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Search Area Expands

Aired March 13, 2014 - 14:00   ET

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


DON LEMON, CNN ANCHOR: Good afternoon and thanks for joining us for this special edition of the CNN NEWSROOM. I'm Don Lemon, in today for Brooke.

We're going to spend the next two hours covering all angles surrounding the mystery of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. Seven days ago, above Southeast Asia, one of the world's biggest twin-engine jets simply vanished.

And now we have some breaking news for you. During the White House briefing, Press Secretary Jay Carney said that based on new information, the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 may expand to the vast Indian Ocean.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JAY CARNEY, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: In an investigation led by the Malaysian government, an investigation that involves many nations with many assets, are following leads where we find them. And it's my understanding that based on some new information that's not necessarily conclusive, but new information, an additional search area may be opened in the Indian Ocean. And we are consulting with the international partners about the appropriate assets to deploy.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

LEMON: All right. So that is new information here on CNN. And all of this unfolding as Vietnamese crews have found nothing (INAUDIBLE) debris field where Chinese satellite images showed objects were in the water. And according to Malaysia, the Chinese now say those images were released by mistake. How did that happen?

Well, my next guest is a 777 pilot with almost 30 years of experience. His name is Les Abend and he is here with me.

Les, what do you make of this new, expanded search for - in the Indian Ocean?

LES ABEND, COMMERCIAL AIRLINES CAPTAIN: Well, it says that there's limited information from the - from any data sources. No communication directly from the crew. It indicates to me that there was something that -- catastrophic that occurred, you know? That the airplane might have broke apart.

LEMON: Yes. And when you sat down, I wasn't kind of - I wasn't really joking, but, I mean, it may seem that way, but I was like, where is this plane? Where do you think this plane is?

ABEND: It's a tough one. You know, what you're dealing with is a situation -- the airplane is highly sophisticated. Boeing makes an incredible product. And it communicates internally within itself. It also communicates to the airline, the dispatch, to the maintenance facilities. So something catastrophic had to occur in order for that communication to be cut off. Where it is, that's a tough question.

LEMON: I want to update our viewers. Again, the new information that we're coming - that we're getting just now from the White House press briefing from the White House press secretary, Jay Carney, says that based on this new information, a new search area may be opened up in the Indian Ocean for the missing Flight 370. Carney said many countries are partnering in the search and following lead where is we find them. So now everyone is trying to get involved in this.

You know, Les, you have been inside the cockpit of a 777 so many times. You know the equipment on this missing plane. What type of information or signals do you think the plane's engines should send back?

ABEND: Well, there's just hundreds of parameters that this is an Trent (ph) 892 engineer on this 777 200 (ph) from my understanding. And it sends back data constantly of exhaust gas temperatures, inlet temperatures, all sorts of fuel flow information. Somehow that feed should be getting back to either the airline and or to Boeing.

LEMON: Right.

ABEND: Or -- and Rolls Royce also -

LEMON: Yes.

ABEND: Who designs the engine. You know, it's hard to say -- at some point there's got to be information available on --

LEMON: Yes, but we haven't heard anything. You said at some point. But there's nothing. You have 30 years of experience. I mean have you ever heard of anything like this?

ABEND: No, absolutely nothing. Never. Absolutely nothing. Nothing at all.

LEMON: Yes. For the transponder to be either --

ABEND: Well, that's another mystery. There's two transponders on board this airplane, OK. If one was to fail, you'd get a - you'd get a message on the screen called an ICAST (ph) message that would say, hey, one's failed. It would be nothing for the pilots to turn the knob and turn on the other transponder. For two of them to fail, that's highly unusual, which indicates some complete electronic failure occurred.

LEMON: You heard "The Wall Street Journal" report that many people are knocking down and so far our -- even our Richard Quest is saying his sources are saying not true, the plane could not -- did not fly three or four hours. That the information from Rolls Royce, the engineers are showing that. But what do you make of that information and is that possible for the plane to fly that many hours after taking off or after losing transmission?

ABEND: If it had a complete electrical failure, which is just -- it's almost unthinkable. To me, it seems as though the crew was faced with some sort of catastrophic problem, they attempted to turn back, and I don't think we're looking in the right place.

LEMON: What do you mean?

ABEND: This thing - this thing may be over land and not over the ocean. When this crew diverted. I looked at the area on the charts and it seemed to me that there's only a radio contact, not radar contact where this airplane -- part of the route went through.

LEMON: OK. So if this -- if this plane is somewhere over land, don't you think we would see some sort of smoldering something, unless it ran out of fuel and then there's no burning?

ABEND: I understand, but there's some desolate areas out there. You would think. But it may have found a desolate area.

