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Investigators Shifts to Pilots, Crew; Dow Up Nearly 200 Points After Crimea Vote; Satellites and the Search for Flight 370; Obama Signs Executive Order Blocking Assets, Entry to U.S. for Russian Government Officials

Aired March 17, 2014 - 10:00   ET

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

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CAROL COSTELLO, CNN ANCHOR: Good morning. I'm Carol Costello. Thank you so much for joining me. Could Malaysia Flight 370 have been flying less than a mile above the ground during the time it disappeared or at least part of the time? A new report from the "News Straits Times," a Malaysian newspaper is raising that possibility. The report suggests the flight flew down to 5,000 feet and across at least three countries.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

FARRAH NAZ KARIM, EDITOR, "NEWS STRAIT TIMES": If it did pass the last point of detection, how did it pass through this area without being detected? The terrain obviously has to be up north in the search. When you go that low, you would have to have the kind of a knowledge to fly to your destination.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COSTELLO: This morning, Malaysian officials announced Australia would take the lead in searching the Indian Ocean. Another bit of information, the head of Malaysia Airlines believes it was the co- pilot that said those last words to air traffic controllers, "All right, good night."

So it has been ten days now. We are digging deeper with our panel of correspondents, analysts and guests, you see them all there. But we begin our coverage with Martin Savidge in a 777 flight simulator along with flight instructor, Mitchell Casado.

All right, Martin, this theory that this plane could have flown 5,000 feet over three countries, it just doesn't sound possible to me?

MARTIN SAVIDGE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: I think you are right, Carol. That's the simulation we've plugged into this simulator now. We've taken the northern route, which has been discussed. So we are in Pakistan essentially flying northbound and even though the altimeter says we are 5,700, we are actually only 730 feet above the ground because it is so mountainous in this particular region. We have set it up so it is daylight. From the view of the cockpit, it seems like you are almost flying down in the dirt from the perspective of the pilot, which, in this case, is Mitchell. What's it like to try to navigate here?

MITCHELL CASADO, FLIGHT INSTRUCTOR: Extremely treacherous terrain, very high-speed, unforgiving. It is very difficult to control. I can't imagine how difficult it would be at night.

SAVIDGE: To do this manually, you are not going to do this kind of flying with the automatic pilot. If the time was right, they did it at night, feeling your way through those mountains with a commercial airliner. It would seem nearly impossible. Testing that theory with a simulator that reflects everything that a real triple 777 would do, this seems unlikely.

COSTELLO: OK, so if the plane really did fly up to seven hours after it lost contact with air traffic controllers, how would a plane that large evade radar detection? Any theories?

SAVIDGE: Yes, there are a bunch of theories out there. I think one is, of course, that they took a path like this, that they tried to stay low, that the pilots had trained maybe on another simulator and practiced over and over until they really knew it down to where they could almost do it in their sleep. That's one theory.

Another theory is shadowing another airliner. Turn off your transponder and get near that airliner so any radar blip you come up as is interpreted as being a regular commercial airliner. It's sort of hiding in the wide-open. The question is, could that really be done? It makes an interesting theory. We are trying to figure out if we can simulate that one to just try it.

Another idea, just turn your transponder off. Flying on the regular commercial highways in the sky, you might not be picked up as being a threat. Military would say it has to be a commercial airliner at that altitude in that room. Maybe the general aviation would ignore it. It is hard to say. There are all sorts of theories. We are trying as many as we can plug in.

COSTELLO: OK, so there was no extra fuel on board. So, by now, the plane would have to be on the ground somewhere and wouldn't someone have seen it, know it, suspected there might be a big plane where it wasn't supposed to be?

SAVIDGE: Right. That gets us back to what we are doing here. Flying at the 5,000 foot level. You are going to raise a lot of attention. On the ground, a big commercial airliner like this is going to be making a lot of noise. We do pass over sometimes populated areas. The passengers are going to notice they are flying at tree top level. You think they are going to be communicating with someone on their cell phones. So, sure, after so much time, it is impossible to believe that no one has said anything, if, in fact, this plane has touched down on the ground.

