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Significant Developments In AirAsia Plane Disaster; Fellow Officers Pay Respects For Fallen Cop President Obama Signs Executive Order On Sanctions Against North Korea; War Against ISIS Takes Its Toll On Iraqi Citizens
Aired January 03, 2015 - 16:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
KAREN MAGINNIS, CNN METEOROLOGIST: Now it looks like those are going to be a little bit more calm. So, this is good news for the search. It's good news both for the vessels on the sea and in the air. Back to you.
POPPY HARLOW, CNN HOST: You're in the CNN NEWSROOM I'm Poppy Harlow joining you live from New York, 4:00 eastern.
And we are following significant developments in the AirAsia plane disaster, the most substantially four objects believed to be from the missing jet liner found hours ago in the java sea. They were discovered within close proximity to one another after searchers spotted an oil slick on Friday. And we're being told one of those objects is 59 feet long.
Also, two more bodies of those 30 bodies that have been recovered so far had been identified. That brings the total identified up to six. We know one was a 44-year-old woman, the other a 23-year-old man.
But search crews were dealt another setback today. The hunt for more bodies and more debris called off for the day due to deteriorating weather. My panel of guests and experts will join us in just a moment to talk about all of it.
But, first, Stephanie Elam explains how those recovered pieces of wreckage could be critical in telling us what happened to this airliner.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
STEPHANIE ELAM, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): To find out what brought down a plane --
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You are going to bite this at a small bite at a time.
ELAM: Investigators look to the wreckage and not just the black boxes for clues.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: 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 the picture will be, the better the picture, the better idea I can get about what happened. ELAM: But when a plane crashes in to the water like AirAsia flight
8501, that task is a more difficult endeavor.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: 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. And if we have other accidents that happen in shallow water, we got most of the pieces back. But deep water we have a very hard time doing that.
ELAM: Take for example Malaysia air flight 370. The missing 777 jet is believed to be 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: If it broke up that debris field on the bottom of the seafloor 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 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 much higher speed than this aircraft here. So therefore the energy would be greater.
ELAM: 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)
HARLOW: All right, joining me now to talk about these developments CNN aviation analyst Les Abend, also Jeff Wise, the pilot and author of the new book, "Extreme Fear."
Les, let me go to you. The fact these four objects were found is certainly progress. Significant you've got one 59 feet long. What does it tell us?
LES ABEND, CNN AVIATION ANALYST: Well, let's hope that these are the objections. Remember, we had a little miscommunication earlier in the week.
HARLOW: Right. Where they thought they had found it with sonar and the company said not yet, exactly.
ABEND: Right. Until we get eyes on it be it a camera or human eyes. I don't want to jump the gun on it. But, you know, an object that size could be a wing, a portion of the fuselage.
HARLOW: That makes sense for an A-320?
ABEND: It does. It does. It makes absolute sense, you know. It might be, you know, a larger portion of it, you know, the fact that we initially recovered two or three victims right off the bat that seemed to be in proximity to the emergency exit slide and there seems to be a piece today. I noticed in the picture that had a CO2 bottle that would have been more than likely part of the system that inflated that slide so, yes.
HARLOW: Jeff, as this search continues one thing that has just come up is that Indonesia's transport ministry said today, look, this airline was in an area it was not supposed to be flying that route Surabaya to Singapore on Sunday. they were supposed to fly about four different days a week but not on Sundays. So now they have banned them from flying that route for the time being. What significance do you give this?
JEFF WISE, CNN AVIATION ANALYST: I don't place any significance to it in terms of safety.
HARLOW: OK.
WISE: They weren't saying that you weren't supposed to be flying because you would fail the safety inspection or some such. It seems to be the paperwork wasn't in order. There were some , you know, it's like getting a building permit.
HARLOW: But what about traffic? We've talked a lot about traffic in this corridor. Could it be that certain air lines are only allowed to fly certain routes on certain days because of heavy traffic?
WISE: I don't think the traffic is that heavy.
HARLOW: OK.
WISE: This is not like, you know, traffic coming into JFK on Monday morning or something. It's a, you know, it is fairly -- very spread- out archipelago. Indonesia stretches the same distance as Los Angeles to New York. It is a huge country.
ABEND: I think it was more of a marketing situation than anything else.
WISE: OK.
HARLOW: Do we know that? I've had some people tweeting that to me and our reporting certainly doesn't have that yet that it was the marketing thing. I know there have been some reports out there.
