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At This Hour

AirAsia Search Zone Expands; Passengers Rescued From Burning Ferry in Adriatic; Manhunt in L.A. After Shots Fired at Cops

Aired December 29, 2014 - 11:00   ET

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

JOHN BERMAN, CNN CO-ANCHOR: Happening now, the search zone expanding for AirAsia Flight 8501, the latest clues and the latest mysteries about just how this jetliner went missing.

MICHAELA PEREIRA, CNN CO-ANCHOR: Armed and dangerous, a suspect on the loose after shots are fired at two Los Angeles police officers.

BERMAN: And dramatic rescue, all passengers, hundreds of them, evacuated after a ferry catches fire. The heat so bad it was melting shoes. Right now, the captain still on board that vessel.

Hello, everyone, I'm John Berman.

PEREIRA: And I'm Michaela Pereira. Those stories ahead @THISHOUR.

BERMAN: Just in, we have good news to report about a Virgin Atlantic flight that had been circling London's Gatwick airport. That flight, a very large plane, a 747, 400 jumbo, has landed safely.

Earlier a spokesman said it had problems with the landing gear. I think you can see that picture right there of that landing gear not fully deployed. Yes, absolutely. That landing gear there not fully deployed.

The plane did have time to return safely to London, the plane now on the ground, and, of course, you can see it right there. The airline says the priority is the safety of the passengers.

Glad to see that plane on the ground.

PEREIRA: A relief there but not so much in southeast Asia where we turn now. The aerial search for missing AirAsia Flight 8501 has been called off for the night, no breakthroughs in terms of the search. It is nighttime in the search area.

We're told that authorities will expand the search zone tomorrow at first light.

BERMAN: One hundred and sixty-two people were on board that flight. It vanished from radar just 40 minutes after taking off from the Indonesian city of Surabaya.

It was en route to Singapore, and the pilot had requested a higher altitude due to weather. That request was denied because there was already a plane at that higher altitude. Communication with the jetliner was lost shortly thereafter.

This morning Indonesian officials say their early conjecture is that the plane is at the bottom of the Java Sea. Those are their words. Really, though, at this point no concrete evidence pointing in any one direction or another.

Our David Molko is at the Surabaya international airport where that flight originated. David, give us a sense of the latest.

DAVID MOLKO, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Hey, John and Michaela.

As you mentioned, search efforts suspended for the night, at least in terms of the aerial search. What's critical to note, though, is the next few hours of the search as it becomes daylight here and we head into Tuesday, the second full day of searching for this missing AirAsia flight, they're going to be critical.

The Indonesian vice president was here a short time ago, a few hours ago, spoke to my colleague Andrew Stevens, said this is still a search-and-rescue mission, emphasis on the rescue.

But we're about 40 hours from the time that plane took off on Monday morning, vanished about an hour into its flight, and no trace of wreckage, no trace of the plane.

We talk a lot about an investigation, what happened, what went wrong. At this point, we don't even know where the aircraft is. And you talk to airline officials like the CEO of AirAsia's Tony Hernandez and he says, "I don't want to speculate. We need to find the aircraft, and we need to try to hope that there's hope for survivors."

PEREIRA: I know that you've had a chance, David, to talk to some of the families that are there, awaiting any word of their loved one.

When they hear that this is still being typified as a search-and- rescue operation, does it make the wait even more agonizing for them?

MOLKO: Michaela, I thinking agonizing is a good word to describe what we've seen here today.

Surabaya international airport here just next to the terminal behind me is the crisis center for AirAsia. This is where family members have come. Several times today, they've gotten briefings from airline and airport officials. We've seen tears. We've seen hugs.

The general sentiment from various family members we've had a chance to speak to briefly is that there is hope that their loved ones have survived, but the hope is fleeting.

I have to tell you one thing that really touched me. They have the passenger manifest, all 155 passengers on board posted outside this building, and you look down the list. It's holiday time here, and you see two, three, four, five, even six members of the same family, same last name on that board. So if they do find wreckage and the aircraft was lost, some families are going to be facing some very difficult days ahead. Of course hope persevering and the search again picking up just a few hours from now.

John and Michaela?

PEREIRA: Our David Molko, our thanks to you.

How devastating to know that whole families could very well be on that plane.

Well, we know the U.S. Navy says that it is ready to assist in the search for Flight 8501. So far, though, it has not been asked to help.

BERMAN: One of the staging areas for search operations is on Indonesia's Belitung Island.

Our Paula Hancocks is there with the very latest on what's happening.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

PAULA HANCOCKS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: The search-and-rescue operation for the missing AirAsia plane has grown in size this Monday.

We're at the airport on the island of Belitung, and you can see the military helicopters have been coming in all day, also some search- and-rescue helicopters. What they're basically doing is going out on sorties, they're coming back here to refuel, have a briefing to find out where they should be going next, and then heading off.

