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Legal View with Ashleigh Banfield

AirAsia Investigation Hampered by Weather; Putting Together the Pieces; Recovering A Plane From Underwater

Aired January 01, 2015 - 12:00   ET

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

DEBORAH FEYERICK, CNN ANCHOR: Hello, everyone. I'm Deborah Feyerick, in for Ashleigh Banfield. Welcome, everyone, to LEGAL VIEW.

It is dangerous, pain staking, high pressure work and search teams in the Java Sea, frustrated by bad weather, would like nothing more than to get on with it. New Year's Day produced few new discovers in the search for Asia Air Flight 8501. You wouldn't know it from scenes like these, but weather over the search zone was once again terrible, sending helicopters home and keeping divers onboard their ships.

To date, the remains of nine of the 162 passengers and crew have been recovered and eight have been flown ashore. One woman has now been identified. She was pulled from the sea on Tuesday. Authorities say she still had her identification on her, as well as a necklace with an initial. The body was given to family members. It was promptly laid to rest.

CNN's Andrew Stevens is in Surabaya where Flight 8501 departed more than four and a half days ago.

Andrew, when you think of the distance between Surabaya and Singapore, the destination, it's really almost the equivalent to the distance between New York City and Atlanta. Are search teams any closer to narrowing down the plane's location, either from the debris or from the individuals who were found?

ANDREW STEVENS, CNN INTERNATIONAL: Well, they're no closer really than they were 24 hours ago, Deborah, and that's the frustrating part of this because the weather is just getting in the way. Three to four meter waves, up to 15-foot-high waves, swells, in that area, high winds, driving rain, and it's coming through in bands. So the rescue crews have to -- or the search crews, I should call them really, have to work around the weather. So when there's a clear patch, they can get in and do just one, maybe two hours searching. Very, very frustrating. As you pointed out, the divers can't get in the water.

The big focus at the moment is trying to relocate what was described as a big shadow seen by a reconnaissance plane three days ago now in the search zone. Now, the divers haven't been able to get down to that because of the conditions -- and think about it, too, this is the monsoon weather, shallow sea, silt gets stirred up at this time of the year, so the visibility is pretty murky anyway. And the other piece of bad news here, Deborah, is the weather is likely to continue like this up till Sunday. It's Thursday night here in Surabaya, so we've got more -- several more days of this sort of weather. So that is going to be so frustrating. More than 90 vessels are in the search zone. But at the moment, they just can't do much at all except ride out this terrible weather.

FEYERICK: You know, Andrew, is there any new information from the airline or the government, concerns they may have about the debris field, if that is what that shadow might be, of it moving, of it drifting, of evidence or even individuals being lost?

STEVENS: They're not saying that publicly at the moment, but, obviously, that is a concern. The longer this goes on, the more scattered the debris is going to be because of the weather. The currents in the area are said to be more circular, so it's unlikely to be moved by currents too far from the existing site, Deborah, at least that's what we're being told. But certainly the wind and the wave action is not going to help. And they need to sort of identify the debris on the water to then work back the currents or the winds have been doing to work it back to the point of impact. So certainly it is a very frustrating process. And also the longer the bodies are in the water, the more decomposition there is, the harder it is going to be to identify them. All these issues.

So, at the moment, they are saying we'll do what we can, when we can. And basically the families where I am at this new crisis center just have to wait.

FEYERICK: That's got to be so painful. Andrew Stevens, thank you so much.

And I want to talk more about the weather, the search, and the prospects now with CNN meteorologist Chad Myers, CNN safety analyst and former FAA inspector David Soucie, and David Gallo, CNN analyst and director at special projects at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

Chad, yesterday you said that the winds and the waves have been awful during the day but OK at night.

CHAD MYERS, AMS METEOROLOGIST: Yes.

FEYERICK: Is that still the pattern that we're seeing?

