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Missing Malaysia Plane Far Off Course

Aired March 11, 2014 - 14:30   ET

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

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DON LEMON, CNN GUEST ANCHOR: All right, we have breaking news here on CNN. Again, I want to welcome our viewers here in the United States and around the world. It's on the mystery of Flight 370. We have just learned here on CNN the plane was way off course when it went missing. This information is coming to us from a senior Malaysian Air Force official. They've traced the last signs of the plane to a very small island off the Straits of Malacca. It was then that they lost contact with it.

If the air force information is correct, again, this is a big development, it means the plane had almost done a complete U-turn and was flying into the opposite direction from its scheduled destination, and it was last seen in the Malacca Straits about 2:40 a.m. Two hours after it took off from the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur.

The question now, why and of course, the question is where is this plane? One expert telling CNN that while mechanical explanations are still possible, those explanations are narrowing very quickly. Opening the possibility that someone turned off the transponder, deliberately inside this cockpit.

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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: If this report is true, it means a couple of things. One is, was there someone unauthorized in the cockpit, ordered the transponder turned off, ordered the plane to fly a 90- degree turn off course. Second, did one of the pilots do it themselves?

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LEMON: OK, so based on its speed and how much fuel was on the plane, Flight 370 could have been in the skies for about seven hours. That means that once this plane went off the grid and lost its radar signal, it could potentially be anywhere within this 4,000-mile radius that you're seeing on the screen.

Our senior international correspondent is Nic Robertson and Richard Quest is here as well. We're trying to get our Andrew Stevens up. He is in Kuala Lumpur. First, I want to go to Nic Robertson. Nic, you're over in London. You have been covering this. What is the reaction to this? What is your reaction?

NIC ROBERTSON, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, one of the questions I have at this time, and Richard I think has excellent insights here, will be able to jump in. But one of question, the key question is obviously who turned the aircraft and was it mechanical. Was it a mechanical slash, an electrical issue that caused the transponder to go down?

Let's say that it was. Let's say the pilot has done what the experts say which is turn to try to fly back home. We're told that it was a clear night. He's flown right across Malaysia and on into the sea. One would have expected if he was trying to get back and had some semblance of control over the aircraft, he would have recognized the land mass.

This is a pilot, as Richard knows, who has over 18,000 hours of flying experience. Would have seen at least some lights below him because he would have been looking for them because perhaps his navigation equipment wasn't working. Again, speculation, but not gone off into the sea. This is the question that I have now.

LEMON: OK, stand by. Richard?

RICHARD QUEST, CNN AIRLINE AND AVIATION CORRESPONDENT: The issue of why and where and how, we don't know. To the point that Nic is saying, if there was a mechanical failure and the pilot had turned back, did he realize where he was? Yes, he would have flown across the peninsula at its narrowest point, but they could have been dealing with all sorts of issues. For instance, one person has just been asking me about the transponder may have stopped, but what about all these other systems?

LEMON: Because this is the most sophisticated.

QUEST: All modern planes send signals all the time. The failure to get those signals either suggests somebody interfered with it and switched it off, or total power failure and therefore these systems switch themselves off.

LEMON: OK.

QUEST: And that is entirely possible. I've been talking to pilots --

LEMON: But then why no communication? Why no we are in trouble? We are over whatever. We are losing power. Why not that?

QUEST: We don't know.

LEMON: OK.

QUEST: With these questions, eventually you are forced into the position of saying we don't know. The biggest issue is why, for me, is how did this plane fly for an hour and 10, and nobody on the ground spotted that a 777 MH-370 with a filed flight plan to Beijing had done a dogleg turn and was now going in the opposite direction.

LEMON: To either of you, my colleague, our colleague, Miguel Marquez has e-mailed me and said with the transponder off, how far can a plane go without being detected on radar in that part of the world? QUEST: It can't. I'm going to go straight in. Look at the map. That is going straight over Malaysia. Malaysia has pretty much universal -- there's a couple of areas in the Andaman Sea and a couple of areas in the Straits of Malacca, off the west side, which don't have radar coverage, but the vast majority has radar coverage. There is no way that they wouldn't have been covered by the majority of that trip. And if not by them, by other countries in the region.

