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Frustrated Families Wait for News; Missing Flight 370; Terrorist Dry Run; Flight Data Recorders

Aired March 10, 2014 - 14:00   ET

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

JIM SCIUTTO, CNN ANCHOR: Thanks, Wolf.

And thank you for joining us for this special edition of CNN NEWSROOM. I'm Jim Sciutto, in today for Brooke Baldwin.

And right now, a mystery remains unsolved. How can a huge airliner, a Boeing 777 like this one, carry 239 people simply vanish. Was it terrorism or a freak accident? We're devoting our whole hour to this investigation with aviation experts and reporters bringing you every single angle of this mystery right up to the minute and we're learning more about the two passengers who boarded the jet Saturday morning with stolen passports. CNN has just learned that an Iranian man purchased those tickets for his two friends. More on this angle in just a few minutes.

At this stage, a U.S. official told me the following, quote, "we have not seen anything so far that indicates this was an act of terrorism." Still, a group calling itself the China Martyrs Brigade is now claiming responsibility. Another U.S. official I spoke to today, an intelligence official, telling us that this group is not one that has been identified before. The only other lead we have now is some debris found near Hong Kong. That is being examined. There have been some false alarms on debris before this point.

And here's the best guess as to where Malaysia Flight 370 was about two hours after departing Kuala Lampur, the capital of Malaysia. It never arrived at its scheduled destination, Beijing in China.

Right now they've expanded the search areas. The U.S. is sending a second warship to the area to aid dozens of ships and planes from 10 countries already there. All of them have so far turned up nothing.

The flight was almost fully booked. More than half of the passengers Chinese. And on board as well, at least three Americans. One of those identified as husband and father Phillip Wood (ph), seen there. The other two just four years old and two years old.

I want to bring in our David McKenzie live from Beijing now.

David, you've been watching this closely since it began. It's been agonizing for family members. Through the weekend we know there was a lot of frustration from family members. They weren't getting timely information. Is that still the case? Are you hearing that from the victim's loved ones? DAVID MCKENZIE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, Jim, that's totally the case here in Beijing. More than half of the passengers on board that ill- fated flight were Chinese, as you say. And at a hotel near the airport, frustrations boiling over today, Jim, people getting angry that they haven't got enough information, blaming the airlines, blaming the Chinese government, blaming the Malaysian government. And you can really understand that frustration as the hours turn into days, not having any closure on what happened because, for all of us, it's a mystery. For them, it's very real because it means they don't know what happened to their loved ones and they're telling me today that really that's the hardest thing, the not knowing.

They have been bussed out tonight, a group of them, presumably to go to Kuala Lampur in Malaysia. Normally in these cases, Jim, people will go to the closest scene of any particular crash. But in this case, they don't know where that is. But many of them opting to stay put here in China and wait out these hours until they can figure out, like the rest of us, what happened to that airliner.

SCIUTTO: It's got to be a painful thing to watch. I read that they were throwing water bottles at airline staff to express that frustration.

Now we're hearing reports of some debris found near Hong Kong. Now, we were looking at a map. Hong Kong is 1,500 miles from Kuala Lampur and that the plane was in the air a couple of hours, might have been able to go 500, 800 miles. But Hong Kong seems a long way away. Any sign that there's something to this debris?

MCKENZIE: Well, they've had this, as you said, all through the weekend. You particularly had Vietnamese navy officials saying they'd seen something from the air that then is investigated on the sea and then turns out to be a false lead. At one point, we did have that oil slick on the waters of the Gulf of Thailand that everyone believed, maybe this was the lead that we were looking for. That turned out to be false.

All through the days and hours, there have been these leads. They've all run up dry. There are more questions tonight than there are answers here in Asia and they've expanded that search area. More than 40 planes and dozens of ships out at sea trying to figure out what happened as they are still calling this, Jim, a search and rescue effort. But as the hours pass, obviously, the hopes are growing dimmer still.

Jim.

SCIUTTO: Yes, right, always that moment before they declare it just a search rather than a rescue operation. Thanks very much, David McKenzie, in Beijing, watching this and with many of the family members there.

