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Legal View with Ashleigh Banfield

Search for Flight 8501; Several Nations Helping to Find AirAsia 8501; Bringing the Home Dead

Aired January 02, 2015 - 12:30   ET

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

PAMELA BROWN, CNN ANCHOR: Karen, I'm going to start with you. It's after midnight out there on the Java Sea. What will it look like when the sun comes up?

KAREN MAGINNIS, AMS METEOROLOGIST: We are in the monsoon portion of the Java Sea. This portion of the world, it is the ITCZ. You probably heard that during the early part of this missing plane investigation. Because of this monsoonal moisture that just kind of feeds in just wave after wave, squall lines of thunderstorms, these embedded thunderstorms.

Well, what we're looking at now, and this is really saying a lot that the weather may be calming down in the next 48 hours. You can see over the last 24 hours and the location that is being searched. Now the dozens of vessels that are on the ocean and the number of aircraft in the sky, including helicopters, when visibility is low, when that water is getting churned up, it is going to be unproductive.

But here you can see on Saturday, there's a little bit of a break. You can see a few echoes of what it's predicted to be, some shower activity, maybe one to two inches of rainfall. Then we go later in the day on Saturday, most of the heavy stuff, if you look at further south in the search area. Now you have to remember, this is a predictive forecast or outlook what we think will happen over the next 24 to 48 hours.

Going into Sunday, there we can see maybe some breaks in the clouds. Maybe the ocean is going to lie flat. Maybe the thunderstorms and the reduced visibility is going to clear out. That would be terrific news because you get some sunshine, you get the winds and they're going to be lighter and that ocean is going to lie flat. You get to see further down with the sunshine.

It's not going to be absolutely positively clear but at least we're looking at clearing and during monsoon season when this happens, that is really saying something significant.

All right, here's the Java Sea. Here's the South China Sea, the southern portion of this. This is the search area, as you've heard by now, roughly the size of the state of Delaware. We get brisk some winds coming out of the north-northwest but look at this. Where you start to see the yellow disappear, that means some of those stronger winds, 25-mile-an-hour winds, maybe higher gusts, now we're looking at winds that maybe 10 to 15 miles an hour. So, Pamela, if anything, I think that this will further along that

search. It gives some hope that maybe there will be more information that they can gather both from the sky with their visibility, also with the vessels that are on the ocean. They'll have more visibility and they're not going to get that washing machine motion that they've been experiencing.

BROWN: Let's hope so.

David, I'm going to go to you now. Putting aside for a moment the challenge of just navigating a search in this kind of rough weather, what are these conditions doing to the wreckage they're looking for?

DAVID SOUCIE, CNN SAFETY ANALYST: Well, first of all, this news about the weather is very exciting for the searchers. They've been waiting and waiting and waiting to just get out there and find something, and although it's gone much better now, we're going to see exponentially the information that we get -- we're going to get so much more very quickly for a lot of reasons.

One is the surface search but another one is we've been waiting from -- for Steve Wood over at all source analysis who has satellites sitting there waiting to give us information about the surface and now the search for debris but they haven't been able to do anything because of these clouds. So I'm very excited that this -- we'll finally going to be able to see those.

But back to the search and what's going on with it, there's a lot of different technologies being used right now but what's an interesting point to make out that's different from MH-370 is that if you'll recall because of the pings that we had from the Inmarsat data, we were finding -- looking for debris, which of course we still haven't found, but we had an idea where the aircraft went down so we were calculating in a V-shape from there looking at where the debris might have gone.

That -- as difficult as that is, this is much more difficult because here's the situation. If you find debris, which we have here, now you've got to reverse calculate where the debris came from. So as this V is this way and we were looking out this way before, now we've got the debris here, we're trying to find out where this spot is, which literally could be anywhere based on the currents, based on the winds.

There's so many different factors in here. So even as we find debris, until we can really get a good idea of where things are through sonar, that's when the real decision-making can be made and you can start to get some answers because that's where the black boxes will be if they find it, the tail section of that airplane with sonar.

BROWN: In your experience, how far can the debris go from the actual core of the wreckage given weather conditions?

SOUCIE: Thousands and thousands of miles, really.

