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Malaysian Government: Took Two Days To Process Satellite Data That Helped Form Search Arcs; Nothing Found In Day Two Of Air Search; Sub-Hunting Planes Used In Search For Flight 370

Aired March 21, 2014 - 10:00   ET

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

CAROL COSTELLO, CNN ANCHOR: Happening now in the NEWSROOM intense yet inconclusive.

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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The first aircraft was seen, but we have no sightings yet.

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COSTELLO: Search planes scouring the seas. American and Australian forces laser focused on finding this debris.

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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: If there is any wreckage on the surface of the ocean and it's out there, we will be able to find it.

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COSTELLO: To the depths of the ocean floor and a robot that might hold the key in finding Flight 370.

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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: They can go up and down mountains.

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COSTELLO: Looking for a beacon of hope.

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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It is about the most inaccessible spot that you could imagine on the face of the earth.

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COSTELLO: In a sea of possibilities, was it hijacked? Was there an emergency? A special edition of NEWSROOM, starts now.

Good morning. I'm Carol Costello. Thank you so much for joining me. Another day of disappointment in the search for the missing Malaysian airliner. The cause, a motive, if there was one, still unknown. It has now been 14 days since the plane vanished and adding to the insurgency the dying batteries on the flight recorders.

Just over 15 days from now, the pings designed to help search crews locate them will start fading away. This morning, crews were back out in the air and on the water, scouring the remote area of the Indian Ocean for objects spotted on satellite images. Unfortunately, they found nothing. It is night time there now. The air searches have wrapped up for the day.

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TONY ABBOTT, AUSTRALIAN PRIME MINISTER: It's about the most inaccessible spot that you can imagine on the face of the earth. If there is anything down there, we will find it. We owe it to the families of those people to do no less.

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COSTELLO: CNN's Andrew Stevens is in Perth, Australia, the hub of the search. Andrew, the weather was pretty good today. So we were hopeful but nothing right?

ANDREW STEVENS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: That's right, Carol. That's the problem. The weather was pretty good. People were saying, once the weather clears up because the first day of the search was hampered by bad weather. We were hoping that when good weather came around, you got better visibility. The searches, the spotters, might have been able to see something on the water, 23,000 square miles they are searching.

That is still a very big chunk of the ocean. But, there was nothing out there today. Five flights went out. They came back empty-handed. There is a feeling here in Perth. I'm on the air force base, the station post for these flights going out there. There is a feeling here after yesterday when there is a lot of buzz here, that finally, there co could be a breakthrough.

That the Australian prime minister said that there was credible information about these two objects. A lot of people were saying, here, finally this could be a turning point in this so far fruitless search. But 24 hours, more than 24 hours, no signs, no signs at all. The disappointment is understandably starting to set in.

COSTELLO: Well, more help is on the way. Three Chinese warships are on the way, including a Chinese icebreaker, that's a certain kind of ship that breaks up ice. How much more help do they need out there?

STEVENS: Well, I think the bottom line is they need all the help they can get. This is, as we heard Tony Abbott say and as we have repeatedly said, an incredibly remote piece of the planet. Four-hour flight just to get there. The closest big land mass is Australia, which is 1500 miles away. They need all the help they can get. They are getting theirs. There are 2600 countries involved in this search still.

Let's not forget there are still searchers moving to the north of the northern hemisphere, Carol. But we have Chinese warships coming in. The Australians are sending theirs in. That should arrive on site tomorrow. Commercial shippings also there. Every little bit helps. The more they can get there, the more likely they are to at least find and identify these objects because that's the thing.

It is all very well to find them. We still have to link them back to Malaysia Flight 370. So everything helps, Carol, but realistically, it is such a remote area that not a lot of useful help can get there.

COSTELLO: Andrew Stevens, reporting live from Perth, Australia, this morning. Also today, Malaysia Airlines confirms a report you saw first on CNN. The flight's cargo did include lithium ion batteries, the power pack used in cellphones and laptops. Now these batteries are known to sometimes overheat and even burst into flames and have caused previous crashes.

