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Search for Missing Flight 370; Back Injury Pushes U.S. Figure Skater; What Does Carter Think of Putin Will Do Next?; Updates In Search For Missing Malaysian Airlines Flight; Search Continues For Survivors Of Killer Landslide In Washington State

Aired March 29, 2014 - 15:00   ET

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

DEBORAH FEYERICK, CNN ANCHOR: Hi, everyone. I'm Deborah Feyerick.

Here are the top stories this hour. Exactly three weeks ago today we were beginning to learn about flight 370's mysterious disappearance. And now crews working around the clock chasing down every lead are hoping that they may have found a clue.

Here is what we know right now. Today, floating objects found in the Indian Ocean search zone were recovered by two ships -- one Chinese, the other Australian. Though, the first items to be picked up from the search area and while they look like trash, it is possible that they are debris from the plane. Experts will analyze them as soon as the ship returns to land.

Chinese search planes spotted three new suspicious objects today --one is red, the others are orange and white. About a dozen other objects were seen in the search area yesterday, including what appeared to be an orange rope and blue bag. Again, it's unclear if the items are connected to the plane but certainly signs of hope, seven ships are trying to track them down. Most passengers onboard flight 370 were Chinese.

Many family members stage add protest today in the streets of Beijing demanding more answers from the Malaysian government. Other families in Malaysia voiced their concerns right to the country's transportation minister. He says he told families, face the fact, he can't and won't give them false hope, but he will do whatever it takes to continue searching and find their loved ones.

We're going to bring in our panel of analysts here in CNN in New York with me, Tim Taylor, a sea operations specialist. Les Abend, there on the end, CNN aviation analyst and Boeing 777 captain and the Justin Green who is an aviation attorney and former military pilot. Also, Robert Arnot is an award-winning journalist and a veteran aviation consultant.

When we look back at this investigation, are we going to see a turning point in terms of the flight -- the path this plane took and where it ended up?

TIM TAYLOR, SEA OPERATIONS SPECIALIST: Yes. Right now I think they're focusing in on a debris field, they should be focusing on both. FEYERICK: You talked about a double search area.

TAYLOR: Yes.

FEYERICK: You said -- it was stunning to everybody all of a sudden we've got this search field that's 1,500 miles off the coast of Australia and now there's one much closer. So do you think they've got the right one, so to speak, right now?

TAYLOR: Well, there is no right one yet until they find it. So everything's --

FEYERICK: In play?

TAYLOR: Everything's in play. So they found debris with a satellite. But I was concerned that this may be wagging the dog or leading the search astray. So focusing everything on this search is important but not to disregard other possibilities, because everything is a possibility right now. And they have data that links the direction and the last half of handshake that should give it an impact area because ultimately, the impact area is the highest likelihood where the black box is going to be.

FEYERICK: And the point of impact, which is fascinating.

I do want to switching gears a little bit, and Justin, talk about the families because you can't obviously forget the reason there's so much energy being attached and the reason so many people are just involved in this, first of all, the greatest mystery since Amelia Earhart's plane vanished, but also the family, the ones we're seeing on television, are in such distress and there is so much mistrust -- not all the families, but a handful of the families.

How -- are they even able to process the information they're getting as legitimate information? Or do they see everything as being filtered through the scope of political correctness when it comes to the Malaysian government because they do not believe that government.

JUSTINE GREEN, AVIATION ATTORNEY: Right. First of all, I have a lot of sympathy for the Malaysian government, for the job that they have to do. An almost impossible job, and the only thing I'd say is, I don't think they've done it very well. And what has happened, they've lost the trust of the families. They've given out information and then taken back information.

