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Legal View with Ashleigh Banfield

Weather Plagues Search Efforts in Java Sea; Conflicting Reports on Sonar Findings; Hope Fades for Families; Security Tightened for New Year's; Interview with Heidi Snow

Aired December 31, 2014 - 12:00   ET

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

JAKE TAPPER, CNN ANCHOR: Hello, everyone. I'm Jake Tapper. Welcome to our viewers in the United States and around the world.

It is January 1st in Indonesia. But for so many people there, this is not a day to celebrate. In the daylight hours, search teams braving terrible weather brought the first two bodies from AirAsia Flight 8501 to shore. Two more arrived just moments ago. This is brand-new video. So far, at least seven bodies have been retrieved from the Java Sea where debris indicates the Airbus A-320 went down on Sunday with 162 passengers and crew, 18 children.

The plane itself or sizable parts of it may have now been spotted by sonar on the ocean floor, though search officials have yet to confirm that. We do know that the bodies are being flown to Surabaya in Indonesia where Flight 8501 originated in numbered caskets. There they will be examined and with help from their already devastated families, identified.

My CNN colleague Andrew Stevens is at the Surabaya Airport right now.

Andrew, has the new year brought any breaks in the weather for the search teams?

ANDREW STEVENS, CNN INTERNATIONAL: It doesn't appear to be so, Jake. The forecast for the next 48 hours is still pretty miserable and still going to hamper this search operation in what looks like a significant way. I don't know if you can hear around me at the moment, the fireworks are going off. New Year's Eve celebrations is a big deal in Indonesia and the contrast really is quite striking. You see sort of these fireworks lighting up the sky with people on my left sort of cheering and smiling and taking pictures of each other, in this what was up till about an hour ago the center, the crisis center. That has now moved to a police hospital where the victims will be taken for identification.

So much sadness, so much pain here over the past four days. But as far as the search goes, to your question, it's difficult to see there's going to be an awful lot of progress made over the next couple of days because the weather conditions are set to be -- continue to be very, very bad. Strong winds, big seas and heavy rain, low visibility.

TAPPER: That's right, the fireworks, of course, it's 12:02 where you are in Indonesia right now. Andrew, if you can provide some clarification for us on the status of the undersea search. Has wreckage been found or not?

STEVENS: Yes, this is the key question. Has the primary wreckage, the main fuselage of 8501, been found? They spotted what they described as a shadow two days ago now. And they said today -- this is the search and rescue, this is the people leading the search and rescue, the representative here in Surabaya, the headquarters in Jakarta, but the Surabaya chief telling us today that they think that sonar readings are confirming that this -- they have indeed found this main fuselage area. But they can't say without a shadow of a doubt. So they're still, at this stage, not saying it definitely is or not, Jake.

This is critical because the rescuers are saying, the experts, the aviation experts are saying that it's likely that the main part of the fuselage will probably be still be intact, which means that will be also where most of the bodies are. And you can imagine the picture -- most of these bodies, we're being told, would still be strapped into their seats, probably about 40 meters below the surface. This is a whipped-up surface now. So -- and given the conditions, they can't get a clarification. They do have sophisticated sonar there, I would say, but at this stage, at least what we're hearing is, even the sonar has not been able to verify whether this is basically the ground zero or not.

TAPPER: All right, Andrew Stevens in Surabaya, Indonesia, thank you so much. Appreciate it.

Apart from recovering victims, search teams are most eager to find the plane's flight data and cockpit voice recorders, the so-called black boxes. Until we have those, experts are left to form theories, conjecture about Flight 8501's demise based on each new piece of evidence. That brings me now to CNN safety analyst and former FAA inspector David Soucie in New York and from Newton, Massachusetts, David Gallo, he's CNN's analyst and director of special projects at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

David, let me start with you. What do we know today that we did not know yesterday?

DAVID SOUCIE, CNN SAFETY ANALYST: Well, I think you're referring to this, David, so I'll jump in here.

TAPPER: Oh, I'm sorry. Yes, I mean David Soucie. Sorry.

SOUCIE: OK, thanks.

What we know today is basically less than we knew yesterday because of the fact that they were very certain that they had located this large object in the bottom of the ocean. Today they're saying, no.

What we also knew yesterday was the fact that the location of the debris was only six miles from where they last knew where the aircraft was. Today it's 120 miles. So I'm really seeing some shades of MH-370 at this point.