LEMON: Yes.

You know, we sit here every day, and we've been sitting here for six days, and I keep - I keep thinking, what else are we going to say about this but - what are we going to say about this, and then new information keeps coming, some of it accurate, some of it not so accurate. And then you wonder, can a plane just disappear? There have been ghost flights. There have been a number of planes that have disappeared. Not many. And we've never heard from them.

ABEND: Yes. Absolutely not. Airplanes just don't disappear.

LEMON: Especially one this size.

ABEND: Yes. This is a 650,000 pound airplane. It's 200 - it's over 200 feet long. No, it just doesn't disappear unless it breaks apart.

LEMON: Yes. In your training, when they train you for this, do they train you for this type of scenario, OK, listen, you've had a catastrophic electrical failure, the transponders have gone out. Is this all part of training or has something like this never come up during training?

ABEND: I mean multiple, multiple issues, not so much.

LEMON: Yes.

ABEND: But, yes, there are checklists that we follow. If there's an electrical problem, the electronic checklists that's normally available may not be available until you go to a standard card-type checklist.

LEMON: Yes. ABEND: Are we trained for it? Yes, we are. Is the likelihood of that kind of thing happening? No.

LEMON: No.

ABEND: It's -- this is highly unusual.

LEMON: Have you ever flown airplanes in that airspace in that part of the world?

ABEND: I've gone to Tokyo and I have not gone that far east.

LEMON: (INAUDIBLE), because I wonder what, you know, just being in that part of the world, there are so many different places that, you know, that Americans don't really know about. And we sit here on American television and we try to, you know, analyze and say, OK, this, this, and this. But from what I understand, it's not as remote an area, these areas, as we think that they are. These are pretty populated areas for the most part when -- that part of Southeast Asia. These are pretty populated areas.

ABEND: I agree. But if the airplane broke apart into very tiny little pieces, people may be unfamiliar with what they're - what they're seeing. And maybe somewhere down the road, somebody will say, hey, what's this in my backyard.

LEMON: All right, stand by, Les. I want to get to John Goglia, a former NTSB board member.

John Goglia, I have a question for you. Being a former NTSB board member, I want to give you the new information from the White House. And this is from the White House press briefing. Jay Carney says that there's new information, a new search field may be opened up in the Indian Ocean or is being opened up in the Indian Ocean for the missing flight and that - he said that many countries are partnering in the search, following leads where we find them. What do you make of this new information?

JOHN GOGLIA, FORMER NTSB BOARD MEMBER (via telephone: Well, it means that they've asked - they've been going over the radar data and other data and they have some indications that the airplane maybe did make the turn that the military said and they are expanding to look.

LEMON: Les Abend is - who is a pilot is here with me and he says he believes that they're looking in the wrong areas. He doesn't think that it's necessarily over water, that this plane could have landed or it could have crashed into -- on to land or broken apart.

GOGLIA: The airplane could be anywhere in the range of that airplane. So I - if it had four hours of fuel left on board, it could be anywhere from four hours from the last point that we saw the airplane. It could be on land, it could be in water. The only thing we know for sure, that little green men didn't come down from space and take it.

LEMON: I mean, do we know that for sure though? I mean -

GOGLIA: Well, that's true, we don't even know that.

LEMON: We don't even know that for sure because - I mean this is a mystery among mysteries. And in all my years, I've never seen anything like this. Les has - in reporting for 20 years. Les has been flying for 30 years and he's saying, as someone who has flown the 777 many times, this is unfathomable to him because there's redundancy built into the plane, two transponders. He's never seen anything like it. In your years with the NTSB, have you seen anything like this?

GOGLIA: In all of my years, and I've got both of you beat, no, I've never seen anything like this. And part of the reason why we haven't seen anything like this is because the massive amount of misinformation that has come out of Malaysia in the beginning. And so this investigation really only started yesterday. That's the way we have to look at it, because everything that happened before then was just messed up.

LEMON: Explain that again, John, what do you mean the investigation started yesterday?

GOGLIA: Well, that's when they finally started giving data, the radar (INAUDIBLE) and the information to the international community that has been there in Malaysia waiting to start an accident investigation. So it's just - I mean that - who's been working the radar traces? It sounds -- at least it sounds like, from the press releases and the press conferences, that the commercial people have their radar and their reports and they were reporting what they've seen, and the military was reporting what they've seen, but it - I never once heard anybody say that they were coordinating them.

