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Mystery of Flight 370; Crowdsourcing the Search; U.S. Intelligence Agencies Find No Evidence; Conspiracy Theories Abound; Obama Meets Ukraine Prime Minister

Aired March 12, 2014 - 15:30   ET

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

RICHARD QUEST, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: And perhaps if there is a criticism to be leveled at the Malaysian authorities in this regard, it is the way in which they didn't get their hands around this information -

BROOKE BALDWIN, CNN ANCHOR: Earlier.

QUEST: -- earlier.

BALDWIN: Should have called NTSB --

QUEST: No. No, not necessarily do that, but if this had had been in Europe or the United States or Australia, you would have found the investigating authorities very quickly grabbing the radar, grabbing the ATC communications, grabbing the met data, all the things that they could then look at the picture.

BALDWIN: Here's the other question from a lot of people on Twitter, because we were talking to our correspondent in Kuala Lumpur, and he was talking about the fact that the police had gone to the pilot's home. They'd found this simulator in the home.

QUEST: It was well known he had this simulator. He's on YouTube sitting in front on it.

This is a -

BALDWIN: This is a guy who just loved it.

QUEST: Look at him. This is a guy who just loves to -- incidentally, this actual YouTube video is about retuning your air conditioner. It's something completely and utterly unrelated to flight.

But this is a man with 18,000 hours of flying experience who loved to fly.

BALDWIN: OK, moving on, what about the fact that they found no debris, no sign whatsoever, of this plane?

QUEST: It took them days to find the debris from Air France 447.

BALDWIN: This debris field is five times bigger than that of Air France. QUEST: You're right. You're right, and that's why, now, they're also looking over land.

Because if this plane -- although it's -- this is -- it's not that remote. It is Malaysia. There is obviously countryside. It's not that remote.

If the plane did come back across and did come down over land in northern Malaysia, is it somewhere in the jungle?

BALDWIN: How would someone have not seen a massive fireball if it hit land?

QUEST: The middle of the night in a rural part of Malaysia, that's how it would happen.

But I take your point. It's entirely possible.

The most disturbing here about this situation at the moment is five days and six days in and they are not able to narrow the area of search. We will not know what caused this for months, until they find the aircraft.

BALDWIN: What are they doing right now? How do you -- when you look at these circles, the search area, you are obviously looking for debris.

But what if it's possible -- I had a guest on my show saying, maybe this was a Sully Sullenberger moment where this thing was a controlled, not landing, but down into the water, sunk.

Would there even be debris? How are they searching deep, deep under water? Are you following me?

QUEST: Of course, yes. By sending boats, by ships -

BALDWIN: Sonar.

QUEST: -- into the area with the sophisticated sonar that picks up the information.

This is how you do it. You basically divide the ocean up into blocks.

BALDWIN: We're getting a diagram here. I love it.

QUEST: You're getting a diagram, a homemade diagram, right? You divide it into blocks.

BALDWIN: OK.

QUEST: And then the ships basically crisscross not just once, but backwards and forwards, and the planes go backwards and forwards.

BALDWIN: Looking, looking, looking.

QUEST: And it has to be very coordinated. And you number them and you literally cross them off as you do it. And then you do it again. And then you do it again. And, if you still haven't found it -- now, the problem here is far from reducing the number of blocks, they are increasing them.

And if you look at the video of these searches -- by the way, we've got new video from the air searches that have been taking place, you just look at these outside the windows of any of these aircraft, and you are literally looking down into the water to see what you can see.

Look at this. How you are expected, out of these windows, to look for any little tidbit, any little raft, anything at all. And you're doing it for hours and hours and hours as you crisscross backwards and forwards.

BALDWIN: What about this? What about -- obviously they want to find that black box. This is -- doesn't the issue of the salt, the seawater affect a black box if it's not found by X period of time?

QUEST: Yes. Excellent point.

However, the box is constructed to withstand seawater, corrosion and all those sort of things.

And once they find the box in seawater, they don't just yank it out. They keep it in seawater, so it will be transported -- in this case, 99 percent certain it will be sent to the NTSB in Washington and it would transported in a sealed box of seawater to protect it. That's what they did with Air France 447.