LEMON: OK, another colleague says they will find the debris floating in the morning. I expect this to wrap up first light with a floating trail of evidence because they have simply been looking in the wrong body of water.

QUEST: My experience suggests that that could well be the case. The reality is, I have absolutely no idea because you could end up with a situation here where this may have come down over land. But we don't know.

LEMON: That was from Drew Griffin, by the way. Someone says, this is a viewer, says why didn't passengers make any calls during that hour and a half? But no one has heard. No one has heard from anyone on the plane. People with loved ones on the plane, they're calling their loved ones, it's ringing.

QUEST: Whoa, you don't know what condition was on the aircraft. They may not have been aware of it. The passengers on board may not have been aware.

LEMON: Yes. Good point. Nic Robertson? Is Nic still there?

ROBERTSON: Yes, absolutely. They may not have been able to call if there was an electrical power failure, which was one of the indicators that may have cause a transponder to go down in the first place. If there was a repeater system on the aircraft that allowed them to use their cell phones via satellite transponder. That system may have been down. The aircraft otherwise from what we understand was not flying low enough for them to be able to pick up the phone network directly through their phones. That could be another answer.

There are questions that have been reported and raised about the phones and about ringing long after the plane had disappeared. There aren't adequate answers for that either. There are so many unanswered questions here. I mean, for so long, the focus was on those two men using the stolen passports, but really, what we heard today from Interpol and from the Malaysian police, that they feel they can move them to one side.

But this leaves over 200 other passengers that have yet perhaps to go through that level of scrutiny because so much focus was going on these, too. Of course, we know they work in all these issues in parallel. But it has been something of a diversion, if you will, at least in our attention.

LEMON: I think most people think, you know, in the news business, it's a big development when we're talking about the passports. But in that part of the world, many fly on stolen passports all the time. Their intent is not nefarious when it comes to the aircraft. They're just trying to get to a better place.

QUEST: What we have with this is another piece of the jigsaw. We do not have the picture yet, but we have a very useful, important piece of the jigsaw. And I think drew may well be right, what's going to happen over the next 24 to 48 hours, which will be another piece of the jigsaw. But anybody who's read one of these reports, I mean, we could be talking about completely off beam, about a mechanical failure, navigational failure, any form of failure.

LEMON: OK, thank you. Stand by, stand by. Many more questions and we'll get some answers for you on the other side of the break. We're going to go live to Kuala Lumpur next.

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LEMON: Breaking news here on CNN, we have just learned here on CNN that the plane took a route that was unknown. It had turned almost a U-turn and that's what we're finding out here. That information is coming from a senior Malaysian Air Force official, that this plane was way off course. And the last information, there's the map. Took off from Kuala Lumpur was supposed to go to Beijing. But instead it turned pretty close to Vietnam and then went back towards the Straits of Malacca. That is the intended route that you're looking at now.

And once it got close to Vietnam, again, it turned and went back over the Straits of Malacca. With the amount of fuel that the plane had on board or that it had left, it could have gone anywhere within a 4,000- mile radius. So still this is unsolved. But the latest information we're getting is that.

I want to bring in now Andrew Stevens who is in Kuala Lumpur with the latest on the search for this plane. Andrew, could they simply have been searching in the wrong body of water or have searches been going on since we've gotten this new information in this particular body of water as well?

ANDREW STEVENS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: That's a very important question, Don, because yes, they have been searching in this body of water. It hasn't been the key focus of the search, but it's certainly -- this is from one of the big English language daily newspapers in Malaysia. So this is dated from this morning. Nearly 24 hours ago now.

And you'll see there, that's the search area and this is where they now think the plane was last sighted. So already, they have been including that in the search area. Now what we've learned today basically is that the turn-back theory looks like it's been confirmed. There has been talk, there have been suggestions that the plane did turn around. It has not been confirmed.