So not right now, you have the families kind of not knowing what to trust or who to trust. You have conspiracy theories being, you know, talked about, and one of the hardest things I have to do and most rewarding things is work with families like this. And I'll tell you, no matter what the circumstance, they're going through hell. They don't know what to do. They don't know how they're going to pay their bills. In this case, they don't even know what happened to their loved ones, and they're in a very vulnerable position right now. And in the U.S., we've actually passed laws. The national transportation safety board has actually, has a family assistance program that is really responsive and really professionally run. Every airline has to file a plan on how they're going to respond to an emergency like this, and we're kind of light years away -- even the lawyers. In the U.S. we have a federal law saying lawyers can't approach the families for 45 days, in any way.

FEYERICK: Which makes perfect sense.

GREEN: Which makes perfect sense because the families are in no, in my opinion, I'm not a psychologist, I'm just --.

FEYERICK: There are no mental conditions. You have to try to do that.

GREEN: Thank you.

LES ABEND, CNN AVIATION ANALYST: , CNN AVIATION ANALYST: It's overwhelming. I mean, Justin will agree with me. I mean, and if not only from the family standpoint, but from the accident investigators here. It's overwhelming. And this is a lot of information to process for everybody, and what can be released, and it's an awful, awful situation.

FEYERICK: And I also think, it's not obviously everybody is watching this, and there's an impact not only on the immediate families but also the entire flying public. Because I've been on four different planes since this happened, and there's always a question in the back of my mind. Is this plane safe?

I want to bring in Dr. Bob Arnot who is a veteran aviation consultant. Are you there?

BOB ARNOT, FORMER PILOT: I am. Yes, I am.

FEYERICK: Hi, Dr. Bob. Well, listen, this theory, you have done, you've done a lot of investigation on possible theories about what happened to this plane, and how it may have come to rest in the ocean. You know, this plane flew for so long that it may than it simply ran out of fuel and then just fell into the ocean. What are your theories? And if that's the case, are investigators going to find larger pieces of that plane potentially?

ARNOT: So, it's a great question. "Wall Street Journal" this morning is reporting Boeing is actually doing engineering simulations of the final few minutes of that flight. And it's very important, because you know if it ran out of fuel at altitude it may actually tuck under a little bit for a little more of a high-speed hit.

So, you're three scenarios here. Scenario one is did it go in like Egypt air where it just plunged right in and perhaps five or 600 miles an hour. If so, the instructions given to those ships and airplanes is going to be look for a very, very small size particles in the ocean. You wouldn't expect to see floating wings or tails like you did with the air France flight.

The second scenario would be like the air France 447 where they basically going to slow stall into the water, much slower speed, probably 160, 180 knots or so. And in that case, of course, they find, you know, full parts of the aircraft, like the tail. The most interesting scenario is Ethiopian 961 which if you remember, crashed off the Comoros islands. That came in an almost perfectly landing on the water but then one of the engines actually hit a coral reef and the engine dis-impacted from the airplane.

So in that case, you'd expect very, very big pieces. You might still have that honeycombed aluminum pieces of that carbon fiber, if the tail were carbon fiber, you might find that. If there are wings that were still, you know, empty of fuel but had air in it those might float, and those big pieces there which you can trace back to the current, giving you your best possibility of actually coming back and finding the actual site it impacted.

Now, the most distressful thing today is that there hasn't been a very good integration of the data. That these are not data points that Immasat has given us. They have just simply said that they've tried to backtrack and try using 19th century geometry.

It is my firm belief that all of this data should have been made public. That is, were they flying to way points, little sort of (INAUDIBLE) like liquids an example, possum is another example, so it meant it was put into a flight management system.

There's a theory of a fire on the airplane, but you know, as a pilot, if I have a fire, what I do is it turn off the master electronics. I automatically get all of the oxygen out of the cabin by depressurizing it and I head for the ground as quickly as I possibly can.

Well, going to 45,000 feet doesn't fit into that scenario. You know, at 30,000 feet, you have got enough -- you know, there is no oxygen out there so can be able to put that fire out. So I think there hasn't been an integration in terms of radar data from Malaysia and Thailand in terms of the pings reported but not giving us the data. And there is some frustration here in the United States among the FAA, the NTSB and even Boeing, that the data flow hasn't been there.

