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Frustration Boils Over for Flight 370 Families; Search for Flight 370 Heads South; Data from Pilot's Simulator; Flight Data Reprogrammed?; Malaysia Fishermen Report Low-Flying Jet; Israel Tightens Air Security After Missing Plane

Aired March 19, 2014 - 09:00   ET

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

CHRIS CUOMO, CNN ANCHOR: His father had to save him from a car.

INDRA PETERSONS, METEOROLOGIST: What are you going to do with them?

(LAUGHTER)

CAROL COSTELLO, CNN ANCHOR: I don't know what to say to that. But I'm glad you're here with us today, John.

CUOMO: Nobody does. Nobody does.

BERMAN: Thank you. Appreciate it.

COSTELLO: Yes. Have a great day, guys.

NEWSROOM starts now.

Good morning, I'm Carol Costello. Thank you so much for joining me. It's been 12 days since Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 went missing and for the families of the missing passengers frustrations are boiling over. Despite headlines about search areas and flight paths and black boxes, despite the perceived inaction from the Malaysian government still at the heart of this story are people.

Someone's mother, father, fiancee today anger and desperation erupted. Take a look. Just hours ago a passenger's mother broke into a hotel conference room filled with reporters crying and carrying a banner, begging the Malaysian government to tell the truth, to bring her son back.

You don't need to speak Mandarin to feel her heartbreak.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: (Speaking in Foreign Language) We are victims' family from Beijing. We have been here for more than 10 days. There are more than 20 of us here.

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: (Speaking in Foreign Language) What have the Malaysian Airlines told you in the past? UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: (Speaking in Foreign Language) They just keep brushing us off, saying keep waiting and waiting for information. I don't know when we are going to wait until -- it's already 12 days, my dear. I don't know where my dear is, 12 days. My son, where is my son? Why don't you give me an answer? My son, it's already 12 days. I have been here for 10 days. I am among the very first ones to come here. They never answer the questions we raised every day. They just brushed us off.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COSTELLO: Moments after this, this happened.

The woman was dragged away by security and taken behind closed doors.

Atika Shubert was at that briefing in Kuala Lumpur when it all went down.

It's heartbreaking to watch, Atika.

ATIKA SHUBERT, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: It is. And -- it was truly a heart wrenching scream to hear that. And anybody who is a parent can just feel it. The anguish in that scream. So we asked for a response from the Malaysian officials that were there. They did briefly address it at the press conference in a question but we also got an official response from Malaysian Airlines and what Malaysian officials have told us is this.

They have said, quote, "We regret the scenes at this afternoon's press conference involving some of the relatives of passengers on board MH- 370. One can only imagine the anguish they're going through. Malaysia is doing everything in its power to find MH-370 and hopefully it brings some degree of closure for those whose family members are missing."

But I have to say, Carol, part of the problem here is the sheer amount of conflicting information that has come out. We've seen the timeline change, not once but a number of times. And it's going back and forth, exactly when did the plane turned. Was it -- did it have a pre-programmed plan to divert away from its original flight path? You know, what more do we know about the pilot and co-pilot? This is information the families want to know and they are simply not getting or they're getting conflicting reports and this is a large part of the problem.

COSTELLO: Atika Shubert, reporting live from Kuala Lumpur.

The search area is now the size of the continental United States and it seems to change every single day. Right now it's the southern area, the southern arc, considered the most likely place Flight 370 could have gone down. The focus is on a new section, 1500 hundred miles off the coast of Perth, Australia. An area a little bigger than the size of Arizona.

Tom Foreman joins us now. So yesterday, Tom, and we've been talking about this conflicting information. Yesterday the size of the search area was, what, three million square miles?

TOM FOREMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Sure.

COSTELLO: Now it's the size of Arizona?

FOREMAN: No, that's one -- that's one part of it, Carol. Let's bring in the map and talk about this. Remember this search area is broken up into a lot of different sectors. This is not all contiguous. And they're deciding on where this might be based on very complicated mathematical formulas and all this different data sets. In fact that area off Perth is one thing we need to talk about.

Searching all this means moving assets. For example they have the Navy's P-8 Poseidon plane down there. This plane can cover thousands of miles in a matter of hours checking the water surface. It's a submarine hunter. So it can look for things as small as a periscope sticking up. It's a great tool with which to search for debris on the water surface. But even with that capability it's a tremendous amount of area to cover.

They've got somewhere around 60 planes out there. They have some 40 ships out there of various types that they can use to go along and look at the surface of the water and to scan beneath the water as well, and yet those assets, even when you combine them with things like the satellite images and -- tracking that they've had that will give them some idea where these arcs are, Carol, this is still an enormous amount of space.

I was talking to one very experienced hunter of plane crashes yesterday and she said to me this is virtually impossible in terms of the space that's involved. This is just an enormous amount.

