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Legal View with Ashleigh Banfield

New Images, Information on Germanwings Crash; Following the Flight Path. Aired 12-12:30p ET

Aired March 24, 2015 - 12:00   ET

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

[12:00:10] ANNOUNCER: This is CNN breaking news.

ASHLEIGH BANFIELD, CNN ANCHOR: Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Ashleigh Banfield. This is LEGAL VIEW.

And our breaking news is a flood of brand-new images and some new information as well from the crash of a German airliner in the Alps of southern France. The airline Germanwings now says its Airbus A320 was at cruising altitude a mere one minute before it started falling. Flight 9525 was en route from Barcelona to Dusseldorf with at least 150 people on board, including babies. Also including high school students.

For some unknown reason, it began a catastrophic eight-minute descent, which no one at this point is believed to have survived. Recovery teams and investigators are scrambling to reach the crash site at this time while devastated families are converging on several airports. At a news conference in Germany, the airline's CEO said both the captain and the plane were in seasoned condition.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

THOMAS WINKELMANN, CEO, GERMANWINGS (through translator): The captain of the airliner was a captain who had been working for Lufthansa and Germanwings for over 10 years. The model Airbus, he had actually flown with over 6,000 flight hours.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BANFIELD: Our live coverage begins this hour with CNN's Karl Penhaul, who's live in Barcelona, and Jim Bittermann, who is live in Paris.

Let me begin with you, Jim, if I can. Set the scene for me now. What is happening in France to locate that damage and get people to the scene?

JIM BITTERMANN, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, in fact, there are about 500 people around the scene. They're trying to get to the actual crash site. Now, just in the last hour or so, Ashleigh, we've heard from a French member of parliament who was with the interior minister, the French interior minister went down to the site and flew over the site in his helicopter. And the member of parliament described it this way. He said, there are no more pieces of the plane, only debris. There were remains of men, women and children on the site. It's a very high mountain grade, no trees, sad and dark. He said that there was absolutely no reason for him to believe that anyone survived this crash.

And we have seen some still photos from the site and from that helicopter pass which just show very, very small parts of the plane indeed. A couple of bits of fuselage and some bits that are scattered over a very wide area, perhaps something between four and five acres, it's estimated, in this very mountainous site.

Now, the Gendarmes, the investigating Gendarmes who are on their way and on the scene now, had to be brought in by helicopter. The helicopters couldn't land because of the steep vertical drops in the area. They had to just be dropped down on ropes. And there are investigators there now. And they are looking around to see if anyone could possibly have survived. But at this point, it's more a question of recovering the bodies, I think, Ashleigh.

BANFIELD: And a four-acre crash site, Jim, that is just a harrowing thought what those rescuers are going to come upon.

Can you also explain the weather situation, Jim? As I understand it, there could be more snow coming to this region, which would make it so difficult to find anything.

BITTERMANN: It's going to complicate things indeed. There's a front moving in there this evening. Even right now, I believe, it's started to rain down there and the rain could turn to snow, which will make finding the remains and also parts of the aircraft difficult. The -- one of the French officials here said that in fact it could be an effort that would take two to three days before they would recover the bodies from the site because of the distances and the drops involved on these sheer mountain cliffs that they're having to work with.

Ashleigh.

BANFIELD: Jim, stand by for a moment.

Karl, I want to bring you in, if I can, with any reporting that you might have been able to gather on the people who were on board this aircraft.

KARL PENHAUL, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Absolutely, Ashleigh. I'm in Terminal 2 of Barcelona's international airport. That is where this flight set out from. We're not hearing too much about specifically which nationalities are on board. We know several different nationalities are on board. Germanwings, the airline, says that at least 67 Germans. We have seen arriving at a crisis center set up for family members here, Spanish relatives arriving of presumably the Spanish passengers on board. We also understand there may be a number of Turkish passengers on board.

[12:05:08] But among the German passengers, we have also heard over the last few moments from the city hall in Halten (ph), that's about 50 miles north of the city of Dusseldorf, the destination of this plane, that 16 high school students had been booked on this flight, along with two teachers. We don't, of course, yet know whether those students made this flight, but they were certainly booked onto the flight according to city hall in their hometown. They had been in Spain on an exchange program, on a student exchange program. We're still waiting to hear whether in fact they did check in for that flight and were on board at the time.

