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Flight 370 Search Expands Into Indian Ocean; Report: Plane Appeared Intentionally Rerouted

Aired March 14, 2014 - 10:00   ET

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

CAROL COSTELLO, CNN ANCHOR: Happening now in the NEWSROOM breaking overnight, the search -- turns wet.

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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: So we went from a chess board to a football field.

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COSTELLO: The hunt for Flight 370 now focusing on a small group of islands almost 1,000 miles from takeoff.

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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There seems to be a real trail to something taking that aircraft. That just doesn't happen by accident.

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COSTELLO: A new report just out that says the plane was deliberately flown in that direction.

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UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: All we know is the transmission stopped. We don't know that someone turned them.

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COSTELLO: Developing this morning, new claims that communications systems on board were shut down separately.

The American Navy rushing to the new search area as new details pour in every hour. You are live in the CNN NEWSROOM.

Good morning. Welcome to the special edition of NEWSROOM. I'm Carol Costello. Breaking news on the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. The investigation and the search take a radical turn. Reuters now reports new evidence that someone deliberately and secretly rerouted the plane toward the Indian Ocean and flew for hours after the last contact.

Citing military radar and unnamed sources Reuters adds a bizarre new twist and how it's opened up a vast new search are. We are covering all the angles. Our correspondents and experts will help peel back the layers of this unfolding mystery.

We begin though with the growing search area for Flight 370. It has now expanded into the Indian Ocean. CNN's Tom Foreman is here with a virtual look. Good morning, Tom.

TOM FOREMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Hi, Carol. You know, this mystery is just getting messier by the day. It is a great tragedy. We can't get any answers. Let's bring in the map and talk about what that has done to the search for this plane. Remember the basics here. If we go into the closer vision, you see where the plane took off. It flew for less than an hour and then it disappeared here.

Remember at all times, this is really all we know. People keep speculating. They've done it for days, but this is what we know. It went here and it disappeared. But look what has followed out of all the observations and thoughts since then. The pattern of searches has grown and grown and grown. It's spread out in different areas to cover many, many great areas.

Now, there has been this shift towards the west more so because of this idea that there is some kind of tracing there. The Andaman Islands over here is one of the areas that's being searched right now. This is a string of islands stretches almost 500 miles north to south. They are not really very wide side to side, about 30 miles or so. Most of them are uninhabited.

There are only a few places in here where you'd have any change of a plane like this coming down and those place tend to have a large military presence from the Indian government. So this is just one of the possibilities out there, but Carol, important to remember.

Even as people talk about the ideas of the west and there are some signals that suggest it might have gone this way. There is still very serious searching going on along in the east along the original flight path toward Vietnam because that still remains a very active search zone.

As I said earlier today, I think we'll be saying all day today, the expanded search area is not evidence of greater confidence that it went west, but of the complete lack of confidence in any of the leads up until this point and the great mystery that keeps growing -- Carol.

COSTELLO: The families continue in their anguish. Tom Foreman, thanks so much. I want to bring in our aviation correspondent, Richard Quest now. He is in New York and in Washington, we have Captain Sean Cassidy. He is the first vice president of the Airlines Pilots Association International. Welcome to both of you, Gentlemen.

CAPTAIN SEAN CASSIDY, VICE PRESIDENT, AIRLINES PILOTS ASSOCIATION: Good morning.

COSTELLO: Richard, I want to start with you and this new Reuters report. Can you delve into it more for us?

RICHARD QUEST, CNN AVIATION CORRESPONDENT: Yes, the report basically says those a pings from the plane or a plane that was picked up by satellite. When you plot those pings, they appear to go over the following wave points. These are recognized wave points. Think of it as the interstate of the sky. You have these big airways that planes use to get from "a" to "b." On those airways, there are various junctions.

You are told to turn right here and turn left here and change altitudes here. These are wave points in an international airway across the sky. When you plot the route that this plane took using the pings, this is what it shows. It shows it went along those wave points. Now look, Carol, even the Malaysians and the United States and even the U.S. Navy says, there is not 100 percent confidence in this information, but pardon the pun, in a sea of confusion, you have to follow every lead you possibly can. That's why this has taken on a significance this Friday.

COSTELLO: I want to talk about these pings because supposedly, according to Reuters, at 1:07 on Saturday, the data reporting system shutdown, 14 minutes later, at 1:21 on Saturday in the morning, the transponder shut down. Is there a scenario you can think of where that might happen?