Even when the Malaysians said hey, you know, here's where he think it crashed, they didn't really consult in full with the FAA and the NTSB. So it is their interpretation as opposed to a wider interpretation of the aviation community.

FEYERICK: Absolutely. The experts, the investigators, all of them.

All right, Dr. Bob Arnot, aviation consultant, Tim Taylor, Justin Green, Les Abend, we are going to be back with all of you after a quick break.

There are only a few labs in the world that can handle recovering data from a damped black box. We're going to take you to one of them and show you how it's done.

We'll bring back our panel for more analysis on the disappearance of Malaysia flight 370.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK) FEYERICK: Today, ships are seeing floating objects in the Southern Indian Ocean search zone, if these items sightings in the new area pan out it could narrow the search for the plane's black boxes, the data and of course recorders. Time, as we know, is running out to find the locator pings coming from those boxes, but if they are damaged, can the data eastern be recovered?

CNN's Athena Jones takes an inside look.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

DR. JOE KOLLY, NSTB DIRECTOR, RESEARCH AND ENGINEERING: This is one of the more advanced labs in the world, and for that reason that's why we tend to help other countries.

ATHENA JONES, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Here at the national transportation safety board state-of-the-art laboratory, a demonstration of what it takes to get vital information from the all- important black boxes.

This is what the pinging of one of the data recorders sounds like once it has made contact with water. Even after a prolonged period in salt water, data from these devices is still retrievable.

ERIN GORMLEY, NSTB AEROSPACE ENGINEER: We have had a good success rate with recovery. All of the recorders, you know, go through different stresses and -- but overall, we've had a very good success rate with water recovery.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Have you ever not gotten data in a water recovery?

GORMLEY: I can't think of one.

JONES: Recorders found in saltwater are first bathed in freshwater and later carefully dried and taken apart to reveal this -- the device's memory card. Even a damaged card can be useful, says recorder engineer Erin Gormley.

GORMLEY: The data does jumps from clip to chip. So even if you have one corrupt chip, because it has cracked or it has gotten some sort of corrosion on it, we still should be able to build the information back.

JONES: Information from the flight data recorder's memory card, which keeps track of data like the plane's pitch, altitude and speed, is downloaded on to a computer system, where teams make sense of the data. To us, it just looks like zeros and ones.

GORMLEY: We get information from the manufacturer of the aircraft that has a data map, and that data map translates all the zeros and ones into actual parameters.

JONES: For the cockpit voice recorder, a team of six to eight people helps transcribe the device's four channels which pick up not just voices, but everything from a door opening to a sea shifting. The work they do here is difficult but it is key to understanding what went wrong in airline disasters.

GORMLEY: We want to make sure this never happens again.

JONES: Athena Jones, CNN, Washington.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

FEYERICK: So we are going to go back to our panel right now and talk about technology.

Is this the best tool we have right now? Do you think there should be some system so that we're not searching around the sea to try find the answer, but so that all of this data is being streamlined into a central location realtime? So we're getting a loop?

Les, what do you think?

ABEND: I mean, all of these tools combine together to make an accident investigation more accurate. So, I mean, airplane signals, if that -- it becomes more available, more prevalent. This combined with the flight recorder will definitely help in an accident investigation. I mean, there's all of this stuff, it can be combined in realtime data, that the digital flight data recorder that's right here, and the cockpit voice recorder is all combined together in addition to other data and the forensics of the fragments from the airplane are extremely important also.

FEYERICK: OK. Now, Les, you had an opinion piece on our CNN Web site. This is fascinating to me. I think you gentlemen have also read it and I want you all to comment on this. A smoldering fire began to effect components and electronics and engineering. Components began to fail's the crew followed appropriate checklists until it was determined the primary concern was landing. That's where the pilot enters that way point between the two different airports. But all of a sudden they can't control the plane. And it drops, it loses altitude and then begins this sort of flight, what people have called the zombie flight. How do you -- that seem like a plausible scenario to you? I know you're the underwater guy --

TAYLOR: But you know, Payne Stewart, the golfer, you can relate it to something like that. But it goes back to lesson and there are other fail-safe things that never fired that buoys never fired in the water, the beacons.

