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Inside a Boeing 777 Simulator; Could Lithium Batteries Have Played Role?; Chinese Report Seismic Event in South China Sea; Weather Conditions in Indian Ocean; Black Market for Fake Passports

Aired March 14, 2014 - 15:30   ET

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

MARTIN SAVIDGE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: And where we are, take a look at this. See all this blue, all these circles? Those are airports. Not just any airports, those are airports at which a 777-200 could land at. This is Vietnam.

So, what I'm basically pointing out to you is if there was an emergency, if there was a problem, very quickly, you can see that there a large number of potential airports they could get this plane down on the ground.

We know that didn't happen. We also know there was no emergency or distress signal that's been reported by anyone.

What we do know is that the transponder was apparently shut down. Let me show that to you.

Right here, this little device looks relatively small in the huge world of the dashboard of the airplane, but it's vitally important.

Mitchell Casado is the pilot here. This is basically what keep us in track with the ground people, right?

MITCHELL CASADO, PILOT TRAINER, 777 COCKPIT SIMULATOR: That's right. That's how we let the ground folks, the air traffic controllers, know where we are, where we're headed, where we came from.

SAVIDGE: Here's how you turn it off, Don, and again, you would never turn it off in flight, but it's simply. You would just make three clicks to this switch right here. It's off.

Doesn't mean we're invisible to radar. It does mean that we are no longer identifiable to radar.

Why do you have an on-off switch? When you are on the ground, you don't need a transponder on, so that's why you can do it.

Could you bump it and turn it off? No. No way. Was it deliberately turned off? We don't know. We do know that, at some point, it was disabled.

Don?

DON LEMON, CNN ANCHOR: Very interesting.

Martin Savidge, thank you. Appreciate that. And also Mitchell, as well.

Coming up, as this mystery grows, we are following some breaking news for you. The possibility that lithium batteries were in the cargo hold. They could have played a role in the plane's disappearance. Could've. They're looking into that.

We are talking to a former FBI agent and a pilot to see how these batteries could have impacted, if at all, a 777 airplane.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

LEMON: We are tracking one of the biggest mysteries in aviation history.

Right now, investigators are looking into whether lithium batteries could have played a role in the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.

Now, I want to bring in our justice reporter, Evan Perez, CNN law enforcement analyst Tom Fuentes. Both are in Washington. Arthur Rosenberg, an aviation lawyer, pilot and aviation engineer here with me on set in New York.

First to Evan, tell us about this lithium battery report.

EVAN PEREZ, CNN JUSTICE REPORTER: Don, right now, investigators here in the U.S. are trying to go through this latest information from Malaysia which indicates there were some lithium batteries that were in the cargo of this airplane.

Now, whether or not those caused a fire, they still don't know, but that is one thing being examined at this point. They don't know for sure whether this could explain it, but it is one of the things that they are looking at.

Now, there has been a problem previously with this lithium batteries. In 2010, there was a UPS plane crash in Dubai that was -- that they believe was caused by lithium batteries that were being carried in the cargo.

And, so, this is something that has been a concern for aviation safety officials around the world for sometime. The FAA, for instance, doesn't allow it in your checked baggage, spare batteries, lithium batteries, for this very reason.

There have been several fires, over a hundred of them, in the past couple of decades, so this is something that they are looking at. Again, this is one of the many theories they have.

As you and I have talked about before, there are some parts of this that are still not explained. For instance, why did the plane turn west from its course over the Gulf of Thailand and head towards the Indian Ocean? That is still not explained. We don't know.

The officials say that it does appear that someone had to pilot the plane and change course for it to go in that direction, but that is not explained by this, Don.

LEMON: I want to talk more with the pilot, with Dr. Rosenberg here with me in New York, a little bit more about that.

But, first, I want Tom Fuentes to weigh in on this new information regarding the lithium batteries.

Tom?

TOM FUENTES, CNN LAW ENFORCEMENT ANALYST: Hi, Don.

I think that really you would have a mutually exclusive situation. If there's lithium-ion batteries that begin a fire, if they start detecting smoke, they're going to look for the first place possible to land.

They're going to be reporting that they are battling smoke and a possible fire, as did the Swiss Air pilots when their entertainment system overheated over Canada.

Secondly, you would not be able to fly the plane or have a desire to fly that plane for another four hours if they had fire or smoke on that aircraft.

Now, if the batteries went so far as to cause catastrophic failure and cause that plane to come down, then that still doesn't explain the blips and pings and all of that that say the plane was still in the air for another four hours.

So, it's either one thing or the other as far as I'm concerned with those batteries.

LEMON: Arthur, do you agree? You and I have been talking about lithium batteries, the same thing that powers most of our cell phones, most of our devices.

ARTHUR ROSENBERG, AVIATION LAWYER: The lithium batteries in this --- conceivably in the cargo hold of this airplane were a lot different than these relatively -

LEMON: Much bigger and a different chemistry, but it seems --

ROSENBERG: Even these batteries can overheat and, on occasion, do burn.

Now, when you put that on steroids and you put a bunch of these Coca- Cola crate-size batteries in the cargo hold of an airplane, and if they overheat, they absolutely have the capacity to burn through the hull of a plane, electrical wire, and so on.

