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Two Steps Forward, One Step Back in Investigation of AirAsia Crash; Gas Prices Keep Falling Down

Aired January 01, 2015 - 10:30   ET

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

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CAROL COSTELLO, CNN ANCHOR: Good morning. I'm Carol Costello. Thank you so much for joining me.

The investigation into the weekend crash of AirAsia flight 8501, two steps forward, one step back. Officials now confirm they've made their first positive identification of a recovered body. The woman is among nine bodies recovered in the java sea where the airliner crashed with 162 people on board. In the meantime search ships continue to rake in small debris. But lousy weather is hampering aerial and underwater searches.

Officials say divers cannot confirm a shadow on the sea floor is actually the plane. It may take a week to locate those so-called black boxes. Of course, they contain the flight data and voice recorders that will likely explain exactly what caused that plane to go down.

Let's get the latest. Let's head to Andrew Stevens. He's in Surabaya, Indonesia. Hi -- Andrew.

ANDREW STEVENS, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Hi -- Carol. Thanks very much.

Agony being piled on agony for the families here because the weather over the search zone is so bad it is severely hampering the operation. We're being told no helicopters could get up today. No divers could get into the water today. They've only got one acoustic listening device in the water looking for signs of those black boxes, the pinging from the black boxes, all because they had three to four- meter-high waves. That's 15 to 20 foot swells in that part of the world, plus strong winds, plus rain -- very, very bad visibility.

The bad news here is it is expected to continue perhaps right up until Sunday. It's now Thursday night here. Gives you an idea of just how long this bad weather is going to continue. So what searchers now have to do, Carol, is sort of work in between the weather systems. When there's a patch of clear skies or calmer weather, that's when they have to do everything, which means it's going to be a very, very slow process.

There's a little bit of hope raise a few hours ago now. Tony Fernandes, the boss of AirAsia tweeting that he hopes that the information about the main -- the primary wreckage can be confirmed soon, but we haven't heard anything more since then. As you say, a shadow has been seen, but they haven't relocated it -- very, very frustrating for everybody; obviously so painful for the families here.

COSTELLO: Andrew, one of our experts, David Gallo, wonders why there hasn't been more debris recovered from the surface of the water. Are they just not telling us or are they just not collecting much debris?

STEVENS: Well, what we heard today, the debris they found was pretty minimal, a couple of bags and pieces of tin associated with the aircraft and a bit of flotsam -- small objects. You're right, officially at least they're saying very little.

It's very difficult to say, Carol. So far the information flow has been pretty good. There have been some conflicting statements obviously you would expect that in a disaster like this but it sort of ties in with the many theories of how the plane entered the water. There's a theory going around, there's a lot of conjecture that it may have been some sort of controlled ditching which has been, sort of questioned pretty heavily because if that were the case, surely the pilots would have had time to radio in to tell air traffic control what they were doing.

But all depending on how the plane entered the water and how intact the fuselage on the plane is will depend on the amount of debris which is now floating on the surface. It's very difficult to say. And also, you have to remember, the stormy conditions are going to disperse a lot of debris anyway so the search field would have to widen, visibility very hard to see so actually picking up the stuff that's in the water is also going to be a challenge as well. So there's a whole lot of reasons why there's not so much debris being found at the moment.

COSTELLO: All right. Andrew Stevens reporting live for us. Thank you so much.

From parts of the plane to pieces of the engine, search teams continue to scour the Java Sea for anything from Flight 8501. From the water surface to the sea floor, putting back together that gigantic puzzle is the investigator's best way to figure out what happened to the flight.

Tom Foreman has more for you.

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TOM FOREMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: There are really three layers to the physical search right now. The one we've been talking about the most right now is on the surface of the water. We know where the plane took off, we know where it disappeared. We know where they have found debris and the search area. We know the water here is very rough at times.

The surface matters because the surface is where you get your first clues most often. Things floating on top of the water may or may not tell you a lot about the cause of the accident, but they are indicators because when you move to the second layer which is the water column beneath them and you start reverse engineering their position against all the competing currents below, you can get an estimate on where they came from, and that can lead you to the third layer down here which is the heavy bits on the bottom because those are the ones you really have to get.

What are we talking about? We're talking about big parts of the plane, parts of the wings and parts of the tail, parts of the landing gear, the electronics, the flight data recorder, the voice recorder, the engines which are each about 9,000 pounds -- all of these are critical. Because if you collect enough of them as they did with TWA 800 which was also in about 100 feet of water off the coast of Long Island, you can reassemble the plane in effect. And when you do that, you can look at all these pieces and see what went wrong. Was there a fire? Was there an explosion? Did it simply tear apart? Did it hit the water intact and then sink? All of those can be critical clues to understanding what happened.

