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CNN Newsnight Aaron Brown

Passengers Survive Air Crash in Toronto; Discovery Crew to Make Repairs

Aired August 02, 2005 - 22:00   ET

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

AARON BROWN, HOST: Good evening again, everyone.
I can tell you, in all honesty, this is not the lead I expected to write tonight. I expected to write a lead, detailing the death of dozens, if not hundreds of people aboard a jumbo jet that crashed on landing in Toronto late this afternoon.

I expected to write it from the first frame of video I saw late this afternoon, smoke billowing, flames coming from the jet. Hours later I am still amazed I am not writing it.

Much of what we do on the crash tonight is to explain why this crash ended not in tragedy, but in a story, hundreds of stories, really, of survival. That's what it was, not a single death. We begin at the beginning.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN (voice-over): Weather was miserable and onboard Air France Flight 358, the final seconds were worse.

OLIVIER DUBOS, PASSENGER: At one point before touching ground there was no more lights in the plane. The plane touched ground, and we felt then that it was going off road, hitting a ravine. And that's where we thought that was really the end of it.

BROWN: The Airbus A340, a jumbo jet, could not stop before reaching the end of the runway.

COREY MARX, EYEWITNESS: It was getting really dark and all of a sudden lightning was happening. There was a lot of rain coming down and an Air France plane. Came in on the runway. Everything looked good, sounded good, hit the runway nice and all of a sudden we heard his engines backing up and he went straight into the valley and cracked in half.

BROWN: But instead of a horrible ending, the news was just short of miraculous.

STEVE SHAW, GREATER TORONTO AIRPORT AUTHORITY: At this stage, the unconfirmed number is there was 297 passengers on board and 12 crew members. There are no known fatalities.

BROWN: This sort of moment, not serving drinks, not handing out headsets, is what flight crews train for. DUBOS: When we went to the emergency exits they opened them up and then they asked us to jump. And it was very, very fast.

ROEL BREMER, PASSENGER: I was the second one off the plane. You don't think, you jump. And when I got to the bottom of the chute and looked around and saw the flames, I only thought of one thing. If you just get out of there as fast as possible.

BROWN: The airport in Toronto had been closed off and on throughout the day because of severe thunderstorms that had bracketed the area. But by late afternoon air traffic controllers had been allowing at least some flights to land.

Eyewitnesses are saying a severe lightning strike took place at almost the exact moment the Air France flight was touching down. Whether that was related to the crash, we do not know.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The rain was very heavy and they're not supposed to lie down but there is some water, lots of water over there.

BROWN: Ambulances ferried the injured to nearby hospitals, but everyone from Flight 358 survived. Not at the way you expert this sort of story to end.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Our first question this afternoon was a very simple one. How did they do it? How did they get all those people off that plane so quickly?

Consider this. In the amount of time it takes to air this next report, more than 300 people made it off a broken and burning airline. About a minute, minute and a half, give and take. That's all. In fact, that's everything.

Here's NEWSNIGHT'S Beth Nissen.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BETH NISSEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): How do you get 300 people out of a large, disabled airplane in under two minutes? Jennie Ziesenhenne just retired this week after 27 years as a flight attendant and instructor with Delta.

JENNIE ZIESENHENNE, FORMER FLIGHT ATTENDANT: You do not ever want this to happen. You always want to have your safe flights. You just really pray it never happens.

NISSEN: Flight attendants are trained for exactly what happened on board Air France Flight 358.

DUBOS: You can't imagine, people were screaming and panicking. And everyone was really stressed.

NISSEN: As soon as the plane came to a complete stop, flight attendants started giving passengers commands.

ZIESENHENNE: We are taught our command to be the same every single time. Release seat belts, get up, get out. Release seat belts, get up. Leave everything.

I believe that when panic starts, it's because people have not -- they don't know exactly where to go and what direction to take.

NISSEN: Flight attendants encourage people, urge people to move quickly and ask certain passengers to help along others who are slower, more unsteady, elderly, very young.

ZIESENHENNE: When people are boarding and they're sitting in your section, what you do is you start identifying who could help in an emergency. You also try to identify who would need help in an emergency.

NISSEN: Crowd momentum keeps passengers moving quickly towards exits flight attendants have identified as safe, with doors that open away from flame and water.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There were two or three stewardesses, and they were really pushing people and letting people jump as fast as possible. Very, very organized and they were just trying to get people out of the plane as soon as possible.