But, of course, bear in mind that Barcelona is a very touristic city. It has a number of main attractions here for both longer-term and weekend tourists. And, also, Barcelona is the gateway to Spain's Costa Brava region, which, again, a major tourist destination, especially for northern Europeans heading to Spain for some winter sun.

So over the next hours we do expect to get from Germanwings a better breakdown of the passengers who were on board, their nationalities and also whether they were here for pleasure, for tourism, for business. And as I say, now word that up to 16 exchange students from Germany could have been on board that flight, too, as well, Ashleigh.

BANFIELD: All right, and, Jim, if I can bring you back into this conversation with regard to the mobilization of the rescue attempts, if the weather isn't good and if there is low-flying -- or low-hanging clouds, a low cloud cover, presumably a lot of this is going to be done by helicopter. Is that even safe? And can they get those helicopters in there with rescuers or even people who will do the recovery?

BITTERMANN: Well, they've got a landing zone prepared about 10 kilometers away from the crash site and there are now about a dozen helicopters parked there. Not all of them are operating simply because there's not a place for them to land. They've, you know, lowered by ropes some investigators who are trying to comb through the debris, what debris they can find.

If the still photo that we've seen is indicative, it's basically a scene of very steep ravines with bits of the airplane scattered throughout this area. And it's -- there's some of this -- the size of the pieces as -- you know, they're a foot by a foot. They're very small pieces indeed. There's nothing that would look like an airplane. There's one part in one still photo we saw, there's one section of the fuselage, which you can see maybe four windows on the fuselage, a section that would be maybe five feet by five feet or something like that. But nothing to indicate that that -- that there's -- that this was a plane.

And so the people that are going to be combing through this are going to have a very difficult time indeed. The black boxes, of course, have pingers on them so that they'll be able to track them down probably fairly easily. But even that could be difficult, especially if it starts snowing and this all gets covered with a couple of inches or a foot of snow or something like that. So it's going to be a very complicated effort indeed.

And you have to hike in here. This is not a place -- I understand from some of the locals that you have -- can drive to a point about 45 minutes away on foot from where the crash site is. So the rescuers and the searchers will have to walk in the last -- or else be dropped from helicopters as they were a few hours ago.

Ashleigh. BANFIELD: Right. And it's those helicopters that you have to be so concerned about when the weather is inclement like this.

BITTERMANN: Sure.

BANFIELD: I mean you have a low cloud ceiling, you've got to be extraordinarily careful of that.

Karl Penhaul, Jim Bittermann, thank you for that. Stand by, if you will.

I've a comment here from the White House. We are getting a comment from Bernadette Meehan, the National Security Council spokesperson. She is the assistant to the president for Homeland Security. And this is what she is advising. She says that -- that the president has been briefed on this crash, that U.S. officials have been in touch with their French, German and Spanish counterparts, the authorities. They have been offered the assistance the United States.

Also this spokesperson sending thoughts and prayers, saying that, "our thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families of the -- and the loved ones." They are also referring all inquiries to the French authorities for updates on the investigation. And here is maybe what the most critical aspect of this statement is. "There is no indication of a nexus to terrorism at this time." Let me repeat, "there is no indication of a nexus to terrorism at this time." This is from Bernadette Meehan, the National Security Council spokesperson with the comment from the United States White House.

There were at least 150 people on board that plane, two babies, possibly even a group of high school students. Instead of greeting them at the airport, their relatives are now gathering to grieve as authorities try to determine what went wrong.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[12:13:31] BANFIELD: Continuing with our breaking news right now, the coverage of the crash of the Germanwings Flight 9525, there are 210 French police that are working the crash scene of the Airbus 320. It left Barcelona, Spain, about 5:00 in the morning Eastern Time, by it crashed it French Alps about 45 minutes after take-off. That plane came down in the mountains in the southeast of France.

And the problem right now, it is extraordinarily remote. It is so hard to access. Here with me in New York is CNN aviation analyst Les Abend. He's a 777 captain and a contributing editor for "Flying" magazine. We're also joined by CNN aviation analyst Mary Schiavo, who is live in our London newsroom right now.

So, Les, let's talk first about the flight path. It was headed to Dusseldorf. Forty-five minutes into this flight, all of a sudden, no contact at all. And yet we're getting a notification from the White House that there's no suggestion at this point that there's a nexus to terrorism. We don't have any indication from the pilots though what happened. What's your best estimate from the smattering of information we have so far? LES ABEND, CNN AVIATION ANALYST: Well, I mean, it's conflicting

information. We talked about that just before we went on air. So we don't really know exactly what -- what -- there must have been some sort of communication. That area of the world is very sophisticated with radar, tracking of airplanes. So, something was happening.