I just got done talking about how great the misinformation had been withheld and not given out and then retracted and then here we have two things that have been given out that we both said, hey, this gives us some clues. And now those clues are being questioned again.

TAPPER: David Gallo, what do you think? Are you satisfied that the searchers essentially know where to look for this plane?

DAVID GALLO, CNN ANALYST: Well, Jake, you know, having been inside the closed doors, behind the closed doors and hearing what the media was saying, often 90 degrees to what we were actually doing, I realize we don't know everything going on. But I agree with David Soucie completely that we started out with a great flow of info and now we're starting to see the first cracks in the system. And that thought's (ph) been pretty air tight.

These are the kinds of words I'm not familiar with from a sonar search, a shadow -- the sonar saw a shadow. They weren't able to confirm that it was the fuselage. Usually you're extremely careful not to say that you found something until you ground-truth it. Sonar is made with sound. Usually, right as soon as possible, you either have eyes in the water, divers or a camera, a camera system, to confirm what you have found. And this is an awful big thing. So I'm starting to feel like we don't know exactly what's going on or that the parts are beginning not to add up.

TAPPER: David Soucie, what does it tell you that so far we have no confirmation that any victims have been found wearing life vests?

SOUCIE: It could be a couple of different things, Jake, to me. One of them is the fact that there must - there could have been a catastrophic event that prevented anyone from responding quickly enough. So there was no way to plan. If you do a ditching exercise, there's time to set things up and to communicate with the passengers and tell them what to do and tell them to, you know, lean forward and grab their knees and that sort of thing on the impact. In this case, it doesn't look like that happened. So the second possibility is that they simply weren't conscious or weren't aware of what was going on prior to even the descent or prior to impacting the water.

TAPPER: David Gallo, the seas are shallow but they are rough. I'm told that floating debris can travel great distances. But will large pieces of sunken debris essentially stay put or will the currents cause it to move around?

GALLO: Yes, I've heard rumors that big things were moving around. That's usually - it's fairly unusual and as -- but normally I'm working in much deeper water than this.

Jake, I want to come back to one thing David Soucie brought up. And he brought it up yesterday, too. You know, we would expect to see much more debris at the surface. And -- but I'm curious about the pattern of debris that we have found and, sadly, the bodies that we have found. That we've seen a door, we've seen an escape slide, we've seen a flight attendant, we're told. Those things normally go together. We've seen one or two bodies that have sadly ended up with clothes -- clothing removed, which normally means that have fell some distance through the sky. And I'm just wondering if what we're finding right now is an isolated event. And complete speculation on my part. But it seems like there's a pattern there. I'd be curious to see if David has anything more to say about that because there's an awful lot missing here.

TAPPER: David?

SOUCIE: To me there isn't much missing. You -- like you said, David, these things go together. The door, the emergency exit door is very clear about how it's removed. It doesn't just go to the outside. It's bigger than the hole. So it can't go outside that window unless it's removed and then thrown out the window. That's the only way that I can see, other than an in-flight break-up where the whole aircraft had been broken into pieces. That's the only time I would find that emergency door separated from the aircraft. But if that had happened, we'd have a large debris field of a lot of different pieces floating out there in the -- and we don't have that. All we have is the door.

The second thing after the door is this emergency slide, which is the over-the-wing slide. It comes out right below the door I just mentioned. It folds out this way and then it folds out this way so that you come out of the window and you slide down that slide to the back of the wing. That's the slide that we have here evidently. And if that's the case, then the sequence of events would make sense.

That -- and the third thing, of course, is the flight attendant that you mentioned that had - that had flight attendant -- the piece about the clothing missing from -- I'm not certain that that would tell us much about whether they flew through the air or whether they had fallen because of the fact that it was a woman that had the situation. Women's clothing reacts much differently than men's clothing. If they're - if they - if they had flown through, you wouldn't even see undergarments necessarily on this person because, at that terminal velocity is when -- it's very rare -- rarely seen where the clothes completely stayed onto a person in terminal velocity. So that's a concern of mine as well.

So it could just as well be that the body in the ocean, especially in turbulent ocean, could have disrobed that person as well. So I don't see that as a negative clue towards the direction I'm going here. But if you use Akim's (ph) razor, which is that the simplest thing is the simplest thing and it probably is right, then the clues that we have add up very directly for me in that someone removed that door and deployed that slide.

TAPPER: David Soucie, David Gallo -

GALLO: Which leads to the evidence that -

TAPPER: Go ahead.