NISSEN: That, they did. Two hundred ninety-seven passengers and 12 crew members safely evacuated in what probably seemed to those people like the longest two minutes of their lives.

Beth Nissen, CNN, New York.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: The big picture, more in a moment on the investigation, which is just starting. First, CNN's Jeanne Meserve is at the airport tonight in Toronto.

What's it like there tonight?

JEANNE MESERVE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, Aaron, it clearly looked like a catastrophe and clearly, there was relief here that it was not.

The airport, Pearson International, has now reopened, but things are certainly not back to normal at this point. Traffic had been backed up for hours. First, by the very severe weather here and then by the crash. They're trying it get that all reorganized.

And then, of course, they're having to deal with those people that came off the aircraft. Many of them were taken to a terminal here, where they're being processed, checked out medically, going through customs and reunite would their loved ones. Some people went to the hospital, but we have heard from officials that all of the injuries, remarkably, were minor.

Some of the passengers on board the flight are beginning to tell their stories. Here's what they had to say.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The landing was, in the beginning, it's OK, but I think the rain was very heavy and they are not supposed to land down, but I think their front wheel broke down, because there is some water, lots of water over there. Everybody was jumping on the inside, and we jumped over each other.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: How did you get out?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The door was a little bit -- not too far from me. I get out.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: When the plane came to an abrupt stop in the ravine at the end of the runway, we could smell a little smoke, looked out of the window. And on the left side we saw flames and we then knew that -- to get to the emergency exit as fast as possible.

Actually, the first time I thought it was game over was when we hit the ravine, then sliding down the chute, at the bottom of the chute, took one look around and saw flames everywhere and just realized you don't go back up for a coffee clatch; you run like crazy to get away from that plane as far as possible.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MESERVE: Now, a spokesman for Air France says that the pilot was the very last one to get off the aircraft. He wanted to make sure that everybody else had exited, the Air France spokesman saying that he received some minor injuries in the crash and in the exit. Those aren't spelled out.

Of course, the experience of the co-pilot and the co-pilot amongst the things that Canada's transportation safety board will be looking at in this investigation. Air France describes the pilot as 57 years old with 15,000 flying hours behind them, almost 2,000 of those hours on this sort of Airbus aircraft. The co-pilot, too, very experienced.

Perhaps that experience and the training of the pilot, co-pilot and the rest of the crew were a factor here in this clearly miraculous exit of more than 300 people from an aircraft in what's estimated to be 90 seconds to two minutes.

Aaron, back to you.

BROWN: I have to hand it to the flight attendants and the work they must have done.

Just quickly, it's been about six hours or so since this happened. If you drove up to the airport in Toronto tonight, would you be aware that a near catastrophe had unfolded there?

MESERVE: Well, I've not been to the Toronto airport during normal operating hours, so I can't tell you what it normally looks like. I can tell you when we drove past the terminal this evening, very crowded. Traffic very much backed up and, of course, a lot of camera crews. Everybody perched, trying to get their shots of some of the survivors and their families.

BROWN: Jeanne, thank you for your efforts. They've been considerable tonight. Jeanne Meserve up in Toronto tonight.

Corey Marx watched all this unfold from a highway not far from the runway. Mr. Marx joins us now by the phone.

Corey, when you heard that everyone had gotten off that plane alive, based on what you saw, what did you think?

COREY MARX, WITNESS: I would say they were lying to me. I couldn't believe it. I honestly -- from what I witnessed, I couldn't imagine anybody walking out of that.

I mean, on that hand, I mean, I think the rest of the world should find out what the crew did and what the emergency crew did at the airports. I mean, it's not -- we haven't had a crash at that airport, I mean, I think since the '70s and almost in the exact same spot. For them to come in and, I mean, when I was there, they were there within a minute. And to get everybody out like that, everybody should take after what they did.

BROWN: From the first moment you saw it. You saw it coming in and landing, and at what point did it start to look abnormal?

MARX: Well, it was, we go there all the time and we sit on the 401, the highway that it sits adjacent to the airport, the major highway. We pull over on the shoulder and watch the big jets come in. This one was coming in from the east and landing towards the west.

And it looked, everything looked fine. It was raining. It was really bad weather. It was really black out. The lightning was going around and when it -- when were watching it come in we saw a couple before it was fine.