ABEND: "The Wall Street Journal" indicated that it was, you know, that it's a slot restricted airport. So it may have a marketing aspect, too.
HARLOW: In terms of when competitors can fly in there and when they can fly in there.
ABEND: Exactly.
HARLOW: OK, good to know.
Les, let me ask you about this. This is the question that we asked and talked so much about after MH-370 disappeared and we're talking about it again. Why are these planes not equipped with realtime data transmission tools, transponders, et cetera?
ABEND: Well actually, they are. It's just a matter of whether those devices are being utilized to transmit data back to some base whether it be the company, air traffic control.
HARLOW: They aren't all equipped with the realtime data relay systems where every second you'd be getting them.
ABEND: Correct, they're not. All airplanes of this magnitude have a transponder. The ADSP equipment, the Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast, which will be part of our system here in the United States which uses satellite, I believe this airplane had it. Whether it utilized it or not, I don't have knowledge.
WISE: It did.
ABEND: It did, OK. So that is available. In other words, it's a matter of equipping it to make the transmissions.
HARLOW: Should it be mandated, Jeff?
WISE: Well, you have to ask yourself, well, in what situation would it be -- provide information that we wouldn't otherwise have. In this case we have all the information that air traffic controllers normally have from the plane. The mode as transponder as Les has been talking about.
And the question that's been very interesting for me is, why did we lose contact with the plane? Was it some kind of electronical failure at altitude or what? And with some analysis some people online have done it turns out that the reason we lost contact was simply because the plane got too low. I should point out that these systems require line of sight between the radar installation and the plane. And if you get too low, you just simply go below the curvature of the earth and that seems to be what happened here. You get below, the plane was about 200 miles away from the radar facility and you have to be 20,000 feet or higher to be visible by radar.
HARLOW: When the -- Les, when the black boxes, the data recorder, et cetera, are found and the cockpit voice recorder are found. It could take years, it could happen this week. But when it happens, what is the single most critical information we can glean from that?
ABEND: Well, I would start with altitude. What the variance was between the time that altitude was requested and then we lost contact with them when that request was denied. Or they were given that clearance to 34,000 feet. Altitude would certainly tell a lot. There's thousands of parameters as we know in that digital flight data recorder that's going to give acceleration, flight control movement, so on and so forth.
HARLOW: After air France 447, it took two years. Let's hope that they are able to recover it sooner. I know they are looking very hard.
Thank you guys. Les, Jeff, good to have you in the program. Appreciate it.
We've been, of course, been on social media all week asking for your questions. Keep sending us your questions for our experts and tweet us at #8501QS. We will get your questions later this evening.
Also, the story we are following very close. New York City police officers packed a funeral home today in Brooklyn for the wake of one of their own. It was the wake for detective Wenjian Liu, one of those two NYPD officers shot dead in broad daylight on December 20th. His funeral and burial both tomorrow.
Our Sarah Ganim is following this very closely. She is live for us outside the funeral home.
I know the mayor was there today, Mayor Bill de Blasio. Sarah. what was the sense? What was it like there today?
SARAH GANIM, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Very solemn today here, Poppy. Just lines and lines, dozens, probably hundreds, maybe thousands of officers coming in and walking through to pay their respects at the wake of Officer Wenjian Liu.
I talked to one officer who didn't want to talk to us with his name but he said that he walked in. It was a very solemn setting. A place of -- a private place for the family to be there to pay their respects, but also a steady stream, a line of officers that were walking by quite fast moving through because there's just so many that would like to come through and pay their respects before the end of the evening.
Mayor Bill de Blasio you mentioned was here as was the police Commissioner Bill Bratton. De Blasio coming in very -- very little fanfare. Walked in. Was greeted with a salute by a handful of police officers who were at the door. He went through. He came back out a couple of minutes later.
There was nothing like we saw last week with the funeral of Officer Rafael Ramos. Officer Liu's partner who was also shot and killed. Nothing disrespectful towards the mayor from any of the NYPD. We did not see that here today. And we really do not expect that tomorrow at the funeral. Because of
a memo that was sent out by the police commissioner asking that officers do not use this as an opportunity to air their grievances. He actually said a hero's funeral is not a place for grievances. It's a place for grieving. He said that -- he asked that they not turn their backs as the mayor speaks tomorrow at the funeral as they did last week for that reason. And I want to read to you a little bit of that memo.