BROWN: Wow. SOUCIE: It can float for days, weeks, months, even years. Some of

these cycles in the ocean -- and I'm no oceanographer but from what we've heard from Dave Gallo and a few others that do this type of flow analysis, it can just circle in some of these areas continuously for years, actually so --

BROWN: Wow. So then how are they able to narrow the search field to, as Karen said, the size of the state of Delaware?

SOUCIE: Well, the search field, first of all, is because of the fact that they've identified where the debris is but that's not really the primary thing that they use to narrow in on this. What they are looking at is radar data which tells them exactly where the last point of contact was for the aircraft. From there, you can draw a circle around -- based on two scenarios whether or not it was a flat spin type of arrangement or whether it was a gliding path into the water.

So as you refine the date, you refine the area, and you can see that that area is closer than they originally thought because they thought it was potential that it had drifted off but now the information that they have based on the debris they found and the way that it's broken up, they are saying that they believe that it's broken up closer and that it would have indicated a shorter stall. So there's so many thousands of pieces of information. It's just this network of riddles that need answers.

BROWN: And it could just take months, even years before we know the full picture if we ever find that out.

SOUCIE: Very much so.

BROWN: Karen, you talk about the fact that this promising news that it looks like the weather will be calming down but what had been the obstacles for search crews when you're dealing with visibility, with waves, and so forth there, the conditions on the sea?

MAGINNIS: Well, just from last weekend when we were continually watching the satellite imagery, we saw these huge, monster cells of thunderstorms. This were just kind of racing across the Java Sea. This is very typical for this time of year and that we might get a break. It's so significant but over the last several days, Chad Myers and myself and a number of other meteorologist here in the CNN and CNN International Weather Center have been looking at this.

And it has been abysmal. The wave heights have been running around 13 feet, which is staggering.

BROWN: Wow.

MAGINNIS: You don't get any visibility. The depth of the Java Sea is roughly -- in this area is roughly around 100 feet deep. So you get a surface wind that's 25 miles an hour, you get poor visibility and you've got almost the perfect storm for the incapability to do a significant search.

BROWN: Wow. Well, you wonder how they were -- how the search has been so productive thus far, as some have said, given the weather conditions. So far they have found 21 bodies in the past -- over the past 24 hours. Go ahead.

MAGINNIS: Well, and that is due to what your guest was also saying, is that you get currents here in addition to the water and you will see not just drift but there's significant moving -- movement that takes place here. So any debris that is floating is going to travel a -- fairly significant distance but perhaps it will get a large push into the fuselage in water that's 100 feet deep. Now that sounds significant but it's not like looking where we were looking for the Malaysia flight in thousands of feet of water.

BROWN: All right. Thank you so much, Karen Maginnis, David Soucie. We appreciate it.

And some of the hour's other top stories we are following. Take a look. These are flags flying today in New York City at half-staff as tribute to former New York Governor Mario Cuomo who died yesterday. Flags from the city were already lowered to honor two murdered New York police officers and will now remain at half staff through the end of the month.

Republicans and Democrats are all remembering the former governor as a man they admired and respected, even those who battled him in the political arena. Mario Cuomo's family says that he died of natural causes due to heart failure. He was 82 years old.

And U.S. Senator Harry Reid is recovering from an accident at his home in Nevada. A statement from the soon-to-be Senate minority leader's office says Reid suffered broken ribs and bones in his face when a piece of exercise equipment broke causing him to fall. Senator Reid was treated at a hospital and they expect him to be back in Washington this weekend.

A federal judge has cleared the way for same-sex weddings in Florida starting Tuesday. That's more than four months after the same judge ruled the state's ban on same-sex marriage was unconstitutional. A follow-up ruling sought to clear up confusion among county clerks, some of whom still felt bound by the state constitution. State officials say they won't interfere.

And this man right here is locked up near Tampa, Florida, today, accused of an unthinkable crime. Police say Christian Gomez confessed to killing his mother and leaving her head in a garbage can. It happened here on New Year's Eve at this home in Florida. The sheriff's office says Gomez and his mother were arguing about household chores before her violent death. Hmm. Disturbing.

A snowstorm in New Hampshire caused massive pile-up involving dozens of cars on Interstate 93 this morning. And drivers describe the conditions as blizzard-like. Police say some minor injuries have been reported but nothing life threatening.

