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Germanwings Plane Crashes in French Alps; Hollande: No Survivors Expected in Plane Crash. Aired 7:30-8a ET

Aired March 24, 2015 - 07:30   ET

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

[07:30:00] MICHAELA PEREIRA, CNN ANCHOR: And according to the BBC, Germanwings has also said they're aware of the reports but can't confirm them as of yet.

The information sharing between the manufacturers and the airlines, is that pretty good and pretty open in Europe?

RICHARD QUEST, CNN AVIATION CORRESPONDENT (via telephone): It's not even month to month, week to week, it's day to day. The airlines and the manufacturers are in constant communication. Because the airlines obviously are getting worthiness directives, maintenance reports, they're getting up-to-date information about the aircraft, any changes in the nature of the aircraft, that's also sent to the various airlines.

So yes, and of course, the airlines themselves have representatives with the manufacturers when they're getting new aircraft, and they're taking delivery. So it's a very, very well-oiled relationship between the two where communications move very rapidly.

Because obviously if there is something, if there is a service directory, a maintenance report that has to be brought forward, and the airbus or Boeing in that case needs to get the information out as fast as possible.

CHRIS CUOMO, CNN ANCHOR: Right. And Richard, we are hearing from French authorities --

QUEST: In this case --

CUOMO: Richard?

QUEST: Sorry, forgive me.

CUOMO: No, that's fine. We are hearing some information from the French authorities that one they confirmed they did get a distress call. Two, obviously they are confirming that this plane has gone down. They're also being told now by a helicopter pilot, that got up in the air quickly after, that debris has been sighted and it is sighted in terrain that is going to be very difficult to reach except by helicopter.

Now this information goes not to only the reality of what happened of this flight, Germanwings 9525. But Mary, back to you, we had been saying earlier on, there is the Grenoble Airport somewhat in that area.

But when you're hearing now that this is in mountainous terrain and the information about the rate of descent, the likelihood that they were going to head for that airport, is that still on the table or do the numbers and where they're finding debris now suggest something different?

MARY SCHIAVO, CNN AVIATION ANALYST (via telephone): Well, it still could have been possibly headed to that airport. But it's clear obviously that they didn't make it which again, the rate of descent and the fact that he was able as the pilot was able to get a distress call out, makes me think that for some reason, they had lost their power, the engines weren't turning and they were descending rapidly.

It reminds me also, there were a couple of crashes in the past where the plane was on fire and they descended as rapidly as possible for that reason. You're also going to descend very rapidly if you've lost the engines and you got to set it up in a glide. The mountainous region suggests they were nowhere near that airport and they didn't make it. If that's what they were intending to do.

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: All right, we want to take this moment to welcome our viewers around the country and around the world who are now tuning in, if you are just joining us, let us tell you what's happening, a Germanwings air flight has gone down in the south of France, Flight Number 9525, it had 142 passengers on board and six crew members.

We understand that at 38,000 feet somewhere mid-flight on its way from Barcelona to Dusseldorf something went wrong. A distress call went out and that airplane then lost altitude from 38,000 feet down to 24,000 feet in the space of about 6 seconds, although we don't know what distress call said or what happened.

CUOMO: Right. It was several minutes that it went from that altitude down, giving a rate of descent that Mary Schiavo has told us is not indicative of a full stall or something that would have made this craft break up in the air.

French authorities -- let's get to Fred Pleitgen in London because we are hearing from French authorities confirmed information about several aspects of what happened here, Fred. What are they saying?

FREDERIK PLEITGEN, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, they have more information, Chris, on the distress call itself. They say the plane was in distress at 10:45 a.m. local time, which is about 5:45 there on the east coast. They said that it disappeared from the radar about that time.

So they must have gotten the distress call shortly after the airplane disappeared off the radar. They say, this comes from a spokesman from the French interior ministry. He said the amount of deceased might be very high. That doesn't bode well at all.