FEYERICK: Or the life rafts, you're talking about.

TAYLOR: The eperbs on the boat.

(CROSSTALK)

TAYLOR: So that's the big thing. And answer to the earlier question, too. When we're underway on a boat, the first rule of navigation is to always know where you are.

FEYERICK: Right. TAYLOR: So if this is the case where these black boxes and navigation, we have a technology to know where every plane is in the sky with satellites. I mean, you can know where someone's hiking a sort of spot system.

FEYERICK: Sure.

TAYLOR: So maybe it is time for that.

FEYERICK: And Justin, I want to ask about the psychological impact of this, because there are two theories. That the plane did this high- dive, depressurized almost immediately, which means that everybody would have been knocked out.

GREEN: Most likely.

FEYERICK: Or that there was an emergency in the cockpit and that being the case, then in fact the people knew what was going on onboard. So there's the psychological impact. Did they -- pass out right away, or did they know?

GREEN: Well, that's the --

FEYERICK: How about that in a legal case?

GREEN: It is -- I mean, I just think morally it's -- I mean, sympathetically, it's a horror to even think about. It's not that important, really, to the legal case. The focus of the legal case right now has got to be on liability, not so much damages.

The airline is going to be liable, but as the U.S. has interpreted the Montreal convention, they're not liable for pre-death fear. So you could actually have someone sitting in a cockpit for an hour knowing that they're going to die, but legally, the airline could say, look, we're not liable for that, under the -- how the U.S. --

FEYERICK: They what they were spotted to supposed to do.

GREEN: Right.

FEYERICK: OK Gentlemen, we're going to get back to you. Thank you to our experts. They are going to be sticking around with us this hour.

We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

FEYERICK: In Washington State, gray skies echoed the mood as people marked the instant a killer landslide struck one week ago today. At least 17 people died in the Oso area and searchers are struggling through the rainy weather to find any remaining signs of life.

I'm going to turn to CNN's Dan Simon. He is live at command center in Arlington, Washington.

And Dan, what is going on right now at that site? DAN SIMON, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, hi, Deborah.

First of all, the governor of Washington asked folks throughout the state to observe a moment of silence at the 10:37 a.m. local time. That is the precise time when the landslide occurred a week ago destroying an entire neighborhood in Oso.

Folk there's at the scene pause add moment and went on with their difficult work of trying to recover bodies. At this point, Deborah, we still don't have a full understanding of the scope of this tragedy. We know the official death poll stands at 17, but there are many more bodies still in the debris. Ninety people are still said to be missing.

Right now it's not raining at the moment, but basically there's been a steady rain over the past 24 hours and it's supposed to continue throughout the weekend. And that's just going to make life a lot more difficult for folks at the scene as they wade through the mud and try to rove belong recover belongings and recover bodies -- Deborah.

FEYERICK: And Dan, you know, it's incredible because what we really saw was an avalanche of mud. It's has been raining for days. Is there any concern that other areas are at risk? Are they considering any potential evacuations of surrounding communities?

SIMON: At this point, no. The land seems to be stable, but they're keeping a close eye out and actually instruments in the ground that are designed to alert authorities if there's any movement in the ground and then we will go evacuate, particularly where the rescuers are or where the search and rescue crews are digging through the rubble. But at this point, things seem to be OK, but, of course, they have contingency plans if the earth is going to move again -- Deborah.

FEYERICK: Incredible and completely unpredictable.

All right. Thanks, Dan Simon, for us there in Washington. Appreciate it.

Well, right now, the search for flight 370 is focused on the surface of the ocean, but what happens when the focus goes deep underwater? Ahead, we'll show you a high-tech tool for searching under the sea.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

FEYERICK: We're waiting to hear if several floating objects retrieved today in the Southern Indian Ocean might be connected to Flight 370. A Chinese ship and an Australian ship picked them up today.