Then it hit the runway, which was a little deeper than I would say normal, but it was still OK. Once it started going down the runway, which was wet, we started noticing it was tipping a little bit, swerving in and out. And then we all looked at each other and were sitting there, the guy in my car and he said, "He's not going to make it." And that particular runway, there's no barriers or anything at the end and all you're going to do is run off into the grass and right into the gully.

HAMMER: Just quickly, from the time it had run off the runway onto the grass, into the gully, how long is it, would you say, before you start to see smoke and flames?

MARX: I would, I would say a good four minutes, a good four or five minutes.

BROWN: OK. MARX: It was kind of weird because you would expect the flames to be coming from the engines or anything like that, but it was more towards the back of the plane. And then there was a slight explosion, sort of like a bang and you saw the back end just break off.

BROWN: Corey, quickly, one final question. As you're watching this, is it happening really fast or is it happening in slow motion?

MARX: Really slow. I mean, it was to the point, it was like a car accident. If you've ever been in a car accident, everything just goes in slow motion.

But it was such -- the reality that it was actually happening. When you're sitting on the highway, this is a deep gully, and it just vanished. So it either went down nose first or he skimmed across it. But all you could see was the back of the tail and the smoke and the heat from the fire was tremendous.

I mean, we couldn't see anything, because everybody was asking if I saw anybody run out. They had to go out. We were south of the plane, so they had to run out and exit from the north of the plane, and you couldn't see anything because the smoke was so thick.

BROWN: Your account has been interesting and we appreciate your time, thanks a lot.

MARX: Thank you very much.

BROWN: Thank you. Corey Marx up in Canada.

Now, to the investigation. In normal circumstances these take a long time, but investigators have some considerable advantages here. Conrad Bellehumeur is the spokesman for the Canadian Transport Safety Board, I guess the Canadian equivalent of the NTSB, and he joins us from Ottawa tonight.

Look, the simple thing to me is, normally you have nobody really to ask questions to and here you have a live flight crew that can tell you exactly what they experienced and I assume you want to know.

CONRAD BELLEHUMEUR, CANADIAN TRANSPORT SAFETY BOARD: Oh, that's right. This is an extremely unique situation in that we're able to interview every single crew member, as well as the passengers and peace that together with the technical data that we'll be able to retrieve from the aircraft.

I know how you're going to answer this, but forgive me for asking anyway. Are there theories now, the degree to which weather might have been involved?

BELLEHUMEUR: I'm sure there's several but at this point, it would be inappropriate for me to speculate.

BROWN: How many people are on the ground in Toronto now starting to take statements? Have they started to take statements? BELLEHUMEUR: Well, there's quite a considerable team. The transportation safety board, of course, will be investigating this incident, and right now we're taking witness interviews.

We'll be meeting with the crew, as well as the air traffic controllers and the passengers as quickly as possible so that they give us as much information while it's still fresh in their mind.

We'll, be as well securing the air traffic control tapes, the communications, the voice communications between the air traffic controllers and the pilot, as well as hopefully first thing in the morning being able to retrieve the black boxes off the aircraft.

BROWN: At the safety board, when did you first hear that you had a plane down in Toronto?

BELLEHUMEUR: Probably I got the official call moments after I saw it on the news. So, late this evening, probably 4:30, something in that area.

BROWN: So you're watching this on TV and seeing what I think many of our viewers. And you're seeing what, I think, many of our viewers and are up in Canada were watching, too, just smoke billowing from this airplane. In your wildest imagination, did you think we'd be talking about 312, I think, survivors?

BELLEHUMEUR: No, not at all. Because the camera angle. I think there was only one at the time, as your previous guest was saying, was from the highway, and you weren't seeing anyone exiting the plane. They must have all exited the plane from the other side.

So the pictures that we were getting was of a plane in the ravine, smoke, lots of flame coming out at that point and, of course, no indication that there were survivors. So, really for us, this is an extremely unique situation and one that we're very grateful for.

BROWN: There are probably 100 things we don't know, but one thing we do know is that the flight crew on that airplane and the passengers, too, did a heck of a job of getting off and sort of doing what you hope people will do. I assume it was crazy, that there was some panic a lot of noise, screaming and everybody got out alive. And that's pretty remarkable.

BELLEHUMEUR: It sure is. We will be looking at that to see if, even though it went very well, are there any improvements that can be made? I mean, it's very rare that you get incidents of this kind where you see that the exits seem it have gone pretty smoothly. But is there room for improvement? That's what we strive for.

BROWN: All your work should be this was, I would think. Thank you.