At the same time, the French president, Francois Hollande has tweeted out his sympathy for the families of the victims. He said, "I want to express my solidarity to the families of the victims of the air crash, we are in mourning for this tragedy."

Again, the French authorities also saying that it's highly unlikely that anybody would have survived that crash in that mountainous terrain. That also meshes, Chris, with what you've been saying with the helicopter pilots are saying, it seems to have gone down in very difficult, very mountainous terrain.

It appears to be terrain that this quickly is only accessible by helicopter in the --

CUOMO: The helicopter pilot reporting through French authority saying that debris has been found and at an altitude of approximately 6500 feet. You know the Alps at that altitude -- we know there are a lot of villages in the area. At that altitude, what are we talking about in terms of remoteness?

[07:35:13] PLEITGEN: Yes, at that altitude, it would be very difficult to get a major rescue and recovery operation off the ground very quickly. A lot of that would have to be done with helicopters. There are choppers in the area. There are a lot of birds that can go up quickly because it's an area of hiking as well.

But of course, it's not one that regularly would deal with something like this. This is a large-scale catastrophe, mass casualty catastrophe, where you need a lot of choppers to make any sort of difference and to actually get people on the ground to sift through the debris as well and see if there are any survivors.

So certainly it would be very difficult and at that altitude, you don't have anything like roads leading to there. You couldn't get heavy equipment there. You couldn't get ambulances.

Would you most probably at least in the short-term, shortly after the accident happened, you would have to helicopter everybody up there and then if you have any people who would have survived, or other casualties, you'd have to chopper them off the mountain at this stage of the game.

PEREIRA: Well, and to add further challenges, we're understanding that the French authorities are trying to encourage people locally to stay away from the crash site because they need to get the search-and- rescue crews, if there's any hope of finding any survivors, which it sounds like from our aviation experts and even from what the president of France is saying, that it's highly unlikely.

Again, Fred, you know this route well, it's about a two-hour flight, again about 142 passengers and six crew members. They make this flight fairly often through the day, do they not?

PLEITGEN: They certainly do. As far as I know they have one of these flights at least every day and the area where it was flying to, Dusseldorf, is in the most densely populated part of Germany. It's the Cologne/Dusseldorf area, the west of Germany. It's a highly industrialized area.

It's an area with several major cities in it, and Dusseldorf itself is actually I believe the third largest airport in Germany. And so it is an airport that has a lot of traffic, it has a lot of flights and the point-to-point charter flights that people use to get to places like Barcelona.

And of course, Barcelona, as far as German or European city trips concerned is one of the most popular destinations. So it's not really surprising that this airplane would have been as full as it was, with 142 passengers on it, six crew members on it.

It's also around the time that many Germans, many Europeans are going on holiday. We are right in front of the Easter holidays. There are people who are taking this time to travel within Europe. It is a route that's very, very frequently traveled.

And generally, there is a lot of travel between Germany and Spain because Spain is one of the major holiday destinations in Europe but for Germans, specifically.

CAMEROTA: Fred, we were talking about the challenges that will exist for the search and rescue or search and recovery efforts. This is a Google map of the topography of where this plane is believed to have gone down. And you can see, just how mountainous and rugged the area is.

We've heard reports from the scene that you could, it's only accessible by helicopter and helicopter pilots will obviously have a challenge of landing in there. This is a good illustration.

CUOMO: And it also quiets some of the speculation about why President Hollande came out so early in the reporting of the incident, the French president came out and said he did not expect survivors.

When you understand, Mary Schiavo, why he came out so early, given the terrain that we're talking about here. What is the chance that a plane could have landed in any degree of safety?

SCHIAVO: Well, in this terrain, by the way, I'm in London, it may have been reported that they have found the debris in the crash at 2,000 meters. So that, you know, it's clearly the mountains, there's no chance to make a controlled landing in that area.