This is becoming one of the staging areas for this search-and-rescue operation. Now, this island is one of the closest areas to that last point of contact that the plane had. And this is the area that much of the search-and-rescue operation is focusing on.

According to one official we just spoke to, the search area now is 240 by 240 nautical miles, so a very large area. They're cordoning it off, sectioning it off, to make sure there's no overlap, to make sure they don't miss any areas. They're doing this very systematically.

Now I did speak to First Marshal Supriyadi. He's in charge of the search-and-rescue operation in this area, and he says that at this point they haven't managed to narrow the search down.

FIRST MARSHAL SUPRIYADI (via translator): We're still searching all areas. Later, if we get new data that leads too a specific location, we can narrow it down.

HANCOCKS: I asked the first marshal if he believe there is the possibility of any survivors still. He said if the plane crashed in water it is unlikely, but if it managed to crash on land, maybe in the jungles to the east of here, then survivors are possible.

Paula Hancocks, CNN Belitung Island, Indonesia.

(END VIDEOTAPE) BERMAN: Our thanks to Paula for that.

You know, such a big search area that Paula was just talking about there, and we know that the weather has been rough, very rough there in recent days.

So what's the situation now and how will it affect the search efforts? Let's bring in Chad Myers at the CNN Weather Center.

Chad, what do things look like right now and looking forward to tomorrow when they get first light? What will they see then?

CHAD MYERS, AMS METEOROLOGIST: I was very encouraged by the pictures that we just saw from Paula, how things have really calmed down. The winds have calmed down. They have been rough. The seas have been rough

This is a shallow part. If you've ever thought about Lake Erie compared to Lake Michigan where the Lake Michigan's deep and there's rollers. Lake Erie, all those waves are very sharp because the waves bounce off the bottom, and you get a sharper steeper wave action

Tomorrow will be a much better day for ships. Remember, there's still those pingers out there that they'll be looking for as well. We learned about those on MH-370.

This plane had a very rough trip. I'm sure the pilot just said, "Keep your seat belts on the entire time," flying through significant thunderstorms, 50,000 feet tall at times, trying to fly around them.

There's a radar on the plane. The pilots can see where the turbulence would be, where the thunderstorm shafts would be, trying to get around those or between those.

But this was a very wide area of turbulence, 50 to 75 miles either side of this airplane. and it was a very rough ride, and then eventually, obviously, something went very wrong as that plane did lose contact.

It was, I would say, the up-and-down winds of what we call the ITCZ, the intertropical convergence zone. It's exactly the same place, different part of the world, but the same area of weather that Air France went down five years ago in that ITCZ where air comes together from two different directions, can't go down because the earth is there.

That air has to go up. That rising motion creates turbulence, creates big thunderstorms, and obviously created that weather that created something very wrong up there in the sky.

Guys?

PEREIRA: But as we know and we've heard our aviation experts say, it's not just one thing that brings down an airliner. It's not just weather. We'll talk about that coming up.

Chad Myers, our thanks to you. MYERS: You're welcome.

PEREIRA: I want to give you a look at some of the other stories that we're following @THISHOUR.

Hundreds of passengers have been rescued from a burning ferry in the Adriatic Sea. We do know at least seven people are dead. One passenger said it was like being aboard the Titanic.

Many people had to wait for 35, terrifying hours for rescuers to reach them. Reportedly they could feel the fire below their feet. On deck, they had to wait in freezing rain and gale force winds. We'll have more on this disaster and the dramatic rescue ahead.

BERMAN: An intense manhunt is under way in Los Angeles. Someone fired shots at two LAPD officers last night as they drove their patrol car. Both officers doing OK right now.

One suspect has been arrested, but teams of officers now on the hunt for a second suspect believed to be armed and dangerous. In fact, the department is telling people in parts of L.A. to stay inside until they find this suspect.

Now, there is the possibility, officials are saying, that the officers were targeted. It raises so many concerns. We'll have more details later this hour from Los Angeles.

PEREIRA: New York Mayor Bill de Blasio is set to address new police recruits @THISHOUR. He'll speak at a police graduation ceremony in Madison Square Garden.

Now this comes -- these are some live pictures, in fact, from that graduation ceremony. All of this comes amid heightened tensions between the mayor and the NYPD. You may recall just two days ago hundreds of officers turning their backs to a video monitor as the mayor eulogized slain police Officer Rafael Ramos.

The man who shot Ramos and his partner had suggested in online posts that he was avenging the deaths of unarmed black men at the hands of police officers. Many officers feel the mayor has sided with protesters over the police.

We are going to monitor this graduation ceremony and bring you any major developments.