What it says to me is, something was happening in that airplane that got their attention. They got some sort of warning, some sort of enunciation on their panels and then they were responding to it appropriately. We discussed -- it's been discussed now the drop in altitude. I wouldn't even call it a drop. It sounded like a normal descent. Less than 2,500 feet a minute. That's something we do every day typically on an arrival. So --

[12:15:15] BANFIELD: Not when you're in the Alps, though?

ABEND: Well, that -- when you're at 38,000 feet, you're still not -- there's still no issues with terrain. You have a good point when you get down to lower altitude. But what it says to me is, we need to get down, we need to divert somewhere, something's going on in that cockpit that we don't -- that we have to handle on the ground.

BANFIELD: So, Mary Schiavo, jump in on this, if you will, for me because that is a very unusual set of facts where we have a plane that originally was at 38,000 feet. It dropped 14,000 feet in six minutes, which might seem, you know, to the layperson like a terrible descent. But as Les just said, that's not so precipitous.

MARY SCHIAVO, CNN AVIATION ANALYST: Right. And I checked the descent rates for this aircraft, and looked at the charts and the tables and this is one that's allowed. Now, at this altitude, though, the recommended descent rate is less than that. So -- but it's not the kind of a descent rate that would cause pieces of the plane to come apart or it wasn't an uncontrolled descent rate. The plane wasn't dropping from 38,000 feet, you know, at terminal velocity.

But this is higher than what's recommended for the Airbus at that altitude, but certainly not something that -- where the pilots were causing damage to the plane. But it's significant in that they were getting down in a hurry for whatever reason or possibly an uncommanded reason.

BANFIELD: So and that is what is intriguing, Les, that they had these six minutes to descend the 14,000 feet and yet no information was sent back to any air traffic control anywhere that there was a problem. The distress call came from the ground to the plane. It did not come from the plane that we know of yet.

ABEND: That's my understanding. And with a lot of emergencies, we've talked about this before on air, it's aviate, navigate, communicate. So they may still have been in the process of aviating. In other words, getting control of their aircraft, doing the checklist and then navigating so that they weren't getting themselves into a terrain danger because they know -- I'm sure they're very situationally aware of the terrain in the Alps. And then they wanted to communicate. Something stopped them from communicating directly because maybe they had a compound problem.

BANFIELD: And so what you're saying is it's not as though it's as simple as hitting a button so that air traffic control can listen in on the emergency that you're trying to get a handle on so quickly.

ABEND: Correct. Correct.

BANFIELD: Right.

ABEND: There's nothing you can do if you can't get control of your airplane. Talking to somebody is not going to help.

BANFIELD: It's not going to help. All right, Les and Mary, thank you for that. If you could both stick around, we do have a lot more questions about what exactly happened.

SCHIAVO: Sure.

BANFIELD: There are some images, by the way, from around this crash site that are only now just coming in. The area is only accessible by air and for those who are extreme hikers. And the weather is now another terrible obstacle for any of the crews who are trying to get in there to, a, rescue, if there is anyone to rescue, or, b, recover, if there's anything even left to recover. Just ahead, a virtual look at the plane and then, of course, that remarkable terrain where it went down.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[12:21:42] BANFIELD: We're following this breaking news of a plane crash in the French Alps.

I want to go straight to our senior White House correspondent, Jim Acosta.

The White House has now weighed in on this. Can you let me know what they're saying?

JIM ACOSTA, CNN SENIOR WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: That's right, Ashleigh. The president's been briefed on this investigation. And the White House, at this point, they're leaving this to the French authorities to lead the investigation on this. But let me tell you about a statement that we've gotten from Bernadette Meehan, who is the National Security spokesperson over here at the White House. She says as far as the U.S. knows, there's no terrorism connection to this plane crash.

Here's what she has to say. "Assistant to the president for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, Lisa Monaco, has briefed the president on the crash of the Germanwings Airbus 320. U.S. officials have been in touch with French, German and Spanish authorities and have offered assistance. Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families and loved ones. We refer you to French authorities for an update on this investigation." And the key phrase here, "there is no indication of a nexus to terrorism at this time." So, Ashleigh, obviously they're going through their investigation over there in France. The French authorities are on top of this. But as far as the White House, as far as the Obama administration, as far as the U.S. government is concerned, they don't see a terrorist link to what's happened out there.