BELLEHUMEUR: Thank you. Best of luck to you, thank you.

BROWN: In a moment, looking that high risks of a really high- stakes, high-altitude repair job. If you can call 200 miles up high altitude. But, first, at a little past a quarter past the hour, time for some other stories that made news today. The aircraft, Erica, so much dominated the day from about 4 p.m. on.

I'm sure other things did happen this afternoon..

ERICA HILL, HEADLINE NEWS: There were a few other things. I'll let you in on some of them now, and I'll save some for later.

Let's starting off with President Bush, another end run around the Senate, another recess appointment today, the president naming Peter Flory as assistant secretary of defense. He was first nominated more than a year ago.

But starting out with President Bush, another end run round the Senate, another recess appointment today, for his appointment has been blocked by Michigan Democratic Senator Carl Levin in a dispute over the release of related documents.

After that, President Bush boarded Marine One with a smile and headed off for his own recess. A smile because he's taking a month- long vacation at his Crawford, Texas, ranch. This will be his 50th trip to the ranch since Mr. Bush took office nearly five years ago.

U.S. Supreme Court nominee John Roberts said a good judge should have humility and understand that judges have a limited role. In written responses to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Roberts said judges don't have a commission to solve society's problems, but that they should simply decide cases according to the rule of law.

And an early return in Ohio. A Bush bashing Iraq war veteran has now opened up a narrow lead over his Republican opponent in a special congressional election. Democrat Paul Hackett would be the first Iraq war combat veteran to enter Congress if he wins in this heavily Republican district. If he loses, Hackett has promised that he will volunteer, Aaron, to go back to Iraq.

BROWN: I'll keep an eye on that. That's a very good story, actually, because that is a primarily Republican district, so it will be interesting to see how it turns.

Erica, we'll see you in a half an hour. Thank you.

Besides Ms. Hill, we have much more on the program ahead, including a drama unfolding in space tonight.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

All kind of repairs, it's very simple but it has to be done very, very carefully.

O'BRIEN (voice-over): An unprecedented spacewalk now just hours away. What could go wrong and what if it does?

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It was a wonderful part partnership because Susan was tough and focused and Jason was fun loving and sort of easy going.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BROWN: A bitter sweet day for a father whose newborn daughter will never know her mom and why delivering your baby between 7 at night and 7 in the morning may be bad for its health. A new study and the questions it raises. We love questions. The more provocative the better because this is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BLITZER: In just a few hours a federal employee will step outside the office with a pair of scissors. He'll walk around the corner, find a piece of fabric or two between two bricks in the wall and give them a trim.

Simple enough, except the employee is an astronaut, the office is in space, the fabric could in danger his life and the job has never been done before. Here's CNN's John Zarrella.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JOHN ZARRELLA, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): This will not be the first time spacewalking astronauts handled an in-flight repair. They've fixed the Hubble Space Telescope. They're retrieved and repaired satellites in orbit. Although they've never worked on a shuttle in space. As repair missions go, mission managers and the astronauts see this as relatively easy.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Well, both kinds of repairs, it's conceptually very simple, but it has to be done very, very carefully. The tiles, as we all know, are fragile. And a crew member out there is a pretty large mass. We'll have to be very, very careful but the task is extremely simple, and we predict that it won't be too complex.

ZARRELLA: But no matter how you slice it, astronaut Steve Robinson will be attempting something that he hasn't practiced on Earth, riding the space station arm beneath the shuttle, pulling out two pieces of protruding fiber called gap fillers from between thermal tiles.

If that doesn't work, using a modified hack saw to saw the pieces off and if there is any miscue he could damage the tiles themselves creating new safety problems. The repair would be easy on Earth, but this is outer space.

WAYNE HALE, DEPUTY MANAGER, SPACE SHUTTLE PROGRAM: Certain inherent dangers in doing this spacewalk. You're more exposed to the earth's radiation belts. You only have one seal between you and vacuum, instead of the multiple ones that you normally do when you're inside the cabin and the space shuttle. You are somewhat more vulnerable to micrometeoroids when you're out in the suit. Obviously, there's sharp edges that you could run in to that could cut the suit.

ZARRELLA: But with the memories of the Columbia still fresh, NASA insists it's less of a risk to repair the shuttle than to fly home as is. The two gap fillers, if not dealt with, could cause a disturbance in the air flow under the vehicle during reentry. That would result in a build up of heat on shuttle tiles.