Now, the questions are many, but the one at the top of the list is, how can a modern airliner flying at 35,000 feet suddenly lose all contact? I want to bring in John Goglia from Miami. He's a former member of the NTSB, which in the U.S. investigates crashes. Now, John, you say that for all communication to suddenly cease without a distress signal indicates a catastrophic failure. Why is that the case?

JOHN GOGLIA, FORMER NTSB BOARD MEMBER: Well, because there are so many methods for the plane to communicate with the ground. You know, people think, oh, we had a complete radio failure. But this airplane has a multitude of radios, a multitude of ways in which to communicate with the ground. So it has five electrical systems, so you can power the airplane - those radios from a number of different sources. It's just - it's just mind-boggling. And everybody I know in this business, we've been talking, it's - it's got everybody baffled because there's just too many redundant systems for this to happen.

SCIUTTO: No question. And you think in the age of communication, right, there must be so many streams of data going from that plane in the air, down to the ground via satellites and ground stations. How can all of those streams disappear in one fail swoop? I mean (INAUDIBLE) remember in past crashes, for instance, the Air France one over the Atlantic, it was sending some signals about maintenance issues, indications of problems. I mean is it likely that all of those streams of data would have stopped, or is it just something that investigators still have to troll through now?

GOGLIA: We have to troll through it, but it is -- it's unlikely that they would all stop because of a single event on the airplane, except a terrorist act, and you hear - you reported just a little bit ago that they're downplaying that possibility. I mean it's got everybody baffled because there's just so little information.

For a while I was thinking maybe they're withholding the information as part of the investigation. But with all this confusion on where to look in the ocean, I don't think they're withholding it. I don't think they know.

SCIUTTO: Yes, interesting. I had heard that the size of the search area could be the size of Pennsylvania. It's a lot of real estate to be looking at, particularly when we're talking about the ocean. I wonder, you know, when you look at past crashes, there were mysteries at the start. TWA 800 off Long Island, the Air France crash in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. You know, it took days, weeks, months, I think in the case of Air France, didn't know for sure really until you found those black boxes two years later. Is that a reasonable expectation that it might take that long really to know what brought this plane down?

GOGLIA: It's looking like it's going to be a long time. You know, if they haven't -- any sign of the recorders, the transmitter on the recorder has at least 30 days of power to send out the signal. So I'm sure they're listening for that to try to see if they can hear that. In the water that sound travels quite a ways. So that's one bright spot in there. But it also has to be clearly in the water. If that recorder and that transmitting device are still within the fuselage, that cuts down the transmission area. So there's a lot of variables have that have got everybody scratching their head. SCIUTTO: No question. And you're starting to have some questions raised about whether they're even looking in the right general area in light of the fact that they haven't found a shred of the airplane. So that might - they might have to go back to the drawing board, even on the search.

So, thanks very much to John Goglia for helping us explain this mystery.

We're going to go now to San Diego, someone else who knows flying well, airline pilot Bill Palmer. He captains an AirBus A-330. He's also authored a book on the catastrophic crash of the Air France 447 off Brazil. That was in 2009. We were talking about that earlier. He's also written today at cnn.com about the Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.

Bill, excellent piece. Really helpful for my own understanding of this. You make a point which struck me as interesting. A lot of folks are saying, hey, you know, this -- why would this plane disappear with no mayday (ph) (INAUDIBLE)? You know, that must mean that it happened out of nowhere. But you make the point that when pilots have trouble, their focus is on correcting that problem. They might not even make the mayday call. Is that right? Can you explain to our viewers how that's the case?

BILL PALMER, COMMERCIAL AIRLINES PILOT: Well, that's correct. You know, the aviator priorities, we say, are aviate, navigate, and communicate, in that order. It could very well take the crew 100 percent of their concentration and effort just to maintain control of the airplane and to keep it going the way that they want to. You know, folks on the ground to make a mayday call really can't help the crew at that time, so it's pretty far down on the priority list and it's possible that, you know, they just never got to it.

