Return to Transcripts main page

CNN Newsroom

Night Search Under Way For Possible Plane Debris; Did 370 Fly On Auto Until It Ran Out Of Fuel?; New Satellite Images May Show Plane Debris; Obama Imposes New Sanctions

Aired March 20, 2014 - 14:30   ET

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

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROOKE BALDWIN, CNN ANCHOR: Let's get you caught up on the rapidly moving developments here in the story, the hunt for Flight 370. It is in the middle of the night in the southern hemisphere where this whole thing is really spotlighted at the moment. But the search for these two objects spotted by satellite bobbing in the Indian Ocean off of Australia. It is continuing.

I can tell you that a Norwegian merchant cargo vessel has taken the night shift. The 19 sailors on board using high powered lights and binoculars to hunt for what could be parts of this missing Flight 370. They are looking for these two tiny specks here. Tiny at least for us from this perspective. They are actually sizable pieces. One of them 79 feet long and the other about 16 feet in length.

You know, what if these two objects spotted almost 1,500 off of the coast of Australia turned out to be pieces of this plane? Listen to this theory by Robert Goyer, a commercial jet pilot, editor-in-chief of "Flying" magazine. This is what he wrote in his opinion piece for cnn.com.

Quote, "While there a small number of possible scenarios at play here, the most likely it seems to me is that the airplane was flying on auto pilot without anyone at the controls and did so until it ran out of fuel and crashed into the ocean."

So let's take a closer look at this. CNN's Martin Savidge is in our virtual cockpit again today with Mitchell Casado, his flight instructor there. So guys welcome back. Martin, let me just begin. You have recreated this suspected path of this flight. What did you glean from that?

MARTIN SAVIDGE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Right now as a matter of fact in the virtual world, we are about almost exactly in the area where that debris was believed to be, 1,400 miles south of Australia. You want to peer out the window and look down as if you can help, but it wouldn't.

Let's talk about the auto pilot. We are on auto pilot right now at 8,000 feet. If you were to disengage it here, let me hear that alarm. There is an alarm that goes off and a notification here. I shut the warning off and you can show us you can take over control manually. The auto pilot is here and this is how it operate and manipulated. You can tell now that Mitchell is flying the aircraft.

However I can put it right back on and now you can see the auto pilot is back on. This plane will right itself and get it back on the course. Get us to the last altitude and we don't have to touch a thing. Could the theory that you talked about where it flies and flies and flies be real? Yes, absolutely.

The only thing we don't know, of course, is once it deviate from the course to Beijing, what the next course was. We don't really know what the next heading was. We know it turned dramatically away, but we don't know the waypoint. Presumably if it was loaded and turned this plane heading south, you can fly easily for six hours or more or until the fuel runs out. Steady out anybody touching a thing. In other words, if the crew was incapacitated, it would keep ongoing.

BALDWIN: Right, which jives with what we are hearing as far as how much fuel was in the plane at that time. Mitchell and Martin, thank you. I want to bring in the pilot and "Flying" magazine, editor-in- chief, Robert Goyer, who wrote that piece I just quoted for cnn.com. He is in Austin. Here in the studio with me, retired commercial and corporate pilot, John Ransom.

So Gentlemen, welcome to you both. First, captain here in studio, you retired after 40 years as captain flying last year. So let me begin with you. You have flown over this part of the world, right? You have gone from what was it, South Africa to Southeast Asia looked down at the vastness, that is the Indian Ocean. I mean, how remote are we talking?

JOHN RANSOM, RETIRED COMMERCIAL AND CORPORATE PILOT: Having flown over the Pacific and Atlantic, you have the feeling of somebody else being out there. There a lot of other airplanes with you within 50 or 60 miles. You see a lot of ships, but flying from Cape down to Singapore, we saw virtually nothing on the surface.

BALDWIN: Virtually nothing.

RANSOM: There were ships and we knew also other airplanes but none nearby. Seeing another airplane as we fly across the Indian Ocean was not a very common occurrence.

BALDWIN: Mr. Goyer to you. Let's focus on these two pieces of what could be possibly debris. It could be pieces of a ship although this is not an often traveled route for ships we know. The largest piece is 79 feet long and could have been part of the plane. What could one learn from these pieces of debris as far as how the plane could have gone down?

ROBERT GOYER, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF, "FLYING MAGAZINE": That's a really complex question. As far as the pieces themselves, it's most likely that they are pieces of either the tail section or an outward section of the wing. Based on the size of it, it sounds like it might be a little bit too big to be part of the tail and it could be part of the wing section. The wing section is made with a great deal of buoyant chambers in it. So it's something that could very possibly float. Then again, this is one of those ocean gyres where the junk gets trapped and spun around for many years. The chances of it being part of the airplane, I don't know. I hope it is our first real clue in this mystery. If it is, we will probably be able to tell only that the airplane broke up and start piecing together the clues as to where the wreckage might lie based on the ocean currents and the amount of time that has elapsed since the presumed crash.