HALE: Given that large degree of uncertainty, life could be normal during entry or some bad things could happen. And then we examined our option to set our minds at rest and make sure that we didn't stay up late night worrying about bad things happening.

ZARRELLA: With so much uncertainty, the decision to repair was an easy one, despite its risks.

John Zarrella, CNN, at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: The decision to attempt delicate work in space is never taken lightly. The subject of our conversation with astronaut Scott Parazynski, a veteran of four shuttle flights. We spoke with him earlier today.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: What are the risks here in actually making the repair? Is there a danger that you could make something worse?

SCOTT PARAZYNSKI, ASTRONAUT: Well, first do no harm is always, you know, something that we like to follow. And I think we're in that kind of situation here. This is a very straight forward task. In fact, we anticipate that the task will just involve Steve on the end of the arm going out and plucking out these two small pieces of gap filler.

BROWN: We were talking just before we started taping about how intensive the training is in the year leading up to a flight. Astronauts, basically, rehearse every element of the flight that your bosses can imagine. Now, you basically are asking a crew to ad lib something that they haven't been prepared to do. Fair enough?

PARAZYNSKI: That is fair, although I think, again, we have such extensive training. There's skills-based training, as well. And this falls well inside the skill base of Steve and Soichi.

Astronauts by their nature are fairly adaptable, and we've been working on these procedures for the past four days very intensively. It's kind of a combination of looking at the procedures just in a one G environment. We have little mock ups of tile that we've practiced the technique.

We've taken it into our big swimming pool where we go through the end to end procedures, the types of tools the crew will need at the work site. We've looked at it in our virtual reality simulator, how to get the crew member there on the robotic arm.

So it's an integrated approach to come up with these procedures, and then we pull the package together and send that up electronically and also have a crew conference to brief the details. BROWN: You expect he'll be nervous?

PARAZYNSKI: Actually, I think every astronaut in the office is envious of Steve's position here today. We'd love to be there in his place or alongside him. This is a unique opportunity. It will be the first time that a crew member has been beneath the orbiter. It will be fairly lonely down there, lonely in outer space but a very exciting process to go repair this, and certainly, he's well prepared to do it.

BROWN: Let me ask a final question, and be as honest as you can in this. This is a bit discouraging that the shuttle and that you all are being faced with this sort of problem on this flight two and a half years later?

PARAZYNSKI: Well, quite honestly, the foam separation on the external tank took us all aback. I did not anticipate that. I thought that the external tank was licked, that we were going to move forward rapidly and continue the assembly sequence for the shuttle.

I've said this several times in the past few days. This is NASA, though, and we're up for any challenge. We try and do the impossible almost every day. I think, you know, flying shuttles and other spacecraft is an audacious undertaking. We have some of America's best and brightest, and I think we will solve the problem and get back to flying in the next weeks to months.

BROWN: And if you don't mind, we'll down here just hold our breath while it happens, and we'll allow your confidence to rule the day. It's good to talk to you, thank you.

PARAZYNSKI: Thanks, Aaron. Bye.

BROWN: Thank you.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Scott Parazynski. We talked with him late this afternoon.

Coming up on the program, still ahead, his picture was in plain sight all over Britain, so how did this terror suspect manage to make it out of the country?

And later, one family's drama comes to an end with a birth just short of a miracle. A word we never use lightly at NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: Police have arrested almost 40 suspects since the failed bomb attacks in London on the 21st of July, including all would-be bombers, four of them. One Hamdi Issac fled all the way to Rome. He's in an Italian jail now, wanted for the attempted bombing at Shepherds Bush in London. In England, he was known as Osman Hussain, and the British newspaper "The Independent" reports that as a teenager, he worshipped rappers like Tupac Shakur. Some of the many things we don't know: How did he go from gangster rapper to accused terrorist bomber, and how did he get out of England? Here's CNN's Matthew Chance.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MATTHEW CHANCE, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): He was one of Britain's most wanted men, his face on every newspaper. So, how could Hamdi Issac, now charged with involvement in the July 21st bombings, have left Britain undetected, boarding a Paris-bound train from London, apparently slipping past the biggest manhunt in British history?

It seems incredible, but security analysts say not everyone has their passport checked when leaving this country.

(on camera): He got a train out of the country. How could that be possible?

PETER NEUMANN, INSTITUTE OF WAR STUDIES: Well, the top priority for the British authorities in terms of border control for the past two years really has been preventing illegal immigration. Now, if that is your priority, you do care about people coming into the country, but you don't necessarily care about people leaving the country.