CNN justice correspondent, Pamela Brown, first reported on this concern last week. But the Malaysian government, I think it was the Malaysian Airlines CEO addressed it today. What did he say?

PAMELA BROWN, CNN JUSTICE CORRESPONDENT: That's right, Carol. You are right. So we talked about this last Friday. That investigators are looking into whether these lithium batteries in the cargo, which have been linked to other plane crashes in the past may be connected to the disappearance of Flight 370. For the first time this morning, two weeks after the plane went missing, Malaysia Airline officials acknowledged that lithium batteries were in fact in the cargo.

But Carol, they tried to tamp down the notion that they could have caused a fire on Flight 370. The CEO of Malaysia Airlines defended his company's handling of the batteries. Let's take a listen to what he said.

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AHMAD JAUHARI YAHYA, CEO, MALAYSIA AIRLINES: They are not declared dangerous so it is the facts. We do check them. Check them several times to make sure the packing is right.

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BROWN: Let's take a look here. This is a lithium battery. This is what you can find in your laptop. In fact, passengers are banned from bringing spare lithium batteries like this in checked luggage, because spare batteries, lithium batteries are more easily combustible than other types of batteries. They can more easily catch fires.

So the questions remain, Carol, could the lithium batteries have sparked a fire and maybe filled the plane with smoke and incapacitated the pilots and the passengers. What this doesn't explain is how the plane could have kept flying for seven hours and why there wasn't a mayday call. It seems like with every theory you have, Carol, you can poke holes in it.

COSTELLO: Just to be clear, the plane wasn't actually using the lithium batteries to power its electrical system. Those lithium batteries were just being transported somewhere. They were in the cargo area. So just to make it clear to our viewers, could those batteries spontaneously burst into flames somehow?

BROWN: Well, it all depends on how they were packaged. We heard the Malaysia Airlines CEO say that he was defending the way that the batteries were handled and the way they were packaged. The International Civil Aviation Organization had a temporary suspension on the transport of lithium batteries on passenger planes in February, 2013, because there had been other plane crashes, including the UPS plane crash, you may remember that were linked to the lithium batteries causing a fire on the plane.

And since then there have been changes in the way that the lithium batteries are tighter restrictions on that. It all ties back to that, Carol. As you heard the CEO say, he defends it, that everything was handled the right way and properly.

COSTELLO: Pamela Brown reporting live from Washington, thank you.

Back now to the investigation, which is now centered on those critical satellite images from the Southern Indian Ocean. Officials are trying to locate debris several days after those images were captured. Today, the Malaysian government acknowledged that it took two days to process the initial images that helped shape those north and southern arcs that have formed the basis of the search.

Steve Wallace is a CNN aviation analyst and former director of the FAA's Office of Investigation. Richard Quest is a CNN aviation correspondent. Welcome, Gentlemen.

Richard, I want to start with you. So how long did it actually take those satellite images to come to light for searchers to know kind of where to look?

RICHARD QUEST, CNN AVIATION CORRESPONDENT: Well, what we now know is that Inmarsat, once they realized what they had, provided the satellite images to the Malaysians around the 12th of March and then you have the Malaysians giving the data, the raw data to the Americans. The Americans analyzed back in the United States. The Brits analysed it back in the U.K. The data is then sent back to the Malaysians and the general feeling of all the investigators is that they needed more certainty about that data on the pings.

So the data is sent back for more analysis and more confirmation before being sent back to the Malaysians. All that took about two or three days for the information to go backwards and forwards before the Malaysian prime minister was then able to come out as you will remember at the beginning of the week and say, there are these two arcs. One is the northern corridor. One is the southern corridor.

COSTELLO: So it took a couple of days. In all this time, that debris is moving, right. It is moving.

QUEST: Here is the point, Carol. They are dammed if they do and dammed if they don't. If they had moved assets and resources on the possibility of this data and three days later, everybody comes back and says, actually, we don't believe that data, the integrity to be that strong, you and I would be the first people to be saying, why didn't they wait until they confirmed it? What were they thinking about?

So we have to accept that in this situation the investigators have to work at a much higher level of integrity, credibility and confidence before they determine to send ships and planes, one way or the other.