And back now to AirAsia Flight 8501, finding the wreckage has been an international effort. Coming up, how the U.S. is involved in the search and the grisly discovery one American ship made, right after this break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: One hundred and sixty-two people were on that AirAsia plane when it left Indonesia and then disappeared. Thirty bodies have now been pulled from the water not far from where searchers believe the wreckage lies. Some of those bodies were recovered by the crew of the American Navy ship USS Sampson. Also focused on that part of the job is sea ships, planes, and helicopters from Malaysia, Singapore, Australia.

And it's already crowded and complicated body of water full of international shipping. Look at this. It's a piece of the plane's fuselage. This picture was posted by the government of Singapore. We're told this was found early today and looks like a window panel.

CNN's Joe Johns is with me from Washington. Also, Peter Goelz, once again.

Great to have you both on with us.

Peter, I'm going to start with you. You are the crash expert here. I want to get your impression on this piece of debris that we just saw. But first, Joe, let's actually go to you because you've been involved looking at the search.

JOE JOHNS, CNN SENIOR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT: That's right.

BROWN: We saw this U.S. Navy ship that is on site and working. Anymore American ships, planes or people on the way to Indonesia?

JOHNS: Right. Well, we knew the USS Sampson had been deployed. Received word that this ship recovered two bodies on Thursday. Now also, the USS Ft. Worth has set sail from Singapore. Not clear what its role is supposed to be but here's what we know about its capabilities. The U.S. combat ship went out on a 16-month deployment starting at the end of December.

The Ft. Worth is one of the Navy's newest vessels, essentially on its first mission. It has side scan sonar which should be useful. That side scan sonar takes an image of the ocean floor. Certainly useful in a situation like this.

The U.S. has also said it would send aircraft to assist, including a P-8 Poseidon aircraft with the capability of doing long-range maritime reconnaissance. Don't know exactly what role that plane is going to play. But in essence, it could be a controller of a fleet of drones as they look at a specific area of the ocean. It's a war fighter. But in this mission at least, it's possible that that plane's underwater detection capabilities will be called into play including dropping sonar buoys to try to locate debris -- Pamela.

BROWN: All right, Peter, now to you again. Let's talk about that piece of debris that we just saw a picture of and hopefully we can put it back up. Tell us, what do you see. Would something like this that we see,

which looks like a window panel, hold any clues as to what happened to this plane?

PETER GOELZ, FORMER NTSB MANAGING DIRECTOR: Well, it could hold some clues but not a lot. First, you would need to identify it as coming from the accident plane. Hopefully there's a serial number and its dimensions match up to the Airbus A-320. But what you'd look at is whether it showed compression damage, whether there was any soot on it. There doesn't appear to be. But it'd be fairly limited what you could ascertain from this equipment -- from this picture.

BROWN: So when you were with the NTSB, how often did you coordinate with other countries? I can imagine it can be challenging at times?

GOELZ: It can be. But it's governed by a treaty under the supervision of the International Civil Aviation Organization in Montreal and the treaty is called Annex 13 and it lays out the procedures and the guidelines for precisely these kinds of events. And it gives a role, Indonesia clearly is where the plane crash took place. They take the lead. The French is the country where the plane is manufactured. They send an accredited representative.

The U.S., where the engines were manufactured, they send an accredited representative and their roles are clearly well-defined. And then, in addition, the Indonesians can ask for other help. From Singaporeans, from the Australians. But the Indonesians play the key coordinating role and it's governed by treaty.

BROWN: So, Joe, I'm curious then. How does it work when it comes to, you know, U.S. involvement? Does the U.S. go to them and say, these are our capabilities, here's how we can help? Do we wait for them to come to us? How does it work in this case?

JOHNS: Right. Well, the U.S. offers up certain assets that they can lend assistance in the search and it's essentially up to the host country, the country that's doing all this to sort of invite the United States in and to take advantage of that assistance. So we're at the stage where we're waiting for Indonesia, for example, to tell us what they want to do with the asset of the USS Ft. Worth. It's pretty much up to Indonesia to call the shots here.

BROWN: OK. That sums it up. Joe Johns, Peter Goelz, thank you very much.