It's been confirmed to us by a senior, but unnamed source within the Malaysian Air Force. He can't reveal his name publicly because he's not authorized to speak to us. It has been around for a couple of days though the fact that this plane may have turned around. What seems to have happened is that the secondary transponder, which sends out the vital statistics, the information about what exactly this plane is so you can track knowing which plane it is, stopped working just about an hour or so into the flight.

The primary radar kept tracking it, though, but they couldn't actually confirm whether this was the same plane, even though it looked like it, and they tracked it around turning to the left, almost in a U-turn back across Malaysia. What's key about this is that they didn't -- they can't confirm that was the actual plane, although it looks very much like it.

So that is why they started looking across the Straits of Malacca. One of our earlier colleagues is suggesting we may find it at first light, which is probably four hours away from now. That may take longer than that because there already has been assets deployed in that region, haven't found anything yet. So this still could go for quite some time.

Important to know, we have known about the possibility of this turn back, this U-turn. Now it looks like it's a confirmation.

LEMON: All right, thank you very much, Andrew Stevens. Standby, I want to bring in now a former airline captain and crash investigator, David Funk. Good afternoon to you, sir. My question is, why no communication? That's what many people are asking. Why no distress call, no communication?

CAPTAIN DAVID FUNK, FORMER PILOT AND INTERNATIONAL CAPTAIN, NORTHWEST (via telephone): Well, there would really be two possibilities. One is they had an absolute and total electrical failure, which is pretty unlikely with a 777. We've got so much redundancy built into the systems of the airplane, it would be real tough to get down to almost no communications capability, including -- and I'm pretty sure Malaysia Airlines does it.

They probably have a satellite phone somewhere on that airplane that operates independent of the airplane's electrical system. May or may not have worked in the cockpit. But more likely scenario is that somebody just didn't want to talk. And if they don't want to talk to you, you can be screaming and yelling, but if you shut everything off, there's no transponder codes for the secondary radar to pick up.

Nobody answering the phone, so to speak, or answering the radio. That creates a problem. More likely, electrical problem. If it's not terrorism, it's almost got to be massive and total electrical failure, which would bring the guys to doing what we call dead reckoning navigation, which is what we used prior to electronic aids.

Basically looking at a map and looking at the ground, or in the case out over the ocean, you take a heading up that you know will put you close to land. You fly it based on a clock and your known speed and hopefully you'll find land and be able to find an airport, which may be the simple explanation for the turn back.

LEMON: If you're looking at the route and this sort of dogleg that it took, in your mind, does that tell you that they had trouble, just good-old fashioned guiding?

FUNK: It's called dead reckoning or pilot flying by looking at the ground with a map. That very well could have been the case. If they did have a total electrical failure, if they were down to a map, a compass, and a clock, which is how many ships still navigate around the world. All our navigators are taught to do that. Pilots are trained to do that from the very beginning. That could be very much why they turned back.

Go to the last place where you knew you were for sure, and there's a big land mass behind you. If you can get over that land mass, you're likely to recognize something. In the case of this captain, an 18,000-hour pilot, he has seen before and remembers and can get himself close to an airport or get it close enough where if you have to ditch, somebody sees you ditching.

LEMON: Does that explain the transponder? Why would the transponder go off? Even with a failure, the boxes are still on, they're still working, of course, keeping the information. But why would the transponder go as well?

FUNK: Not an expert on the 777. I am on the 757, the 767, and the 747 because I flew all of those airplanes extensively, thousands of hours. But there is no separate and independent backup battery for the transponder system. It's one of those things, it's not considered that important, if you've only got enough things to fly the airplane and you're down to the battery only with 30 minutes of battery life left when you're down to just the battery, it's only going to last you about 30 minutes.

You could be in, for want of a better word, in a desperate situation to get hold of anybody to help. In this case, if they did the turn back because it was a total electrical failure, this is an electric airplane. It needs the power to run a bunch of systems. But as I said, the likelihood of the multiple failures that you'd have to have, it gets pretty unlikely.