I think the French president was probably trying to be helpful and clearly familiar with the area. Grenoble was an Olympic site in the '60s, very mountainous. I think perhaps he was just being honest. He is familiar with the area and it's not likely you can make a controlled landing.

CUOMO: We're hearing from Lufthansa right now, we don't know yet what happened they're saying in a tweet. Lufthansa is, of course, the airline that owns Germanwings. They're going to be developing information. Here's the full screen of the back and forth, what's going on with Lufthansa right now.

The reality obviously is that we want to hold out hope that this is a rescue and not just a recovery. But given the terrain and what the French authorities understand from this distress call, Mary, it makes sense they're assuming the worst. Yes?

[07:40:01] SCHIAVO: I think, yes, and also with that rate of descent and then disappearing from the radar. Whatever they were attempting to do by descending quickly, it was disappearing from the radar that means they've gone in. So -- I don't hold a lot of hope, but certainly they should look.

PEREIRA: OK, really quickly, I want to talk about the route, Mary and some of our aviation analysts, have talked about the highways in the sky. Quickly, Mary, if not Richard, if you're there, talking about the fact that they took a real turn to the east.

Quite a depart fewer from where they were and headed more for the terrain. That terrain that is so mountainous and so difficult to get to. The good fortune is there in the Alps they do have a lot of rescue crews as Fred Pleitgen has been telling us.

We understand this area is near a resort ski area. But Richard Quest, talk about that, is there any inkling you have about why that could have happened? We understand weather was not said to be a factor in the area.

QUEST: Well, you've got to ask yourself was that a controlled turn that was taken. Was there a reason? You work your way back to what was happening on the aircraft at the time of the incident. Now, there are many occasions where pilots have taken a turn because that's the only thing they could do.

Then you, there was a loss of control of the aircraft and it could have been a turn that was uncommanded. We don't know reason for those turns -- in this case.

CUOMO: Richard -- Richard --

QUEST: What caused the incident? Was it an aircraft fire where the pilot needed to fly somewhere knowing he was flying over mountainous regions and need to get down? Was it a case that an aircraft had failure, where suddenly they lost control, rudder -- whatever it might be, was it a loss of power?

What it as incident on board the aircraft? These are all issues, but what in the fullness of time will be explained. But they will lend themselves to then show how the actions took place. If the pilot had to take evasive action, was he in control of the aircraft or she. Was the plane fall out of the sky or was it controlled flight into terrain?

CUOMO: Richard, and to just to put some facts down the road of speculation, first of all, this path while it looks unusual, we're being told this is the normal path that the flight takes, Germanwings, 9525 from Barcelona to Dusseldorf. It does go out across the water before coming down to its destination. That wouldn't be the unusual part.

QUEST: That would be the route from Barcelona. That's the way that euro control, the aviation system, that controls the higher levels of air traffic control across Europe, that would be the way it would be routed because of the sheer amount of air traffic that's doing this criss-crossing.

I'm sure in the Alps, are going to be showing the picture of European air space. The amount of aviation is simply staggering and it is up to euro control to insure the safe skies and also of course, to manage the disparity and various different air traffic control systems that exist. Europe has been trying to get what's known as single European skies for years, and has not managed to do so.

CUOMO: All right, because obviously we just want to make sure as we're going through this and there are obviously lots of questions, we want to fill in understanding we can to not fuel that speculation. This route while it looks like it was taking a detour, it wasn't.

This is the normal flight path. What is obviously and tragically abnormal is how this plane went down in the Alps. What we understand about that from French authorities and data online that was tracking this flight is that into the flight at full altitude of 38,000 feet, this plane put out a distress call and started descending at a rate of 3440 feet per second and then within minutes, about 5 minutes was from 38,000 feet to 24,000 feet.

We've heard from Mary Schiavo, David Soucie, and Richard Quest, our analysts, that's a quick descent, but not a rate of descent that would have broken apart the aircraft and there are pilots online who say they have used that rate of descent before to avoid weather.