Talk about that area that you mentioned off of Perth. This is one of the reasons it's difficult. This area is actually moving. Yesterday it was further away from Australia. But they have to deal with all the currents that have occurred since the accident. And even when you fly over an area there can be glare on the water, there can be white caps. It can simply be the angle at which you fly over a given area that can make something invisible to you even though it's right there.

When you combine all of that it makes searching even a small area and trust me that is not a small area, it's a fraction of the entire area but that's a huge area to search. There have been many plane searches in tiny, tiny fractions of that where they cannot find the plane. So that's why this continues to be a challenge. And yes, the families are very frustrated as they would be but I'll guarantee you many of these search teams are also very frustrated because they are taking on a gargantuan task.

And if you want to know how hard it is, I always say to people, look out of the window of the plane when you fly over the water, think about the last time you did, you could have seen even an ocean liner down there and it looks like a speck on the water. And that's huge compared to what they're looking for -- Carol.

COSTELLO: Tom Foreman reporting live for us.

Another bit of information that could prove important. Data was deleted from Captain Shah's homemade flight simulator. This is what I'm talking about. That's Flight 370's captain in a YouTube video sitting in front of his simulator. The Malaysian government seized that simulator and now says data was deleted but they did not say who deleted the information.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

HISHAMMUDDIN HUSSEIN, MALAYSIAN TRANSPORTATION MINISTER: I would like to take this opportunity to state that the passengers, the pilots and the crew remain innocent until proven otherwise.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COSTELLO: CNN aviation analyst and former inspector general for the Department of Transportation Mary Schiavo joins me now.

Welcome, Mary.

MARY SCHIAVO, CNN AVIATION ANALYST: Thank you. Good to be with you.

COSTELLO: Nice to have you here. According to the "New York Times" that data was deleted on February 3rd, a month before the flight vanished. It sounds like a thin lead. Is it?

SCHIAVO: Well, it's a very thin lead but it is a lead because in some of the investigations I've been involved in we were able to recover the computer data and I think, you know, very good computer analysts and experts will be able to recover it, unless as everyone knows it was rewritten over, something was put on top of it. It will be difficult.

But having been deleted that much in advance of the plane gone missing, you have to wonder and on a flight simulator what they would be looking for is, did they test the routes, were there other waypoints, what airports did he simulate landing at? What routes did he fly. And if they can -- if there is that information -- if that information is even there they will be able to recover it unless it was overwritten.

COSTELLO: Well, that information sounds harmless at face value, though.

SCHIAVO: Unless they were -- they were checking out airports or he was checking out airports in countries that he doesn't ever fly or countries there'd be no reason to go to. These particular waypoints that are out in the ocean, unless there's something suspicious but, you know, for those of us -- I have a Microsoft flight simulator, you like to land in all sorts of strange airports. You put in new strange airports and try to land there just to see if you can do that. You know, I often don't make it. But -- so just landing in odd places, I mean, say you wanted to go land in Fairbanks, I mean, that might not be ominous at all by itself. So they're going to look for a pattern. It's -- they'll get the data recovered and chances are, you know, there might not be much there at all.

COSTELLO: Yes. Malaysian officials say Captain Shah is innocent until proved guilty. On one hand it's really easy to go after the pilot. But he's the obvious suspect, right? On the other sometimes it is the obvious suspect. What do you think?

SCHIAVO: Right. Well, let's go back to, you know, statistics of accidents. In about 75 percent of the time whether it's a mechanical or anything else, the NTSB, our NTSB, does find pilot mistake or pilot error even in a non-criminal case. So the focus is always on the pilot, whether it's just a crash, a malfunction, even a weather- related crash. They'll look at the pilot and often the pilot gets cited for many things.

So it's very natural to look at the pilot and in a criminal investigation you have to look at the pilot. And I worked on the 9/11 cases literally for 11 years until they were finished and every single person in the plane who touched the plane, loaded the plane, put the passengers through the airport, everyone was considered suspicious until they could be cleared.

And that's what you have to do in a big investigation particularly where criminal activity is suspect. Certainly not proven but suspect. Everybody is examined until they're cleared.

COSTELLO: Mary Schiavo, many thanks to you.

SCHIAVO: Thank you.

COSTELLO: Another twist this morning when the co-pilot said, "All right, good night," to air traffic controllers at 1:19 a.m. on Saturday the plane's on-board computer had already been reprogrammed. Investigators tell CNN someone rerouted the flight a full 12 minutes before the co-pilot said those last words to air traffic controllers.

Martin Savidge is inside that Boeing 777 simulator along with pilot Mitchell Casado.

Welcome to you both, gentlemen.

MARTIN SAVIDGE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Carol.