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COSTELLO: Still to come in the newsroom, what happened aboard Flight 8501? Did the AirAsia plane go into a stall? Did it try to land on the water? We'll take a look at those scenarios next.

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COSTELLO: As the search for victims from Flight 8501 goes on, so does the search for clues. Some experts believe the AirAsia plane may have gone into a stall. So what is a stall?

Here is CNN's Miguel Marquez.

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MIGUEL MARQUEZ, CNN CORRESPONDENT: When an airplane loses lift or stalls the results could be catastrophic.

Once you are in an unrecoverable stall, what happens?

LES ABEND, CNN AVIATION ANALYST: There are various types of stalls. But for the most part, on a swept wing airplane, ok, you're going to see more or less a flat situation because the pilots are going to try to control it. And it will almost be like a leaf.

MARQUEZ: How is that possible? How can that be --

ABEND: Well, it's possible because they got to such a slow airspeed.

MARQUEZ: A stall occurs when not only the airspeed slows, but the wings are at such an extreme angle, or as pilots call it, the angle of attack. The plane loses lift and can plummet.

ABEND: The reason the airplane flies is because you have high pressure underneath the wings and low pressure on top. If this is the nose of the airplane, my tip on my fingers, and this is the relative wind, ok, the steeper the angle of the attack occurs, the more likely you'll get a stall.

MARQUEZ: In the case of QZ8501, already a possible critical piece of information: air traffic control data showing the A-320 descending shortly before disappearing from radar.

ABEND: It's disturbing to me that an attempt would be made -- at least that's the evidence so far, we haven't verified it with data -- that he was avoiding weather by going up. That's not something we normally like to do. We'd rather go left or right.

MARQUEZ: As with Flight 8501, Air France Flight 447 in 2009 was flying from Rio to Paris in a powerful storm. Ice formed on the pedo (ph) tubes on the plane's exterior. The tubes deliver critical information to the plane's computers. Pilots had confusing signals as to what was happening with the plane.

ABEND: They were getting horns and sirens, readouts on their displays. And they're trying to determine what's happening with the airplane.

MARQUEZ: The 447 pilot thinking the pilot was losing airspeed increased power and climbed pushing the aircraft into a catastrophic stall. The flight voice recorder captured the confusion in the cockpit. With the stall warning blaring, the plane's capital says "Watch out, you're pulling up." One of his co-pilots chillingly responds, "Am I pulling up?"

With Flight 8501, despite equatorial heat at that altitude and in those stormy conditions, ice could rapidly and easily form. Were the pilots of Flight 8501 getting similarly bad information about what was actually happening to the plane?

ABEND: You're talking super cooled water droplets at this altitude. What would have happened is the concentration was such that it blocked the pedo tubes and perhaps the heating system either failed or didn't keep up with it.

MARQUEZ: All questions for investigators as the search for victims continues, the search for answers just as intense.

Miguel Marquez, CNN, New York.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

COSTELLO: All right. So let's talk more about this. Jeff Wise is a science writer and author of "Extreme Fear". Thanks for coming back. I appreciate it.

Let's talk about the stall because some information is leaking out. And when experts look at the screen grabs from the radar, the plane appears to be very steeply going up, like almost straight up in the air. They say it's unbelievably steep. And when you look at it, you almost don't believe it.

JEFF WISE, AUTHOR, "EXTREME FEAR": Right. There's a couple of things to bear in mind. First of all, we don't know the conditions under which this happened. For instance, there might have been a very intense updraft.

Secondly, we don't really know the providence of this data yet. We just don't know where it comes from. So as with so many of the facts in the early stages of the investigation, we have to take everything with a grain of salt.

COSTELLO: So when you talk about an updraft, just so people understand, the wind gets underneath the plane and pushes it up and there's nothing the pilots can do to stop that.

WISE: Right. So basically a thunderstorm is a system of the warm, wet air from the sea surface gets drawn up and it's like a chimney of air going up, and then it comes down with the precipitation. So you can have very intense and very closely defined areas of updraft and downdraft and wind shear in between them so it can be a very turbulent phenomenon.

However, I think I should point out that this does not cause accidents. Historically planes in modern times do not crash because they fly into thunderstorms by themselves. Other things happen. Air France 447, there was another case also in Indonesia back in 2007 which was very similar to 8501 actually where it was a combination of, yes, they were flying in bad weather, there was also an equipment problem. The pilots were then trying to troubleshoot the equipment problem. They got distracted. They weren't paying attention to outside. They got into a steep stall -- not a stall, a spiral dive situation and the plane came apart.

But I think what's really important for people to realize is that they should not fear that they're going to go flying today or tomorrow and their captain is going to get into some turbulence and find themselves in an unrecoverable flight mode. That's not going to happen.

COSTELLO: But still, there is some evidence that that pilot experienced trouble in the air because of the weather. Now, let's say he tried to get around it or tried to go up and there was a freak cell within that cloud, that cumulus cloud that affected the engines of his plane.