SCIUTTO: There was another interesting point you made in your piece, and this was talking about that change of direction, because just in the last 24, 48 hours there was an indication from the radar telemetry that the plane might have reversed course at one point. But you make the point that that wouldn't necessarily be intentional. That that could have happened as the plane - and again, we don't know this happened, but as the plane was coming down and out of control. Explain to our viewers how that would work.

PALMER: Well, if we look back at the Air France 447 crash, as the crew struggled to maintain control of the airplane, it made a greater than 180 degree turn just as a consequence of it. It wasn't their intention to turn around necessarily, but it was just a side effect of their trying to maintain control of the airplane.

SCIUTTO: Now you - it's too early, as you heard earlier in this broadcast, I was speaking to intelligence officials, they're saying they see nothing to indicate that this is terrorism yet. I just want to remind our viewers of that point. But they're still looking at everything because there's so many strands to look at, including mechanical failure. But just based on your experience, you've looked at a lot of the things like this. You said in your piece that this is - that the Air France crash might be instructive for this. But when you look at it, what does your gut tell you about the most likely explanation. And I won't hold you to this, because I know it's early, but bringing all these points together, these signs together, what do you think makes sense?

PALMER: Well, I really don't want to speculate on it. There's a lot of possibilities and we need some facts before we can come up with reasonable theories.

SCIUTTO: All right, fair - fair point of view. And we're hearing that from a lot. Again, to remind our viewers, on the terrorism side, intelligence officials saying they see nothing to indicate terrorism. And on a mechanical side, so far nothing to indicate a mechanical failure. It remains a mystery.

Thanks very much to Bill Palmer, a pilot himself on the AirBus 360, for his news on this.

Still to come on this special edition of CNN NEWSROOM, new details on the stolen passports. That's one of the very few clues investigators have. And now we're learning an Iranian man may be behind the purchase. That's coming up next.

Plus, there is no wreckage, no confirmed signs of anything from this flight. We're going to talk to a former CIA operative about the possibility that this could have been a dry run for terrorism.

And later, the flight data recorders. Critics say this critical instrument is outdated. So why has this technology not evolved with the times? Coming up.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

SCIUTTO: Flight 370, investigators are furiously chasing down one of the few leads they have, the two mysterious passengers who apparently were flying on stolen passports. Everyone agrees that's suspicion, but suspicion isn't proof and it doesn't mean this has anything to do with the plane's disappearance. We have CNN's senior international correspondent Nic Robertson live from London. He's been looking into this and confirming details about the middle man, Nic, an Iranian middleman who bought the air tickets for the men traveling on these passports. What do we know about it?

NIC ROBERTSON, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, this is someone that the travel agency identifies as a Mr. Katim Ali (ph). And they say that they've known him for a couple of years. That he frequently used a travel agency that issued the tickets. That he called up this time to book - he asked for the cheapest tickets for his two friends to travel to Europe. That was on the first of March. A couple of days later, he didn't pick up the tickets. They were canceled.

On Thursday, just a day and a half before the flight takes off, he calls the travel agency again and says, get my two friends the cheapest tickets to Europe. They're booked. Somebody shows up. We don't know whether it's the Iranian, Mr. Katim Ali, or an associate. Somebody turns up, pays for the tickets in cash, takes them away and these are used with those - with those stolen passports.

The notion that this - that he is a repeat customer - Mr. Ali is a repeat customer of this travel agency is certainly something that will help investigators, a pattern of activity. Were these two men on these two stolen passports part of that pattern of activity of his using this travel agency, were they an anomaly? Certainly there will be some clues, it seems in here, that will help investigators, Jim.

SCIUTTO: Two things stand out to me there. One is, tickets bought with cash and tickets bought last minute. I mean those tend to be warning signs. That said, intel officials have been telling me, in addition to saying there's nothing to indicate terrorism at this point, they make the point that there are a lot of reasons that people travel on stolen passports. I mean, for instance, they're going to Europe and they don't - and they're from a country where they need a visa to go to Europe. You know, this would be a good way to get to Europe without a visa, travel on a stolen Italian passport. Is there -- is there any sense that this guy did this kind of thing for a certain kind of person? You know, someone running away from the law or smuggling or trying to get into Europe illegally?