LEMON: Can I get you to go through a couple of these very quickly for me?

ROSENBERG: Sure.

LEMON: You've been providing us some great information. OK, so if officials are saying that they believe that the plane was structurally intact for another five hours after this contact, does that -- that doesn't explain this, right?

ROSENBERG: If you try to put the pieces of the puzzle together, so, what do we know? The plane was headed in a northeasterly direction. Communication stopped. The transponder was cutoff. It seems like it was intentional and purposeful.

The plane then turned around and headed back in a southwesterly direction.

If there were lithium batteries that were smoldering, they were getting heat warnings, temperature warnings, some anomalies in the airplane, pilots often return to their instinctual behavior, which would be, let's turn around and go back to where we came from.

LEMON: OK.

ROSENBERG: Which was only 45 minutes --

LEMON: OK, so, if so, how is it possible that no air traffic control tower ever asked the plane to identify itself if it was flying for five hours or if it landed somewhere?

ROSENBERG: I can't speak to the issue of whether they asked the plane to identify themselves, but when you start talking about transponders and what air traffic controllers see on the ground, there's a simple explanation of why the plane disappeared.

When you squawk-ident a transponder, you're basically saying, "This is me," to the controller on the ground. There is a highlighted moving airplane on the control radar screen which lightens up and he knows that's you.

Without that, you're a little dot that can be a bird and you're almost indiscernible with all that chatter on the radar.

LEMON: He can see you, but you are not unidentifiable. Is that what you were saying?

ROSENBERG: Absolutely.

LEMON: OK, very good. And we already talked about how, if the plane was underwater, the ACARS would not work.

ROSENBERG: It's not going to work.

LEMON: All right, thank you, guys. Thanks, everyone. Tom Fuentes, Evan Perez, Arthur Rosenberg, appreciate it.

Coming up, reports of a seismic event between Malaysia and Vietnam at the bottom of the sea on the same day and after Flight 370 disappeared. Could that have something to do with this mystery?

(COMMERCIAL BREAK) LEMON: We are following breaking news here on CNN. Investigators are looking into whether lithium batteries in the cargo hold could have played a role in the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.

Another angle investigators are looking into, reports of a sea-floor event in the waters not long after the jet's last point of known contact.

CNN's Brian Todd joins us now from Washington. Brian, who recorded this event and does it really prove anything?

BRIAN TODD, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Don, Chinese researchers say they recorded a so-called "sea-floor event" in the waters between Malaysia and Vietnam.

That event, according to the Chinese, happened about 72 miles northeast of the plane's last confirmed location, and they say it occurred about an hour and a half after the plane's last known contact.

Now, we've spoken to seismologists today. They say a sea-floor event means any kind of seismic energy located on the sea floor which could be caused by an earthquake or artificial impact.

There are two seismic monitoring stations in Malaysia. Now, the way the Chinese laid out their readings, those monitoring stations placed two circles on a map.

The circles intersected in two different places of possible seismic activity, and one of the places is near where the plane went missing. That's considered an area of low seismic activity.

There's -- that map there is where you see the two circles, two places where they intersect, could be two possible places of seismic events. The one place on the right hand side is near where the plane lost contact.

So, if anything happened there, it may well not be an earthquake, because that is low seismic activity right there.

Now, I spoke with Ved Lekic. He's a seismologist at the University of Maryland, asked him whether the missing plane could have hit that water in that point and caused seismic activity on the sea floor there.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

PROFESSOR VED LEKIC, SEISMOLOGIST, UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND: I would suspect this is not in fact due to the impact of a plane on the sea surface and is more likely to be a seismic event possibly located on this western side from the stations and not in the vicinity of where the plane actually lot of contact.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

TODD: Now, the U.S. Geological Survey just told us it detected a 2.7- magnitude seismic event just west of the Indonesian island of Sumatra, that second point where we tele-strated. That event happened right at that time.

The USGS says that's from a naturally occurring earthquake. The agency believes that's the seismic activity in question here, and they believe it's not related to the missing plane, Don.

LEMON: Brian Todd, thank you very much.

Our special coverage of the mystery surrounding Flight 370 continues. Still ahead, we're going to take a closer look at the new search area in the Indian Ocean. How deep is the area investigators are now focusing on?

And we're going to spotlight the chain of small islands that missing jet may have been headed towards.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

LEMON: Let's talk about sea conditions because they are playing a role in tracking the missing Boeing 777. The waves position and the current circulation all factor into where the plane could be if it landed crashed into the water.

I want to go now to CNN meteorologist Chad Myers for more on this perspective. So, Chad, what factors need to be taken into consideration during this particular search?

CHAD MYERS, AMS METEOROLOGIST: You know the ocean is a big place if you've been on a cruise ship ever in the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico is not even near the size of what we're talking about here, Don.

It's just a tremendous amount of square footage here and also now here. And the difference between where originally the plan was to take a look, from here, that's the original flight plan, so somewhere in here in the Gulf of Thailand, we're talking about 100-feet, maybe 150- feet deep. That's about all we get to here.

