries currently scouring an area about the size of Pennsylvania. Now the plane involved in this, the Boeing 777 has a stellar safety record, only one fatal crash in nearly 20 years in service.

And that last accident, last year's Asiana crash in Northern California was likely pilot error. So we are going to bring CNN's Rene Marsh. She covers this for CNN for a little bit more on the background.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

RENE MARSH, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): The Boeing 777 is one of the most high tech planes in the sky and a work horse of international travel.

MARK WEISS, FORMER BOEING 777 PILOT: The 777 I have to say was probably the nicest and most sophisticated, but also one of the easier airplanes to fly. MARSH: It's so sophisticated it beams messages to the ground to identify maintenance problems before it even lasts.

STEVE WALLACE, FORMER ACCIDENT INVESTIGATOR: There are systems to communicate with the company. There are even systems sometimes that monitor the health of the engines as automated report.

MARSH: The 777-200 extended range models like Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 are capable of flying from New York to almost anywhere in the world nonstop.

WALLACE: It really has an excellent, excellent safety record.

MARSH: That's why the mystery behind how this flight vanished has stumped the world even pilots like Mark Weiss who flew 777.

WEISS: This was way out of the ordinary. This is just something that happened instantly or relatively quickly and overcame the proof and overcame the aircraft.

MARSH: Since the first 777 rolled off the assembly line in 1994, the planes have made about 5 million flights. Yet its first fatal crash came last July when this Asiana Airlines 777 crashed in San Francisco. Three people died. The cause still under investigation. But in this crash, finding the plane itself is still the first priority.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

MARSH: Those data recorders are a priority. Without those or debris, there is no way to get a full picture of what happened. This remains a mystery -- Jim.

SCIUTTO: CNN's Rene Marsh, thanks very much. She covers aviation for CNN.

Now let's go back to New York with CNN super aviation expert, Richard Quest. Richard, as we are learning more about the captain of the flight now, he's an avid social media fan who had a flight simulator in his home. I also know you had an encounter face to face with the co-pilot of the plane. What more can you tell us about them?

QUEST: Let's start with the captain, Captain Shah. He had about 18.5 thousand miles, hours of experience. This is from YouTube and this is from social media. It shows that the captain had actually had a flight simulator built in his home, not a full motion simulator, but obviously as you can see he was an avid flyer. He absolutely adored it according to everything that we have read about him.

This particular video had nothing to do with flying, but he chose to do it in front of his simulator. But the core thing to bear in mind is he was an extremely senior captain in the Malaysian 777 fleet. One of the reasons he was so senior was because the first officer who was flying with him in the right hand seat, First Officer Farik Hamid, he was relatively junior. He had 2,700 hours flying experience. He was only transitioning to the 777 fleet. So Jim, this flight that you see, which I talked with First Officer Hamid, charming. He did the landing at Kuala Lumpur. The captain again, a senior captain described it as text book and perfect. But we clearly have here two very competent experienced captain and the first officer.

SCIUTTO: It must be hard for to you see having been with him in the cockpit. That ties you to this story personally. I was going to ask you just one more question. There has been a lot of talk in light of how wired planes are today, that the pilots don't do any more flying really and there has been criticism from pilot group that their skills are not hone when there are problems, you know, in the plane.

But if you were to have an incident, you have a pilot there with 185,000 miles. I imagine if you were to have an incident, that's the kind of pilot you would want at the controls.

QUEST: That level of hours, yes. You are talking here, Jim, about the startle effect. It's one of the issues that aviation authorities are very concerned about now. Not only basic pilot handling skills, basic flying, if you like, but there is a general feeling by many that that has actually gone down and deteriorated.

But the startle effect. You are in the middle of the night. Flying for 14 hours and all of a sudden the cockpit lights up like a Christmas tree and alarms are ringing and you don't what's happening. That was a situation in 447. Less likely in this one. It was a relatively short flight in quite congested air space between Kuala Lumpur and Beijing, a 5-hour flight.

And you did have a relatively an inexperienced first officer. But to your point, the startle effect on the question of airmanship in those situations is a very real issue in aviation at the moment.

SCIUTTO: Yes, it's a big question. One reason you need those is you need to see what the plane was doing and what the pilot did in reaction.

QUEST: I can't emphasize enough on this one the rarity of it. The fact we simply don't -- unless they are keeping the information from us, we simply don't have anything.

SCIUTTO: Yes. All questions. No answers as we said. Thanks very much to Richard Quest in New York. More on the 200 families that can do nothing more but wait for those answers. Their loved ones still missing more than three days after the Malaysian Airlines flight disappeared. We learned more about who was on the flight. That's next.

Plus how can a commercial airliner just vanish with no trace of anything. We try to understand what could cause this major disappearance.