Let's focus on the item that you're talking about here which is the Flight Management System. That's this box right here. It does a lot of things on this aircraft but I guess the best way to look at it for the purposes of this explanation is think of it as like your GPS. And the way you program your GPS when you're going on a road trip you put in the destination and it tells you how to get there.

Well, in essence, this is like that, only you sort of have to enter all the different waypoints. So here's your keypad, here's your screen. You pre-program it before you take off. In this particular case, of course, they were going from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. However, as you point out, it's being reported now but at some point it seems after they took off and once they were on their way they made a change in their course. Now to do that it isn't that hard, is it, Mitchell? I mean, it's just some keystrokes.

MITCHELL CASADO, PILOT TRAINER, 777 COCKPIT SIMULATOR: It is. It's a matter of punching in a few keystrokes, usually five or six for the destination and you enter it into the flight plan. It's going to ask you, are you sure you want to do that, and if you are sure you press execute and the airplane does that. That's right.

SAVIDGE: And when -- and when the plane does that, we should point out, you know, it's been described as a very hard turn. It really doesn't feel that way when you're on board in the simulator. Actually like a passenger you would think oh, it's just a normal turn in the sky. So you wouldn't necessarily know that the aircraft is now deviated -- well strongly away from what was going to be the Beijing destination.

But we should also point out, Carol, that pilots do this, I won't say, regularly but it's not uncommon to change course when you're already flying.

CASADO: No. It's not -- certainly not uncommon. It happens. I mean, there's mechanical problems. There's sick passengers. Sometimes weather gets in the way. You have to be on either thunderstorms or things like that. So it's actually not uncommon at all.

SAVIDGE: So the fact that they did alter course is not unto itself an indication of suspicion. You could point and say but, boy, it was a significant change of course, but that doesn't tell us the motivation inside the cockpit, Carol.

COSTELLO: Well, except --

SAVIDGE: It's something that has to be worked through.

COSTELLO: Except according to these investigators this happened 12 minutes before the co-pilot said to air traffic controllers, "All right, good night." He didn't indicate there was any problem on board.

SAVIDGE: Correct. Right. You're right. And neither did apparently the instrumentation. In other words, those other systems we talked about here, the ACARS, those things that can report to the ground what the aircraft is doing. They did not seem to indicate that, say, there was a fire on board or that there was a problem with the aircraft or how it was operating. So that's true, that's why this is suspicious that apparently they entered in, this course changed 12 minutes before it happened, and even in that last conversation, "All right, good night," certainly doesn't sound alarming.

CASADO: No.

SAVIDGE: And in fact, that "all right good night" is a kind of handoff, right?

CASADO: Yes. It's well within the realm of our standard phraseology. Just like you would -- it's pleasantry after your communication. Very normal.

SAVIDGE: Because they were going from Malaysian airspace so they would have had the Malaysian air traffic controller say contact Vietnam on such and such frequency, good night. And that's where you get that response, "All right, good night," from the aircraft.

COSTELLO: So just the mystery deepens yet again. Thanks to both of you, Martin Savidge, Mitchell Casado.

Still to come in the NEWSROOM, mighty warships lead the search but a humble skiff and his fisherman aboard may hold the latest clue to that missing airliner. We'll hear from some humble fisherman who say they saw that plane fly low overhead. We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

COSTELLO: Problems with communication and coordination have hampered the search for that missing jet from the beginning. Twenty-six countries are helping now, but some of those resources are not being used. Case in point: a U.S. air crew sat on the tarmac for hours waiting for permission to take off.

The P3 Orion's onboard radar and dual visual scanning crew made it ideal for a water search. Its mission was to search waters south of Java Island, but that's on hold because the plane never got clearance from the Indonesian government.

Is it in the air now? Do we know?

I'm asking my people in the control room.

That plane is not in the air. So, it's just sitting there when it could be used in this vital search.

Another intriguing twist in the investigation to tell you about but like so many other developments it raises even more questions. Fishermen about 10 miles off the coast of Kota Bharu say they spotted a low flying airliner on the morning of Flight 370's disappearance. Now, this unconfirmed sighting at least 350 miles after its last known contact could add to the evidence the airliner was intentionally avoiding detection on radar.

CNN's Saima Mohsin is in Kota Bharu.

And before we get to you, Saima, I just want to tell people exactly where this island is. It's between Vietnam and Indonesia about 240 miles from Kuala Lumpur in the wrong direction, right?

So, Saima, what have we been able to find out from these fishermen on this island?

SAIMA MOHSIN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (via telephone): They basically were out at sea, they were night fishing, there was a group (INAUDIBLE). Two of them were awake while the rest were sleeping when they suddenly caught a low flying aircraft. It took them completely surprise. In fact, one of the fishermen said to me, I turned to my friend and said, is the pilot crazy?