He said this. He said it was not all of the officers, and it was not disrespect directed at Detective Ramos. But all officers were painted by it, and it stole the valor, honor, and attention that rightfully belonged to the memory of Detective Rafael Ramos' life and sacrifice. That was not the intent, I know, but it was the result.
Now, Poppy, he also said in that memo that no one would be disciplined for this. He did not feel it was the right time. And a little bit later here today outside the funeral home the president of one of the -- of the police unions that he agrees with that memo -- Poppy.
HARLOW: All right, Sara Ganim live for us in Brooklyn outside of the wake for Officer Wenjian Liu.
Sarah, thank you for that.
Coming up next, the president promised retaliation after hackers hit Sony. Now we're getting an idea of what he has in store for North Korea. They are, of course, accused of perpetrating that hack attack. We'll talk about that next.
Also the president had time to unwind with his family on holiday in Hawaii. But vacation is over. It is back to the battle of the beltway in D.C. How's the new year looking? That's next.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
HARLOW: President Obama heading back to Washington today after two- weeks vacation in Hawaii with his family. As the new year begins we are told he'll be pushing an economic agenda.
Let's go straight to Jim Acosta. He is traveling with the president and joins us live from Hawaii.
Jim, the president will be starting off with a new Congress, a majority Republican Congress. You spoke to the White House about the president's plans. What did he say?
JIM ACOSTA, CNN SENIOR WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: That's right. Well, the White House doesn't want this year to be a year of reaction, you know, the way that last year was a year of action. The president using his pen. They don't want the president spending all of his time of 2015 simply reacting and responding to a GOP-controlled Congress. And so, the president next week as he returns from Hawaii, Poppy, he's going to be hitting the ground running. He's got three different events across the country. He is going to be going to Detroit first to talk about jobs in the automotive industry recovery there then heading off to Phoenix to talk about the housing sector and then finally wrapping up this three-day tour in Tennessee where he'll be talking about college affordability. All of this to preview his upcoming state of the union speech.
But as you mentioned, I had a chance to talk with the principle deputy White House press secretary Eric Schultz earlier today about the fact that the White House clearly anticipates the president will be using that veto pen to block measures that will be passed from this Republican house and Senate in the coming weeks and here's what Schultz had to say.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
ERIC SCHULTZ, DEPUTY WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: The president has been clear that there's some bright lines that he doesn't want to see rolled back. That includes the affordable care act, that includes immigration, that includes the progress we've made on climate. So the president has zero interest in re-litigating the old ideological battles of the past. I mean, what he's focused on is taking bold decisive action to help build on the middle-class progress we've seen over the past few years.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ACOSTA: Now, one key battle to watch in the coming weeks, Poppy, is the keystone people line. That has been hotly contested issue in Washington as you know. But Republicans in Congress are vowing to make it one of the first priorities in passing legislation to fast track the project. And the president has said in the last couple weeks he's been sort of cool to it. Calling it a Canadian oil project. Really downplaying the economic potential for the U.S. So that is an indication there that the president may use his veto pen to block that legislation.
But the White House and Eric Schultz says there are plenty of areas where both Republicans and the president agree on trade and on tax reform. The question is whether or not Democrats allow the president to see that kind of legislation come to his desk.
HARLOW: Right.
ACOSTA: So it is going to be very interesting to watch here in the coming weeks, Poppy.
HARLOW: Well, and of course, the president signing an executive order on those sanctions on North Korea on Friday making big headlines there even while he's on vacation. The U.S., the White House, indicating, Jim, that this is really just step one in what could be a very large scale response to the Sony hack.
ACOSTA: That's right. You saw that statement yesterday from the White House press secretary Josh Earnest that this was the first aspect of the U.S. response, sort of an indication that the U.S. is not taking a responsibility for that vast Internet outage in North Korea. The president made the initial comments at the end of December. But what the Obama administration is saying that in the coming weeks
the U.S. is going to be working other countries around the world potentially China to start turning up the heat on North Korea. There are other countries, obviously, who don't want to see the North Koreans hack some of their big companies in the way that Sony was allegedly hacked by the North Koreans.
And, Poppy, you know, just listening to senior administration officials talk about this, it sounds like they're talking about a similar approach that was taken with Russia. You know, the United States, President Obama, he lined up those G-7 countries to apply pressure on Moscow after those actions in Ukraine and they don't say that, yes, all of those sanctions had the effect of reversing Moscow's behavior. That didn't occur. It certainly did -- did not make things comfortable in Moscow with respect to their economy. But they do feel like a similar approach might pay dividends with North Korea so that is also something to watch in 2015, Poppy.