CHANCE (voice-over): And the quality of the first photograph may have been a handicap. Only later, after he'd left Britain, was a more identifiable shot released. Even then, police said they didn't know his name.

(on camera): He must have been just a face in the crowd, albeit one that should have been seared on the minds of every police officer and every train passenger here in Britain. But it seems that from Waterloo station, Hamdi Issac boarded his train to Paris, and began his escape across Europe.

(voice-over): Police believe Issac traveled via Paris to Milan in Italy, making calls on his cell phone. It's known the phone went dead on July the 27th, a day into his journey. When it was switched on again, it had changed from a British to an Italian network, but the handset was the same, allowing police to track him to Rome.

It is a surveillance technique telecom experts say is simple. Cell phones emit regular electronic messages to locate themselves on the network, providing an easy trace for police.

JAKE SAUNDERS, TELECOM ANALYST, ABI RESEARCH: That message is like a pebble being dropped into a pond. That -- the signal is going out and out and out. It goes to one base station, hits another base station, and they can listen to the time and the distance and the strength of the signal and figure out where you are.

CHANCE: It's not clear when police established their fix on Issac, whether they allowed him to run across Europe making calls in the hope of being led to others, or moved in as soon as they could. British officials say they're reviewing the circumstances by which he came to leave the country. But for many here, it seems a major lapse.

Matthew Chance, CNN, London.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: We talk a lot here about the new normal. We should from time to time remind you what it means. When something like 9/11 happens or the London bombings, what was normal in our lives and in our minds disappears. If we're to stay sane, we have to find a new normal. In the old normal, we'd hear a car backfire and we'd think, a car backfired. In the new normal, we think something else. London is living the new normal. Here's CNN's Walter Rodgers. * (BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

WALTER RODGERS, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): At London's King's Cross station, they have begun removing the flowers and other memorials to the victims of last month's suicide bombers, perhaps believing the worst has passed.

But at 2:38 in the afternoon, police radios again crackled, this time with reports smoke was pouring out of the double-decker bus. The streets were sealed off, the bus passengers feared terrorism.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: A middle-aged guy gets on, sits beside me, and once he actually got off the bus, and two seconds later, the smoke has started coming from the seat that he was actually sitting on.

RODGERS: Some passengers fled so quickly they left clothing behind. It was a false alarm. Only an engine fire on the bus, but the fear was all too real for those on board.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Everyone started panicking, and started (INAUDIBLE) hand-dropping out of a top window, jumping out a top window.

RODGERS: London police are just as stressed. Nerves are raw on city streets.

Police sources say detectives are now so overworked looking for would-be terrorists that work on several major murder investigations has been cut back. There's also anxiety that crime may rise now that 400 police, 10 percent of the London force, are investigating terrorism threats.

(on camera): Londoners now desperately yearn for a return to normality and August calm. But below these streets on the underground, the subway, the anxiety remains palpable. When the train makes an unpexected stop in a darkened tunnel, you often hear gasps, and fear is etched on many passengers' faces.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Before, I was always using tube; now I go only by bus and my friend's car.

RODGERS (voice-over): Two of the underground tube lines damaged in the July 7th bombings have been reopened, but with a substantial police presence to reassure anxious passengers. So, now, with the memorial bouquets beginning to wilt, trees are being planted to preserve the memories of the suicide bombers' victims.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: And an oak is a good British tree. We will survive.

RODGERS: Hearts of oak the British may have, but these days their nerves are rather ragged.

Walter Rodgers, CNN, London.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Up next on the program, why it may be better to deliver your baby during the day. Why it might be a matter of life and death. A provocative new study, what it means for parents.

Also, another baseball steroid accident? See whose body they got into this time.

From New York, this is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: As if parents don't have enough to worry about, here's something else. A new study suggests babies born between 7:00 at night and 7:00 in the morning are much more likely to die in their first four weeks of life than those born during the day. Why is that is a mystery, we guess. Joining us now, Dr. Michael Brodman, the chairman of Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Mt. Sinai Medical Center here in New York.

I've looked at the explanations of this all day, and I have to tell you, none of them make sense to me. But basically, what you think is it has something to do with hospital staffing, right?

MICHAEL BRODMAN, MT. SINAI MEDICAL CENTER: Correct.

BROWN: Why?

BRODMAN: Well, it's not true, but...