You know, we've heard the talk about the two Iranians that were traveling on false passports and maybe Interpol is not looking at them the same way. There's still 225 other passengers that we need to vet prior to making any decision that it was or was not terrorism. I wouldn't make that strong a statement this early in the investigation.

LEMON: Captain Funk, I've got to get to a break. But I have to be honest with you, you have given us the best information that I have seen thus far on the air. Will you please stand by because I want to talk to you more?

FUNK: Sure can. You bet.

LEMON: Great information explaining the electrical system, the transponders, and everything. The breaking news here on CNN is that this plane had veered way off course and it had turned back, almost a U-turn. This is a significant development in the investigation for this plane. It may explain to us very soon the whereabouts of this plane and the passengers on board. More breaking news right after this break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK) LEMON: Breaking news on Flight 370. The flight was way off course, according to a Malaysian official, had made a U-turn. Joining me now is former airline captain and crash investigator, David Funk. If you're looking at the information and from the map, what do you think happened to this plane?

FUNK: They made a turn back for some reason, we don't know yet, whether it was because of interference in the cockpit or massive electrical failure. You know, until we go from this being a search and rescue operation to a recovery operation, I don't know. And it's kind of bad, you feel bad for the families because they just don't know and you want to be very sensitive to that as an investigator. But let's make sure we know what's happened to the airframe and the folks that were on it before we start to suppose what happened.

LEMON: Captain, good information. Captain Funk, thank you very much. I want to get now straight to our CNN's Tom Foreman. Tom, you have a better picture of exactly what happened.

TOM FOREMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, you know, Don, like all of us, we're trying to figure out what the pictures of happened here because it seems like all of this evidence is almost not helping us. Look, this was the original flight path. It takes off, it's going up here. You've been talking about this all hour. This is now what we believe to be the real flight path.

This plane would be going about 560 miles an hour. The math, at least so far, seems to generally add up that it would go from here to here. I think, Don, as you try to patch together what happened though you have to break this almost into segments and say what do those segments tell us.

For example, what we're hearing from Interpol and others is that so far, there is nothing in here that indicated that something was wrong. No hijacker, nothing like that that anybody was aware of, at least in this part. In this section over here, if this, in fact, happened as we think it happened, if this report is true, this is definitely wrong because it's taken it somewhere that we don't intend, but the real question is, as the captain was just mentioning, right here.

What happened that made this occur, and there are really several possibilities, Don, but I think you have to bear in mind. Yes, you could have a hijacking situation where they're forced to do this, but that does beg the question, how do you wind up with absolutely no communications? None, no passenger? Maybe their cell phones couldn't get a signal.

Maybe because it's 2:00 in the morning as Richard said a while ago, maybe everyone's asleep, they have no idea anything's going on. Even if they had a signal somewhere in here, they didn't do anything about it. There are other possibilities. One we talked about a lot yesterday that I think is worth bearing in mind.

If you have explosive depressurization of the cabin, if a window blew out, a door blew out at 35,000 feet, if the right steps aren't taken absolutely immediately, you could have a whole plane full of unconscious people in a minute. And the pilots tried to do something and simply managed to turn the plane before they blacked out, you could get the exact same pattern.

LEMON: I thought about that as we were talking about the depressurization with Richard Quest a little bit earlier. We went through that scenario last night on "The Don Lemon Show." What they said was, what we came up with, if the passengers were, you know, aware and conscious, they could have said cell phones in the bag. If, it indeed, is terrorism or hijacking. So you wouldn't have any communication because no one would have their cell phone. The hijackers would take the cell phones -- Tom.

FOREMAN: That's true, that's true. But what's the point of terrorism? The point of terrorism is to terrorize people. We've had no credible credit taken for this. Then you start saying, well, that's part of that puzzle that's missing. That is a missing part of the puzzle right now. I think it's one of the other reasons why Interpol is saying we think this is pointing away from that as a possibility.

LEMON: Tom, we've got to get to a break. We'll see you soon. Thank you. More breaking news right after this.

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