BALDWIN: OK, you bring up two things, John Ransom, I would like to ask you about. He brings up the tail and the wing. We don't know what this is in the ocean, but now reading about aviation in the last two weeks, I know now that you have fuel and a plane and a wing, correct?

RANSOM: The wings sometimes the fuselage and also occasionally the tail.

BALDWIN: So the possibility that it could be a wing if we go with the theory that it was auto pilot until it ran out of fuel crashed. The possibility would be it could be part of a wing because it would be floating because there is no fuel. Is that a possibility?

RANSOM: It could be. The difficulty is trying to guess just how they separated from the rest of the airplane. There certainly is a chance when the fuel ran out, the airplane descended relatively gently down to the surface of the ocean. There was also a chance with a little bit of power left, the airplane tried to trim itself nose up as they dropped off until it got to a slow speed and became very difficult to control.

BALDWIN: Tried to trim itself. The auto pilot would have done that potentially.

RANSOM: Either the auto pilot or subsystem in the auto pilot. As the airplane slows down, if it's in a hold mode or something similar, it would tend to take the stabilizer trim, which is what controls the pitch of the airplane under the auto pilot and try to run that nose up to keep the airplane level until it runs out of authority to do that. Plus when the engines quit, they probably didn't quit symmetrically.

BALDWIN: How do you mean like before the other?

RANSOM: Right. There are tiny variations and fuel quantities in the tanks. So one probably ran dry if that's what happened before the other. Now the airplane is a symmetrical and it's losing power. It may keep it going straight, which controlled the airplane in there.

BALDWIN: Retired Captain John Ransom, I have more questions for you and the viewers have a lot of questions for you so do me a favor and stick around. Robert Goyer, thank you so much for coming on and also writing that piece on cnn.com. You are staying as well. So thank you for staying.

In a matter of minutes as I mentioned, keep your questions coming. Send me a tweet @brookebcnn, hash tag it, 370qs and we will have these two generous gentlemen to answer some of your questions as clearly this is their expertise.

Coming up here, with so many questions about this missing plane, one thing is certain. There are serious concerns about gaps in security in our skies so my next guest says sometimes sadly it takes a tragic event like the disappearance of this plane to close those gaps. But why wasn't something doing -- someone doing anything sooner. We'll explore that next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BALDWIN: The mystery of Flight 370 might change the future of aviation security perhaps. In our high tech world, a jumbo jet possibly went thousands of miles off course without instantly being tracked. So this bizarre saga doesn't always fit with our always connected mind set.

Joining me now, "Time" magazine's assistant managing editor, Bill Saporito. And Bill, I read the piece that you assisted on this morning. You know, you asked the question, who is watching the sky. You are talking about infrastructure. You are talking about radars that, to quote you, "could have been cobbled together over decades and bits and pieces." It doesn't sound very sophisticated to me.

BILL SAPORITO, ASSISTANT MANAGING EDITOR, "TIME" MAGAZINE: It's not in places. This is a network of radars and satellites and other things. It's not one eye in the sky watching everything. It will go to different countries at different times and different technologies and there are different abilities to operate these technologies. As a result, we have this patch work situation.

BALDWIN: You quote a very veteran accident investigator with the NTSB in your piece. Let me quote him, "In my business there is what they call a tombstone mentality. To get things done, you have to have blood on the ground or dead people." He goes on, "When things go right, it's very difficult to spend money on anticipating something going wrong." That's disconcerting enough, but you make the point that there are these, you know, systems -- this radar systems, that are typically switched off. Tell me why.

SAPORITO: Well, because they are expensive to operate and you need people to run them. Let's bring this to the U.S. We are using radar to track planes, which is line of sight, correct?

BALDWIN: Correct.

SAPORITO: You have to bounce it off a plane. This technology is ancient and here we are an advanced country. We are using a system that is decades old.

BALDWIN: Why?

SAPORITO: Well, it takes a lot of money to get up to speed on the newest technology and the FAA has a plan for instance called Next Gen, which will use satellites to track planes, but that plan is estimated to cost $40 billion and will not be completed if it gets completed on time until 2025. So just think about the network in the U.S. and all those airports and all those planes who have to put satellite navigation in all of them. It's a big, big project.

BALDWIN: Finally, quickly, you brought up something in this piece. I didn't know, which was you say not only is it possible for the pilot to turn off communications, it's possible for the pilot to disable the black box.

SAPORITO: Yes, we had a long investigation into this across numerous sources and we have information that you can do it through the circuit breakers. One thing that pilots have to be able to do, and I'm sure your experts have talked about it, they have to be able to disable some of these systems, for instance, on the Air France crash, they were getting bad information from the sensor. So you have to be able to disconnect from some of things although the pilots I talked to were surprised that they could do that. They didn't even know they could.

BALDWIN: They didn't. That's interesting. Bill, Saporito of "Time" magazine, thank you so much. Coming up next as we talk about these experts and these pilots, they will take your questions about the plane. Everything from parachutes on board to the difference between cockpit and cabin. Send me tweets and questions @brookebcnn, #370qs. We will talk to these experts, answer your questions live right here coming up.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BALDWIN: All right, you have questions and we have some answers. We have some experts. So rejoining me to discuss, "Flying" magazine's editor-in-chief, Robert Goyer and also a pilot, and here with me in studio, aviation safety expert and retired pilot and captain, John Ransom. So Gentlemen, welcome back. Let's get right to it.