MYERS: Yes, unfortunately, that's the pattern over there in monsoon season. When you get the air coming together during the afternoon and in the morning hours, the air wants to rise. Then by nightfall, the air is not coming together, the air is not rising anymore, it's actually falling and you get the skies to be clearing. And so good during the day is not going to be possible for months, I don't think, until this whole area goes away. Great in the evening may lend some help to the guys who can dive still because at 100 feet or 110 feet, there's not much light down there anyway. If you're going to be a diver, you're going to understand that 110 feet, even with the sun directly overhead, there's not going to be that much sunshine getting all the way down, especially through that slightly murky water, as well. Here's the forecast here for the recovery. It is the box right here,

this little area. That's where most of the debris has been found. The plane slightly to the left of that box, because the waves and the wind has been going in that direction the entire time. We talk about that. And there's very little current in this area here either. And once something sinks to the bottom, we're not going to be moving it around in the current. Only the stuff on top.

Especially the things, Deborah, that are sticking out of the water. Let's say a part of a wing or a winglet sticking out of the water, that wind will grab that and act like a sail and can blow it downstream, downwind. And that's the way the wind has been going the entire time, right into this box. And even here, 35, 45 miles per hour, not out of the question at times, especially in some of these thunderstorms. And you can just see it, it doesn't go away. You think about this, trying to get out of a boat, dive down, and you've got waves above you or you're on a ship looking for white debris from a white airplane and there are just white caps everywhere. It's hard to distinguish one from the other, Deborah.

FEYERICK: Sure. Absolutely. And looking at the debris field, that area that you're looking at, it's interesting because it's opposite the direction the plane who have been flying to get to Singapore.

MYERS: That's correct.

FEYERICK: David Soucie, the depth of the water in the area, it's about eight to ten stories. How do you analyze why searchers are only finding small pieces right now, that they haven't found more?

DAVID SOUCIE, CNN SAFETY ANALYST: Well, it's a very good question, but remember with MH17, when we didn't have access to the site, it's kind of similar here, we don't really have access to the site. Back there we relied on all source (ph) analysis of satellite images and Steve Wood there gave us a lot of information about where to find the bodies and debris. In this case, Steve, I've spoken with him and he's been trying to get the analysis that way, as well, which would help us find the other debris. But, again, the weather is in the way. You can't look through these clouds. And when they do get little glimpses, they are getting some information, but still no debris.

FEYERICK: And, David Gallo, what do we know right now about the ocean floor and how that could perhaps make the search more difficult?

DAVID GALLO, CNN ANALYST: Well, it's shallow, relatively shallow, compared to the deep water searches where the depths have been mild. So we're talking about 100 feet or less in some cases here. But, you know, one of the things that concerns me looking for debris is that there's been a steady stream of commercial traffic, ships coming from Singapore on the way towards Australia. I just looked at the traffic in that area, marinetraffic.com, and there were about 30 ships transiting that area going like nine, ten miles an hour. And to me this is like a crime scene and here we have this steady stream of commercial traffic just blasting through it and I'm wondering, what do they see? You know, it is amazing to me that we've seen so little debris, even with the weather the way it is. FEYERICK: Yes, because arguably those ships, all those ships, are

extra eyes in that region, which could ultimately prove helpful. You don't think that they're interfering, though, in that plane.

David Soucie, what do you think?

SOUCIE: Well, they certainly could be. And as he said, it's an accident scene. And every accident scene I've worked, the first thing you do is secure the site and make sure that nobody disrupts it. It's much like the crime scene investigations you see on TV and things like that. So you've got the ships going through there, which can disrupt and can make evidence that you have sink to the bottom as it goes over it.

But, you know, I don't know that these ships, they're cargo ships, they're large containers, they're not looking for things. You know, there's not enough crew on there. They're busy already. They're not going to be spending time looking like searchers would. So I don't know enough about this to know if they could diverted, but certainly, if they could, that's what they'd be doing.