This is new video on some of the objects being scooped up from the water. We don't know if they're plane debris just yet or simple ocean trash, but experts plan to analyze them later today.

Chinese search planes spotted three new suspicious objects today. China's official news agency says one is red. The others are orange and white. About a dozen other objects were seen in the search area yesterday including an orange rope and a blue bag. It is unclear if those items are connected to the plane. Seven ships are trying to track them down.

Family members staged a protest today in the streets of Beijing demanding more answers from the Malaysian government. Other families in Malaysia voiced their concerns directly to the country's transportation minister. He met with them today and promised that he's not going to abandon the search.

So far the hunt for Flight 370 has focused on what planes and satellites can spot on the surface of the ocean. Once crews find where the plane went down the search will go much deeper underwater.

Rosa Flores saw this one piece of equipment that will help in the undersea search.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ROSA FLORES, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, this device dives into the ocean several miles and it creates a map of the ocean floor. It's called an AUV, an autonomous underwater vehicle, and it uses side scan sonar, you can see it right here, to create that picture. It's also equipped with a GPS system. You can see it right over here. And of course, that lets the crew know where this probe is at any point in time.

Now just go ahead and start launching. This probe is owned by CNC Technologies. It is highly customized and hear this. It has been used before to identify and help recover plane wreckage in other parts of the world. So in the case of MH-370 what a probe like this would be able to do is it would be able to narrow the debris field. It would help narrow the search, which, of course, is one of the daunting tasks that we've been talking about in the Indian Ocean.

So what we are seeing here is this probe is going to go into the water. Now for demonstration purposes it's tethered. That would not be the case, of course, in the Indian Ocean. It would be untethered. It would go several miles deep into the ocean, and then it would start creating this picture of the ocean floor.

Now once this launch is onto the water, you`re going to see it. It kind of floats, it's buoyant, but again, it goes deep into the ocean. Now in a control room, there are crew who would be programming the mission for this device. In the case of MH-370 a piece of equipment like this would scour the ocean floor, looking for any oddities, looking for anything that looks like a debris field. Anything that looks like the wreckage of MH-370.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

FEYERICK: And if they do have to go to the bottom of the ocean, how hard is it going to be to retrieve the pieces?

Here with me in New York is Tim Taylor, a sea operations specialist.

First of all you have a lot of experience with what we just saw Rosa explaining to us.

TIM TAYLOR, SEA OPERATION SPECIALIST: Yes. Yes. I've actually mapped 1800 square miles of bottom, up to 5,000 feet deep with an autonomous vehicle.

FEYERICK: OK. How effective are these in locating what could be pieces of the plane?

TAYLOR: Extremely effective but they are short range.

FEYERICK: What does that mean?

TAYLOR: Meaning you have to narrow the search area. You can't just throw these in and they're going to cover the whole ocean. Some of the bigger ones can get 1500 meters on each side, maybe. So you can cover a good area, but the ocean is so big that you have to narrow it down.

FEYERICK: Right.

TAYLOR: 1800 square miles took mere 24 months. That's three seasons.

FEYERICK: Right.

TAYLOR: Weather, in fact -- so actually three years to map 1800 square miles.

FEYERICK: And what's incredible is that one piece of the plane that they're now looking at, and you see the new search area there and the old search area there, but it took a plane three minutes flying in the air just to find what they believe are two separate pieces.

TAYLOR: Right.

FEYERICK: So, I mean, count three minutes. That's a lot of time.

TAYLOR: Right.

FEYERICK: And distance between the various pieces and the various parts. So are you hoping to find -- obviously probably hoping to find a concentrated number of pieces. How realistic is that?

TAYLOR: It's getting harder every day, and harder every -- every minute the clock ticks. OK? You have -- you have debris that you want to create a plot and navigate back to where the impact was. And you have the impact zone. So you have two search areas, and what you're really looking for is the impact zone and where it sank. So that's the priority. But these clues that float are what leads you back to it.

