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Crisis in Ukraine; Mystery of Flight 370; California Earthquake

Aired March 17, 2014 - 15:00   ET

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

BROOKE BALDWIN, CNN ANCHOR: That was the team out of our Los Angeles affiliate KTLA executing the safety move. It's called drop and cover. Seismologists say the quake was a magnitude 4.4 and there were at least six aftershocks. I have to think I would have done the exact same thing there. No major damage reported, just a couple of fallen potted plants and no injuries, just rattled nerves.

Hour two. I'm Brooke Baldwin. And you are watching CNN's special coverage of the Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. CNN has a new timeline today which is really raising even more questions. So, the burning one of many now, was a crucial tracking system turned off before the co-pilot made that final transmission to the ground saying, all right, good night?

This of course would suggest that a plan was already under way to deliberately divert the plane when those words were radioed in. And one bit of potential evidence in this case is a flight simulator found in the home of a plane's pilot and police seized it over the weekend. They're examining it and looking for data and looking at those previous flight paths from that pilot.

CNN's Martin Savidge joins me because he is in a professional 777 cockpit simulator.

And, so, Martin Savidge, let me begin with this. I want to ask you first about this report that apparently this Flight 370, it dropped in altitude from something like 45,000 feet down to 23,000 at some point in time. Have you emulate that in that simulator and is that even possible?

MARTIN SAVIDGE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: We have tried to emulate that.

In fact, right now, we are just about at 45,000 feet, which is also difficult to climb to. We can't do it with the automatic pilot, so Mitchell is doing that manually. And the problem he's finding when he gets at this altitude is that it's a very delicate balance for this aircraft.

It was never meant to fly this high. You are always in this constant threat of either going way too fast or way too slow. Way too fast is dangerous because things start to go wrong in a hurry. Way too slow means you literally just fall of the sky.

So, just tell us, what do the controls feel like?

MITCHELL CASADO, PILOT TRAINER: Yes. The controls are very, very sensitive. It's very, very hard to control, very imbalanced.

SAVIDGE: OK. So, now let's try to emulate which is that dramatic drop. Push over the top, in essence kind of like the roller coaster here.

BALDWIN: Oh, wow.

SAVIDGE: And we are going to attempt to try to recreate what was described, which was the 45,000, 44,000-foot drop in minute.

(CROSSTALK)

BALDWIN: I hear the bells going off.

(CROSSTALK)

SAVIDGE: -- start to go off. There's a whole cacophony of them going off right now. What are the alarms? Just tell us what they're trying to say.

CASADO: We are approaching about 37,000 and 38,000 feet per minute down, and well above our maximum speed. Our airplane would be coming apart at this point.

SAVIDGE: That's the biggest problem you're going to find is, number one, I don't think you can make the plane fall that fast, at least not as far as that report said.

But the other thing is certainly it would not remain intact. Things would start to rip off, things like covering over the landing gear, things like antennas, things like vital flight services.

CASADO: Yes, absolutely, stuff you would need. You might even get to the point where the wing might start to come off at that speed, absolutely.

SAVIDGE: And yet it couldn't have happened by the next report, because then they say the plane actually leveled off, which trying to pull a plane out from something like this?

CASADO: No, you wouldn't be able to fly the airplane after. It wouldn't be airworthy. It would have been too far damaged. The plane would have just crashed after that.

SAVIDGE: That is not even taking into account, Brooke, what would have happened to the passengers. The g-forces alone could have been lethal.

BALDWIN: Wow. And that's one of the questions. It's, could a pilot have practiced that kind of maneuver? And just listening to you and your teacher there, Mitchell, saying, no, not at all. That was something.

Let me ask you this, because the reason we are talking to you in a simulator is because the pilot had a simulator in his home. We know police are grabbing that simulator and looking through the simulator. First of all, how much does this kind of thing cost? I can't imagine it's very cheap.

CASADO: These simulators, the simulator that we're in? Yes, this simulators about a quarter of a million dollars, a little bit more all tricked out the way it is, and the simulator, it goes up. You can really go nuts with simulators.

SAVIDGE: Yes. This one essentially is all the mechanisms that you find inside of a 777 attached to a very sophisticated computer.