HARLOW: We'll be watching very closely. Jim Acosta, thank you for that. We appreciate it.
Let's talk more about the new U.S. sanctions against North Korea. Gordon Chang is the author of "Nuclear Showdown, North Korea takes on the world." He joins us now.
Thank you for being with us, sir. Let me get straight to it, looking at the sanctions what we know so far from the treasury department on these economic sanctions, sometimes they have a lot of bite and sometimes they don't. Do you think these will have any effect?
GORDON CHANG, AUTHOR, NUCLEAR SHUTDOWN: Well, these will have some effect but actually very little. The sanctions that would have effect would be to cut North Korea off from the global financial system like the ones that were put in place in 2005 by the Bush administration. Those had a direct and immediate impact. We know that because when Pyongyang wanted to move money around the world, it had to actually stuff cash into the suitcases of diplomats who then got onto planes.
HARLOW: Right.
CHANG: This was not like that at all.
HARLOW: So Gordon, you have said the most important target here that the treasury department has told us about in these sanctions is the general reconnaissance bureau. What is that? And why does it matter so much?
CHANG: Well, the general reconnaissance bureau is a collection of agencies which include unit 121 and lab 110 which are the two cyber- hacking units and it's very important because they also have got some other special operations in that general reconnaissance bureau. It's one of two major organizations that conduct cyber-hacking. And so there's another one which has more of a military flavor to it. But most people suspect it was the reconnaissance general bureau that was responsible for the Sony hack. HARLOW: But here's what stands out to me, glaringly, China is not
anywhere included in these sanctions. And it is very well known, well documented that North Korea is incredibly reliant on China for its internet connectivity, you know, there have even been stories about North Koreans crossing the border working at certain hotels in China to do the large-scale hacks. So, is it not effective until you go right after the enabler?
CHANG: I couldn't agree with you more. Because more than half of North Korea's cyber warriors are actually based in the Peoples Republic of China. We know that Chinese IP addresses were used because of the hacks which means because of the great fire wall which is the most comprehensive and sophisticated set of internet controls, the Chinese saw these attacks leaving their soil going into Sony. And also, more importantly, more than 100 terabytes of data coming out of Sony back into the Peoples Republic of China.
So clearly, the Chinese authorities knew what was going on and actually they've been hosting North Korean cyber warriors for many years and they have been actually training them as well along with the Russians.
HARLOW: All right. Well, we know this is just step one from the White House. We'll see what's ahead. Appreciate the expertise. Gordon Chang, good to have you on the program.
CHANG: Thank you and happy new year.
HARLOW: You as well.
All right. Well, it's been a horrific year for many Iraqi civilians. The war against ISIS has taken a toll on many of them. Is there any reason to think that 2015 will be better? We will discuss next.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
HARLOW: Last month in Iraq just in December alone more than 1,100 civilians died in violent attacks. That is according to the United Nations. In fact, all of 2014 was particularly deadly there. 12,200 non-combatants died in Iraq last year almost double the number of people were injured. Compare that to six years ago, 2008, the height of the war in Iraq, the casualty figures were much lower for civilians. More than 6,000 civilians were killed.
Bob Baer joins me again, our security and intelligence analyst and also he's a former CIA operative. Also joining us from Amman Jordan, Jomana Karadsheh.
Thank you both for being here.
Bob, looking at those numbers, what's the main reason for this spike?
ROBERT BAER, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY ANALYST: Well, I think we're seeing a civil war in Iraq between the Shia and the Sunni and it's inevitable there be civilian casualties as well as military. And, of course, you have ISIS as a lot to blame for it. It is such a violent movement. And there's been a reaction from the government in Baghdad using militias going into Anbar province which is Sunni. It seems to be descending, you know, into a worse and worse situation.
HARLOW: Jomana, you have spent countless days, weeks, months, years on the ground reporting on this throughout. A, how reliable do you think these figures are? Because I know they change from agency to agency. And also, how much of this do you attribute to the fight against ISIS?
JOMANA KARADSHEH, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, Poppy, if you look at these figures, these are coming from the United Nations, and they do put the caveat on these figures of 12 plus thousand civilians killed last year, saying this is the absolute minimum that the figures could be higher. If you look at the Iraq body count, this is an organization of project in the United Kingdom that has been keeping a tally of civilian casualties in Iraq since 2003. They say in 2014, more than 17,000 civilians were killed and the figures could be higher.