BERMAN: Of course, we are following the search for AirAsia Flight 8501. A leaked image is raising questions about the final moments before this flight lost contact. Why this -- why a picture that -- of radar imaging could show that the jet was at risk of stalling midflight.

PEREIRA: You likely have question about AirAsia. You can tweet them to us. Use the hash tag "8501qs" or post them on our Facebook page. We're going to try to get you some answers ahead @THISHOUR.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK) PEREIRA: As search crews in the Java Sea rest and prepare to relaunch those efforts to look for the missing AirAsia passenger jet, another search continues for reason why Flight 8501 lost contact with air traffic control and disappeared, simply, from radar.

BERMAN: Look at this picture right here, because there are people who do believe it might provide some clues as to what went wrong.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GEOFFREY THOMAS, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF & MANAGING DIRECTOR, AIRLINERATINGS.COM: What we've also been able to obtain from some pilots is a radar printout of the aircraft, and what it shows is this particular flight at an altitude of 36,000 feet and climbing.

But traveling at approximately 105 miles per hour, too slow to sustain flight. So it looks like on this radar evidence that we have that he was involved in some upset, high-altitude aerodynamic upset.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: Let's talk about this. I want to bring in our safety analyst David Soucie, also aviation analyst Mary Schiavo. And David, you know, I can't read air traffic control radar but I am assured what that shows. If it is real, is that as that plane was ascending to 36,000 feet, it was probably flying about 100 miles an hour, too slowly to be at that altitude. What problems could that create if that's, in fact, what happened?

DAVID SOUCIE, CNN SAFETY ANALYST: Well, it's a pretty simple problem because what happens is the air over the top of the wing is what creates the lift -- The speed of the air over the top of the wing -- If the air is not going well over the top of the wing, not going at a high enough speed, there's similarly not enough lift to lift the aircraft up and that's what happens in a stall is the air is either disrupted or there's --

BERMAN: The word you used was stall. If you're flying that much too slowly at that altitude, it could cause the plane to stall.

SOUCIE: Well, the stall in this situation is even much worse than what you might think, because in a stall situation if your power is not on, if you pulled power back and the aircraft is angling up and it stalls, then that's a recoverable stall. In this situation, the power was evidently on full power trying to climb and it had climbed too rapidly and that's when it stalls. If it stalls with power on, it's a much more dangerous situation to be in.

PEREIRA: So Mary, let's just run with this supposition for a second, because aren't pilots trained to deal with stalls? You would go through those scenarios in training, would you not?

MARY SCHIAVO, CNN AVIATION ANALYST: Well, they are trained to deal with this. It's some of the most basic training you get right in the first days of flight school. However, these pilots were in a tough situation. They were climbing through horrific thunderstorms, their engines, turbines, would be ingesting lots of rain, they would have wind that were shifting dramatically. I think some of the weather charts saw one minute it was a 40 mile an hour head wind and then a 20 mile an hour tail wind and there's all sorts of winds going on. That contributes to the lack of performance on the engines. So as they try to recover, one of the things they have to do is, of course, get the nose down, let the air speed increase. But at some point if you put too much pressure on those engines and on the plane in the climb, if you're climbing too fast, for example, you can make it so that you can't recover and you can't get the engines to recover from the stall and you can't get the air flow enough back over the wing. So it just depends on what they were doing in that cockpit while they were trying to deal with this.

BERMAN: David, it sounds to me like what Mary is laying out is the combination of factors that we always talk about. It's never just one thing, or rarely just one right, it's a combination of factors. So what you have here is this weather problem. We know there was a weather concern, at least, the pilots asked to fly above it or at least around it. Now we have that radar image that shows that perhaps it was flying too slowly, the plane, if that's real. So again, you put all of this together, you start to perhaps paint a picture of what went wrong.

SOUCIE: Right. There's a couple of ways that that's referred to. One of them is a Swiss cheese model. And what that is is that if you picture a piece of Swiss cheese and in that Swiss cheese it has holes and those are holes in the safety systems. But there's layers of Swiss cheese to prevent any particular thing from going through all of that and causing the end, which is the accident. Occasionally when those holes all line up, that's when you have an accident, when there's holes in each of those safety levels, the last being the pilot's ability to recover.

PEREIRA: And Mary, that's why a lot of people at home would be wondering, well look, we understand there was a lot of air traffic through there, other planes were able to get through this horrific weather, these terrible thunderstorms, just fine but because maybe of this Swiss cheese idea all of those factors didn't line up for those other planes?

SCHIAVO: That's exactly right. And every air crash that I've worked on, it's always been a combination of factors. It's almost never just one thing and when it is weather, often what you have is something with the plane, some kind of a quirk. For example, this plane has a warning on the attitude indicators, in other words the tubes on the side of the plane that take in air and let the pilot know whether she or he is nose up or nose down. For example, if those had a problem at the same time the pilot was trying to recover, it would be very difficult, if not impossible to recover.