The one that was inside of I believe the pilot's apartment there, a different matter, but still very sophisticated tool.

CASADO: Very much. There's all kinds of additions that can get in your simulators and you can buy these controls to get the tactile feel of the controls. That can run you well into the thousands of dollars. I would imagine this guy's simulator must have cost upwards of $5,000, $6,000.

SAVIDGE: But it is a computer, most Brooke, and that's the vital part, because you say it could have a lot of evidence or a lot of information.

CASADO: Absolutely. It's storing all that information. Everything he did has to leave a footprint.

(CROSSTALK)

BALDWIN: And we know police -- we know investigators are looking at the footprints to rule this guy out and say he is absolutely innocent or perhaps not. We just don't know that yet.

Martin Savidge and Mitchell, thank you both very much inside that simulator here.

And back to the timeline that we are really focusing on piecing these bits and moments together -- much of the focus centers on the minutes following the last transmission from that system that sends data about the plane.

Let's open this up to Les Abend. He's a 777 pilot and contributing editor for "Flying" magazine, and Buck Sexton, former CIA officer and national security editor for TheBlaze.com.

Gentlemen, welcome.

And, Les, I have seen you fielding many a question, so let me just jump in on this, because you have flown one of the jets and do you think it's possible for the aircraft as we have this could be a possibility that this thing got to, as we have looked at the map, Kazakstan, Turkmenistan, that region of the world -- could it have gone that far, A., and landed and, B., landed undetected?

LES ABEND, CONTRIBUTING EDITOR, "FLYING": Well, yes, it could have got that far. Could it have gone undetected? I doubt it very much.

There's just -- the radar picture -- even as a primary target as we call it without the transponder, assuming that was the issue, you would still be able to track that airplane.

BALDWIN: I heard you, Les, talking and describing piloting the plane is almost like -- it's like a laptop. It is very sophisticated and the notion of the pilot having the knowledge to, I don't know, if you can even flip off ACARS and cease that information from going to the ground or certainly turning off the transponder.

Is that something highly sophisticated or is that something as a pilot you would know?

ABEND: The ACARS is not something that we generally utilize as far as changing its configuration.

The only time we do anything with it is if we're not getting -- we know we are not getting a transmission from it. And it can either receive signals from VHF standard communication, people like air traffic control, or from the satellite. If it's not doing that, we can possibly try to fix that, but as far as disabling it, that's not a function that we would even consider performing. It is possible. It can be done.

BALDWIN: OK. Buck, you know this part of the world, back to my initial question to Les. When we talk about the possibility of this flight trying to get as far as its fuel could have taken it towards the Yemen, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan region, potentially would have to fly over major, major nations, which obviously have detecting capabilities of this plane, but do you think they really would want to admit they saw the plane on their radar, would they want to admit sophistication that they have?

BUCK SEXTON, NATIONAL SECURITY EDITOR, THEBLAZE.COM: Governments not telling us everything they know on this issue I think is probably happening.

It's definitely happening in the case of the Malaysians who at this point I think the best option for them would be that they are actually running an active disinformation campaign because the alternative is that they are so incompetent that I think people would be scared to fly out of there for sometime.

As for the radar picture, and where this plane might be able to go, some of the countries that are being floated out there as possibilities for the airspace that this plane might have entered are absolutely I think beyond the pale. They would have definitely gotten picked up.

This is a big bus in the sky and it's a lot harder to get under the radar with this kind of thing than I think most people realize. And so really while the search I know has extended to the vast area stretching all the way up into the Stans and then down into the southwest of the Indian Ocean -- or southeast of the Indian Ocean. Clearly, there really should be I think much more of a search over open water, because this is not getting past people's radars.

BALDWIN: Les, how much of this -- you have been watching the coverage and there is so much we don't know. I think you have to focus on the facts. When you focus on the facts, do you feel like this is more mechanical or is this more commandeering a plane?

ABEND: In previous discussions, I believe -- and this is a contention like everybody else's -- is that this was a mechanical issue. Something occurred to start shutting down systems in the important part of the airplane, which is the E&E compartment, the electronics and engineering compartment, which is eight feet behind the cockpit and below the galley.