Now, if we look at the statistics, put out by the United Nations, put out by the Iraq body count and others, you can see a sharp increase in civilian casualties after June, starting in June, so the second half of 2014. And this is when we saw, as Bob mentioned, that ISIS expansion in operations had into other parts of the country moving into Mosul and also military operations by the government in Baghdad.
And as always, Poppy, covering the Iraq conflict for years, as we have seen, it is the civilians who bear the brunt of the violence and sectarian violence in that country.
HARLOW: So Bob, any reason to be hopeful at all that those numbers could start to go down this year?
BAER: I asked that same question, Poppy, to the people in Anbar province, the Sunni area, people in Mosul, and they keep coming back with even more pessimistic answers. No, it's going to get worse this year. ISIS is not going to collapse anytime soon. And it will take an enormous amount of force for Baghdad to re-exert control over the Sunni areas, if they can at all.
So, to answer your question, Poppy, no. I think it's probably going to get worse this year.
HARLOW: Right. And I want both of you to address this.
Let me start with you, Jomana. Take a look at this picture. I'm going to pull up, two young girls, young women, in their 20s, Italians missing believed to be captured by extremists in Syria. You're looking at them there. Video messages have been sent from them back to their families. We know the Italians have been negotiating for their release. Do we have any sense of what group is holding them?
KARADSHEH: Well, Poppy, it's not yet clear who is holding these two Italian aid workers believed to have been kidnapped near Aleppo back in July. And this video that you're referencing was released on December 31st with that plea to their government and negotiators to help return them back home. There have been some postings online saying that it is Jabhat al-Nusra that is also al-Nusra front, the Al Qaeda affiliate in Syria that maybe holding them. But there's been no official confirmation of this. We have seen nothing from by Jabhat al-Nusra to confirm that they are holding these two young aid workers.
And of course now, there is concern that they could be held by other extremist groups, concerns that they could end up in the hands of other groups. Now, if they are indeed, Poppy, in the hands of this group, we've seen over the past year other foreign hostages who have been released by al-Nusra front.
HARLOW: OK.
We know, Bob, that the Italians have actually been successful in negotiating the release for ransom payments of their hostages being held in this region before.
BAER: Exactly. You know, these hostages they take a lot of them for simply to trade them for money or whatever they're after. There's a good chance the Italian government has back channels to whichever group has taken them and is probably prepared, like the French did, to pay money to one of these groups. They simply don't care if they are terrorist group or not. And I think there is a good chance, and especially since they have executed no women so far, that these two women will get out very soon.
HARLOW: We hope that they do. We hope that they do certainly.
Jomana and Bob, thank you. Appreciate it.
All right, coming up next, we're going to talk about one theory, controversial, about AirAsia 8501. Could it have landed on the Java Sea and then possibly sunk?
Remember the miracle on the Hudson right here in New York City, a plane made that incredible landing on the Hudson River. Could this plane have done the same in the Java Sea given the weather conditions and all we know about it? We'll talk about that, ahead.
But, first, the missing AirAsia plane has made a lot of people a little nervous about flying despite what the statistics do show us. Maybe every time a plane hit an air pocket, your heart skips a beat. Mine certainly does sometimes. The FAA says turbulence is the cause of most weather-related incidents.
Here's more on what causes turbulence.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: People were screaming.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: All of a sudden, there was just a like a drop.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There's like getting in a car crash.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Very, very scary. (MUSIC)
(END VIDEO CLIP)
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
HARLOW: Well, a number of theories are being discussed about what happened to AirAsia Flight 8501. One is the possibility that the captain did attempt an emergency landing on water or what's known as a ditch landing. The Airbus A320, that airplane, is equipped with a ditch switch. So, a pilot is attempting to land on water, hitting the switch closes the valves and the ports below the airplane's float line, sealing out any water.
Here to provide some insight and talk about the possibility of this, Les Abend, and also Jeff Wise.
Let me start with you, Les.
As one expert put it this basically turns the ship into a -- the ability to float, a boat, if you will, for a little while. You're a commercial airline pilot. Yes, it happened here on the Hudson River, the miracle on the Hudson. Is it possible in the Java Sea with those weather conditions?
LES ABEND, CNN AVIATION ANALYST: Of course, it's possible but not likely with the success that Captain Sullenberger had. The ditch switch what it really does primarily is it closes the outflow valves which are responsible for pressurization, they open and close according to pressure. And actually, Captain Sullenberger did not and Jeff Skiles did not close that switch. They beat themselves up over that.