PEREIRA: Mary, David, we're going to ask you to stay with us. We're going to put some viewer questions to you a little later @THISHOUR.

BERMAN: Yeah, and if you do have questions out there about this search for the missing AirAsia flight, put them on Twitter, the hashtag is #8501Qs. David and Mary will be back to try to answer some of these questions.

PEREIRA: Another story we're following, Los Angeles police are on high alert after two officers were shot at. A search is on for a man that's considered armed and dangerous. Many are wondering if law enforcement is being targeted after the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown. We'll explore that ahead.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BERMAN: All right. Happening now in Los Angeles, scores of police engaged in an intense manhunt for a suspect who might have shot at officers overnight. This happened as the officers were in their patrol car, neither was hurt, luckily. One suspect is in custody.

PEREIRA: However, police are telling folks in south L.A. to stay inside as they hunt for a second suspect. All of this comes barely a week after two New York City police officers were shot and killed as they sat in their police cruiser. Obviously, there's an added sense of tension and urgency in the search that is ongoing in Los Angeles. Our Sara Sidner is in L.A. and she joins us now.

So Sara, let's talk about this. What's the latest in terms of the effort to find a second suspect? And do police believe this suspect is still armed?

SARA SIDNER, CNN CORESPONDENT: The police are still looking for the second suspect. They have one suspect in custody and they have found a weapon, as well. We're not sure exactly what that weapon is, but they have found a firearm, as well. And I will let you know that they expect to take some of this police tape down in the next ten minutes or so, so they're wrapping some things up and interviewing the officers who were involved in the shooting. Both of them were driving along, they were in their black and white patrol car, they were going to another call, they said that these two people that they are looking for or that they were looking for had nothing to do with the call that they were going on. They then said that they saw the flash from a muzzle of a gun and then they were fired upon. And they said it was completely unprovoked, that they were not involved with these two suspects in any way, shape, or form. They weren't on a call that involved them, and so it was a surprise to these officers, they were not hurt and they did manage to fire a gun at the suspects, as well, and did manage to get one of the suspects in custody. We also talked to a detective a little bit about exactly what they're feeling now, the police in particular, when it comes to the level of danger that they face considering what happened in New York and here is what she had to say.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DET. MEGHAN AGUILAR, LOS ANGELES POLICE: I don't know that they necessarily feel that they're becoming targets because of what's going on around the nation, although, you know, last week we had two New York police officers that were killed, so it's undeniable that we're aware that there are a very small, small, small percentage of people out there that are so angry at the police that they're willing to hurt them. (END VIDEO CLIP)

SIDNER: And we did talk to someone in the neighborhood who talked about that and said that there are a few people here who do mean to do harm to police officers. Michaela?

BERMAN: Sara, you say that these suspects were not involved in any way with what the police were doing at the time. We just heard from that spokesperson saying police in general don't necessarily feel like they are being targeted. And nevertheless, it begs the question, you know, what happened? Do they have any evidence that points to any intentionality in targeting the police last night or any planning?

SIDNER: Well, we asked them about whether or not this had anything potentially to do with the protests. There were protests, anti-police brutality protests, on Saturday here and there have been sporadic protests, just as there have been across the nation, and the detectives said no, they don't think that there's any link there. They don't know why these two suspects started firing on the officers, but certainly they said the officers were not, for example, going to a call involving them. They were not involved with these two suspects in any way, they were not trying to arrest these two suspects for any reason. And so that's something that they're going to be asking the one suspect that they have in custody and certainly still looking for that second suspect, John.

BERMAN: And Sara, quickly, I'm curious what you heard from the spokesperson about what they're telling their officers in terms of just sort of keeping their heads up for that very, very small minority, and then also what they're doing to sort of keep things cool and good within the community.

SIDNER: Yeah, you know, the LAPD, according to the detective, already does a lot of measures to keep the officers safe. For example, they don't have a one officer team, it's always two officers who go out on calls. And so that for a long time they've had it that way. And as far as community policing, that's something that the LAPD is already working on, as well. That doesn't mean there aren't problems, that doesn't mean people don't feel a certain way in some communities towards the Los Angeles Police Department, but they aren't doing anything particularly different now considering the protests across the country and considering what happened in New York, but they said they are always, always vigilant. Michaela and John?

PEREIRA: Yeah. They've done a lot in the years that I was in L.A., in terms of community policing, to be sure. Sara Sidner, we thank you for that.

Ahead here, hundreds of passengers left stranded on a burning ferry, imagine this, and we're told some of the lifeboats didn't work. We'll bring you up to date on what happened off the coast of Greece.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)