So Mary, let me bring you back in. When we first heard it, the uninitiated, you think wow, it went down pretty quickly. You're saying no, that that could have been a controlled descent and that's a big difference, right?

[07:45:14] SCHIAVO: Absolutely. And that descent rate is some degree of control. If you were free-falling from the sky they would have gone from altitude to the crash in under 3 minutes and probably about 3 minutes. And I'm in London looking at the weather reports over here and they're still saying it was clear.

You would descend if you had some weather on your radar up ahead that had come up and it was an issue. They could have encountered weather that caused some problem of icing, which would have affected the engine. But you now, at that altitude you don't get hail.

It would have to be some sort of weather condition, but they're not reporting any in Europe. Not reporting any weather at all. I'm thinking it was some kind of mechanical that caused them to want to get down in a hurry. But you know in the Alps, you don't do that. You don't just descend down to those levels, the debris was at 2,000 meters, that's about 6,000, 5,000 feet?

PEREIRA: Mary, you talk a lot about the -- this -- the midway part, the cruising part of the flight as being the safest time in the flight. We've learned that from you repeatedly here on the air. Is there in a two-hour flight typically is there a use of auto pilot? SCHIAVO: Yes. And modern day and age, auto pilot is used literally after takeoff. You can do the whole thing on auto pilot, really. But the whole flight is pretty much on auto pilot. You need to do things and routes, change routes, you dial different things into your auto pilot and your flight controller pretty much does the whole flight.

This kind of a descent would not be auto pilot. It's clearly when the pilot called the distress, they were undoubtedly hand-flying the plane and were descending very quickly. The airbus wouldn't do that by itself. The airbus would not put itself in that kind of a descent.

That's not what they do. I still believe they had some manner of control, an onboard emergency such as mechanical, fire, they lost an engine.

CUOMO: All we know on that right now from French authorities is that they did get a distress call and that the last words they're saying they heard were "emergency, emergency," and obviously very frightening words to hear in connection with what was going on in the airplane.

But David Soucie, we've got you up on Skype now I believe. This is more just confirming what is suspected than it is providing information into how this happened. But just in case you weren't hearing, the French authorities saying that not only did they receive a distress call, but the last words they heard from the cockpit were "emergency, emergency." David?

DAVID SOUCIE, CNN SAFETY ANALYST: Yes, good morning. They are frightening words and what's concerning to me, I was looking at the air speeds. The air speeds of the aircraft before, about 15 minutes before this rapid descent, at 3400 feet per minute, the air speed declined very sharply and came back up again.

So there's something that occurred about 15 to 20 minutes before the accident. That gives me some concern. Then it went up to about 450, to 500 knots, there was a slight depression again in the air speed. Now it's very concerning to me because the altitude remained the same at this point.

Now when the air speed continued to stay stable, that the aircraft then descended so it's confusing right now as to what could have possibly happened. Not a lot of explanations for this, other than some kind of engine failure origin trouble at this point.

CUOMO: Did you get the information about what they didn't squawk? They didn't squawk 7700, which is supposedly a distress signal for pilots, explain what that means, and what does it mean that they didn't?

SOUCIE: Well, what it means is that at that point they're squawking saying I have an emergency, we have to clear the air space for me to make a maneuver. That's what the 7700 tells the air traffic controllers. Is that right now, I need all the air space I can get I'm going to have to make an emergency landing.

What that might tell me he thought at that time he may have been able to make it back to Grenoble Airport and at that point could just say emergency, emergency, and not be able to respond in any other way.

If you think about it the tactile decision to actually reach up and change that squawk to 7700 takes time and attention so if that time and attention is being distracted by something else then of course he wouldn't have time to do that.

CAMEROTA: So David back to the data that you've been looking at, we know that the airplane descended from 38,000 to 24,000 feet over the course of say 7 minutes midflight obviously very unusual. You're saying that 15 minutes prior to that, from what you're seeing, that the air speed declined very rapidly, what might that mean?