FEYERICK: You were telling me something fascinating about your search for a World War II submarine that you ultimately found 40 years after it sunk.

TAYLOR: Right. Correct.

FEYERICK: And the interesting thing is that there were actually people, remains, still onboard that submarine.

TAYLOR: Mm-hmm. FEYERICK: Is that the expectation of what we could find, depending on how the plane -- if it did enter the sea?

TAYLOR: If you find a debris field -- first of all, the submarine we found is 70 years gone.

FEYERICK: My gosh, sorry.

TAYLOR: And from World War II and 600 feet of water. So it's been pretty much protected from any impact -- until we found it. No divers, no fishermen, but the analogy we can draw is that the families are -- have the same sense of loss, and they need that closure. They need a piece of the submarine, they need -- excuse me. A piece of this plane or they need a piece of wreckage to have some idea that the plane is actually there.

Otherwise, they won't believe it, but if we do get back to the impact area to look for this, it's going to take a long time. We have to narrow it down.

FEYERICK: And I remember with TWA Flight 800 I spoke to a diver at that time, and again, many years ago, but talking about how they brought the people up one by one, carrying them up to the surface. There's that -- that's going to have to go on.

TAYLOR: Right.

FEYERICK: As well. We're not just talking about pieces of a plane here.

TAYLOR: I would imagine, if I was involved in the search here, the history I've seen when people do this that finding bodies is a priority. If they do find the wreckage and they do find remains, they should bring them up, and they do bring them up. Unlike a submarine and the World War II, they treat that as graveyard and they do not bring it up. That is a tomb and it's protected.

And all the work we do is under Navy permit and we are extremely respectful of that, but in this flight's down, loss of life, bringing any remains back is extremely importance, and they did recover a lot of remains on the Air France flight.

FEYERICK: And with the Air France flight as you mentioned it took them two full years to retrieve most of that plane. Is it possible we could be facing that kind of search length?

TAYLOR: Easily, and, you know, this could be 70 years before they find this. I mean, it's a big ocean and it's three weeks. And there is no impact narrowed down and there's no debris field narrowed down, and the longer it goes, it's --

FEYERICK: Right.

TAYLOR: It's expediential to find it.

FEYERICK: Yes. You're talking about all the currents. You're talking about different pieces once they're broken off. They're just drifting out to various pieces of the ocean.

Tim, thank you so much. We're going to -- we're going to get back to you. We have so much more talk about on this and we appreciate you sticking around for us.

TAYLOR: Nice to be here.

FEYERICK: Making the show here.

Well, next, our panel's final thought. How long will it take to find this plane?

Tim, what does that look like to you?

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

FEYERICK: Let me bring back our panel, Tim Taylor, Robert Arnot and Les Abend and Justin Green.

Final thoughts, gentlemen, on how long it will ultimately take to find this plane?

Tim, quickly.

TAYLOR: I don't know. That's the big $64 million question. If it gets in the water, it could take years.

FEYERICK: All right. Jim -- Justin. Sorry.

GREEN: If Tim doesn't know, I don't know.

(LAUGHTER)

FEYERICK: All right. And Les, what do you think?

ABEND: There's a lot of assets out there and a lot of people in this world that really want to see this thing come up. I wouldn't be surprised if it's before Air France. I have a lot of faith in these people.

FEYERICK: So you're talking about less than two years?

ABEND: Less than two years yes.

FEYERICK: OK.

ABEND: That's my guess and with all my source.

(CROSSTALK)

GREEN: And there's lessons learned from Air France, too, I think will help.

FEYERICK: Which is, just quickly?

GREEN: You know, just in terms of how they can narrow the focus of the search.

FEYERICK: All right. And Dr. Bob Arnot, how long do you think it would take for this plane to be lifted or to be found, just to be found?

ARNOT: I mean, I think it's either immediate that they find all of these pieces in the water and this is the plane and, of course, the Chinese have found colors that are the airplane's colors. We're hopeful here. Or it's going to be years.