They're very well aware that you cannot -- and that had been under the seabed for two years. So, they're very well aware that you can't just -- bing -- open the thing up.

BALDWIN: Keep it in the seawater.

QUEST: They keep it in seawater, in chemicals, until they're ready to open it and analyze it properly.

BALDWIN: Final question, just if you were tapped to help with this, what's your number one question for these folks who are searching?

QUEST: I want to know -- my number one question is what information if any were they receiving by form of ACAS messages from the aircraft, right up until the moment it stopped.

Those ACAS messages are crucial. We got them in 447. We have not definitively heard from Malaysia Airlines and from the investigators that they have not received.

I would want to know from Rolls Royce what information they may have received. They are not confirming or denying that they received information.

BALDWIN: Because they make the plane.

QUEST: They make the engines. BALDWIN: They make the engine on the plane.

QUEST: Boeing hasn't confirmed or denied if it's received any information, because they look after the airframe.

So, there's all sorts of little things, but fundamentally, keep your eye on this. This is the size and scale of what we're --

BALDWIN: We'll be thinking of your grid and the back and forth and back and forth.

You're good. Richard Quest, you're good. Thank you so much.

Five days, one plane, no signs at all, U.S. intelligence officials turning to satellite as well to try to see if there are any clues that can help find this plane. We'll tell you what they have found, if anything, coming up next.

Also ahead, how you in the comfort of your own home can search for the plane if you have a computer. We'll talk to the creator of this crowdfunding Web site that puts the search in your hands, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BALDWIN: All this talk about this missing Malaysian Air Flight 370, guess what? You can help. I'm talking to you.

Without leaving your home, you may help solve the mystery of this missing airliner, because right now, thousands of crowdsourcing volunteers are scouring detailed satellite images posted online by Digital Globe.

The Colorado firm owns this advanced commercial satellite network. Take a look at how this works.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

DAN SIMON, CNN CORRESPONDENT: The Boeing 777 is no small airplane, but in this case it feels like a needle and the ocean is the haystack.

That's why a Colorado company called Digital Globe has elicited the public to help find the missing plane.

LUKE BARRINGTON, DIGITAL GLOBE: And we'll ask you to mark anything that looks interesting, any signs of wreckage or a life raft.

SIMON: The company has pointed a couple of its orbiting satellites at the Gulf of Thailand, and put the images online at tomnod.com for people to scour for anything suspicious. See something interesting, you tag it with an easy click

A CNN iReporter found this image that he thought resembled the shape of a plane. No word on what, if anything, it is, but by crowdsourcing the images, you put more eyes on possible clues.

It's not the first time satellite imagery has been used in this way. It helped track tornado damage last year in Moore, Oklahoma, and more recently the floods in Colorado

But the most well-known example of crowd sourcing following a tragedy occurred after the Boston Marathon bombings. Investigators asked attendees to submit any image or video that might assist them in locating the perpetrators.

As for the plane, the sheer number of digital volunteers has overwhelmed the Web site, a sign of a public eager and willing to help.

BARRINGTON: In many cases, the areas covered are so large or the things that we're looking for are so hard to find that without the help of hundreds of thousands of people online, we'd never be able to find them.

SIMON: Dan Simon, CNN, San Francisco.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BALDWIN: So, that's how it is working. Let me bring in Shay Har-Noy, senior director of Geospatial Big Data at Digital Globe. Shay, nice to have you on, and we're going to get more to how people can help.

But, first, so many people have been so interested this and gone online, this site has crashed.

SHAY HAR-NOY, SENIOR DIRECTOR OF GEOSPATIAL BIG DATA, DIGITAL GLOBE: Yeah. So, yesterday we had quite a bit of trouble keeping up with the volume with the outpour of support and love from the international community.

But our servers are up. We're handling the load. We're seeing about 2 million page-views every 10 minutes.

We have over 100 million page-views since we launched about 34 hours ago and just the response has been extraordinary.

BALDWIN: Those are insane numbers. Take me back, Shay, to just when you came up with the idea, and how exactly does this work?