And if it was a fire, this is a scenario that I keep bringing up, who knows if that's a possibility. But it would start shutting down a lot of systems. As you brought up, I have said that this is a laptop, flying laptop computer, and it depends upon internal signals to make it fly, including some software.

(CROSSTALK)

BALDWIN: But if it was mechanical, there is not a single piece of debris and no tail or no cushion. Nothing.

How do you explain that? They have been searching for 10 days.

(CROSSTALK)

BALDWIN: Go ahead, yes.

ABEND: Have they been searching over land?

(CROSSTALK)

SEXTON: I think the absence of a distress signal is something that has to be look at pretty closely.

Also, as I'm sure your other guest can tell you, this is supposed to be one of the safest air frames in the sky. For it to have that level of catastrophic failure without anybody even being able to get so much as peep out that they were in trouble seems to be a bridge too far.

But let's honest. At this point, we are not analyzing incomplete data. We are often analyzing incorrect data, which makes this that much harder. The governments that have been feeding us information, they keep changing their tune. Over the weekend, it became clearly a human error and now it could in fact I guess be mechanical error, although I think somebody on the plane had a lot to do with what happened here.

The question is just who and why they did it.

BALDWIN: The timeline continues to change. It's like this whole thing is fluid and then you still have the 239 passengers and their loved ones. We don't know where they are.

Buck Sexton and Les Abend, gentlemen, thank you so much.

Got to break away and get to the breaking news here. We are getting news and an update. It's an update of the United States' involvement in the search for the missing plane. Let's go straight to the Pentagon to Barbara Starr.

Barbara, what are you learning about this?

BARBARA STARR, CNN PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT: Well, good afternoon, Brooke.

What we now know is several U.S. military officials are saying that Navy ship the USS Kidd that has been searching for so many days will be leaving the search area in the coming days. The Kidd is going to return to its routine Navy deployment in the region and the P-8, the long-range Navy surveillance aircraft, is going to move down to Perth, Australia.

On the face of it, it is a reduction in the U.S. effort, but there is a strategy behind all of this. The Kidd has been searching pretty much to the north the Bay of Bengal and the Strait of Malacca. A lot of that water has now been pretty thoroughly searched. Australia taking over the southern sector where the southern radar track goes. That is hundreds of thousands of miles of open ocean.

What officials are telling us is the long-range surveillance aircraft will be much more efficient, much faster in searching that vast amount of ocean space in the southern Indian Ocean than the Navy ship could be. It's going to be on its way home. The aircraft will move down to Perth, Australia, and we are under the agreement announced earlier today going to start seeing the Australians take over for the Malaysians a good deal of the searching in that southern Indian Ocean -- Brooke.

BALDWIN: Barbara Starr, thank you so much on the U.S. involvement there on the search here.

We have a lot more coming up on the disappearance of this Malaysian Flight 370. Let's take a closer look at cell phones on board the plane, because obviously there are apps to find your lot of phone? Why can't phones be used to find the flight's current location? Were people not on board with the cell phone and were they not able to tweet, to e-mail and to be on Facebook? We will explore that angle. I know a lot of you are wondering that.

Also ahead, we will hear from the emotional girlfriend of the American who was on board this missing plane. She is so hopeful. She believes he is alive somewhere. She has his bag packed and ready to roll as soon as he is found.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I have an outfit for him in my backpack, because he wouldn't want to wear his dirty old stuff anymore, I'm sure.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BALDWIN: The disappearance of Flight 370 has sparked a lot of talk about technology. It's so much part of our daily lives and it has people asking all kinds of things, like why can't a cell phone provider used the find my phone app to find a passenger's phone?

It sounds simple, a lot of people wondering that. We will put the question to Lance Ulanoff. He's the chief correspondent and editor at large for Mashable.com.

Lance, we will get to that in a moment. I feel like that has been asked. Let me get to this. When you are on board a plane, explain to me why with these 239 souls on board, not a single person it seems hopped online, used a cell phone. Was there no Wi-Fi capability?