COSTELLO: Martin Savidge and pilot, Mitchell Casado, thanks as usual.

Investigators agree whoever commandeered that plane though knew exactly what they were doing. They knew the intricacies of flying a Boeing 777. So finally Malaysia investigators are focusing on who was on board the flight.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

COSTELLO (voice-over): Finally, more than a week after Flight 370 vanished, Malaysian plane clothes officers searched the homes of both pilots, the first, 27-year-old Fariq Abdul Hamid. The co-pilot lived with his parents and according to the CEO of Malaysia Airlines utter the last words to air traffic controllers at 1:19 a.m. last Saturday, all right, good night.

AHMAD JAUHARI YAHYA, MALAYSIA AIRLINE CEO: Initial investigations indicated it was the co-pilot who basically spoke the last time it was recorded on tape.

COSTELLO: The interesting twist here, at 1:07 a.m. a full 12 minutes before Hamid's final words, one of the plane's ACARS or communication systems had already been shut off. These are pictures of Hamid on a previous flight. There is nothing obviously suspicious about him except for an incident in 2011 when two Australian passengers say he allowed them inside the cockpit on a 2011 flight from Thailand to Malaysia. Neighbors said this about Hamid's mother.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: When we do the prayer, almost every day, every night. I pray for her and the family. I think he is quite good -- patient.

COSTELLO: Investigators also searched the pilot's home, Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah. They carted out his homemade flight simulator.

PETER CHONG, MISSING CAPTAIN'S FRIEND: He is a very sociable person, a person that loves people and enjoys his work. As far as his job as a pilot, he is definitely a very committed, professional pilot.

COSTELLO: Zaharie's family posted a YouTube tribute to their father, describing Captain Shah as loving, reflective, generous, cool, sporting, intelligent, supportive, and the list goes on and on. You see the t-shirt he is wearing in this photo. It says, democracy is dead. He wore it at a May, 2013 rally on Kuala Lumpur where supporters protested charges of vote tampering by the majority party.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

COSTELLO: Which may mean something. It may mean nothing. Joining me now is Mary Schiavo, former inspector general for the Department of Transportation, and a CNN aviation analyst. She is also an attorney for victims of transportation accidents. Good morning.

MARY SCHIAVO, CNN AVIATION ANALYST: Good morning.

COSTELLO: All right, well, let's talk some more about these pilots because there is nothing overtly suspicious about them, is there?

SCHIAVO: Not at all. The fact that the co-pilot made the last transmission is even more ordinary. Because usually, the pilot not flying, works the radios so we know the caption was flying. The co- pilot was doing the radios. That's completely normal as normal as can be and saying all right, good night. You know, in the cockpit, you exchange pleasantries sometimes. I have been wished happy birthday. There is just nothing suspicious about that.

He had the opportunity to say something if -- there are codes that you can utter if you're in duress or there is a problem on the plane or a hijack code. And apparently, all right, good night, was not any kind of a code. It was just a pleasantry.

COSTELLO: Well, here is the thing. He said that, all right, good night at 1:19 a.m. on Saturday. Twelve minutes before, one of the communications systems was shut off on the plane at what, 1:07 a.m. on Saturday. He didn't mention that and this also happened as Malaysia turned over control to Vietnam in the skies, right?

SCHIAVO: That's correct.

COSTELLO: So what does that mean? Tell us what that might mean.

SCHIAVO: Well, it is very confusing actually is what it means because ACARS, the aircraft communicating and reporting system, you don't really shut it off. You have to turn the circuit breaker, basically pull the fuse. Would that really shut it down or would it just alter the display in the cockpit? So there is a big question over what that really means because you don't just switch off ACARS. You do turn off the transponders. So there is a big question as to what was really happening with ACARS.