HAR-NOY: Yeah, absolutely. So, tomnod is a Web site owned by Digitial Globe. It was acquired by Digital Globe last year, where we aim to have people online around the world helping us analyze our imagery.

So, as you may know, Digital Globe operates five of the highest resolution satellites in the world. That's great, but how do you actually extract information from it, right?

It's this needle in a haystack problem that we're hoping to save with the aid of viewers like that ones that are at home right now.

BALDWIN: So how exactly does this work? If I am logging onto my computer, I go to this Web site, what am I doing, just going page after page after page looking at satellite freeze-frames?

HAR-NOY: That's exactly right. So we've zoomed into the native resolution of the image, and we allow people to come in and identify what they see.

So, they can look at ships. They can look at oil slicks. They can look at other anomalies that they might see in the image.

And this, aggregated together from many people, from hundreds of thousands of users, actually millions of users, working together, we're able to analyze basically their votes, as to who's reliable, who's not reliable, and what's really going on in the image.

Then we're able to take these and give them to expert analysts.

BALDWIN: So here's the real question, Shay. With all these eyeballs on this screen, has anyone spotted anything helpful where you call up the Malaysian government and you say you need to take a look at this?

HAR-NOY: So, that's a really good question. So, we' haven't found a smoking gun, if you will, as far as the clues go. We have found a lot of really interesting pieces of debris, lots of ships.

Because there's so many boats and international governments active in the region, we can see a lot of their efforts. We can see from space all their boats and infrastructure that's in place.

But, up until now, there hasn't been the smoking gun, the final clue, that leads to the location of the wreckage or the missing aircraft.

BALDWIN: It is stunning how many days it's taken, but also just the interest in this story, where this plane is, and so many people, as you pointed out, on your Web site trying to help.

If people want to help, this is Digital Globe. So you are the senior director of Geospatial Big Data, Digital Globe, for people who want to log on and help you out.

Shay Har-Noy, thank you very much. Best of luck to you.

And speaking of satellites, you know, some are questioning whether spy satellites could have picked up any evidence of the -- maybe an explosion onboard this flight.

CNN Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr is working that angle for us today. And, Barbara, what are your sources telling you?

BARBARA STARR, CNN PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT: Brooke, what we are learning is that this is something they did not see.

U.S. intelligence and national security agencies, including the Pentagon, have now been back through all of the data they have from satellites flying overhead, any potential radars or sensors in the region and they do not see, we are told, any evidence of a mid-air explosion, no intelligence data showing a mid-air explosion.

That may not be definitive that one did not take place. Let's explain to people. The satellites that fly overhead, what they are looking for is the launch of a ballistic missile, a threat, and that would be a very hot, steep trajectory of a missile coming off a coastal region. This happened perhaps over open water. Perhaps whatever the event was not hot enough, long enough to provide the kind of infrared image signature, if you will, that a satellite, an intelligence satellite, would have picked up.

And there were no U.S. Navy ships in the area with any of their radar. They were thousands of miles away, so none of them picked up anything.

So at this point what the national security agencies are telling us, they have been back through everything they collected. For now, they see no evidence of a mid-air explosion.

Brooke?

BALDWIN: OK. Barbara Starr at the Pentagon, Barbara, thank you very much.

Coming up, we're staying on this international mystery here, and, you know, a lot of people have a lot of conspiracies as far as what could have happened. We'll dive a little deeper into that.

Anyone talking about "LOST?" We've heard that one. Lots of conspiracies, Pamela Brown, tracking them down, we'll have that for you, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BALDWIN: Conspiracy theorists, boy, are they having a field day or what with this mysterious disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370?

The search for the missing jet now moving into day six and it seems everyone has some kind of theory about the fate of this missing plane. Some of them, however, need a little vetting.

Here's CNN's Pamela Brown.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

PAMELA BROWN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: The agonizing wait taking a terrible toll on hundreds of families who still have no idea what happened to their loved ones.

And with the wreckage still missing, speculation is swirling -- outlandish theories about Flight 370 surfacing all over the Internet and social media.

Aliens? An international kidnapping? A Hollywood stunt for the remake of "LOST?"