Now, coordinating different (ph) radar stations requires a lot of care because you have to first timeline them and get the time to line up. Just having a bunch of data but a clock that's in two different places - two different clocks in two different places doesn't mean they line up. So you have to make sure that you're starting from the same point and you're looking at the same point in the sky at the same time. And that's - that's the most tedious part of running this, there's multiple radars and you've got to get them coordinated and then you start comparing the data and what they've seen. And I'm sure that's what the folks at the NTSB and the other folks who are there, I'm sure that that's what they've been doing for the last 24 hours or more is getting -

LEMON: Well, John -- John - go ahead. Finish your thought.

GOGLIA: Go ahead. And getting it all lined up so that they can have an accurate picture of what they think they know. And then we can start drawing conclusions from that.

LEMON: Well, I know Les wants to weigh in, but you kind of took my next question. If this had happened, one would think, in Europe or in the United States that there would be a more coordinated effort. Is it because of the part of the world that this happened in, that the - the search is not as coordinate as you feel it should be?

GOGLIA: I mean we - I've looked at the data from accidents in many places of the world that the NTSB has participated in, and this rivals the lowest common denominator I've ever seen.

LEMON: Meaning?

GOGLIA: Meaning, it was a messed up investigation from the beginning. So now someone - someone has to say, OK, let's start with a clean sheet of paper from today. And I think that's what they did yesterday in saying, OK -

LEMON: Les -

GOGLIA: Let's start from scratch and do the radar the way it should have been done in the beginning and then proceeds from there.

LEMON: Les is here shaking his head in agreement and smiling. Why? Do you agree with what he says?

ABEND: Well, I very much agree with -

LEMON: It's a messed up investigation?

ABEND: Which - well, it has that appearance. And I think there's a supplement to what John's saying is that there's a possibility, as I mentioned earlier in the interview, that this airplane transmits a lot of data, not just the engines. The entire airplane transmits data. At the very minimum, it transmits altitude, attitude (ph), heading. So any of these trends would go back to Malaysia Airlines and you could see, just like -

GOGLIA: I've been told - I don't want to interrupt you, but I've been told that Malaysia did not buy that package. It was too expensive, so they - after -- I think it started with the package, but then when they had to pay for it, they stopped paying for it. So there wasn't (INAUDIBLE).

LEMON: You mean they didn't buy the package for the airplane or they didn't buy the package for their entire air fleet?

GOGLIA: Yes, the package for the airplane. They bought it for the engines because that package saves them a lot of money in the engine maintenance.

LEMON: And they didn't think they would need that because there is -

GOGLIA: That they did not buy the package that gives all the airplane data.

LEMON: They may not have bought that. One, it saves them money. And, two, they may not have thought they needed it because there's so much redundancy already built into the plane?

GOGLIA: Correct.

ABEND: Correct. Yes, the data can be downloaded. It doesn't necessarily have to be transmitted while your -

LEMON: Yes. ABEND: You know, live.

LEMON: So here's my question then to both of you. And I'll start with you first, John. So then do you feel - do you feel like Malaysian officials are not giving us all the information that they can be? Are they holding - that they should be? Are they holding information back?

GOGLIA: I think the (INAUDIBLE) just take a step back and look at the -- what was on TV. It does appear that, at least in the beginning, there was a disconnect between the government, the airline management and then the comments that were coming from the military. It appears there was nobody really one person in charge that was pulling everything together.

LEMON: OK.

GOGLIA: And that's what started all the confusion. And then we had the (INAUDIBLE) frenzy because we wanted some basic information. And I think most of the people in the press realized that this thing was going in the wrong direction and trying to - and trying to get as much information as they can. And maybe even actually help get it back on track. But, I mean, that the train never got back on the tracks until, I think, yesterday.

LEMON: John, stand by. John Goglia is a former NTSB board member. Les Abend is a very, very accomplished pilot, 30 years of experience flying 777s.

(INAUDIBLE) information. Some -- both of them believing that this investigation started yesterday because now there is a - it is coordinated. It had been coordinated before. New information coming from the White House at the White House press briefing saying the search for this missing airliner may extend to the Indian Ocean now. A live report from Kuala Lumpur next. Make sure you stay with us. New information on missing Flight 370, right here on CNN.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

ANNOUNCER: This is CNN breaking news.

LEMON: And the breaking news here on CNN. During the White House briefing, Press Secretary Jay Carney says that based on new information, the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 may expand to the vast Indian Ocean.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JAY CARNEY, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: In an investigation led by the Malaysian government, an investigation that involves many nations with many assets, are following leads where we find them and it's my understanding that based on some new information, that's not necessarily conclusive, but new information, an additional search area may be open in the Indian Ocean and we are consulting with international partners about the appropriate assets to deploy.

(END VIDEO CLIP) LEMON: An additional search area may be opened in the Indian Ocean and they're partnering with other countries to take them where the search may lead.