[07:50:09] SOUCIE: Well, it would mean to me that there was either one of two things, either intentionally the aircraft had pulled back its power, which is kind of common, actually after you reach cruising altitude to pull your power back because you're at max thrust takeoff during the takeoff period.

But then after that, you pull it back. That's not where this occurred. This occurred during the actual climb itself. So it wasn't after it stabilized. It was during the climb itself there was a rapid air speed decrease and back up again.

If you look at the graph, there's a sharp spike in it that says, spike that says this will slow down. It was significant, 50, 60 knots and then go back up from there. They reduced the power. There was mechanical failure that caused them to do that. Of course, it's very speculative at this point, but the air speed is a prime indicator of something going wrong.

PEREIRA: David Soucie, we're going to ask you to hold the line. We want to turn back to Fred Pleitgen who is in London. I understand you have some new information for us.

PLEITGEN: I have some new information and I also have a question, but the new information that I have is that the flights and we were getting this from the German authorities, they're saying the flights that departed Barcelona Airport at 9:55 a.m. and it had a 20-minute delay upon take off. So it took off about 20 minutes late than it was supposed to do.

The German Air Traffic Control, which is obviously the air traffic control unit, had good cooperation. They believed that the crash probably occurred around 10:37 a.m. in the morning. That the plane went, as you guys have been saying, from 38,000 feet down to 24,000 and was last seen at around 6,800 feet, which is, of course, apparently the place or the altitude at which it might have hit a mountain.

It was supposed to land at 11:55 a.m. local time in Dusseldorf, which is exactly two hours after takeoff so it's about a two-hour flight. But the question I have and this just occurred to me because there was an incident with a Lufthansa Airbus A321.

Apparently in November of this year, where an A321 took off from Spain at the airport there and as it was climbing, apparently the plane all of a sudden started for no apparent reason rapidly descending, and it was only by maneuvers of the pilots that the plane was -- managed to stabilize. It continued its flight.

And in the end, Lufthansa apparently said that they believe all of this has to do with air speed centers so I'm wondering if our experts might want to chime in on that. Because we do know that in the past air speeds centers have been made responsible for planes all of a sudden changing their speed.

And there was an incident with the Lufthansa aircraft, an A321 that happened in November of last year where apparently that was a factor.

PEREIRA: David, your thoughts on that?

SOUCIE: It was a factor. In fact, Air France 447 was another airbus aircraft that had the same problem with the air speed sensors. What happens is these air speed censors crystalized. The air speed is called a feto tube. That's outside the aircraft. It's a small hole that allows air to go in.

So from that information you can get a lot of things about air speed. It's the only external air speed indicator you have, there are two of them. The model that's in there was a dash 1 in the Air France 447. The Dash 1 was replaced with the Dash 2 improvement, which would increase the heat try to get rid of these crystals.

So what happens is when the crystals are so big when they enter it. It's not typically in the past, feto tubes have had problems with this, but it was because the air enters the tube and because it's under pressure, it condenses and causes ice inside the tube.

This is different. This is when you're flying through crystalized ice in the air, it's big enough and it doesn't enclosing the arteries and can cause the computers to think that the aircraft is slowing down when in fact it's not.

And so responses to that the pilots don't have good information. They're looking at information that says your air speed is slowing down, you're slowing down, yet the aircraft continues to fly normally. So it really is confusing to the pilots. It can cause a lot of confusion in the cockpit and that is in fact what caused Air France 447 to crash.

PEREIRA: David, one question for you. I know that we learned so much about the communication systems aboard planes. In fact, when we were covering MH-370, we learned a lot about that together. But the advancements, the calls for increased information and data sharing, and I remember at that point, the Boeing model plane that was involved in that flight, it could send communications as well. Is this aircraft, a plane that would have engines that could send data?