HARLOW: But they still managed it.
ABEND: But the airplane, you know, was in such a stable condition that it managed to float for a while.
But in the seas that were indicated at the time, I don't see that likely, Poppy.
HARLOW: Jeff, Les, let me -- Les, thank you.
Jeff, to you, let me ask you this -- an emergency exit door and an inflatable slide were among some of the first items of debris that have been found. Do you read anything into that? Do you take that as any indication that potentially passengers were trying to exit the aircraft if it did successfully ditch into the water?
JEFF WISE, CNN AVIATION ANALYST: It's tempting. It's tempting. But I think we should resist the temptation because it is just two data points. Yes, perhaps you can imagine a scenario when the plane ditched and then the door came open and it exceptionally got knock out by heavy seas or something.
But it could also have been separated at a decompression event at altitude and so, there's multiple reasons that you could get that same, you know, effect. So, I don't -- I think we should at this point --
HARLOW: Be wary.
WISE: Yes, yes.
HARLOW: Has a plane ever successfully ditched outside -- a commercial plane, outside of that U.S. Airways flight on the Hudson River? Like, in the ocean, for example?
ABEND: The one that I'm familiar with is a DC-6. This is a long, long time ago. That successfully ditched.
However, they were able to communicate that ditching to navy ships and other ships that were there. But they successfully ditched with I believe all surviving passengers.
HARLOW: Because one of the theories here that some people are talking about is that if it did that, then it could have floated for a while, but could have been overcome by a big wave given the weather situation there. Is it even responsible to be talking about this as a possibility?
ABEND: It seems a little implausible with the sea conditions and the weather that we're talking about. You know, I go with what Jeff is saying. We need to keep our minds open to the potential break-up in flight or a potential break-up on impact with the water.
HARLOW: As they are recovering those bodies, as they are recovering the debris, Jeff, what is your read on the most important -- obviously the most important thing is the black box, the flight data recorder, the cockpit voice data recorder. But outside of that, maybe, if they are able to find this 59-foot object that they say they have spotted if it's part of the plane. How -- what can that tell us? Can anything tell us anything definitive without the black boxes?
WISE: Well, I find it hard to imagine frankly that you'd have a 59- foot section of the airplane and not have all the other parts of the airplane in close proximity. If a wing comes off a plane -- and Les correct me if I'm wrong -- if a wing comes off a plane, that planes not going to go anywhere. It's going to come pretty much straight down. And you might find some separation, American Airlines 587 came apart over JFK in 2001 and some parts were a little bit over here, a little bit over here. But, you know, very much in close proximity.
And it's been over a day since we started to hearing about the large pieces of wreckage. I don't quite how you could know it's a big piece of plane and yet not have taken --
(CROSSTALK)
HARLOW: -- bad weather, that's even part of this plane. Because as we know it's been detected with sonar but it hasn't been retrieved yet.
WISE: What has been detected? What have they seen? Why do they think it's a plane but now --
HARLOW: Yes, it's a very good question. And we have to tread carefully given the wake of MH-370 and the fact that so many leads were, then, disproven and the families, it was heart-wrenching for them.
ABEND: But let me say that's part of the investigation process. You follow a lead and it goes nowhere and you start over again.
HARLOW: True.
ABEND: So, hopefully, this is a piece of the airplane.
HARLOW: All right. Les and Jeff, stick with us. We're going to talk with this a lot more this hour.
It has been online all week. We have been reading your questions. You've been tweeting us. Please send us your questions about this flight AirAsia 8501. We will answer them, #8501qs.
We'll get back to those in just a moment.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
HARLOW: New developments in the hunt for AirAsia Flight 8501.
Officials telling us here at CNN that AirAsia did not have a license to fly the Surabaya to Singapore route on that Sunday, the day that the flight departed.
We've been asking you to tweet us your questions all week. Many of you have a lot of questions about this. My expert panel here to tackle your questions.
Les, let me ask you the first one. Cloud tweeted us is flying the route on Sunday without authorization more a bureaucratic issue rather than a danger issue? Good question. Does it matter for safety?
ABEND: It is a good question. And the short answer is it is a bureaucratic. It is marketing. They had slot restrictions. It does nothing between air traffic control and their flight plan. In other words, they were cleared, authorized to fly that route and it's -- it's --
HARLOW: But, then, why would they ban right now the transport ministry ban Air Asia from flying that route for the foreseeable future?