LANCE ULANOFF, MASHABLE.COM: One of the things we are not certain of is whether or not there was Wi-Fi capability. In the business class on Malaysia Airlines, they have sort of a rudimentary messaging system where you do use some e-mails and text messages, but not much else. I don't even think you can browse the Web.

There are 239 passengers and 153 of them were Chinese and they were probably using what is called Weibo, which is a very popular social network there, which again puts a level -- it's sort of a wall between us and the information. We can't really search for it to know.

But here's the technical reality. If you are flying at 35,000 feet and going about 600 miles an hour, you are not going to be able to attach to a cell phone tower. The cell phone towers have sort of a limited range. One might go maybe three miles. That's half the distance in height that you might need and most of them are pointing at the ground. The other thing to keep in mind is where they were flying not densely populated areas.

So, there wouldn't be a lot of towers for them even to ping. And of course don't forget you are supposed to turn your airplane into airplane mode.

(CROSSTALK)

BALDWIN: Supposed to. Let's assume not everyone did.

ULANOFF: That's -- well, here's the thing. I have to agree with you that I am shocked that not a single piece of communications has come out, even if the moment the plane turned a different direction, everybody didn't flip on their phones and try. But they may not have been able to get a signal.

At this point, it seems as if there is nothing that got out of that airplane from the technology within.

BALDWIN: It boggles my mind when we are in an age of such connectivity, I hop on Facebook and I know what my friends are eating for breakfast. I don't care, but still it's like everyone is spewing all this information and how we don't have a blip of that from this plane, I don't get it. Go ahead. Go ahead.

(CROSSTALK)

ULANOFF: I was going to say, you are absolutely right. We live in a 24-hour connected world. That's our expectation.

But you get on an airplane, you know it's dicey. You say, do they have Wi-Fi? If they don't, you are kind of -- you're disconnected from the world for up to five or six hours. That's not unusual. And over the air -- flights that go over the water from continent to continent, forget it, no Wi-Fi. Very unusual. Also, no cell towers in the ocean.

BALDWIN: I suppose we are spoiled here if we're flying just within the domestic United States here.

ULANOFF: That's right.

BALDWIN: Lance Ulanoff with Mashable.com, correspondent, chief correspondent and editor, thank you so much for joining me today.

ULANOFF: My pleasure.

BALDWIN: Let me move along because we are just getting some news in to us at CNN.

A popular fashion designer was found dead in a New York apartment today. L'Wren Scott was also Mick Jagger's girlfriend.

Alexandra Field is live in New York with more on this story -- Alexandra.

ALEXANDRA FIELD, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Brooke, they are investigating this as an apparent suicide.

L'Wren Scott, 49 years old, was found in her New York City apartment, according to a law enforcement official, hanging by a scarf that had been tied to a doorknob. Scott had texted her assistant we're told this morning around 8:30 asking the assistant to come by and the assistant arrived at the apartment around 10:00. That is when she found Scott, a noted fashion designer, the longtime girlfriend of Mick Jagger.

Law enforcement sources say there were no signs of force entry, but that there was not a suicide note either. We are hearing from Mick Jagger camp and they have released a statement. A spokesperson had said Mick Jagger said he is completely shocked and devastated by the news.

And really the entire fashion world left reeling by this loss, again, Scott just 49 years old. She has had really a noted career and very much in the spotlight. She grew up in Utah and she was a model in her younger years, going to Paris, later becoming a stylist in Hollywood and even designing some costumes for various films. She then started her own label, L'Wren Scott, back in 2008.

It's really a big loss here, a lot of people in the Twitterverse expressing just their shock and their sadness for the loss of really a truly great talent, Brooke.

BALDWIN: And 49 years young. Our thoughts with her family, of course. Alexandra, thank you so much.

We will have much more on our special coverage here of this missing plane. Seems like we are getting new information into where the missing Malaysian flight could be and what could have happened. We have the timeline and it takes a closer look at just the facts from day until now. The facts. That's where we want to focus.

The other big story we're watching, the Obama administration announces sanctions against Russia today. The move comes just hours after Crimea voted to secede from Ukraine. And my next guest says President Obama has four days to stop Russian President Vladimir Putin. We will discuss that deadline and what happens if it's missed.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BALDWIN: According to its parliament, Crimea became an independent state today. With Russia's poised to gain it, Ukraine lose it, the U.S. and Europe are doing what they can to stop it by putting pressure on Russia.