[07:55:00] SOUCIE: Yes, actually it does. There are two models of this aircraft that have two different engines in them as well, the Rolls Royce system. I know which is what was in the Boeing system, in MH-370 and MH-17. That information is being sent continuously, but now remember that we talked a lot about the SATCOM system. The SATCOM is the satellite system that relays this information. Now this aircraft was close enough to the ground and close enough to mainland that it may have also been communicating through radio signals back and forth. And the ADSD systems that are ground base not satellite base.

So there are two different systems that could have been sending information and mostly like were so we'll look forward to hearing that information. That would give us any indication as to what was going on with those engines, where it was air speed.

It will tell you if there were vibrations on the engines. If there was something not just fuel starvation, which we typically is lined with some kind of engine failure, but if there was something else going on, let's say a constant speed unit which is on the aircraft, it would have failed. That would cause a high vibration that could affect the fuel controls themselves.

So all of that information is very detailed, there's about 10,000 pieces of information that are sent every second through this system so we know what's going on through the aircraft. I don't think we're going to find an MH-370 situation where we don't have any information. It's very likely we will determine what caused this and we'll know that shortly.

CAMEROTA: David, it's also high tech the way you speak about it and the way all the systems have to work together. The low tech question obviously when planes go down is always weather. We understand it was cloudy but nothing certainly alarming. At 30,000 -- 38,000 feet is weather a factor?

SOUCIE: It's really not. That's the reason that aircraft fly at that altitude is because there's very few thunder heads and weather accumulations that would cause that type of failure at this altitude. If you think of that high an altitude, we're already talking 30, 40 degrees below zero.

So anything that would have iced up is already in the ice condition and the ice condition that will then take its own gravity and fall out of the sky so that it's not -- become snow, hail, ice, whatever it may be. At that altitude you're very clear of that sort of thing unless of course there's a high thunder cloud that goes up that high, in which case the pilots know that and they avoid those things.

So it's very unlikely, that's why we talk about this 95 percent, that 95 percent of all accidents are on takeoff or landing phases of flight because in the middle you have high, everything is normal, there has to be something extremely anomalous to cause an accident during mid- flight at that point.

CUOMO: All right, David, we have a lot of new information here so let's give our viewers everything we know about the Germanwings Flight 9525.

We do have breaking news. Germanwings Air Flight 9525 has crashed, 148 souls on board, 142 passengers, 6 crew members. Here's what we know. The flight was supposed to go from Barcelona in Spain to Dusseldorf in Germany. This is the actual air path, plane going down midway in the French Alps.

French authorities have confirmed that the flight has crashed. There was a distress call. Let's get right to Paris. We have Jim Bittermann there. What is the latest information about this horrible situation?

JIM BITTERMANN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, Chris, there's a number of things that are being reported here as well as some things that we can confirm, and that is that the interior minister is on his way down to the crash scene as well as the environmental minister and transport minister.

Local officials have also been mobilized. It's being reported that in fact they have been requisitioning gymnasiums and local schools to handle any bodies that are recovered from this crash.

President Hollande said a short while ago that he is reasonably sure that there were no survivors. This is a very mountainous area in the Pyrenees, very difficult to access. It's going to take a while for people to get to the scene.

According to the reports from the scene, the crash scene is spread out over about four acres and one of the aviation experts here has brought out a chart that he says indicates the air speed and altitude of the plane.

And according to that chart the plane descended in a fairly controlled fashion from about 39,000 feet to this altitude, which it crashed, which is about 6,000 feet up in the mountains and then very controlled fashion, which would suggest, perhaps, that in fact the pilot was in control of the aircraft all the way down to the crash -- Chris.

CUOMO: All right, Jim, so we know that there's going to be in a couple of hours a press conference here in Cologne, Germany, from what's going on. President Hollande came out saying no survivors were expected. Do you attribute that to the information they got from the cockpit or just the simple fact of where this plane went down and it probably could not have been a controlled landing that high up in the mountains?