GALLO: Maybe the plane is -- there's a big piece of plane - you know, in Air France, there were 238 people on board, souls on board, 50 bodies or so found at the surface. I think almost double that found at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. And so that may be the case here as well that we may be looking for a bit of fuselage with many bodies still left sides. Horrible for the families again.

TAPPER: It's awful.

David Soucie, David Gallo, thank you so much.

For the families of those on board the AirAsia flight, hope for a miracle is fading, if not having faded. Ahead, I will talk with a woman who lost her fiance in a plane crash. She knows all too well what these families are now going through and she has founded an organization that supports families of crash victims.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

TAPPER: Welcome back. I'm Jake Tapper.

As the world waits to find out just what exactly brought down AirAsia Flight 8501, the families of those on board are waiting for what will be devastating news. Bodies of at least seven of the 162 souls on board have, as of now, been recovered. And while the chance anyone survived is slim to none, the families continue to hope for a miracle, but prepare for reality.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

TAPPER (voice-over): For the families praying and waiting for good news, each piece of debris discovered represents the destruction of their last hopes.

TONY FERNANDES, AIRASIA CEO: The only slight benefit is that for the people in there, there is some closure. This is a scar with me for the rest of my life.

TAPPER: Now as victims' belongings are collected from the sea, the world is gaining a clearer picture of who we've lost. One hundred sixty-two souls, including 18 children.

One of the first pilots to spot debris told the Indonesian newspaper "Compass" that he saw victims floating in the water still holding hands. It's perhaps an apocryphal tale, but it is symbolic of the tragedy.

In this South Korean church, the congregation is weeping for one of their missionaries. Park Sun Bong (ph), as well as for his wife and for their 11-month-old daughter. Gone along with them, a fiance whose chance to become a husband will never come.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: They said that his plane was missing.

TAPPER: His bride-to-be explained that Alan Aktafina Sho (ph) perished along with his family on their last trip together.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It was supposed to be their last vacation before we were -- us got married.

TAPPER: Britain's only citizen aboard, Chi Man Choi, was traveling with his two-year-old daughter, Zoe, when the plane went down. According to the newspaper "The Telegraph," the father boarded this flight because there were not enough seats to fly with his wife and son on another.

The wife of the pilot is mourning as well.

RR. WIDIYA SUKATI PUTRI, WIFE OF CAPTAIN IRIYANTO (through translator): The children still need a father. I still also need a guidance from husband. He's a good husband in my eyes, and he's a faithful husband.

TAPPER: Captain Iriyanto was an experienced Indonesian air force veteran whose daughter posted this photo on social media pleading for his return. A return that tragically will never happen.

(END VIDEOTAPE) TAPPER: I'm joined now by Heidi Snow. Show knows firsthand what the families of those on board AirAsia Flight 8501 are dealing with. She lost her fiance in the TWA Flight 800 crash and started a group called ACCESS. It's a grief support network for people who have been affected by air disasters.

Heidi, once again, thank you so much for joining me.

Few people can have any idea what these spouses and children and siblings are going through. But you, obviously, do, unfortunately. What is the best thing that loved ones of the victims can be doing in this situation?

HEIDI SNOW, FIANCE KILLED ON TWA FLIGHT 800: Well, all of us at ACCESS have the unenviable credentials of having lost a loved one in an air disaster. And at this point so many of us, particularly those who have lost loved ones in the ocean, TWA, Swiss Air, Egypt Air, a lot of us are reliving these losses as we watch this unfold. And so many of us remember being in a hotel such as -- for us it was the Ramada Inn following Flight 800. I'm just -- being there and giving information to those who are trying to collect DNA samples, all of that is a very difficult time.

And we've begun getting a lot of calls for help for people from past air disasters who are really reliving their losses because they are walking along with these families. They all remember being there. I remember being there. And it is just such a difficult time and it's so hard to handle the transition from hope to actually the finality that we may never see our loved ones again. And I remember that phase as being extremely difficult personally. And so many of the people who have called us for help over the years all know what that's like. We start out, we get that initial knowledge that our loved potentially was on that plane. And then it starts to unfold. And as time goes on, it just gets harder and harder as you really have to accept that they're truly gone, as the bodies start coming in. And that transition from hope to reality, I just remember being so difficult.