ROBERTSON: Yes, we don't know if he was doing this, let's say, again to sort of, you know, to cheat immigration and get people into Europe or was he doing it because these guys were drug mules. It's not clear. Or was he - or was he, Mr. Ali, a mr. fix it, that everyone in the underworld knew if you need to get to Europe with stolen passports, he's the guy. He'll get you the passports, he'll get you the tickets and get you there. So there a lot of questions we don't know.

But, I mean, look at it this way. Let's say the man traveling on the Italian passport, he was booked all the way through to Copenhagen. And we know now from - we know now from the aviation officials in Malaysia that one of these gentlemen was black (ph) at least. Don't they think that that would trigger some kind of suspicion or even Interpol records on arrival in Copenhagen, and the other, the Austrian one on the - stolen Austrian passport was going to Frankfurt, the same there. I mean what was going to happen at the end of their journey? There are still so many questions in play here. And it seems that whatever mechanism was in place, it may well have been used, tried and tested and used before. The reason for doing it, just not clear, Jim.

SCIUTTO: That's the question for sure. Thanks very much, Nic Robertson. A mystery there as well.

And we just want to remind our viewers, intelligence sources telling us that as of this moment they have nothing yet to indicate terrorism here, but a former investigator reminds us today that stolen passports were used by al Qaeda in the past, in a practice run for planned airline bombings nearly 20 years ago. Have a listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MARY SCHIAVO, FMR. INSPECTOR GENERAL, U.S. DOT: People forget something called the Bojinka plot. The Bojinka plot was a plot to take out 12 jetliners over the Pacific Ocean. And they were aiming for U.S. jetliners, but they did a trial run. And they did a trial run on a Philippine jetliner and they used fake passports.

BROOKE BALDWIN, CNN ANCHOR: A trial run.

SCHIAVO: And they didn't take credit, because they didn't want anyone to know that they were testing and who it was.

BALDWIN: Oh.

SCHIAVO: So there's no indication here that that applies in this case, but there are similarities, and that would be why no one was taking credit.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SCIUTTO: Joining us now from Irvine, California, CNN national security analyst Bob Baer. He's also a former operative of the CIA.

Now, Bob, could this have been a dry run? You look at this and again, you know, there is nothing certain here. We're far from certain. But when you look at the pieces of this, are there indicators here that make you think that's a plausible theory, that this was a dry run for something?

BOB BAER, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY ANALYST: You know, it is plausible. Simply the fact that the plane disappeared. Planes don't disappear like this. The Air France one didn't disappear like this one. So you really have to look at the possibility of it blowing up in mid-air. It's sheer speculation. And there's always the possibility that somebody who thought they were carrying drugs, were actually carrying explosives. The same people who, for instance, make the Samsonite suitcases to carry heroin or cocaine will often use explosives in the walls. I mean this is speculation again. Were these guys on a trial run? Did they think they were carrying drugs? Yes, that's a possibility, absolutely.

SCIUTTO: How about this idea of a middle man? I imagine there were a lot of fixtures like this around Asia. Listen, you need a passport, you need a ticket to someplace, you're traveling on questionable documents. This guy, he knows how to get it done. I mean does that give you a further indication that something was going on here from a terrorism perspective or would terrorists be unlikely to use a middle man, right, they would keep it within a tight group? I'm curious what you think. Does that add to the concerns about terror or does it take away?

BAER: Well, it adds to my concerns because a terrorist group would go to a fixer (ph) too, a well-known one. They piggy back on drug smugglers, immigration smugglers as well. So absolutely they could go to this guy. He may know nothing about it. He's given a sum of money and said, get these people on the airplane and get them passports. You know, it's definitely a possibility and its question is, who called him. And I hope the man is being detained right now.

SCIUTTO: Well, always good to have you on, Bob Baer, sorting out the credible from the speculative. And again, it's early, as you've reminded us as well, but certainly so many more questions to answer. Thanks to Bob Baer in California.

Still to come here, it's one of the most important clues to the disappearance of Malaysia Flight 370. But if the flight data recorders are never found, we may never know what really happen. So, are we flying today with outdated technology?