Key thing is you're asking about being able to get this black box data. There are systems now where you can stream that information live. So they can watch these airplanes. There's been some resistance, but here's the importance of it, you can see when pilots aren't performing correctly. Like the Asiana pilots making those approaches into San Francisco and correct it real-time.

So with the opportunity to prevent a lot more accidents and, of course, to find planes like this, if you stream that black box data live and there are companies in Canada right now that make that equipment.

FEYERICK: Right. And so at least you can do that.

And gentlemen, you know, one quick question, because a lot of people are watching this and they're wondering, should I be afraid? Should I just go about and do what I normally do? Because look, I get on a plane now and I'm thinking to myself, OK. Check my, you know -- my little life vest. Let me think about what I'm going to do.

TAYLOR: Do you do that when you get in a cab?

FEYERICK: I put my seatbelt on.

TAYLOR: I mean --

FEYERICK: I take cabs all the time.

TAYLOR: It's more dangerous to take a cab in New York City than to fly. And Les, I'm sure, can agree with that.

(LAUGHTER)

ABEND: Of course. And, you know, the old lightning axiom and getting hit by lightning. I mean, it's -- it really is. And besides, you're operating most of the time in a radar environment where you're constantly being tracked regardless.

FEYERICK: Right.

ABEND: So this is a different part of the world.

FEYERICK: You know, it is such an anomaly and, again, as we've said, there's not been this intensity in a search since Amelia Earhart. Do you believe that something like this could potentially happen again? How crucial is it that we know what happened so that we don't have another plane flying off into another ocean?

Actually, Dr. Arnot, let me ask you. Go ahead.

ARNOT: Well, so it's crucial, you know, there has been this fire theory. And of course, we know that there had been an EgyptAir flight where there's a flash fire on the ground in the cockpit. So it's absolutely crucial that if there were a fire, if there were some catastrophe like that, that we know right away so that we could take the right kinds of actions.

Remember that Swiss Air Flight 111 that had the fire in the cockpit that actually drove the crew out of the cockpit, so they had to just sit helplessly by while the aircraft crashed. So I think it's vital to find out.

In terms of being afraid, your other guests were saying there, it's more dangerous getting a cab, probably more just crossing the street. I've been in the air, you know, probably a dozen around -- hours or so since the crash and I have, you know, absolutely no reservations given the tremendous professionalism by air crews around the world.

FEYERICK: All right. And clearly in the end it could be that the pilot was trying to take heroic measures to try to save the people on this flight, to try to save this plane. It just didn't go in that direction.

All right. Tim Taylor, Justin Green, Les Abend and Bob Arnot, thank you so much for joining us all. We will be back to you again in the next hour. Thanks.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

SANJAY GUPTA, CNN CHIEF MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Looking at the grace of these jumps and turns, you'd probably never guess that 22-year-old figure skater Max Aaron started skating on a different kind of ice. He started as a toddler and he fell in love with ice hockey the first time he picked up a stick.

MAX AARON, 2013 U.S. FIGURE SKATING CHAMPION: I wanted to be on the Detroit Red Wing because I wanted to play University of Michigan hockey. And that was like my goal, my dream.

GUPTA: He used speed to make up for lack of size. He started figure skating with his sisters during the off-season to help his game. Soon he was starting his days in figure skates and ending them in hockey skates. By 2007, he was well on his way to fulfilling his dream. He was on the elite USA Hockey Development Team. But in 2008, he had a major setback.

AARON: My back was constantly bothering me throughout the entire season and I kept pushing on. And by the time -- after the -- both seasons were over, we were in the gym, you know, with my hockey buddies and we were lifting weight and I remember doing a dead lift and then my back all of a sudden it just seized up. I kind of tilted over and I remember I could not walk. I couldn't get off the ground.

GUPTA: His back was broken.

AARON: After three months, I finally got out of the body cast. And I started PT. I just had to learn how to walk and, you know, pick things up off the ground and then, you know, I wanted to get on the ice.