WISE: It will not cause the plane to drop like a rock from the sky which I think is the implication of some of these reports. The plane is not going to stall get into an unrecoverable mode and fall, crash to the ground. That will not happen.

Other things could contribute to the problem being worse. But these planes are -- modern planes are built incredibly robustly. Training is very solid, especially in the United States. My one fear at this point is that people not think that these planes are ticking time bombs that can easily get into some kind of mode where they're going to just fall like a rock from the sky.

COSTELLO: Let's talk about the evidence found in the water. There was a black suitcase. David Soucie says that the black suitcase found came from an area very close to the black boxes. That suitcase was intact. That probably means something good for the black boxes. WISE: Well, yes. I mean we can't learn too much from the very

limited amount of debris that we have right now. But I think one of the things we can deduce is that it wasn't an extremely high speed impact. There was a case also in Indonesia, a Garuda flight a few years back where the pilot committed suicide by pointing the plane straight down, impact at almost the speed of sound. A lot of this -- the debris that they recovered looked like it had been through a wood chipper. It was really just super fragmented. And the stuff that they found so far doesn't look like that.

Again, early days -- very hard to draw firm conclusions at this point but I think what we're looking at is neither a super high speed impact nor a Sullenberger style ditching where the entire thing stays intact -- somewhere in between that which is a very wide margin for sure.

COSTELLO: The other thing that David Soucie pointed out, there was an emergency door found in the water. Those doors are designed to open inward unless somebody opens them outward.

WISE: Right -- they kind of pull in and then swing out. We don't know if the plane came apart, essentially, in which case you could have, you know, the door could be pulled from the air frame, et cetera, everything gets scattered. Perhaps there would be some kind of scenario where the plane lands intact, they open the door and somehow subsequent bad weather takes it apart. It's hard to say at this point at least for now.

COSTELLO: Hard to say.

WISE: Hope we find answers soon.

COSTELLO: And of course, the biggest clue I think that all of our experts agree is the conditions of the bodies because the bodies are intact, none of them were wearing life vests. So it's probably safe to assume that the pilot didn't tell people to put their lifejackets on or maybe they didn't have time. I don't know. I can't assume anything.

WISE: You know, we only have such a small number of bodies -- our minds do go back to Air France 447 in which a number of bodies were found intact. We do know that in that case the plane hit the surface at about I would say 130, 150 miles per hour, that kind of speed range. And so many of them -- the fuselage remained largely intact and went to the bottom in large pieces. But people did -- you know, were scattered as well. So it's hard to know. It's somewhere in the middle.

COSTELLO: Well, we hope the weather clears and we can get some answers finally. Jeff Wise, thanks for coming in. I appreciate it.

WISE: My pleasure -- Carol.

COSTELLO: Still to come in the NEWSROOM, officials say it could be a week until those black boxes on board Flight 8501 are located. We'll talk about that next.

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COSTELLO: It's hard to imagine what the families of Flight 8501 are going through as they wait for the search crews to find their loved ones. So far nine victims have been recovered but that means there's still 153 people missing. Finding the plane's exact resting place is a task that sounds a lot easier said than done. Aside from the rough weather, the search zone is about 60,000 square miles. To put that into perspective, that's bigger than the state of Florida.

Once officials locate the plane, the next challenge begins, pulling the wreckage and the victims out of the water.

Let's bring in CNN's senior Washington correspondent Joe Johns. He has more on that for you. Good morning -- Joe.

JOE JOHNS, CNN SENIOR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Carol. This is just an enormous job when you think about it. It can take a long time. First they have to map out where all the pieces of the plane are, a lot like how a crime scene technician might try to log evidence when and where he or she finds it. Then the heavy lifting begins.

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JOHNS: How do you pull a plane up from the bottom of the ocean?

PETER GOELZ, FORMER NTSB MANAGING DIRECTOR: What you want to do first is to really map the entire accident scene.

JOHNS: We spoke with Peter Goelz, a former investigator with NTSB who worked on the recovery and rebuilding of TWA Flight 800 that crashed after takeoff from New York City.

GOELZ: You document everything until you really get the information off the data recorder and the voice recorder.

JOHNS: He says the site needs to be treated like a crime scene and mapping the debris field before removing objects could be key to finding out what happened. Then comes the process of pulling up the giant pieces of debris from the bottom of the sea.

GOELZ: You would have a number of lifting cranes and you would have teams of divers. The divers, of course, even working at 100-foot depth, you'll have to have decompression chambers.

JOHNS: a potentially slow process because divers can only remain at those depths for short periods due to health concerns. But does Indonesia have the know-how to carry off a recovery effort like this. There are still questions about the location of all the debris.

DAVID GALLO: Seems like a fairly small body of water. But when you're out there, it's huge.