CASSIDY: There are certainly all kinds of possibilities out there, but as virtually every single previous guest that you have had on here has stated, unless we can actually get to that aircraft and verify it based upon the data reportings and every other bit of information, that's just another hypothesis. Certainly, there is a scenario in which they could be turned off.

COSTELLO: OK, so I want to shoot down another theory, if you will. The one theory is out there, it is only a theory, is that this airliner was heading toward the Andaman Islands, in a known flight path. Some people have the idea it could possibly have safely landed there. Malaysian officials are scoffing on this. Let's listen and then I'll ask you after.

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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There are no chances that a big aircraft coming to Andaman can be missed. Apart from these airstrips. It cannot land in any other island.

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COSTELLO: The Andaman Islands are made up to have 500 other islands and it is long and skinny. Others say it looks like an airport runway. So captain, tell us if that's even possible that a large jetliner could land on this strip of land?

CASSIDY: Highly unlikely. You would require a paved facility, reinforced concrete runway. This thing weighs 250 tons. There is a difference between safely landing and trying to ditch or crash an airliner. That's a different conversation. I think what we need to realize is that, if, indeed, that plane did change course and deviate from the former wave points. There was a reason something had to happen in that airplane to make it intentionally go in a different direction. Now we have a military radar information, military surveillance say one thing, we have an unconfirmed source from Reuters saying something else. What the previous guest talked about and I think should be a major point of emphasis, is we need to correlate all this data that's coming in related to the accident.

We need to make sure that we go back to the point where we have the highest level of confidence in where that plane last was and that's where we need to start. There is plenty of theories out there. There is very little correlated and verified data.

COSTELLO: OK, correlated data. Richard, I'm sure the investigators on the ground wish there was such a thing, but it does not appear there is such a thing right now.

QUEST: A voice of sanity from the captain. Thank you, Captain. Going back to the last point of reliable information, that last point of reliable information was when the plane handed over from Malaysian air space to Vietnamese air space within all right, good night.

At that point, the transponder loses. Everything else is conjecture. Good conjecture, it has to be followed down. Can those -- can the plane land in the Andaman Islands. I am going to give you a fact. Of the Andaman Islands, only about 36 are inhabited. The editor of the local newspaper on "NEW DAY" this morning, told Chris Cuomo, there is no evidence. No one saw. There has been no report of any plane landing on any of the airstrips, even assuming they could carry a 777.

As for the other several hundred uninhabited, because it is under the Indian authorities, there are no reports of any untoward activity. These islands are highly sensitive to the Indian government and they would certainly know about them, if indeed, it had happened.

COSTELLO: Richard Quest, Captain Sean Cassidy, thanks so much. We are going to bring you back for more questions in just a bit. We appreciate your time.

Tens of thousands of square miles and underwater currents and topography that can make a search even more daunting. If the search turns to the ocean floor, aviation investigators say American expertise will lead the way.

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JOHN GOGLIA, FORMER NTSB MEMBER: We have got some tremendous technology. The airplane is in the water. It is likely going to be found. For years, the United States and the Soviet Union played the cat and mouse game with submarines. The technology that was developed as a result of that is phenomenal.

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COSTELLO: Our next guest is at the forefront of that technology serving as the director of special projects at Wood Hole Oceanographic Institution. David Gallo led the efforts to locate the remains of Air France Flight 447. Thank you so much for being with us, sir. DAVID GALLO, WOODS HOLE OCEANOGRAPHIC INSTITUTION: Thanks, Carol. My pleasure.

COSTELLO: Well, David, it took five days to find the wreckage of that plane and nearly two years to find the flight data recorder, the so- called black box. So how daunting is this mission?

GALLO: Well, it took five days to find the first wreckage on the surface of the ocean. It took two years to find the site on the sea floor of the aircraft and then the black box. The search area we have got looking at now, it is at least the range of the plane from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. It is almost the entire North Atlantic. It is like going from Honolulu to Los Angeles and Los Angeles to New York. It's huge.

The first thing we would want to know as underwater experts, what is the water depth, what does the see surface look like. What does the seabed look like? Is it mountainous and that area includes some of the flattest and some of the deepest and steepest places on earth. We need some shred of evidence of that plane on the sea surface before we can begin to do what we do best.

COSTELLO: Is there a shred of evidence right now?