The first question, Robert, I am going to give this one to you, the question is, why don't we put floatation devices on all of the black boxes. It makes sense. Good question.

GOYER: It is a really good question. I think that the question really is asking why do we have such antiquated technology on these black boxes, which as you probably know are orange? And the answer is they were expensive to develop the technology and they are installed in thousands of airplanes. Any time you mandate that the airlines put new equipment, there is a push back on that from them about that.

Now the real answer isn't floatation devices for these black boxes. The real answer is some kind of a satellite data link where you are linking up all of these data through satellite and gets downloaded by somebody on the land. The advantage of doing that is you don't have to find the black boxes.

You have the data and you'll know where the airplane is. You know where to look for the recovery. It will happen instantly, immediately, and this technology exists today and there are companies who are trying to sell this technology. It's high time we started doing this. It's a very good question, black boxes are antiquated. We need to get better technology.

BALDWIN: It seems to be a theme here, antiquated technology. Just money, money needed to fix a lot of these things. Question two, Captain, you get this one. This is from Krista, why there is no parachute on seats of airplanes so if something happened, the passengers could parachute out of the bottom of the plane. I don't know if you would know how to parachute in the midst of an emergency, but you get to answer that.

RANSOM: If there were a smaller plane that might be a good option. A larger plane that has 400 or 500 people in there, how about the incapacitated person? Are you just going to leave them? It just is not practical in the airliner environment.

BALDWIN: Question, next question, Robert, this is from Cynthia. Cynthia wants to know, are the pressure systems, we've been talking a lot about this actually in commercial break, are the pressure systems in the cabin and cockpit separate systems? Can someone in the cockpit disable oxygen in the cabin?

GOYER: That's a great question. The answer is that the systems are not different. The entire front of the airplane is a single pressure vessel and they get the same oxygen -- the same pressurization. The difference is that the pilots have a number of safety devices at their disposal. One of this call a quick dawning mask. So in an emergency, they have to be able to get that mask from its holder and on their face and working in just a heartbeat.

They are good at doing it. They train all the time. As far as the smoke is concerned, most airliners have smoke hoods. So if there is smoke in the cockpit, they can put on these smoke hoods as well and be able to see through that. The passengers of course have to drop down oxygen masks and that's the full extent of the emergency oxygen that they had. It is one big system of pressurization. But there are different ways to get oxygen in case of a depressurization.

BALDWIN: OK, as you mentioned this is a sophisticated plane especially for these pilots, there are bells and whistles going off to tell the pilots put those oxygen masks on, as I was discussing with John Ransom, if in fact there is an issue with cabin depressurization. Robert Goyer and John Ransom, thank you both very much and thank you for your question. Keep them coming because we will answer some more questions next hour.

Up next, though, let's talk about the ocean and the search. We'll talk with an oceanographer who said it is actually not farfetched to believe this is debris from the plane to tell us why.

Also ahead, our other breaking story. The president speaking out today making a surprise announcement on the crisis in Ukraine. Russia slaps sanctions against U.S. lawmakers. We will tell you who is on that list. You are watching CNN's special coverage.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BALDWIN: Back to our special coverage on Flight 370 in just a minute, but first to the president of the United States here, Obama announcing today's sanctions against 20 more cronies of Vladimir Putin for their alleged involvement in Russia's brazen annexation of Crimea. Russian soldiers and armed supporters have surrounded Ukrainian troops. They are virtually trapped at bases throughout Crimea. Ukraine said it's drawn up plans to get its troops out of Crimea thus apparently giving up without a fight.

CNN's Nick Paton Walsh is in Crimea for us right now. So Nick, will these new sanctions hurt Putin and his friends who are really just addressing here.

NICK PATON WALSH, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: They are remarkably fierce, these sanctions. They are very target and what's key really is they seemed to hint at Putin's own personal wealth in some ways. One of the individuals targeted is a man called (inaudible), who the U.S. Treasury in this statement says is quoted personal cashier. So his own wealth has always been a matter of debate and question and denial by the Kremlin.

These individuals include childhood friends who the Treasury says got wealthy contracts through the Sochi Olympic games, his chief of staff, many other people are very close to him and shined a big open light really I think on quite where senior Russian officials money maybe hiding. Moscow responded fast by putting similar sanctions against some key White House officials who jokingly will cancel his holiday in Ciborium, would lose his shares in gas prom.

But really this U.S. move is startling because it basically freezes these people out of international business because you can't really work with them if you also want to do business with the United States and that part of the global kind of financial market. So very fierce moves indeed -- Brooke.

BALDWIN: OK, Nick Paton Walsh in Crimea for us. Nick, thank you.

Now this, we continue on hour two. I'm Brooke Baldwin. Top of the hour, we are tracking what is being called the best lead yet in the search for missing Flight 370 and you are looking at it here.