JOHNS: David Gallo, with Woodshole Oceanographic --

GALLOW: Usually you're extremely careful not to say you found something until you ground truth it.

JOHNS: Woodshole participated in the recovery effort in the crash of Air France flight 447 off Brazil's northeastern coast whose black boxes took almost two years to recover, footnoting what a painstaking process this can be.

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JOHN: On the other hand, this AirAsia crash occurred in much shallower water than the Air France flight suggesting recovery could be easier. But one thing investigators are worrying about is the possibility of poachers or tourists looking for souvenirs that could interfere in that investigation -- Carol.

COSTELLO: That truly makes me sick.

Joe Johns reporting live from Washington. Thank you so much.

Checking other top stories for you at 51 minutes past, at least 36 people dead, dozens more injured after a stampede in downtown Shanghai. Chaos erupted shortly before midnight during the city's New Year's Eve celebration. It's unclear what triggered the stampede. Of course officials are investigating.

2015 brings the start of state-issued driver's licenses for undocumented immigrants in California. Starting today DMVs will issue licenses to undocumented immigrants who meet qualifications like passing a driving test. About 1.4 million non-U.S. citizens are expected to apply in the first three years.

Despicable, disappointing, price gouging -- just a few words customers are using to describe Uber this morning. The company reportedly charged as much as $300 for a 20-minute ride last night. That added up to an estimated $100 million in revenue for New Year's Eve alone. Uber says its surge pricing policy helps guarantee available cars and requires customers to agree to the price hike before they buy.

Gas prices they keep falling and they're not yet done. A gallon of gas on this first day of 2015 will cost you just under two bucks -- that's on average, $2.24 on average. Since summer, gas prices have been declining all across the country. States with the lowest prices are seen here in dark blue with a gallon of gas averaging as low as $1.91 a gallon. Isn't that crazy?

This mirrors plunging oil prices, of course. Oil prices finished 2014 down a stunning 46 percent. But the big drop in prices could come with a hefty price tag -- job losses.

Let's bring in Ryan Mack, he's a market analyst. Good morning, Ryan. So let's -- ok. Let's get the bad news --

RYAN MACK, MARKET ANALYST: How are you doing? Thank you. Happy New Year.

COSTELLO: Happy New Year to you.

I want to get the bad news out of the way first. Job losses are associated with these low gas prices. Why?

MACK: Well, bottom line is, we have a pile up (ph) of correlation between things like U.S. oil rigs and the price per barrel of gas. So as the price drops, there's less demand for oil. Not less demand but less amount of oil rigs in the economy, therefore, less jobs. So it really is a perfect storm of things that we're seeing here, essentially those who work for oil field service-related companies are the first to get laid off within this type of economy.

Essentially what we're seeing, we're in the middle of a huge price war of OPEC versus the U.S. because we're trying to -- on the road towards energy independence, essentially trying to flood the U.S. economy with lower-priced gas -- lower-priced oil therefore making this influx of U.S. shale companies become less and less viable and making less money and having to make adjustments. Therefore, we're seeing lay-offs.

COSTELLO: So how many lay-offs are we talking about?

MACK: Well, I mean potentially thousands of individuals. I'm looking at -- in terms of economic professor, first of all, I'm looking at this as a microcosm of the entire economy as a whole. You have those individuals -- this is a perfect example of how low-skilled labor is no longer in as high in demand as it once was and the job security is no longer what it once was. The job security for low skilled labor is slim and none.

Therefore, those individuals who are in technology -- the technological boom for the U.S. shale industry is one of the reasons fracking has increased and why we're on the road to independence. If you're into technology, development and implementation, essentially you are on the side of being able to have job security.

So the perfect storm essentially is because of this, one, you have increased fuel efficiency. I was in a parking garage the other day and I saw an entire floor dedicated to electric carports. That's never happened. They're sprouting up all over the country. You have decreased demand from (inaudible) countries like China. They have a maturing (ph) economy. You've got increased focus on alternative energy. You've got the OPEC price war, the largest production of oil in the U.S. in 30 years and they're going back and forth and trying to make sure they're being more competitive.

Then you also have an increased demand for an asset class of oil. You know, in 2000 when the stock market crashed, they looked at gold and real estate as additional asset class. In 2005, you had a spike in oil. And then in 2007 and 2008, you had $140 a barrel of oil. Many of the individuals are looking at the asset class of oil as a viable alternative. We might see $35 and even $25 a share for oil, not necessarily because the valuation is there but because speculation is there, people are bailing out or even shorting oil futures.

COSTELLO: All right. Ryan Mack, thanks so much. Thanks for being here on New Year's. I appreciate it.

Thank you for joining me today. I'm Carol Costello.

@THIS HOUR WITH BERMAN AND MICHAELA" after a break.

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