ABEND: Well, banned it for AirAsia.
HARLOW: Yes.
ABEND: Yes. But it doesn't mean that route is not available for other aircraft.
HARLOW: No. But for AirAsia. ABEND: Well, you know, I guess they discovered this discrepancy and
this discrepancy probably was occurring for a little while the way it sounds. They weren't flying on the days that they had been authorized to fly, but I really don't see it. I don't see it. It's a peripheral I think to the investigation.
HARLOW: OK. So, Jeff, Samie tweeted us, will the seating assignments of the victims' bodies that were found give us any idea about where the breach was on the fuselage?
WISE: Yes, absolutely. I mean, I think that would be a reasonable. I mean, again, we don't want to jump to conclusions but you might expect if the hull fractures at a certain point, that people who are sitting close to that event would more likely wind up, you know, free. Like in the case of air France 447, some bodies floated free. Some remained fastened in the seat belts in the structurally complete part of the plane on the seabed. That would be a clue.
But, again, once you -- if these are big sections of the plane on the seabed and they pulled them out, then you're going to get some real answers.
HARLOW: Here's an interesting question that Ivan tweeted us. Do we have the technology that will transmit the information wirelessly and avoid a search for the black box?
Les, that seems plausible.
ABEND: It's plausible. But it doesn't exist at this point for the purpose that we're talking about as far as finding the black box. I mean, we've discussed military airplanes have a deployment system where they -- where the ELT, the emergency locator transmitter, physically comes out of the airplane and they can find it floating. But at this point, commercial aircraft don't have that system.
HARLOW: And, Jeff, this question comes from Chaz, tweeted us, "is it possible the plane made a safe landing on the sea but was taken down by a wave?"
Emergency door was opened, right? They are talking about the emergency door was found and the slide was found. We were talking about it in the last segment. Possible?
WISE: Yes, it's possible. We were talking about it during the break. I mean, the idea that the plane ditches, Sullenberger-style miracle on the Hudson, there's some evidence that maybe not everybody accepts is fully valid at this point, but there's been some information leaked from air traffic control that suggests that if this is true that the plane climbed steeply, lost speed, and then subsequently very soon after went into a steep dive and that would suggest being out of control frankly.
HARLOW: And not able to ditch land.
WISE: You would have to -- for it to have ditched, you then have to have a scenario in which the plane is completely out of control and plummeting towards the surface of the ocean and then the pilots recover the plane and manage to get it into a very --
ABEND: In answer to the question, I mean, the fragments that are being found, you know, that window piece that we've seen, there was -- it looked to me like a pneumatic hose piece that was to me would indicate that a ditching --
WISE: Not wave damage.
ABEND: Not wave damage for sure.
HARLOW: All right. Gentlemen, thank you. Appreciate it answering those questions.
Keep sending us your questions, by the way, #8501qs.
And consider this: one big advantage for the search teams looking for the parts of the flight and recovering the bodies is that that area, that part of water, where they are looking, that is a big advantage. We're going to talk about more why the Java Sea itself could aid in this search.
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HARLOW: The primary obstacle to finding Flight 8501 is not the fact that it is likely at the bottom of the Java Sea. Monsoon rains and high ocean waves have certainly hampered search efforts. But once the storm dies down, finding the jet should be easier than other disaster searches, largely because of the depth of the water there.
CNN's Tom Foreman explains.
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TOM FOREMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: The search area has been narrowed down considerably to a box here about 45 miles by 45 miles, and the water here is considerably more shallow than some other searches in the past. That should make things easier.
Let's look at a comparison here. This is where they are searching right now, just 80 to 100 feet under the water. Compare this to the world's tallest building here. We put them upside down from the surface. That's the tallest building in Dubai. That's the Statue of Liberty. There's the Eiffel Tower.
Look at other searches in the past and what they found. The Lusitania in World War I was about three times as deep. And they were able to locate that. The space shuttle Challenger in the 1980s, parts of that were found at 1,200 feet. That took a lot of searching there.
But then you go down much, much deeper where there's no light at tall, the Titanic at 12,500 would be way down here. If you go beyond that, to the Air France crash over the Atlantic, they found wreckage on the surface there in five days but it took two years to locate the bulk of the wreckage way down here. And now, of course, when we talk about Malaysia Air, that plane
they've been looking for, they are looking down here around at 16,000 feet among canyons and mountains in complete darkness and very severe cold.
So, by comparison, much easier what they're trying to do right now, but because of the weather and the always-present uncertainty underwater -- easier doesn't even easy.