BROWN: It's not true that you think that, or it's not true that hospitals are staffed differently at night?

BRODMAN: Well, there's different numbers of people at night...

BROWN: OK.

BRODMAN: ... but the quality is the same or better.

BROWN: Well, then why do you think that it must have something to do with hospital staffing?

BRODMAN: Well, I guess what happens in obstetrics is most of the time, babies deliver, everybody is happy, everything is great. But on rare occasion when things go bad, they really go bad quickly, and it gets horrendous, and you need help. And at 4:00 in the morning, if you need a neurosurgeon or a cardiologist, you don't know who you are going to need when the baby comes out, and you just have to start calling. And obviously, at 2:00 in the afternoon, there are more people around.

So, it's not the staff on the labor and delivery floor; it's who you're going to need from other services that, I think, makes this so.

BROWN: OK. Here's the part of this I don't get. That would make sense to me if these infants were dying in the first four hours of their birth. But the study talks about the first four weeks of their birth.

BRODMAN: Right.

BROWN: They actually, by and large, I assume they go home, they carry on as little one-week old and two-week, and then something or something within that period happens. What does that have to do with the staffing at the hospital at the moment of their births?

BRODMAN: Very good question. The -- that's the problem with the study, is it -- neonatal mortality pertains to the first 28 days of life. So, it also includes the care that they were given in the nursery and at home. But, to do the study, they had to use records, and these were the easiest records to access. So, that's how the study centered on the delivery as opposed to the other 28 days.

BROWN: So, we don't know that -- you might be able to work this back and say that you're more likely to -- well, are you able to work back and say, actually, this only is relevant in the first week or the first four hours or the first day or whatever? Are you able to do that?

BRODMAN: Not from this study.

BROWN: Not from this study.

Parents hearing this, I mean, one of the things you -- well, I was going to say, you have no control over, but the fact is, to some degree you do have control over...

BRODMAN: That's correct.

BROWN: ... when you have birth. You can induce labor, you can schedule a c-section. People do it all -- women do it all the time. Is that a greater risk? Are you putting the infant at greater risk by doing that?

BRODMAN: Well, the interesting thing about the study is, although the risks went up, the risk was still very, very small. It was somewhere around 2 per 1,000, and it went up to 2.3 babies per 1,000. So it wasn't a large number of babies.

But what we're seeing now is a trend. The pendulum is swinging back. The pendulum in the '80s and '90s was natural childbirth, no intervention. And now women are saying, you know, I want convenience. I want to know when I'm going to have my baby. If they have a baby at home, their second one, they want to know when to call the baby- sitter, when to call the baby nurse. And interestingly, there's a rise -- there's a rise of primary cesarean sections, women having their first baby and saying, I want it on Thursday at 8:00 in the morning, no labor, just deliver me. The risk is slightly higher -- it is higher than a vaginal delivery. But because of the advances in medicine, and in the same journal, there was an article saying how low the risk was for anesthesia for a c-section. So, the risk of c- sections are getting closer to the risk of vaginal deliveries, and so women are saying, I will accept that risk and I want the convenience.

BROWN: If it turns out that your baby is delivered at 8:05 at night, should you be panicked?

BRODMAN: Not at all. Not at all.

BROWN: Thank you. That's really -- that's what we wanted to know. Nice to meet you.

BRODMAN: Nice to meet you. Thank you.

BROWN: Thanks for coming in.

We began tonight with the miracle of hundreds; up next, the miracle of one. It really is, too. A bittersweet miracle, though. A baby born to a mother she'll never get to know. A follow-up story as NEWSNIGHT continues on CNN.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: Either my curiosity or 40-second questions have put us a little bit behind, but it's still about quarter to the hour, and Erica is still in Atlanta...

HILL: I am.

BROWN: ... with still more news.

HILL: And that was interesting stuff, actually. I read this story earlier, so I was happy to get more information. So, thanks.

BROWN: Thank you.

HILL: We're going to start off for you in Seattle, where Mariners pitchers Ryan Franklin today became the second Major Leaguer suspended for steroid use in the last 48 hours. He tells the Associated Press he has no idea why he tested positive. In any case, he has got 10 days to figure it out.

Iran may be a lot further from building nuclear weapons than previously thought. A new U.S. intelligence estimate puts the timeframe at about 10 years, assuming there are no snags. Compare that to five to seven years according to the Pentagon.