JONATHAN KAY, JOURNALIST: It's accelerated in recent years because of the Internet and, because in this case, with the international aspect of the story, where you have people piping in with their conspiracy theories literally from all around the world.

BROWN: Another theory, a meteor took the plane down. There was a known meteor in the area at the time the plane took off.

Could it have hit the plane? Given what we know about the erratic flight path, highly unlikely.

And then, there's the idea the miraculous might have happened, that the plane somehow landed near the rocky outcrop of an island called Palau Perak, and the passengers are still alive, the hope fueled by so-called "phantom phone calls," family members saying their missing loved one's cell phones are still ringing.

Is there anyone on the other end of those calls? Doubtful, but it does give the loved ones of the vanished plane's passengers a place to put their hope.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: And, Brooke, all the unknowns and conflicting information coming out of Malaysia are fuelling the fire. People often hone in on the irregularities and oddities in any disaster to weave a larger theory that would help them make sense of it.

And when you have vacuum of information like in this situation, people want to fill that vacuum with their own theories like we've seen in other historical tragedies like 9/11 and the JFK assassination and other plane crashes.

But, Brooke, you really can't blame those family members of the plane's passengers for clinging to hope and trying to make sense of it all.

BALDWIN: No, especially when the phones are still ringing of those who were on board that plane. Bizarre.

Pamela Brown in Washington, Pamela, thank you so much.

You know, she touched on the heartache for these family members still waiting, wanting, demanding answers, days of not knowing what's happened, watching search crews trying to find their loved ones.

Family members are now talking exclusively to CNN saying they're still hoping for a miracle.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BALDWIN: All right, want to take you to Washington, to Washington we go. A pretty significant meeting has just wrapped between the president of the United States and the interim prime minister of Ukraine.

Prime Minister Yatsenyuk is speaking outside White House. Let's dip in just for a short minute.

PRIME MINISTER ARSENIY YATSENYUK, UKRAINE: ... kind of talks have in the barrel not at your head, mainly in case of this barrel is made in Russia. So, we urge Russia to stick to its international commitments and obligations and to stop this unacceptable military intervention into the sovereign and independent state.

We highly appreciate the U.S. support, both in economic and political terms, and we do believe that in the nearest future the new Ukrainian government will be ready to deliver real change.

But in order to deliver these changes, we need to stop the Russian military.

BALDWIN: OK, so, the prime minister there, speaking, referring to the military intervention.

The world is watching this referendum out of the Crimea Peninsula there in Ukraine as to whether or not it will vote to join the Russian Federation.

Many leaders around the world, including President Obama saying that referendum would be illegal.

Also this happening, as we know, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry traveling to London meeting with his Russian counterpart Friday.

Here we go. President Obama -- we've turn around some tape, President Obama meeting with the PM. Let's listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: It is a pleasure to welcome Prime Minister Yatsenyuk to the Oval Office, to the White House.

I think all of us have seen the courage of the Ukrainian people standing up on behalf of democracy and on, you know, the desire that I believe is universal for people to be able to determine their own destiny.

And we saw in the Madong how ordinary people from all parts of the country had said that we want a change.

And, you know, the prime minister was part of that process, showed tremendous courage and upheld the principles of nonviolence throughout the course of events over the last several months.

Obviously, the prime minister comes here during a very difficult time for his country. In the aftermath of President Yanukovych leaving the country, the parliament, the Rada, acted in a responsible fashion to fill the void, created an inclusive process in which all parties had input, including the party of former President Yanukovych.

They have set forward a process to stabilize the country, take a very deliberate step to assure even on its stability and negotiate with the International Monetary Fund and to schedule early elections so that the Ukrainian people, in fact, can choose their direction for the future. And the prime minister has managed that process with great skill and great restraint, and we're very much appreciative of the work that he has done.

The most pressing challenge Ukraine faces at the moment, however, is the threat to its territorial integrity and its sovereignty.

We have been very clear that we consider the Russian incursion into Crimea outside of its bases to be a violation of international law, of international agreements of which Russia is a signatory, and a violation of the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Ukraine.

And we have been very firm in saying that we will stand with Ukraine and the Ukrainian people in ensuring that that territorial integrity and sovereignty is maintained.