FEYERICK: Right. Let's talk about this aerodynamic stall that we're now hearing about. The pilot radioed saying that he needed to change altitudes.

SOUCIE: Right.

FEYERICK: Air traffic control said he could make a left but he could not climb higher from 32,000 feet to 36,000 feet.

SOUCIE: Right.

FEYERICK: First of all, what kind of a difference would that have made to potentially get the plane out of harm's way and was the pilot perhaps forced to do that anyway?

SOUCIE: Well, either he was forced to do it or it happened on its own, which would be from an updraft, a serious updraft could have resulted in the same thing. If the aircraft is flying and it hits into an updraft system, it's going to lift the aircraft and it could easily have lifted it -- not easily, but it could have lifted it 4,000 or 5,000 feet. That could be one explanation.

The other is that simply he felt like he was in imminent danger and he had to change. But what's odd about that is, in order to change and take command of the air space, which would mean that the air traffic control would clear air space for him. When you declare an emergency, that's what happens. But in this case, it was not declared, and that's very strange to me because if you're going to get off of that path, you know that you may be putting other aircraft and other lives in danger. So the first thing you would do is say, I need some space, give it to me so I can make a safe change.

FEYERICK: Right. And yet it appears by all -- for all intents and purposes that there wasn't even time for that communication after its effectively disappeared, making what we believe may have been that left.

SOUCIE: Either that or there was no communication mechanism.

FEYERICK: Right. OK, which means something was wrong with the plane.

SOUCIE: Exactly.

FEYERICK: All right, David Soucie, David Gallo, Chad Myers, thanks so much. Stick around, we're going to be coming back to you within the half hour.

And the key to understanding what happened to Flight 8501 may be in the aircraft's black boxes, but first investigators have to find them. Next, we're going to look at clues that may lead to those answers.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

FEYERICK: Experienced crash investigators admit they never get back all the pieces of planes that crash into the sea, but what they need, what they've got to have, are the black boxes. Stephanie Elam met some experts who piece together these tragic mysteries by looking at lots of small clues.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

STEPHANIE ELAM, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): To find out what brought down a plane --

MICHAEL BARR, INSTRUCTOR, USC AVIATION SAFETY PROGRAM: You've got to bite this at a small bite at a time.

ELAM: Investigators look to the wreckage, and not just the black boxes, for clues.

BARR: I will never have all the parts. Never. But the more parts I get, it's like a mosaic. The more bits I can put into the mosaic, the better my picture will be. The better the picture, the better I come up with an understanding of what happened.

ELAM: But when a plane crashes into the water like AirAsia Flight 8501, that task is a more difficult endeavor.

BARR: A crash on the land is much easier because the parts stay where they landed. In the water, you're working with currents and winds and so the pieces won't be where they had the initial impact. The deeper the water, the more difficult. We have other accidents that happen in shallow water, we got most of the pieces back. But deep water, we have a very, very hard time doing that.

ELAM: Take, for example, Malaysia Air Flight 370. The missing 777 jet is believed by many to be somewhere at the bottom of the Indian Ocean. By examining other crashes, investigators can deduce what likely happened if the massive plane did crash into the water.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: In this case, the primary energy of this wreckage was absorbed by the right front cockpit. It has two jet engines, just like the Malaysian aircraft, but, in fact, it's 10,000 pounds versus the 777, which was 600,000 pounds, 60 times larger.

ELAM (on camera): If it broke up, that debris field at the bottom of the sea floor would be massive.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You're absolutely right.

ELAM: So this wing here, this is a wing that crashed into the water.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What's important to us here is tracing the front leading edge of this -- of this right wing. It looks like it struck some object. But, in fact, this wing hit the water, the water being a very, very hard surface when you hit it fast.

ELAM: And so if you're talking about a 777 hitting the water, it would be immensely more noticeable.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And that 777 would be moving at a much higher speed than this aircraft here. So, therefore, the energy would be greater.