But if the screen went dead in the cockpit on ACARS, yes, they should have noticed it. Would they have told that to the air traffic controller, probably not because that's the communication with their company. It is just another mystery. But having the co-pilot say the last communication makes things seem more normal, not less normal.

COSTELLO: OK, so let's focus on Captain Shah now, 18,000 hours of flight experience, right? Everybody seems to have loved him. His family said he was a normal, great dad. He wasn't overtly religious. He wasn't overtly political. So as an investigator, where do you go with this?

SCHIAVO: Well, what they do and what they did in the Silk Air case, which the NTSB thought was pilot suicide. The United States court rule was mechanical. But they looked at things like problems at home, gambling debts, bank accounts, big debts, recent purchases of life insurance. They looked at personal problems that might indicate somebody would have an inkling to do something die or like a suicide or join some kind of a plot or any kind of association with any separatists or terrorist groups and they did that at 9/11?

Immediately at 9/11, they looked for that for everyone on the plane. Apparently, at least we have heard nothing from the investigators, none of that has come out. By this time in the 9/11 investigation, we had tons of information. Information was pouring forth about the plot and about these people, about these terrorists on the plane. The eerie silence here is almost deafening. It is so odd that there is nothing.

COSTELLO: But that tells you something too, doesn't?

SCHIAVO: Well, for me, I mean, sometimes nothing and I am an old prosecutor. I was a prosecutor for a number of years before I was an inspector general. Sometimes nothing is nothing. You look for every possible piece of evidence, but you also have to have motive. Remember every crime is motive and opportunity. Here, we are not finding any motive. Sometimes, at some point, if you cannot find any evidence, perhaps there isn't any to be found.

At some point, someone is going to have to wonder if we are maybe looking the wrong place. Why don't we see who else? Look at the Malaysian Airlines. If as much went wrong as they said, are they examining people who touched the plane, security at the Malaysian airport, people who catered the plane, people who loaded the baggage? At some point, you have to wonder if they are looking the wrong place.

COSTELLO: Yes, and one of those places that at least my gut tells me is wrong, this plane was flying at 5,000 feet over three countries to avoid radar detection. It just doesn't seem plausible. Does it seem plausible to you?

SCHIAVO: No. I think the problem is the satellite, not really pings, just data fixes. These satellite data fixes I think are better on directional but not on altitude. I think that the altitude, you know, the 45,000, the 23,000 feet. Now it's 5,000 feet. We haven't gotten the same indications on altitude yet. What I'm hoping they can do and I'm sure they are working feverishly on this. This is really important data. I think they have to smooth out the data that they are getting and clear out the white noise and see if they can't refine this altitude issue better.

At one point, it was 45,000 feet. You know, 5,000 feet, if it is true, who knows what's true. You have two paths, one north up towards very mountainous countryside and one south into the Indian Ocean. There is no way. If they are flying at 5,000 feet, you would have a tremendous fuel burn and they have to go into mountainous regions. They couldn't have done it. You would be out of fuel. You would be in the Himalayas.

COSTELLO: Mary Schiavo, thanks for your insight. Much appreciated.

Still to come in the NEWSROOM, 26 countries from around the world are assisting in the massive search for that vanished flight. So, well, let's go to CNN's Tom Foreman. He has the latest on the search area. Good morning.

TOM FOREMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Carol. We're going to take a look at not just all the countries that are looking, but all the possible places that people think this plane could have put down. As Mary pointed out, there are real challenges to reaching some of them. We'll have that in just a moment.

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COSTELLO: The Crimea referendum is giving a boost to Wall Street this morning. Stocks are actually soaring as investors largely expected the vote to break away from Russia and now the Dow is up triple digits as a result. So Alison, make sense of this for us. So why would Wall Street be going crazy because the people of Crimea voted to break away from Ukraine?

ALISON KOSIK, CNN BUSINESS CORRESPONDENT: Because for one, there wasn't any surprise in how this referendum ended up. This is exactly how Wall Street expected it. You are seeing Wall Street react to basically no surprise here. It is more of a relief. There is also more in play here because we got some economic reports. That really is a big reason why you are seeing the Dow up 179 points.