But now if the plane really did make that left-hand turn and out here into this part of the ocean, we're talking about 12,800 feet on average. That's just the average number here for how deep this plane, if it's on the ground, if it's somewhere else, it could be landed.

This is all speculation, but I just want you to know how shallow this is. That's why it's one color, under 200 feet. It's deep here. There are trenches and that's why we see what we see here.

And remember, Don, the plane had enough fuel on board to reach everywhere you see here, so I know we're focusing on what could have happened to the plane in the water, but there's still some potential that this plane was stealthy enough with everything turned off that it could have landed somewhere, some place that was preplanned, with no one there to see it.

LEMON: That is a giant area, not only in the ocean, not only in the waters, but also on land.

MYERS: It had so much fuel because it was going to go to Beijing, 2,800 miles worth of fuel.

LEMON: Let's stick to the water now.

MYERS: Yeah.

LEMON: Quickly, the conditions now in the Indian Ocean?

MYERS: Warm, that's good, 90 degrees in some spots, 87 the average. If people are in the water or in the rafts, there's at least that theory that it's warm enough that they're not hypothermic. That's some good news.

And there's not that much wave action here because we're not really into monsoon season. There are some currents, but the currents are one-to-two-miles-per-hour, just pushing things along, not creating turbulent, turbulent water.

If people are still alive, they have a chance of being alive a long time if, of course, they have fresh water to drink, Don.

LEMON: This is crazy. Where is this plane? Did it just fall off the face of the Earth? It's unbelievable that we're sitting here eight days later and still no sign of it.

Thank you, Chad.

MYERS: You're welcome.

LEMON: Appreciate it.

Coming up, two men boarded that flight with stolen passports. That's putting a spotlight on the black market for fake and stolen passports.

Is it more widespread than you might think? We'll examine that next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

LEMON: A major issue that's surfaced during this chaotic search for Flight 370, two passports.

Two men boarded the plane using stolen passports, and while there's no evidence that they had anything to do with terrorism, they represent a part of a big, big problem, black market passports.

Here's CNN's Zain Asher.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

TONY SALES, CONVICTED FRAUDSTER: It can take weeks to make a passport. It can take a few hours depending on the quality of the passport that the forger is actually making.

ZAIN ASHER, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Tony Sales spent 15 years forging passports in the U.K. before he was sent to prison in 2009.

SALES: By just gently picking the edge of a passport and now you can start to peal the passport back.

ASHER: Here he is changing the name on this passport to mine.

SALES: Anything can be faked. Someone actually made this passport. That means it can be repeated again.

You can see how close through to the picture we actually are.

ASHER: According to Interpol, approximately 40 million passports have been stolen since 2002, some of them sold illegally to people who look similar enough to the original bearer.

GIDEON EPSTEIN, FORENSIC DOCUMENT EXAMINER: Even if you look a little bit like that person, that's going to be enough.

ASHER: Others end up in the hands of counterfeiters.

SALES: There's a huge black market for stolen passports. It's absolutely huge. It's -- probably on a daily basis, an average fraudster buys five or six.

ASHER: But forensic document examiner Gideon Epstein says a counterfeit passport is more likely to raise red flags at airport security than a stolen one because many countries have implemented passport-security features to prevent alteration.

For example, the first page of the U.S. passport contains an image of an eagle with 13 arrows, while a fake passport might have just 11 or 12.

And watch as the letters "USA" change color under ultraviolet light.

BRENDA SPRAGUE, HEAD OF PASSPORT SERVICE, U.S. STATE DEPARMENT: We are looking to introduce a next generation passport that will even have additional forensic features.

But no matter now good you are, someone is always going to be trying to beat the system.

ASHER: Especially when it comes to theft. Not every country regularly checks Interpol's database to see if a passports is stolen.

Two men on Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 were allowed to board with passports that had been reported stolen in 2012 and 2013.

One solution, passports like these that contain a microchip with biographical data designed to prevent them from being used by the wrong person.

SPRAGUE: Border security officials all over the world can read that data and validate that you are who you say you are.

ASHER: But many countries, particularly in the developing world, are still behind on implementing them.

SALES: We've seen a lot of the new electronic passports come in that have made, definitely, forging a passport much more difficult, but of course, every system has weaknesses.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

LEMON: Zain Asher joins us now. Unbelievable, where did you find him?

ASHER: He's based in London, but what's interesting is that because of his history with passport forge, he applied for a visa to enter the U.S., but he was denied it. No surprises there.

But he now works to educate companies on passport fraud, on retail fraud, that kind of thing, so he got out of jail in 2010 and he's sort of since turned over a new leaf.

LEMON: Most people use them -- do they use it to get to a better place? They want to move? They want to change identities? Trafficking?

ASHER: So, back in the day, he would charge to make a top-quality fake passports, he would charge between $8,000 and $10,000 and he would basically go into a bank and basically withdraw money. He withdrew half a million pounds on his (inaudible).

LEMON: Unbelievable. Unbelievable. Thank you very much. Zain Asher, appreciate it.

Thank you so much for joining us. We appreciate you.

Bill Weir filling in for Jake Tapper now, and "THE LEAD" starts right now.