And one of the first bodies recovered was a flight attendant on Flight 8501. Her family says knew the risks that came of flying but she loved it anyway.

CNN was with her family when they learned that she was identified. That emotional story up next. You're going to want to grab your tissues.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: One hundred and sixty-two, 162 people on that doomed AirAsia flight and now 162 caskets, 162 funerals, 162 people who no longer have a future. Families left behind, forced to say good-bye to someone early.

CNN's David Molko has the story of one family's loss.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

GARY TUCHMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): They are people who have something in common, they belong to the same Protestant denomination. But as they come into a church sanctuary used by the police in Surabaya, Indonesia, they arrive with something else in common. They are all people who lost loved ones aboard AirAsia Flight 8501.

The heartbroken people here are members of the Charismatic Mawar Sharon Church with about 4500 members across Indonesia. Sadly, many of them had packed the AirAsia flight to celebrate the New Year in Singapore.

Lianggono Tejo Bunarto is a church pastor.

(On camera): Forty-six people from this church were on the plane.

LIANGGONO TEJO BUNARTO, PASTOR, CHARISMATIC MAWAR SHARON CHURCH: Yes.

TUCHMAN: That's almost one-third of the total people on the plane.

BUNARTO: That's right. We're putting trust in God's hand.

TUCHMAN (voice-over): The 46 members of the church were not all traveling together. It was just a coincidence so many of them ended up on this flight.

BUNARTO: Some things that happen in our lives, sometimes we just don't understand what cause it. Really in time. And in that way, we just put our trust, everything, completely in him. Because it's going to bring everything is the best for our life.

TUCHMAN (on camera): None of the bodies of the 46 members of the church have been recovered yet. The pastor telling me that until they are accounted for, they are in a place between life and death.

(Voice-over): Church members preferred not to talk on camera. But sometimes you don't need to hear words because when you look at their faces, you understand how they feel.

Gary Tuchman, CNN, Surabaya, Indonesia.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: And that was obviously our Gary Tuchman, not David Molko. Hoping to get you that story but CNN is gathering resources on ways to help the victims. For more on the emotional impact of a tragedy like this and how to cope, check out CNN.com/impact.

We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: Well, we know one of the bodies recovered so far out of the 30 bodies was a flight attendant who was on that doomed flight.

Here's more from David Molko.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

DAVID MOLKO, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Step by step toward their final resting place, each bearing a number, each number a soul. Casket four no longer nameless but identified as the first crew member of Flight 8501 still wearing her uniform. Her name Khairunisa Haidar Fauzi, or Nisa as she's affectionately known by her family, including her father Haidar and mother Rohana.

H. FAUZI (Through Translator): Nisa is an obedient daughter. She's always tidy. She loves to learn. Lots of her friends love her.

R. FAUZI (Through Translator): Just like her dad.

MOLKO: In the family hotel room, Nisa's parents smile and even offer a laugh as they share their memories.

(On camera): She cared about her family very much.

R. FAUZI: Yes.

MOLKO (voice-over): Pictures from their daughter's Instagram account show a poised young woman with a giving heart, her mother says, and an adventurous spirit that took her hundreds of miles away from the family home in Sumatra.

R. FAUZI (Through Translator): It's a dream. It's fun. She's never complained. She already knew the risks.

H. FAUZI (Through Translator): She knew the risk but she loved this. It was her dream. She loved traveling.

MOLKO: Their reflections and our interview suddenly cut short by a phone call, the call no parent ever wants to get. Leaning on Nisa's two older brothers and cousins, their smiles vanished, replaced by a sense of urgency and finality.

A few hours later, a solemn transfer of remains. Her parents say they've already made preparations for their daughter's burial as she begins her final journey home.

R. FAUZI (Through Translator): Goodbye. Goodbye, Nisa.

MOLKO: David Molko, CNN, Surabaya, Indonesia.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Well, the CEO of AirAsia Tony Fernandes tweeted about that flight attendant today and he said, go look here, "I'm arriving in Surabaya to take Nisa home. I cannot describe how I feel. There are no words."

Just unbelievable pain for that family and all the other 162 families just in this agonizing wait to learn about their loved ones.

Thank you so much for watching. Brianna Keilar is in for Wolf and that starts right now.