GALLO: No. Again, I wake up every morning thinking, at least we have something to go by. Then, everything gets refuted. Why would they do this to get it to the Andaman Islands? If it was running for five hours, it is a lot shorter than that. If they landed and left the plane running. I don't know what the focus is on those islands. If it is those islands, the sea floor can be very tricky if it is in the water around those islands.

We just need to have something to cling onto. At Air France 447, it was the last known position, as we heard the previous, your guest say that last all right, good night, if that is the last known position, that's a great place to start. We should at least have a look beneath that place on the sea floor.

COSTELLO: But I thought they already looked there.

GALLO: I don't know. I have no knowledge of that. On the surface, they have looked. Have they looked beneath the surface to see if there is anything? Knowing where the plane isn't at this point becomes very important information. While we are expanding the search area, I would hope there is a team underwater scouring the floor of the Gulf of Thailand having a look and seeing if there is anything there so we can at least cross that off.

My sense is we need a big white board with some nice new Sharpies and on the left side only the facts that we know are true and real and we can build a program and then on the right side, all the things that need to be tracked down. Not a lot of evidence to go by.

COSTELLO: OK, so I'm going to throw something else into the mix that's confusing. Chinese researchers recorded this sea floor event in the waters around Malaysia and Vietnam about an hour and a half after the missing plane's last known contact. Do you put much stock in this?

GALLO: Well, again that is a lead that needs to be checked out. Is it a seismometer, a listening device -- that's where the earthquake occurred. We have volcanic activity and earthquake activity. An expert could tell the difference. It is a lead that needs to be checked out.

COSTELLO: So you are an expert oceanographer. You have handled these situations before. Has anyone reached out to you?

GALLO: We have offered, our president, Susan Avery, has offered assistance through our State Department and we haven't heard any requests. We are standing by if we can be of help to help as much as we can.

COSTELLO: That's great. Thank you so much for being with us, David Gallo. I appreciate it.

GALLO: Thank you, Carol.

COSTELLO: Still to come, recreating what may have happened on Flight 370. Martin Savidge is at the controls of a Boeing 777 simulator. Good morning, Martin.

MARTIN SAVIDGE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Carol. Yes, we are just about to take off from Kuala Lumpur just as 370 did on that fateful night. We are going to fly the same route. It is a simulator. There is so much to learn, stay with us.

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COSTELLO: While there is so much we don't know about the disappearance of Flight 370, we can show you what it's like inside the massive jet cockpit. Martin Savidge is at the controls of a Boeing 777 simulator. He is joined by pilot trainer, Mitchell Casado. Welcome back both of you. So Martin, just take us through this once again, the simulation of this flight.

SAVIDGE: Let me tell you what we are doing right now, Carol. Remember, it is a simulator. What is happening right now is Mitchell Casado is the pilot. He is in the left seat. We are on the ground in Kuala Lumpur. It is nighttime. This is the same circumstance that the Malaysia Airlines 370 was at. We are beginning to take off. We are heading down the runway. Everything you see Mitchell doing is everything that the pilot and co-pilot would have been doing.

I'm in the co-pilot seat. It is designed to mirror exactly the course. In fact, Mitchell was just putting in all the coordinates that we will follow. We have followed their course. We will go with their altitude and move at the plane's speed. All of this to design and give you the feel of what they were going through. We can only go so far.

There is the point where the plane simply seems to have stopped and we have had these very mixed reports as to what was and what was not going on. I'll point out a couple of things. This is the main navigation tool here. It is the course. It is the highway in the sky. I believe it has been referred to. We are on that course. We are now climbing in elevation. Here is where you see the height. We are going over 800 feet approaching 1,000. Here is our speed. The goal is to eventually get to 35,000 feet.

That's the last known altitude we knew and very shortly, here, Mitchell is going to put us into autopilot because the plane was flying at auto-pilot when it was last referenced. This was everything as it was happened as it was happening that night as we knew it. Let me point out something pretty important here. The transponder. It was apparently for some reason off. Why did it go off?

Here it is, this little device, looked small, make look innocuous, vitally important. Mitchell, tell us again the reason the transponder is so important?

MITCHELL CASADO, PILOT TRAINER, 777 COCKPIT SIMULATOR: It's vitally important because it's the -- it's what the air traffic controllers on the ground used to identify the aircraft. They need to predict where that is going to go and be 5, 10 miles down the road to keep it separated.