GUPTA: But he had to come back slowly and wear just one pair of skates.

AARON: I was never a medalist, and that was tough for me. So I decided I will figure skate and I'm going to pursue that as far as I can.

GUPTA: The medals started adding up, including a bronze in the 2010 Junior Nationals, a gold in the 2011 Junior Nationals and a gold in the 2013 nationals.

AARON: If you would have told me that the minute I broke my back, you're going to be a national champion in figure skating, I wouldn't believe it. I would have been like, yeah, right.

GUPTA: He was the U.S. Men's first alternate for the Sochi Olympics. And now he's skating for a world title in Japan.

AARON: I was talking to the doctors and they say, you know, you're -- glad you caught it even earlier when you did, you know, you could have been paralyzed and, you know, I don't take that for granted.

When other people tell you, you can't do this or you can't do that, don't listen. Go for it and go for your dreams and don't look back.

GUPTA: Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN, reporting.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

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FEYERICK: Former President Jimmy Carter says the U.S. and the world need to take a strong position if Russia invades Ukraine. Carter has fought for human rights around the world. His latest book is "A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence and Power." And the crisis in Ukraine is also very much on his mind.

Here's what he told CNN's Piers Morgan.

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PIERS MORGAN, CNN HOST, "PIERS MORGAN TONIGHT": What would you do with Vladimir Putin right now if he continues to be aggressive, say, in eastern Ukraine?

JIMMY CARTER, FORMER UNITED STATES PRESIDENT: If he tries to take over eastern Ukraine, then I would go to a very severe embargo, stopping all trade between Russia and the outside world that we can control, freezing every bank account that any Russian had in the western world. I would withdraw my ambassador's great diplomatic relationship with him. Exclude him from any consideration of world health -- I mean of the world organizations sponsored by the United Nations. And let him know that military consequences might result if he invaded part of Ukraine.

However, I think what Putin is going to do as I read his -- watched his speech the other day that he made last week, and he very clearly said he was not going to do that. But what he'll do now, I think, with his proximity to eastern Ukraine is to give them the best possible image of what the Russians will do to Ukraine.

I think he will give them very lucrative and prosperous loans and trade agreements and so forth to convince the doubting Russian speaking people in eastern Ukraine that Russia is my friend.

MORGAN: What is the theme here of this book?

CARTER: The theme is that the most serious and unaddressed human rights abuses on earth is the abuse of women and girls in the United States and Europe and in all the other rest of the world. And this has been growing. And it's very similar to the racial discrimination I knew when I was a boy living on the farm when the same thing happened just to black people in particular the south and some other parts of the world.

And the white people deplored it, but they didn't do anything about it. Most of them, because it was really beneficial to them to be given the best jobs and the best education and all the advantages over our black neighbors. And the same thing is happening now with women around the world.

And in our American universities there's horrible sexual violence. Very seldom reported, only 4 percent of the rapes on college campuses are reported because the presidents of the colleges and so forth don't want their college to get a bad reputation for sexual attacks.

The same thing happens in the U.S. military, as you know. It was reported by the military itself that 26,000 women were sexually abused in 2012. And only 1 percent of them resulted in any punishment of the rapist. And the problem is that on university campuses and in the military the rapists are serial rapists. Quite often it's the same man over and over who discovers that he can't be punished.

And this happens in America. Also in the United States women get about 23 percent less pay than men for the same job. The Fortune 500 companies only less than two dozen of them are women and CEOs. And they get 42 percent less pay than men. So this is a pervasive thing in the United States.

And if it's bad in our country it is to admired institutions that is corporations and military and the universities, how much more bad it is, how much worse it is in countries where there's not very much respect for law and order.

(END VIDEO CLIP) FEYERICK: Thank you for joining -- thank you for joining us everyone. I'm Deborah Feyerick. The next hour of NEWSROOM continues with Don Lemon after a very short break. He has the latest information on the search for Malaysian Airlines Flight 370.

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