I want to get live now to Kuala Lumpur and CNN correspondent Saima Mohsin. She can tell us about the resources now that the Indian navy is sending to the Indian Ocean.

What's going on, Saima?

SAIMA MOHSIN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Hey, Don, an extraordinary turn of events we're having here as this search continues to expand rather than narrow down. As far as we understand, the Indian navy has dispatched two of its naval ships off the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. So this also tallies up, of course, with what the United States is saying it's doing now. They are also deploying one Donia (ph), that's an aircraft from the Indian navy. Another aircraft, a Hercules transport carrier, and various other maritime aircraft. (INAUDIBLE) both - they're adding both to the aircraft and naval ship fleets that we've seen already from a multinational search operation.

But what is extraordinary, Don, is, as you've just been discussing on the show, is this expansion of the area that's being searched. It was already 27,000 square nautical miles. A huge expansive sea alone, not including the land that's already being searched for this missing plane, MH 370.

But now we're seeing that this is going even farther west. And what is extraordinary, Don, is that we simply don't know where this plane could have ended up. Did it end up on the east of Malaysia or out to the South China Sea, which is actually the course that it should have taken had it gone all the way to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur, or did it make that air turn, carry back over the Malaysian peninsula to the west where, in fact, we were filming out over the Straits of Malacca. That sea -- strip of sea and ocean that comes up the west coast of Malaysia. We were out filming that search and rescue operation there. We saw the ships out searching, joined the chief of defense force and the chief -- minister of defense for Malaysia. And I asked him, you know, are you guys completely lost as to where this plane is? Why are you unable to pinpoint it? And he said, we're completely overwhelmed, but we're trying our best.

Don.

LEMON: All right, Saima Mohsin, I appreciate you joining us from Kuala Lumpur.

I want to turn now to my expert who is sitting right here next to me, Les Abend.

Les, when you hear that Malaysian officials are saying they are completely overwhelmed, they have no idea. You heard what the gentlemen from the NTSB said just a little bit earlier, Goglia. He said, you know what, this investigation started yesterday because there has been - it's been so uncoordinated. What do you make of this when you hear these particular events, you hear from her and you hear from the other gentlemen?

ABEND: It sounds to me that a lot of assumptions were made. You know, the one we heard on early in the investigation about the military. And they went off like a shotgun in the search and rescue process. So I think with the NTSB helping now, maybe more specific assumptions can be made so that we can attempt to figure out what might have happened at a certain point and where from that point the aircraft may have impacted, may have diverted. So, you know, these things - these possible scenarios, I don't think, have been researched precisely.

LEMON: All right. Well, let's talk about scenarios. Let's talk about conspiracy theories. People are saying, OK -

ABEND: Right.

LEMON: This plane was taken down. It could be on some remote desert island. It was hijacked. It was terrorism. For a plane that big?

ABEND: We're going to deal without the aliens, of course. We'll discount that. Yes, this - this is a 650,000 pound airplane, OK. It's over 200 feet long. Where are you going to hide this thing and how are you going to get conspirators to get on board this airplane, commandeer it and bring it to some remote place? Somebody's going to know about it.

LEMON: You said that you don't - you don't bring an airplane down that big, meaning landing it without -

ABEND: Without a lot of noise and without drawing attention. And where - where in that area of the world are you going to be able to find an appropriate landing strip to put it down? Now granted putting that airplane down can probably be done in about 6,000 feet of runway if you're never going to take it off again. And there may be more landing strips of that. But I - you know, that's so far-fetched. So far- fetched --

LEMON: Yes.

ABEND: That I just -- there would have been so many things involved -

LEMON: Yes.

ABEND: For that to have actually occurred.

LEMON: Do, do, do, do. Do, do, do, do.

ABEND: Yes.

LEMON: This is the twilight zone.

ABEND: Yes.

LEMON: It's - I mean this is very bizarre, very bizarre. But you have 239 people still unaccounted for and a huge jumbo jet.

ABEND: Take it even from the standpoint of losing navigation. This airplane has got two GPSs on it, which I'm sure you're familiar with. It's got its own onboard inertial computers, two of those. If it came down to a complete electrical failure, it still has what we call whiskey compass, which is a - which is a compass suspended in fluid.

LEMON: Right.

ABEND: So the chance of the crew getting lost is pretty slim.

LEMON: You said this has the airline community shaking its head.

ABEND: Pretty much.

LEMON: Pretty much.

ABEND: Yes.

LEMON: All right, Les, stand by. Thank you very much. Les Abend is here.

We're going to continue to investigate the mystery of Flight 370. We're also going to take you to the White House. The president will be speaking soon. More on our breaking news coming up right here on CNN. Don't go anywhere.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)