ELAM (voice-over): Yet even with all the pieces investigators are able to put back together, if they don't recover the part of the plane that failed in flight, the cause of the crash may remain a mystery.

Stephanie Elam, CNN, Los Angeles.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

FEYERICK: And I want to get back to David Soucie and David Gallo back here.

You just saw the immense task investigators have, even when they can put their hands on the wreckage, but what can people in your line of work do when you don't have that hard evidence? How do you analyze what you know, David Soucie?

SOUCIE: There's the difference between hypothesis, theory, and evidence. And so working those three things together, evidence drives the others. However, in this case, when you don't have evidence, you have to start with theories that you know, proven theories about physics, proven theories in history of other accidents. You put those together. From there you drive hypotheses and you test those hypothecs. You say, if this happened, then that happened. The difficult thing for us at this point, and for all -- for the investigators on site right now, as you mentioned, there's no real evidence, but interestingly enough when you do have evidence, the lack of evidence tells you something, too.

FEYERICK: Right. Of course.

SOUCIE: You know, the fact that you have --

FEYERICK: Because how it broke up or how the plane didn't break up, all that kind of thing.

SOUCIE: Yes, that there's no debris, for example --

FEYERICK: Right.

SOUCIE: That's a fact. It's not something disputed or part of a theory or hypothesis or a test, it's the fact. There's no debris in that area. And where they did find debris, it was a specific kind of evidence.

FEYERICK: Right.

SOUCIE: So you put those together and then that either supports or falsifies one of your hypotheses, which then supports or negates your theory.

FEYERICK: Right. And, David Gallo, what -- based on your experience, what do you understand of the wreckage, where it may be, where it's been found so far, the shadow that people are talking about, what can you piece together from all of that?

GALLO: What I piece together is we're just getting incomplete, sometimes contradictory information. So we'll have to wait and see to get something official. But I will say one thing, Deborah, that in the past we used to commit when something went into the deep sea, we committed the ship or plane and souls for eternity to the deep. And now with new technology, we can go to any depth and we can produce a full forensic map, in a virtual sense we can bring the wreck site back to the investigators or we can allow them to investigate it in real time through satellites and robotics. So we've come an awful long way in the deep sea so that we can do deep sea forensics in place right now.

FEYERICK: Which is really remarkable. When you do deep sea forensics, look, a lot of people might just say, when the plane is found, bring up the passengers and then bring up the particles. Why is it important, in your opinion, to map out what you're seeing on the floor?

GALLO: In Air France 447, we collected over 100,000 still images and made a bird's eye view and then provided that to the investigators, the forensic team, so they could pick and choose and direct operations about where -- that's hugely important. And I do believe there are clues. So if you start recovering things from the deep sea, quite often they're damaged on the way back to the surface. So like any accident scene, it's great to be able to produce for the investigators a virtual view of that wreck site on the deep sea, bringing them to -- bringing that to them in their own laboratory.

FEYERICK: Sure. Absolutely. And, obviously, once the entire analysis is done, that kind of information could prove crucial into how the plane went down and the altitude, all of that kind of thing, the pitch.

David Soucie, so far they've found two black bags, a gray suitcase, seemingly intact, stairs, as well as other pieces of scrap metal. Why do you think these pieces and what does it tell you in terms of suitcases being intact, passengers that have so far been found, nine altogether, also being intact, what does that tell you? SOUCIE: Well, at this point the information that we have is that you

have something. What the clues come from is not just that you have it, but where it was that you got it, where you picked it up from, and the condition of what it is that you picked up. For example, a piece of metal. A piece of metal torn off of an airplane could mean a couple of things. If indeed under microscope you look at that metal and a crack had propagated earlier, then you can tell that that had happened and then you can tell what's quick, whether it's a slow moving tear or whether it's an abrupt, sudden tear. That you can see under a microscope. So that would give you a lot of clues as to whether the aircraft landed as a ditching or whether -- and then broke apart, or whether it landed all at once or whether it went into the nose. So all of that can be determined by just a few small pieces of metal.