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SCIUTTO: Welcome back. I'm Jim Sciutto in Washington. Two hundred and thirty nine people aboard 227 passengers, 12 crew, on Malaysian Airlines Flight 370. The jumbo jet that vanished early Saturday morning.

CNN's Nick Valencia joins me now from Atlanta to talk about the passengers. You know, Nick, looking at this list, it is heart breaking as a father. You have five toddlers and two of the Americans a 4-year-old and a 2-year-old. It's always gutting to learn those stories. Tell us what you found when you looked into some of the passengers on board.

NICK VALENCIA, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, those who have been affected by this tragedy, this disappearance, Jim, have really been telling us that it's incomprehensible. They just don't understand how a flight could disappear out of mid-air. And as you begin to learn more about these passengers and dig into their personal stories, it really opens the personalization of what happened here.

One of those people that was on the plane that CNN can confirm is Phil Wood. He is originally from Northeast Oklahoma City and his friends describe him as a very earnest man, an honest man, very kind and humble, God centered, a graduate of Oklahoma Christian University in 1985. He went on to work for IBM and traveled the world. It was a passion for him that was sparked at a very young age when his family moved to Germany.

Now earlier our affiliate caught up with his brother who talked about the emotion that the family is going through right now.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TOM WOOD, BROTHER OF MISSING MALAYSIA AIRLINES PASSENGER: So I'm crossing my fingers that, you know, maybe there is a happy ending to this.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

VALENCIA: Two more passengers that we can now confirm were also on that flight, Jim, were two Canadians originally from Montreal. (Bai Shamo), 37 years old and her husband, 42 years old (Mektash Merkashi). You are looking at the photo there of the beautiful couple. They have two children. We understand that those two children were not on the flight, but many people at a loss for words to try to figure out what happened to this beautiful couple.

We heard from the boss through our Canadian affiliate, CTV, who described the husband who was a vice president of Chinese operations at an energy and resource company described him as a great friend and a great colleague.

Also we learned that another woman from Malaysia who was living in the Pittsburgh area, she was also on that flight. We know very little about her personally other than she has been in the United States in 2010. That flight was eventually going to connect her back to come here to the United States.

Many people as I say are just grief-stricken and with so much sorrow, Jim. They just want to know what happened and there so few answers out there right now -- Jim.

SCIUTTO: No question, Neil. It always gives meaning to those numbers, right, 239, just a number. You see their faces and they are very real people. That couple, who you showed the picture, they were neighbors and friends of ours in Beijing. It's a small world today. Everybody is tide. Thanks very much for bringing some of those stories.

VALENCIA: Thank you.

SCIUTTO: No parts and no pieces and no communication. How can an airliner just disappear without a trace? We will have more on how something like this can possibly happen.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

SCIUTTO: In an age of satellites, radar, sonar and infrared and sophisticated high tech communications, how can a huge passenger jet simply disappear? So far what happened to the Malaysia Airlines flight has baffled everyone where much of the search and rescue is being track and coordinated there in that room.

So we've asked our Tom Foreman to look into the mystery for us. He joins us from Washington now. Tom, you know the technology as well as anybody. In this day and age, it seems impossible to understand how can this happen particularly with no information whatsoever? What did you find?

TOM FOREMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, there are still big holes out there essentially in radar systems that allows us to know only so much about planes that are out there flying. You may remember the Air France flight that left South American and how it vanished and nobody had any idea where it was for quite some time.

Plus there are things that can happen on the plane that are not terrorism that can also make it disappear without a trace and very quickly. For example, you can have the failure of something like a wing or an engine or the tail. Remember this plane in 2012, the one that disappeared actually had a wing tip taken off of it in an accident and that had to be repaired.

Are the repairs done properly? Yes, they are, but there have been circumstances where repairs don't last in the long run. There is also this possibility, which is something that is not a bomb, not a terrorist attack, but sure can look like one.

If you had a catastrophic failure of a door or a window on a plane like this, this would cause an explosive depressurization of the cabin. That means in less than a half second, everything loose inside would rush out and the temperature outside, which is minus 6 degrees Fahrenheit would try to equalize of what's inside that would cause a freezing cold dense fog to completely fill the cabin.

And that would render everybody including the pilots in a matter of 5 to 6 seconds unable to focus and concentrate and maybe even unable to see as their bodies were pounded by this enormous change in pressure and temperature. All of that can add up to exactly what we have here, a great big mystery because suddenly the plane that was simply is not there anymore -- Jim.

SCIUTTO: Incredible. And a reminder of that detail. That that plane had had its wing tip fixed before. Just one of the many things to look into. Thanks very much to Tom Foreman with all of the many possibilities for what could happen to this flight.

I'm Jim Sciutto in Washington. Thanks very much for watching. Coming up, we are going to have more coverage of the mystery of Flight 370. Plus some of the day's other top stories including the Newtown shooter's father speaking out in public for the first time. A potentially huge breakthrough in Alzheimer's research right after this.

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