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HARLOW: Yes. That is true. Tom Foreman, thank you for that.
Back with me to talk about search for missing Flight 8501 CNN aviation analysts, Les Abend and also Jeff Wise.
Les, to you first, do you agree with what Tom said in terms of an easier path to hopefully finding this plane given the depth of the sea and, frankly, what we found so far?
ABEND: Certainly easier than what we've discovered with MH-370 and then Air France 447, that we compare Airbus A320.
But, you know, a lot of us felt that we'd have more pictures and more wreckage to see at this point in time, but it's been a very daunting task and I think it's primarily due to the weather, the sea state.
HARLOW: Yes. Jeff, I want you to respond to this. I want to listen to some sound from some of the officials there talking about what has been located with sonar. So, let's listen to this and get your reaction on the other side.
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BAMBANG SULISTYO, INDONESIAN SEARCH AND RESCUE AGENCY CHIEF: This is a picture. We are looking at three positions with a total of four objections spotted. Position number one, object number one. Position number two has object number two and number three. And position number three has object number four. Position number two containing two objects which are 300 meters apart from each other. Tonight, a ship arrived at this area with 12 divers.
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HARLOW: Those sonar images are not very clear at all. I mean, it's very hard to tell. Do you think it is jumping to conclusions to say these are most likely part of this aircraft, Jeff?
WISE: I have to say yes. That is my reaction. As we were talking about before the break, if a wing came off this plane, everything should be pretty closely together. And I didn't see anything that looked like a fuselage, a tube, cylindrical kind of thing. I didn't see anything that looked like landing gear, which is one of the things that really stuck out when they came back with the Air France 447, side scan sonar. Tail fin. Nothing that really that leaps out as part of a plane. And so, you would expect at least one of those things to be associated -- if it is a debris field, you would expect to see something like that.
HARLOW: Les, what's your take from that?
ABEND: It's promising but I'm still skeptical. You know, it just doesn't -- you know, as far as the Airbus A320, a lot of composite material in that tail. Why was it not found floating? I know we saw Air France 447 back in '01, American Airlines Flight 587 the same kind of situation. So, you would think with an airbus you might see the floating tail. It may still be attached to the fuselage and we don't see anything that seems to resemble that. It's hard to say.
HARLOW: What is going to be able to tell us definitively whether this plane broke up in the air or broke up when it hit the water? What part of the debris? How much debris has to be collected to tell us that, Les?
ABEND: It's all a matter of how it's fragmented. A lot of it, unfortunately, the gruesome task of doing autopsies, as a matter of fact, the flight attendant that was initially identified, they may already know at this point in time whether she has saltwater in her lungs and that may very well have said whether she was aspirating at the time that the impact occurred. So, there is -- there is that kind of information.
HARLOW: And, Jeff, so much talk around MH-370 when it disappeared was the race against time because of the pings, right? And the pinger locator and the batteries run out after I think 30 days. Is there a race against time here for that?
WISE: I wouldn't expect there to be. It's funny, we really haven't heard much about pingers.
HARLOW: At all, yes, right.
WISE: That's one of the pieces missing, yes, and I don't know why. It might have to do with the weather.
The forecast that I saw for the area is we've got two good days of weather ahead of us and so they should be telling us -- I mean, think the surface search is mostly for the recovery of remains I think for the loved ones.
As time goes by that debris becomes less useful from a forensic point of view trying to locate the underwater material which stays put near where it entered the water presumably. That's what we really want. That's the stuff -- that's where the black box is going to be. That's where the answers are going to be found.
And, yes, the way you find that is by listening it should be. Now, these black box pingers don't always work. They didn't work in the case of Air France 447.
HARLOW: And it took two years. WISE: And that's why it took two years.
HARLOW: Yes.
WISE: We can't assume that they work, but you should be listening. So, yes, 30 days is the lifespan of these -- the batteries, the power of the batteries.
HARLOW: Got about three weeks left.
WISE: It should be plenty of time. It can't be very far.
HARLOW: All right. Jeff, Les, good to have you on. Thank you, gentlemen, both very much.
Thank you for joining me. I'm Poppy Harlow in New York.
Coming up, a reported sighting of a tornado in Mississippi. A lot of treacherous weather we're dealing with across the country. Right now, we're going to talk about that.
Also, more in-depth coverage of this continuing search of Flight 8501. Another hour of CNN NEWSROOM starts after a break.
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