And then the next step is, in time they're going to have to shut down the grief site and the families are busy and they're all together like some - they're bonding with each other and they're able to feel like they're in a place where everybody's at the same point. But as time goes on, clearly these families are going to have to go home and many of them are going to go home without actually having remains, as we did with Flight 800. And that's really the transition time that I find most difficult. And that is what led me to found ACCESS. It was that point where I had to go home but I still didn't have any remains or concrete information that he was truly on board, other than the manifest. And I was lucky enough to meet a woman who lost her fiance on Pan Am Flight 103 eight years earlier. And she really got it and she really helped me get through the day. And I could see that she became a role model to me. And that's what led me to found ACCESS so nobody would ever have to go through their grief alone following this type of loss.

Right now, in the media, everybody is extremely occupied with getting information and that kind of thing. But in the next few weeks, that's going to change. It's going to not be the headline news and families are really going to have to go home, many without any kind of confirmation of physical remains. And that is really where we come in. And that's when we get the most calls for help to ACCESS, how to resume our lives, how do we go home without having anything tangible, without having a real funeral and those kinds of things.

TAPPER: Yes.

SNOW: So that is why I founded ACCESS so that nobody is alone for the loss (ph).

TAPPER: Your Skype is going out right now, but I just want to remind people of the website's address, it's accesshelp.org, accesshelp.org. Our thanks once again to Heidi Snow, such a powerful message, such an important group.

SNOW: Thank you.

TAPPER: For more on how families of those on the plane are coping and how you can help, go to cnn.com/impact.

We're going to take a break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

TAPPER: Welcome back.

Now for a bit of time traveling. It is already 2015 in some parts of the world. Minutes ago, Bangkok ushered in the New Year with a massive celebration. Australia kicked off the New Year a little more than four hours ago with its spectacular pyrotechnic show in Sydney Harbor. South Korea rang in 2015 a couple hours later with its watch night bell ceremony in Seoul, ringing the bell 33 times to celebrate the new year. And even North Korea welcomed 2015 with a huge crowd and traditional fireworks in its capital Pyongyang.

New Year's Eve is, of course, a night filled with celebrations, champagne and, of course, New Year's resolutions. New York City is resolved to make sure its massive party goes off without a hitch. Counterterrorism teams, bomb-sniffing dogs, more are in place to keep a million at least revelers safe. The NYPD is also planning for possible demonstrations. Rosa Flores is live in the middle of it all in Times Square with more.

Rosa, how are law enforcement officials stepping up security for this evening?

ROSA FLORES, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, hi, Jake.

Here's the biggest takeaway for revelers who are here from all around the world. And you can see people from all over. They are not going to notice anything different. Everything is going to be the same. It's going to be the same experience. But the NYPD, they are telling us that they are beefing up security. They are going to be monitoring social media. Why? Because they've received increased numbers of threats from people on social media and these threats are against the NYPD. So they're going to be doing a lot of that. And they're also giving us some more details as to what they're doing. Take a listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CHIEF JAMES O'NEILL, NYPD: As with any New Year's Eve detail, we're absolutely concerned about the security of everyone there, including the police officers. So there is obviously a heightened sense of security during this detail. So and we -- as we turn the police officers out, you know, we remind them that they have to look out for each other and work together and make sure we stay - we all stay safe throughout the -- this great event tomorrow night.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

FLORES: Now, as you mentioned, the NYPD is preparing for protests. They have a specific detail just for that. They have officers that are ready to be activated at a moment's notice. But again, the big takeaway is that everybody that's here from around the world, they're going to have the same experience, Jake, the same feel of the celebration here in Times Square.

Jake.

TAPPER: All right, Rosa Flores, happy New Year to you.

Of course, you are invited to ring in the New Year with CNN. Anderson Cooper will once again do his best not to suffer through a giggle fit as the one and only Kathy Griffin does her thing. Watch it all unfold live from Times Square, "New Year's Eve Live" begins at 9:00 p.m. Eastern here on CNN.

To mark the end of 2014, the Vatican, today, held an event for final players and thanks for the year, just a short time ago actually. In many ways, it's been a banner year for the papacy and a year of change for the Catholic Church. In 2014, Pope Francis made headlines railing against Islamic extremists and even against members of his own church who flaunt their wealth and power. He also helped facilitate the improved relations between the United States and Cuba.

Now back to our top story, of course, the search for the AirAsia plane. Coming up, a look at just how officials will go about trying to find the key parts of the plane and what that could tell us about what went wrong.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)