And at the National Zoo, you don't need the CIA to tell you, it's a boy. It did take three and a half weeks to make the call, though. Mama pandas cuddle their cubs 24 hours a day, so you don't want to get between a mother and her cub, Aaron, but they have now been able to get close enough to say that, in fact, it is a little boy.

BROWN: Well, if that zoo keeper had gotten out of the way, we could have really seen that panda.

HILL: Maybe next time.

BROWN: Thank you. Talk to you tomorrow. Thank you.

This is a story we have been following for nearly three months. It could have ended any number of ways. Susan Ann Catherine Torres came into the world today, thankfully, under the most extraordinary of circumstances. Her mother, Susan Torres, was left brain-dead after a stroke on the 7th of May. She was suffering from melanoma at the time. Doctors had been keeping her alive on a ventilator to give her baby a chance to live. The baby was delivered by c-section. Experts say the infant, who is 12 weeks early, weighs but 1 pound, 13 ounces, and is not yet out of the woods.

Her uncle, Justin Torres said he'll have a message for his new niece when she's old enough to understand.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JUSTIN TORRES: You have no idea how hard some people fought for you. And you have no idea how important you are to us.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BROWN: She became important to lots of people. As lucky as this baby is, she has many hurdles yet to clear. We talked with CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta tonight about it.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Doctor, there's really a couple of sort of loose strings here to deal with. The mom, sadly, has sort of done what she can do. Will they now take her off the machines that have kept her alive?

DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN SR. MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Yeah, it sounds like that's what is going to happen here. I don't know if it will happen right away, I mean, there's certainly no urgency. But a couple of days, disconnect the breathing machine, which is the one that's most likely sustaining her life at this point, and any other medications that were keeping her blood pressure up, and allow her to pass away.

BROWN: Let's turn to the baby. You have certainly not the smallest baby ever born or the most premature baby ever born, but you have a very small baby that is going to face lots of challenges.

GUPTA: Lots of challenges. And you know, we've gotten pretty good at this, Aaron, actually, taking care of these small babies. The numbers -- this is one of the areas of medicine where the numbers just keep getting better. Let me give you a couple of them, because I think they're important. Between 1.1 pounds and 2.2 pounds, this is the weight, 70 percent of these babies survive. At 28 weeks gestation, 28 weeks is what we're talking about here, it's closer to 90 percent. So you know, her likelihood of survival here is pretty high.

There are concerns I think you're alluding to, you know, sometimes the brain isn't fully developed, sometimes there can be some bleeding in the brain. These children tend to have higher incidence of cerebral palsy, for example, but the data very much is on this baby's side, Aaron.

BROWN: Right, you got a little precious one out there tonight, and she -- the emphasis is on little. She's small. We just hope the best for her.

GUPTA: Thanks so much, Aaron, I appreciate that.

BROWN: Thanks for coming in tonight.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Morning papers after the break.

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BROWN: OK. Time to check the morning papers from around the country and around the world. I wish I had five minutes to do this, but I do not.

"The Washington Post" leads: "Documents tell of brutal improvisation by GI's. Interrogator general's sleeping bag death, CIA's use of secret Iraqi squad are among the details." Yikes. "Rebels in Iraq kill seven Marines," another side of the story. "Oil ministry says fuel rationing will begin soon." My goodness.

"The Washington Times." "U.S. sees big summer spenders. Employee discounts boost car sales," which may, by the way, explain "The Christian Science Monitor Lead," "U.S. savings rate hits four- year low, 0 percent." We were so busy spending, we didn't save a penny last month. What are we going to retire on? Social Security? Nah.

"San Antonio Express News." Nobody believes that Social Security is going to be there, but we're spending like crazy. "Toronto Airport Miracle." Pretty good lead, right? I'd put that on the front page of my newspaper. We did in my newscast today.

"Homeland security, homeland absurdity. Anti-terror funds going to the 'burbs." That's the "Boston Herald" lead. But this is the one that's going to get their attention. "How Lowe" -- that would be Derek Lowe -- "can he go? He's caught canoodling." I've just never said "canoodling" on television. I wanted to.

"The Chicago-Sun Times" weather for tomorrow -- "no mercy"; 94 in Chicago tomorrow.

The picture of the day in a moment.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: This is the picture I saw when I walked into work today. Never occurred to me I would be reporting this story where nobody died.

Let's hope tomorrow brings some good news too to mix among the more dreary things. We'll see you at 10:00 Eastern time. Good night for all of us.

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