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Shooting at Army Base in Fort Hood, Texas; Plastic Debris in Indian Ocean; David Barford`s Flying Machine

Aired April 04, 2014 - 04:00   ET

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


CARL AZUZ, CNN ANCHOR: CNN STUDENT NEWS starts now. It`s Friday, April 4, it`s good to have you watching. I`m Carl Azuz at the CNN Center. On Wednesday afternoon sirens went off at Fort Hood, a large military installation in Texas. Officials say one soldier carrying a gun, he wasn`t allowed to have on base started shooting other members of the U.S. Army. He killed three people before a military police officer confronted him in a parking lot and he took his own life. 16 other soldiers were wounded in the attack. Police don`t know yet why this happened. They say the suspect, Army Specialist Ivan Lopez, had a history of mental illness. They are not sure if this was an active terrorism. But it immediately brought comparisons to a previous shooting at the same post.

Five years ago, a former Army psychiatrist killed 13 people and later said he was on the terrorist mission. Army Chief of Staff, General Ray Odierno, said lessons learned from that shooting kept this one from being worse than it was.

Four days in the financial literacy month. We are breaking down another term for you. One that will hopefully help your college bounce students know what to expect in the years ahead.

This one`s default, and it`s not something you want to do. If you get a student loan, you`re required by law to pay it back. Miss a payment, and the loan is delinquent. Keep that up, it could go into default. It basically means you didn`t keep your promise to pay back the loan, and going into default can hit you hard later on. It could make it tougher to borrow money again for things like a car, a house, or even a cell phone. So, make your loan payments, make them on time, you won`t risk being delinquent or going into default.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Time for "The Shoutout." Which of these is a term for an ocean current? If you think you know it, shout it out! Is it a gurge, gyre, gnar or gaur? You`ve got three seconds, go.

Gyres are massive circular ocean currents that rotate clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere. And counter clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere. That`s your answer and that`s your "Shoutout."

AZUZ: Gyres are natural, but some of the stuff swirling in them isn`t. Garbage, trash from nations, shorelines, boats, collected in currents swirling around the oceans. The Indian Ocean search for a missing Malaysia Airlines passenger plane has been called "the most difficult search in human history". Gyres of garbage are making that search even harder.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Debris that you might see in our homes or around our homes, here`s a toy grenade, here`s a paintbrush handle, here`s a toy leg from a baby. Flip flops.

RANDI KAYE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Not items from a landfill. But from the ocean. More specifically, the Indian Ocean gyro. Essentially, a garbage patch swirling with trash and overflowing with plastic. The massive rotating current spins counter clockwise. Marcus Eriksen is the director of research for the Five Gyres Institute in California. He says gyros are like plastic soup.

MARCUS ERIKSEN, 5 GYRES INSTITUTE: But that`s typical of what the material looks like.

KAYE: In 2010, he sailed through the Indian Ocean gyro, the same area where search teams are now looking for doomed flight 370.

ERIKSEN: What we found there, were things like derelict fishing nets, multicolored buoys, all fishing buoys like the one that`s behind me. Lots of buckets and crates, other consumer goods like bottles. And bottle caps. And bags and forks and knives. There was so much stuff already there. So the aircraft and debris from the aircraft is blending into all that.

KAYE: Which is one reason why locating the missing plane is such a challenge. Satellite images once thought to be debris fields, likely just floating garbage. A Chinese ship just this week in search of the airplane came across trash instead. Even sea life can`t tell the difference. Fish, sea lions, birds, they all ingest this junk thinking it might be food.

ERIKSEN: You know, to hear this talk about there are being 300 plus pieces from the aircraft. There are 300,000 plus pieces of trash already there.

KAYE: The Indian Ocean gyre isn`t the only one that exists. There are also two in the Pacific and two in the Atlantic. They form when ocean currents bounce off the continents and create a vortex of swirling water, which posed debris from the shores to the center of the ocean.

The gyro in the Indian Ocean is thought to be about 2 million square miles. Now, keep in mind, the entire United States is just under 4 million square miles. And this garbage patch isn`t just huge, it`s also on the move, traveling about half a mile per hour or about 12 miles per day. And it may be carrying parts of the plane with it.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

AZUZ: Leonardo da Vinci sketched a flying machine in 1485, but, of course, he never flew in one. 2 Frenchmen climbed aboard the first untethered balloon in 1783, but didn`t exactly power it. Even the Wright brothers at the dawn of powered flight, didn`t have to flap or pedal themselves. You might say these folks, compared to the men you`re about to meet, took the easy way up.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The dream is pretty much as old as time itself, the flying under our own power. The sprit, the endeavor, has always been there, but seldom the means. Contraption after contraption left crumpled in the resolutely earthbound. When Orville Wright took flight in 1903, muscles gave way to engines. And the fantasy of powering aircraft by ourselves, largely evaporated. Except that it has refused single-minded individuals. David Barford is living his childhood dream in his very own bespoke flying machine cold Better Fly. By day, he designs Formula One engines for Mercedes Benz, by Louis Hamilton and others, by night, he plans his next David Barford powered flight.

DAVID BARFORD, FORMULA ONE ENGINEER: I`m like a caged animal if I can`t make things.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It began with a sheet of paper and a pencil at a table at his home in North Hampton. And with a dogged ambition to design a human powered aircraft that he could build himself in his garage.

BARFORD: Some people have said, or why didn`t you put electric motor on it, and fly it with an electric motor? But that just completely misses the point. That`s not flying as I wanted to experience flying.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Better fly has a huge wings span, 22 meters across. Yet she weighs just 42 kilograms around half the weight of the pilot. It took eight long years before she was ready for her first test flight.

BARFORD: The bottom half has to just be an engine. Legs going like crazy, but your top half and your control system needs to be quiet, so you can smooth and calm. So one (INAUDIBLE) is going to be like a swam paddling - paddling away. All of a sudden you get to a certain speed, and you just rise up. Really smoothly, no dramatic effort involved to it if you like.

Feeling was beautiful. Really was. Very pure. The day after I fly and so (INAUDIBLE) just (INAUDIBLE) just as I drove to work. And - yeah, you and - I can join them.

And I think that was when you realize, actually, what you`ve done that you can join the birds and fly and do your empower.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: David now belongs to a very exclusive flying club. More people have been to space than have ever flown a human powered aircraft. David is turning that very dream into a reality. One flight at a time.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

AZUZ: We are taking flight over the Pacific Northwest on today`s "Roll Call" starting just east of Seattle. We`ve got the Wolves watching. They are Eastlake High School representing some Amish Washington. Now, to the Midwest, at Donipan Trumbull High School, the Cardinals are flying high over Donipan, Nebraska. And if you are in Lake Charles, Louisiana, watch out for gators - of course, we are talking about the gators of LaGrange High School. Glad your watch.

It`s peanut butter jelly time, and this is one serious sandwich. It`s more than 51 feet long. And if you try to lift it without it falling apart, you couldn`t. It has more than 60 pounds of peanut butter alone. Fortunately, no one had to eat it alone. A group of charter school students in California bit into it, as a celebration of national peanut butter and jelly day. They couldn`t finish it, so other older kids came in to lend a helping tooth. Costs some bread to build that thing, but no expense was spread and it certainly makes lesser sandwiches jellies. Everyone who ate it got stuffed. It was worth its dough, because it had all the ingredients for success, for butter or for worse. I`m going for glass of milk, we hope you have a great weekend and that you`ll be watching again on Monday.

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