Ashleigh.

BANFIELD: All right, Jim Acosta reporting live from the White House. Thank you.

We may not know what caused Germanwings Flight 9525 to crash, but we certainly do have some information about that very aircraft. Here's what we know. The plane was an Airbus model A320. The twin engine single aisle aircraft. It was carrying 150 people. We can confirm that is the final number, 150. It was delivered to Lufthansa from the production line back in 1991 and it had just a little more than 58,000 flight hours on it.

Joining me now with a virtual look at the flight path and the very rough terrain where that plane crashed is CNN's Tom Foreman.

So can you walk me through everything that we know technically about this plane and where it crashed?

TOM FOREMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, we know, as you said, that it wasn't a particularly old aircraft, not by industry standards. It was inspected by Lufthansa engineers just the day before this flight. They're very good engineers. It was piloted by a very capable captain.

So we know all about this. We know it's a workhorse plane. This is not a plane known to have tremendous problems or something like that. It has problems, but nothing really out of the ordinary as far as we know.

If you look at the flight pattern of this plane, Ashleigh, that's where the mystery comes in because everything looked normal. This is the speed of the plane here in red. The blue is the altitude of the plane. And all of this looks perfectly fine. Along in here, the plane was going somewhere around 500 miles an hour plus. That is perfectly normal.

It lost a little bit of speed right in here. Nobody knows exactly why or what that was about. And then here, even when it stopped, when it hit the ground, it was still going about 400 miles an hour. So the big mystery is, why this? Why this descent here that we've been talking about all morning long? A long descent where, at this point, I'll say, right here, that's where it was in the range of the tallest of the Alps. So around 13,000 feet, a little bit shorter than the Colorado Rockies.

At this point, they are very deeply in the danger zone. And as you've had experts say all morning, Ashleigh, no pilot is willingly going to go there unless they have some alternative that is even worse. And we heard no call from the cockpit. No trouble. So that's why this is such a mystery right now, Ashleigh. [12:25:10] BANFIELD: It is so odd to see that speed so high at the

time of the impact.

Can you talk a little bit about those questionable pitot tubes now, what they are and how that may have been a contributing factor? And I stress may have been, as no one knows at this point.

FOREMAN: Yes, you're right to stress that because we don't know. But we do know these have been a problem before. Sometimes when you're getting on a plane, if you look down below the cockpit you'll see these down there. They just look like this. And brought up large, you can see they're like this.

This is a device that measures basically static air pressure. Air pressure where it's not moving, with what's happening outside. And it compares the two and it calculates what the speed of the plane is. These have been known in the past to have problems with icing. They're heated so they shouldn't ice over, but sometimes at altitude they ice over anyway. It's just a natural artifact of being up there.

And when that happens, if you're in the cockpit of this plane, you would no longer know precisely how fast you're moving. And that affects a lot of things because, believe me, when a plane like this is flying, the thing they are relying on is the instrumentation. It's not looking out the window to tell them where they are. That raises the possibility -- I wouldn't say it's a probability, but the possibility that this plane could have been descending very rapidly toward the ground, smoothly, and the people in the plane did not know it was descending. That's what happened with the Air France crash over the Atlantic Ocean. So it's something they have to certainly look at, Ashleigh.

BANFIELD: And then, Tom, just to the right of you, on the viewers' screen right now, we're getting some of the first live pictures coming in from the rescue staging area. This is Seyne-les-Alpes (ph) in France. Presumably it is as close as they can be to the crash site itself. But at least now we're being able to see some of the efforts now to stage and plan for what will invariably become a recovery operation.

One of the more harrowing facts that's emerged just from the bird's- eye view that they've been able to get of the crash site, is that there is not a piece of this plane left that is larger than the size of a car. And that may be one of the reasons why authorities were so quick to say it is likely that there will be no survivors and that this will likely not be a rescue operation for long, even if it is now.

This is quite a critical look though. As you can see, this may look like a mountain plateau, and a mountain valley area, but make no mistake, the place where that plane crashed is extraordinarily difficult to access. It can be accessed on foot. It can be accessed by helicopter. But the weather is terrible and it's only getting worse.

Less than an hour after take-off, it was pretty clear that something went really badly with Flight 4U9525. We're going to trace the plane's path. We're going to take you to Paris as France now copes with its worst plane crash on French soil in 15 years.

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