And just minutes ago, Russia's Vladimir Putin signed a decree acknowledging the sovereignty of the Republic of Crimea. And as Russia proceeds to do this, take this course, so does the United States, because today we heard from the president, President Obama announcing expanded sanctions against Russia specifically targeting 11 people for their part in the crisis in Ukraine.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: As an initial step, I'm authorizing sanctions on Russian officials, entities operating in the arms sector in Russia and individuals who provide material support to senior officials of the Russian government.

And if Russia continues to interfere in Ukraine, we stand ready to impose further sanctions.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BALDWIN: The European Union also announced its own list of 21 individuals penalized for the very same reasons.

The West is also not recognizing Sunday's referendum in Crimea; 96.7 percent chose to join Russia with the turnout of 83 percent. But we are hearing from one White House official that some of the ballots were pre-marked for these voters in Crimea.

Joining me now, senior correspondent for The Daily Beast Josh Rogin. He just wrote this piece this morning, "Obama has four days to stop Putin in Crimea," which details how a cease-fire between Russia and Ukraine ends this Friday.

Josh, as I bring you on and the news today that the president and the White House officially naming names in these sanctions, stopping short of naming Putin himself, you have some news you are about to share with me with a list from Putin. JOSH ROGIN, "NEWSWEEK"/DAILY BEAST: Right. According to my diplomatic sources -- and this is first on CNN -- President Putin is about to unveil his own list tomorrow.

The Russians are working on this feverishly behind the scenes. It's going to include some U.S. officials, some U.S. senators, some U.S. congressmen. One person who will be on the list is Dick Durbin, the minority leader -- I'm sorry -- the majority leader -- majority whip in the Senate.

BALDWIN: Senate.

ROGIN: Senator Durbin, not only in addition to being a Senate leader, introduced a resolution criticizing Russia's invasion of Crimea.

He has been very tough on the Russians. And this is seen as a direct retaliation for President Obama, naming the head of the upper chamber of the Russian State . We are looking at a list that mirrors the American list.

Other senators who might be on the list, but I haven't confirmed yet, could be John McCain, Bob Menendez, Bob Corker. Officials that could be on the list include Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, who has a personal beef with President Putin, and who knows, there could be others as well.

BALDWIN: This is what you are getting from your sources, breaking the news here on CNN.

And as we're hearing about this volley back from Russia, let's talk about these sanctions from the U.S. that you wrote about in your piece. I believe the word you used was inconvenient. They are not severe enough to really stymie Putin, but inconvenient. How do you mean?

ROGIN: Right.

We should note here that the administration did two things today. They announced 11 individuals who would be sanctioned now. And then they announced that they're going to give themselves the power to sanction lots of other people later.

So, they could have more sanctions coming depending on what happens. But the sanctions that they have unveiled are not going to hurt Putin or his friends or the Russian government to -- in the next five days to convince them to change course. Nobody thinks that. Right?

When the cease-fire expires on Friday, there could be an open conflict between the Russian forces in Crimea and Ukrainian forces who are still in Crimea. What we see is Russia consolidating its power there and increasing its troop presence. And nothing that the administration did today addresses that directly. They seem to be working on two different time paths here. And that means that, although we are increasing the pressure on Russia, they don't seem to be blinking just quite yet. BALDWIN: Four days away from this cease-fire that you are reporting on here. We shall see if there is anything that can be done to stop from the Russians from grabbing Crimea, at least officially according to them.

Josh Rogin, Daily Beast, thanks for breaking the news with us. We appreciate it.

ROGIN: You bet.

BALDWIN: Coming up next, we're taking a closer look at the timeline of Flight 370, the Malaysia Ariel aircraft. We have heard a lot of theories, but what are the specific facts we know about this plane? How can investigators use that information to try to track it down where it could be and what might have happened?

Also ahead, you, the viewer, have a lot of questions about this. You have tweeted many of your questions. And we will ask an expert to answer them live coming up here on CNN.

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