FEYERICK: And what about the location, if those suitcases, for example, were too large to fit in the overhead --

SOUCIE: Right.

FEYERICK: Does that mean that investigators are any closer to perhaps finding the tail section where -- or the underneath part of the plane where those bags are kept?

SOUCIE: Yes. It doesn't necessarily mean that, because there's so many other explanations for what it could be. So we talked earlier about evidence supporting or negating the hypothesis. That evidence neither supports nor negates the hypothesis that the aircraft broke into pieces in an abrupt matter or in a ditching manner. So that doesn't conclude anything yet.

However, what it would do is give them clues as to whether -- where the aircraft might be because of the size of the bag and how it's drifted. We talked about the evidence that they did find being 100 miles from the place that it was located last.

FEYERICK: Right.

SOUCIE: That doesn't mean that's where it hit.

FEYERICK: Right.

SOUCIE: It could have hit six miles as they originally reported and drifted for 94 miles afterwards.

FEYERICK: Right.

SOUCIE: So there's too many questions still, as David says.

FEYERICK: And that's really where David Gallo comes in, because you're able to look at the currents, you're able to look at the path of the plane that it took possibly under water, providing also crucial information.

David Soucie, David Gallo, stand by with us for a moment because the big question, what happens once they actually find the missing airliner, will it give families any sort of consolation? We'll examine what it takes to raise a plane from the bottom of the sea, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

FEYERICK: And as more bodies and debris are found floating in the waters off the coast of Indonesia, it seems more and more likely that search crews will find Flight 8501 at the bottom of the Java Sea. It is a relatively shallow body of water, about 100 to 150 feet deep. That's about 10 to 15 stories. Hopefully, that will make the search and the salvage operation a little bit easier. CNN's Joe Johns reports on how the plane could be recovered from the sea floor.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JOE JOHNS, CNN SENIOR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): How do you pull a plane up from the bottom of the ocean?

PETER GOELZ, FMR. 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. And 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 depth for short periods due to health concerns. But does Indonesia have the knowhow to carry off a recovery effort like this? There are still questions about the location of all the debris.

DAVID GALLO, WOODS HOLE OCEANOGRAPHIC INSTITUTION: It seems like a fairly small body of water. But when you're out there, it's huge.

JOHNS: David Gallo, with Woods Hole Oceanographic.

GALLO: Usually, you're extremely careful not to say that you've found something until you ground truth it.

JOHNS: Woods Hole 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.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

FEYERICK: And Joe Johns joins me now live from Washington. Joe, is there any sense about how long, once the plane is found, that

it could take to actually bring it to the surface?

JOHNS: Really hard to say. This is sort of a unique situation. It could be a few days, but it all depends on how long it takes them to locate, not just the debris, but also the black boxes. I think that's an educated guess, is anybody's guess right now, Deb.

FEYERICK: Is there any sense of who would be in charge of that? Right now Indonesia has the lead, they've got the most ships that are out there searching. Is there any sense who would be in charge and how much this might potentially cost?

JOHNS: Well, hard to say. I know, and you know, we've worked so long and hard on MH370. This is a plane that has never been discovered. So, how much will it cost certainly depends on how long it takes. And Indonesia will probably remain the lead on this. However, other individual countries, for example the United States, have been offering the type of assistance that might help them get this stuff, including one thing I think we all have been talking about is aircraft that can actually drop sonar (ph) buoys (ph) into the water to try to locate where the debris is. How much does that cost? It depends on how long they have to fly.

FEYERICK: Right. Absolutely. All right, Joe Johns, thank you so much. A lot of families wanting a lot of answers. We appreciate that.

And ahead, the grim task of identifying the passengers of Flight 8501, How more time -- how much more time under water could make that task even more difficult.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)