For one, we got a report on industrial output. It showed an increase in February. Also, a report on industrial production. That beat forecast plus a regional manufacturing report jumped this month. It's showing that after having a couple of months of really soft data coming out of the U.S. now we are seeing a pickup happened and you are seeing that relief happened in the numbers right now.

What's interesting is that Wall Street rarely focuses on those kinds of reports like industrial production and a regional manufacturing report, but you're seeing investors really hone in on these reports, Carol, because the data had been worrisome talking about jobs and housing and GDP. All of that has actually been blamed on the extreme weather conditions that have been happening across the country for the past couple of months.

There has been worry that maybe it wasn't the weather's fault. Well, now, seeing the pickup in these smaller economic reports, there is hope going on Wall Street that maybe, just maybe, it was the weather's fault in the first place -- Carol.

COSTELLO: All right, that makes more sense to me. Alison Kosik, many thanks. Another word on Ukraine and Crimea. The United States has imposed new sanctions on Russia. That's actually happening right now. The president issued an executive order that names 11 individuals, seven of them are in the Russian government and four others. It authorizes additional sanctions as the need arises.

Our Michelle Kozinski is on this story. She is actually in a White House briefing. When she gets out of that briefing, of course, we'll take her live from Washington and she can explain in more details. Let's get back to this new and stunning report though about Flight 370s flight path.

According to the "New Strait Times," that's a Malaysian newspaper, investigators believe the missing jet could have flown down to 5,000 feet in an attempt to avoid radar. CNN's Tom Foreman joins us now from D.C. So Tom, take us through such a scenario.

FOREMAN: Well, you know, Carol, we talk about all these countries that are involved in helping to search for this now. There are nearly as many countries that it might have run into if it went this route that people are talking about now. If the plane ended up coming out of the basic area, it vanished. We have expanded, expanded, expanded and now we're talking about this idea. It could have taken either a southern route or a northern route. The southern route is largely all about water, but it went up toward the northern route, let me list some countries that are along this route. You got Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia and China and then beyond India and Pakistan and Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. There are tremendous number of places if you take that 7-1/2 hour flight pattern.

But I do want to talk about a little bit about what Mary said a little while ago because even though that looks like a tremendous number of countries it could wind up based on 7-1/2 hours. Think about what Mary said about the flight of the plane like this. If you have a plane flying along at 35,000 feet using fuel for 7-1/2 hours, yes, it flies for a very long time. That is not true if you have a plane flying for a different level.

If you talk about a plane flying down let's say 5,000 feet or something like, when you talk about flying, now, you are burning an extraordinary amount of energy. You may be having 30 percent, 40 percent efficiency you had at 35,00o feet. Because remember planes like this are meant to fly at the stratosphere. We all live in the troposphere.

The troposphere has so much more air in it, so much more density of molecules that you burn a lot of energy. Plus all the maneuvering required to fly low to the ground as Mary pointed out, you are going over the Himalayas. If you were to apply that, you could fly for a long time in terms of hours, but you wouldn't cover nearly as much ground.

Based on that calculation, you start saying somewhere around Western China at the most. This plane is probably out of fuel or it is sitting on the ground somewhere during part of this process. We don't know which. You know, Carol, this is a constant calculation. In this case, you look at that big map, you see about 15 different countries it could wind up in. In reality, you start talking more about maybe seven of them with China, Western China, being the furthest point -- Carol.

COSTELLO: All right, Tom Foreman, thanks for making things so clear. I appreciate it.

All right, more breaking news for you this morning on the situation in Ukraine and Crimea, President Obama is expected to make a statement at 10:45 Eastern Time in about 40 minutes. He will probably announce more sanctions on Russia. Because as you know, there was a referendum over the weekend in Crimea supposedly they had 83 percent turnout and some 90 percent of voters in Crimea voted to break away from Ukraine and join Russia.