SAVIDGE: Remember it's a very crowded sky out there, Carol, so you need to identify, you need to know who is out there so you can communicate. That's what the transponder does. Can you turn it off and let me demonstrate, three clicks to the left over this little knob and now it is off. It doesn't mean we are invisible. The plane will still appear as a blip, right, Mitchell, on the radar.

We don't know who that blip is and we don't know what their intentions are. Like driving the wrong way down the highway essentially in the minds of air traffic controllers. Let me put it back on. I will show you something else you can do with this. Say you were hijacked, there is way for the pilot and co-pilot to communicate without getting on the radio. They can enter a code. I'll do that. I won't enter the code.

You can enter a code like this. Now, the aircraft is sending out an alert that everybody on the ground, alarms and red flashing lights say, we have a plane that's been hijacked. There is no account that signal was ever sent -- Carol.

COSTELLO: What about the data reporting system because apparently that was shut down as well, 14 minutes after -- no, at 1:07 on Saturday, the data reporting system was shut down and 14 minutes later, that transponder switch was turned off. Tell us about the data reporting system.

SAVIDGE: You know, first of all, there are a lot of things on this airplane that are sending out data. That can be a little broad in that term. Sometimes it has been confusing. We are not sure what it is. Mitchell, explain, what are the various things transmitting out information.

CASADO: You have ACAR to send short but vital messages to the ground. OK, so we use that the same way you would use a text on the phone. The ground wants to let you know, we have a problem. Maybe a volcano has erupted. You need to deviate 20, 30 miles around the course. Maybe we need to tell them we have a sick passenger especially useful when we are out of the HF range.

SAVIDGE: You also mentioned the engines transmitted data independent of what the pilot is doing. Just to say what their pa parameters are at the time.

CASADO: We send that to the maintenance personnel on the ground so that they can keep track of how those engines are performing over their life span.

SAVIDGE: The important thing to remember, Carol, is that shutting those systems off, the radio and the ACARD system off, that is not easily done, it is not an on/off switch, is it?

CASADO: If you are going to shut down, we call this box, the FMC, you have to have an intimate knowledge of the architecture of this system. It is not an on/off switch. You have to go in there. It is many key strokes to delete the flight plan. When you put a flight plan in here. It tunes in automatically and you don't have to delete all the radio signals and radio stations.

SAVIDGE: What we are saying is that if those systems were shout shut down as has been reported, it means the pilot or co-pilot was intentionally doing it or somebody that knew their way around a 777, 200 flight deck.

COSTELLO: Interesting so I'm going to take a break, but before I go, how far into the flight are you now?

SAVIDGE: Well, we have just taken off. So, Mitchell, where are we?

CASADO: We're passing 18,000 feet. So this is the point where we would transition to what we call high-level air space. It is just about another 10-15 minutes before we transition to the north/northwestern shore of the Malay Peninsula and about another 50 or 45 minutes before they get to the point where they lost contact.

COSTELLO: We'll let you fly on. I have got to take a break. Martin Savidge, Mitchell Casado, stick around. We will continue this conversation and see you in a minute.

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COSTELLO: All right, let's return to our discussion on the last known moments inside the cockpit of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. CNN's Martin Savidge and pilot trainer, Mitchell Casado are in a Boeing 777 simulator. And before we get to you, Martin, I just want to take people through the timeline again.

So the plane took off from Kuala Lumpur at 12:41 a.m. on Saturday. At 1:07, the data reporting system shut down. Fourteen minutes later, the transponder shut down at 1:21. At 2:40, the plane lost contact with air traffic control. That's about all we know. So, you are on board this simulator and you have taken off from Kuala Lumpur. Where are you now?

SAVIDGE: We just reached a cruising altitude of 35,000 feet. While you were in commercial break would have been the time I would have gotten on the address system and told everybody, you can, if you want, unfasten your seat belts, get up and walk around the cabin. That would have been announced. The plane is basically now in automatic pilot mode and let me show you this. This is basically your navigation system. See this one that says BTOD, is the last-known reference point.

CASADO: We are about 180 miles away.

SAVIDGE: Just so the audience know, Carol, the whole idea is we plugged everything in from the information we had the knowledge of that flight. So it's on its way from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. Let me point out something here. I mentioned we are on automatic pilot that's why you don't see us touching anything. If you deviate it from course, if this plane turns, here's the way it would happen. We would turn off the automatic pilot.