And it's one of the workhorses of the skies. Just how safe is that Boeing 777, the aircraft involved in Friday's disappearance? We dig into its operational history.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

SCIUTTO: Welcome back. I'm Jim Sciutto in Washington.

Watching us report this story, you might have the same question a lot of us here have, how do you simply lose an airplane entirely? GPS is in everything from cars, to watches. Why won't it work in planes? And are the airlines just avoiding new spending on safety.

We have CNN's Brian Todd joining me now with some answers.

Brian, first, I'm thinking, I've got a phone here that must be sending about 20 streams of data at any one time.

BRIAN TODD, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Right.

SCIUTTO: This is a passenger jet, in touch with multiple sources on the ground. Why isn't it just streaming this data rather than storing it in the famous black boxes.

TODD: That's a big question now, Jim, and a debate that is reignited with this incident. You know, experts say the technology does exist, that the technology is, as they say, mature enough now to be able to stream some data live to the ground from planes. That did actually happen with that Air France crash in 2009. There was some maintenance data of that plane that was streamed back to the ground in real time but it was not constant and it was not very detailed. It was some basic maintenance data that told them there was a problem with the so- called pita (ph) tubes on that aircraft.

What they cannot do now is stream live the detailed data that those black boxes have. That the - you know, what the pilots are saying on the cockpit voice recorder, some of the information on the location, speed and heading, which would be on the flight data recorder. All of that information now is on the black boxes. That's why this Malaysia Air incident has reignited the debate. They have to recover that black box from the ocean somewhere, presumably.

Safety experts are saying it is time to implement that capability on transoceanic flights at the very least. The problem with that though, Jim, it's going to cost the airlines a lot to retro fit planes. They'd have to build stations on the ground where technicians could monitor the data, process it, et cetera. They would also have to streamline the data. You know, on each flight, the black boxes record hundreds of what they call parameters, information on heading, speed, location, and they do it repeatedly. They would have to really figure out a way to streamline that data to just include the basic facts of where the plane is going, what's wrong and only in an emergency situation.

SCIUTTO: Now, with - and you and I were talking about this before we came on air.

TODD: Yes.

SCIUTTO: When you talked to experts, it would seem to me, and, you know, they know more than me, but it would seem to me that you could streamline just to send the simplest data, right. Send location, speed, you know, something like that so you know where the plane is. Why is that such a cost and such a, you know, such a technical infrastructure issue?

TODD: Well, you know, you're talking about having to put some basic capability on a fleet of - you know, around the world, maybe 15,000 planes.

SCIUTTO: Well, yes.

TODD: And then you'd have to build stations on the ground. I mean the technology is there to do it, but the airlines don't necessarily want to spend the money on it. And you have to also factor in that you only get incidents like this maybe once a decade. Now, we have had it now twice in the past five years, but it doesn't happen every much. And they're asking the question, did they want to spend that money for incidents that happen so rarely. But as Peter Goglia, a former NTSB managing director pointed out to me, it costs hundreds of millions of dollars to search in a situation like this. That's being spent right now trying to find the Malaysia airplane.

SCIUTTO: Yes.

TODD: And it - they spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to find the Air France plane. It took them two years to find that black box. So that's very costly as well.

SCIUTTO: Yes, you wonder, I mean lots of times it's incidents like this that cause the airlines to take safety measures. You have two planes in five years that disappear -

TODD: Right.

SCIUTTO: Maybe that will be the spark.

TODD: Could be. Sure.

SCIUTTO: Thanks very much to Brian Todd in Washington as well.

Let's talk more now about the search for those flight data recorders. We have CNN's Richard Quest in New York now. Richard flies all the time, talks to the pilots. You know it better. You know, we have to wonder, why can't you just stick a microphone in the water and hear that famous ping to figure out where these data recorders are?

RICHARD QUEST, CNN CORRESPONDENT: In theory that's exactly what they're going to do, which is why the new vessels that are heading into the area have much more sophisticated sonar that will just put a probe into the water to see what they can listen to. Listening to Brian there - listening to Brian and the issue of tracking where this plane is, you see, they should know where the plane is because they have the radar track. And the radar show this particular body of water is well and truly over radar.