Russian troops have tightened its presence around Crimea. The president is about to announce new sanctions against more government officials and more wealthy individuals within Russia. He will probably announce those sanctions at 10:45 Eastern Time. Of course, we'll carry the president's remarks live.

Back to the plane now. Malaysia Airlines calls the search unprecedented. By using airplane signals, they are confident Flight 370 continued the flight long after the plane lost contact with radar. Let's bring in William Waldock. He is a safety science professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. Also joining the conversation, CNN aviation correspondent, Richard Quest. Welcome to you both.

Good morning. All right, William, first to you. They are examining all sorts of satellite systems. The latest is the theory that the plane somehow escaped radar detections and all satellite by flying at 5,000 feet for a period of time. Does that sound credible to you?

WILLIAM WALDOCK, PROFESSOR, EMBRY-RIDDLE AERONAUTICAL UNIVERSITY: Well, if they flew toward land, that aircraft is not equipped to be able to do omething like that. Military aircraft have the ground search radar and terrain following radar, which allows them to dodge things in their path like mountains. If they go down to 5,000 feet, particularly in the dark, I would say they are more likely to hit a mountain than anything else.

COSTELLO: Richard, tell us about the latest on these satellite signals that experts are picking up.

RICHARD QUEST, CNN AVIATION CORRESPONDENT: Well, what we now believe is the way in which this worked. The so-called pings or the so-called signals. What was happening is once the aircraft had made an established contact, with a stat light, then the satellite continues to look for that plane. It does so every hour we understand from MR- SAT people. What happened is even though the transponder and the ACARS system were disabled and not transmitting. Note, I don't say switched off.

Because we are still not sure. We still do not know why. All we know is that they were not transmitting. The satellite continues to look for it. In a very fundamental, basic sort of way, it is a bit like the plane is still discoverable. The plane is still got its antenna out. I am not suggesting it is blue tooth. It is the idea that the satellite looks for these things and sees, yes, there is a plane there. It can recognize which plane it is.

Now, in this case, Carol, the plane is not responding. It is not sending any data. These blips, these pings, whatever we want to call them, they are the satellite recognizing a plane and recognizing which plane it is. The problem is, from what we understand, it can't tell you exactly how high it is or even exactly where it is.

COSTELLO: So much confusing information. Gentlemen, I'm going to have to interrupt this conversation because we have to take our viewers live to Washington and Michelle Kosinski. As I told you a little bit ago, President Obama is expected to make some sort of statement at 10:45 Eastern Time about added sanctions on Russia in light of this referendum that took place over the weekend in Crimea where supposedly Crimean citizens voted overwhelmingly to split from Ukraine and join Russia. Michelle, what's the president expected to say?

MITCHELLE KOSINSKI, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Well, he signed an executive order just this morning listing individuals who now will be sanctioned under the two executive orders. The most recent one today. It expands the pool from which the U.S. can choose certain people to sanction in the future. There is a total of 11 people that the U.S. government has sanctioned.

They include deputies of the Russian parliament, an aide to President Vladimir Putin, one of his advisers, other people that the administration calls key players politically, as well as cronies of officials of the Russian government. When I mentioned that pool that they are expanding now as part of this executive order that includes Russian officials, arms dealers and anyone who materially supports those individuals.

So they made it very clear that sanctions will increase as Russian actions increase, but they felt like this sends a message, as they put it, that real costs will be imposed Russia if these actions continue. If diplomacy fails. Z. Just to make clear, these new sanctions are only meant to send a message, not to cause real pain for the Russian government.

These are real actions. First of all, to freeze assets and bar anyone from doing business with the people named. There are 11 named but the European Union named 21 individuals that they are going to sanctions. The U.S. and the E.U. have been working closely, senior administration officials said that the two lists people that will be sanctioned overlap but are not identical. Freezing of assets and barring entry and revoking visas to these individuals.