I asked him if this was unusual because they usually go out fishing under this flight path and they regularly see aircraft. He said, no, I'm very clear on that. A lot of planes fly very high up in the sky, we can hear them but don't see them this low. This was flying very low. I've never seen an aircraft fly this low before.

I also asked him, well, what did you see as the aircraft? He said, well, it was flying from Malaysia over towards Vietnam over the South China Sea where we were fishing and it was flying so low that the lights that normally are small look as large as the size of the coconut.

COSTELLO: So these Malaysian planes have distinctive markings. Could these fishermen see any of these markings?

MOHSIN: Yes, absolutely. That's what we want to get to the bottom of. Was this flight MH370, unfortunately, we haven't (INAUDIBLE) we can't confirm that that was the aircraft. They didn't see the markings on the plane.

But what they did tell me in terms of the direction, the location, and the timing, by the way, it was around 1:30 a.m. That is the time shortly after Flight MH370 made its last known identification and identified itself on the radar and, of course, it then lost contact with air traffic controllers. All of this tallies up with possibly one of the last sightings of the plane.

COSTELLO: Interesting. I'm sure you're going to continue your investigation in those islands.

Saima Mohsin, thanks so much.

In the meantime, Malaysian authorities are rejecting reports of a sighting of that plane in the Maldives. Residents there told a Maldives news outlet that they saw a low flying plane with markings similar to flight 370.

Malaysia' transport minister said those reports are not true. The Maldives ministry of defense confirmed that radar and surveillance showed absolutely no sight of that plane.

Still to come in the NEWSROOM: Israel tightens its air space due the disappearance of Flight 370.

Nic Robertson is covering that part of the story.

Hi, Nic.

NIC ROBERTSON, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Hi, Carol.

Well, Israel is putting its air traffic controllers, civilian air traffic controllers on heightened state of alert. More details on what that all means when we come back after the break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

COSTELLO: The disappearance of Flight 370 has forced Israel to tighten its air security rules and consider a new potential threat not limited to that Malaysian plane.

CNN's Nic Robertson is in Jerusalem with that side of the story.

Hi, Nic.

ROBERTSON: Hi, Carol.

Well, for years, Israel has been at the forefront of global aviation security, if you will, sort of cutting their own path, analyzing the threats out there, taking their own measures and steps.

What we understand now after several days of meetings looking what happened to Flight MH370 considering other issues, they are deciding to tighten up the way that they check civilian aircraft approaching the country.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ROBERTSON (voice-over): In Israel's Aviation Security Operation Center, staff are on heightened alert.

From pilots' calls to airport security, multiple information streams are mined for anomalies.

(on camera): In this room, Israel's security hangs on minute by minute second by second decisions about approaching aircraft. In here, the possibility of a rogue passenger jet is a permanent threat.

(voice-over): Shalom Dolev who masterminded the center says their system would have alerted a problem had MH370 been near their airspace.

SHALOM DOLEV, AVIATION SECURITY EXPERT: Once it would be identified as a possibility for security background for such an incident, security incident would be announced and started to be managed.

ROBERTSON: Managed by alerting the airline and air defense forces, informed by the data already scoured by the data matrix at the center's call. Since Flight MH370 disappeared, checks here have become more rigorous as their lab sees a new threat emerging, the air crew.

DOLEV: Maybe the last wing of trust was broken and I mean the air crew.

ROBERTSON: Just for you weeks ago, an Ethiopian airlines co-pilot hijacked the passenger jet he was flying, seeking asylum in Switzerland. Three months before that, a Mozambique airlines pilot hijacked a regional jet he was flying, intentionally crashed the plane, killing all 33 people on board -- a disturbing trend Dolev says that can't be ignored.

DOLEV: It's not necessarily only the traditional terrorist background that we were used to manage, but many different additional motives.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ROBERTSON: So, it really seems that before we know all the details of what happened to Flight MH370, it may already be changing the way we fly. We may not see it when we're sitting there on the planes but does seem to be an awakening now among aviation experts that there's potentially a whole new realm of problem and threat out there, Carol.

COSTELLO: So do the Israelis have a theory about what might have happened to Flight 370?

ROBERTSON: You know, they very likely do. They are not sharing it with us. They don't want to go on the record and say they think it's X, Y and Z. They do have their own intelligence capabilities around the world and will certainly, as we have seen here for civil aviation security have come to some conclusions.

But it does seem listening to this aviation expert who has been at the center of civil aviation protection inside Israel for decades now that there is a real growing concern about all those pilots that flight towards Israel and other countries and all the different airlines because some airlines he says the airlines only screen the pilots when they join. That could be 25 years earlier.

He also goes on to say and it's not only the pilots, it's all the people working invasion security, the thousands who check the planes, the thousands who man the different airports around the world that all these people who come close to aircraft perhaps require a higher level of screening.