COSTELLO: I understand. Joining me now, I want to bring in Leo Romaine. He is the president and CEO of Satellite Imaging Corporation. Good morning, sir, and thank you for joining us. This timeline that Richard Quest was talking about, does that make sense to you?

LEO ROMAINE, PRESIDENT AND CEO, SATELLITE IMAGING CORPORATION: Yes, it does. It takes a while before satellite image data is physically collected and then transferred to the ground station, downloaded to various computers and then they do the analysis. For a scientist or an imaging analyst, who positively make it, they have to do quite a considerable amount of spectral analysis and check the reflection data and then release it.

COSTELLO: Let me ask you. I'm sure you have seen these images, this debris. When you look at these images, what do you see?

ROMAINE: I see definitely some debris. The size is pretty fair size. All depending on what kind of satellite censor was collected. It looks like the two images available were collected by the world view 2 satellite from Digital Globe and this has eight multi-spectral bends. With this kind of information, the reflecting data can be analyzed. Although the debris is moving, they would be able to get a better idea on what kind of materials it could be. The reflective data would be different from aluminium than wood.

COSTELLO: The other thing that people don't -- they probably do understand but there are other images of that debris that this company is not sharing, right?

ROMAINE: No. The company will share. It is to everybody's interest to find out any kind of debris of the aircraft. They are not going to hide anything away. I don't think so.

COSTELLO: OK, let me ask you this, Steve. So this debris is definitely moving. They are going to try to find it. They are going to call in lots and lots of mathematicians to determine where this might be. Can you sort of take us through that?

STEVE WALLACE, CNN AVIATION ANALYST: They put in those buoys in the water to calculate the drift and the NTSB has already weighed in with its experts. People have taken that Inmarsat data, we have a fairly high degree of confidence in it. They have drawn those two arcs and gotten away from the northern one on the notion someone would have seen it on radar. We seem to have focused on the intersection of where the fuel would have run out after the last ping. The best experts, many of them Americans, have calculated where this would be.

Let me just add one also one quick thing to Pam Brown's very good analysis on the lithium batteries. The UPS fire was a main debt cargo hold. This airplane the cargo holds is since it was a passenger plane are below the deck with the very latest in fire detection and suppression. There would have been plenty of time for a distress call, which we did not see.

COSTELLO: I mean, it's unlikely in your estimation that lithium batteries could be to blame? Is that what you are saying?

WALLACE: Well, for several reasons. They are recognized as having certain inherent risks. The packaging requirements are quite strict. The lack of a distressed call kind of moves that over further over to the edge of the table for me.

COSTELLO: All right, Steve Wallace, Leo Romaine, Richard Quest, many thanks to all of you. I appreciate it.

Still to come in the NEWSROOM, U.S. war planes new mission, find Flight 370. We'll talk about high-tech U.S. assets being used.

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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The plan is, we want to find these objects, because they are the best lead to where we might find people to be rescued.

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COSTELLO: Australian and U.S. planes have completed their Flight 370 search mission for today with no sign of that floating debris. Get this, searchers covered 9,000 miles by air and sea, which sounds like a lot, until you take into account the size of the entire area. Let's bring in Tom Foreman to talk more about that. Good morning, Tom.

TOM FOREMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Carol. You know, we have been talking about this being a moving target out there. I want to show you how much of a moving target it is. Remember we are talking about how they were all converging all these forces down there. They were bringing the airplanes and they were bringing in the ships and really about half of all the search assets in the entire area, the entire arena over there being brought in.

But look what's changed about the search area in just past 48 hours. See that little sliver down there. That's what they are looking at now. That's different as you can see from what they had been looking at before. This was the bigger area right here. Now, they have narrowed it down to this little sliver down here based on mathematics and a lot of, if this, then that. We all know the more you do that. The more you extrapolate data, the further you get away from certainty.

So to remind you, the only thing we really know even at this point is that the plane took off and less than an hour later is was gone. What's making this change down here this if, then, equation, among other things is all the currents in this area. This is the juncture between the Indian Ocean and the south ocean, the southern ocean, the one around Antarctica. It is very stormy and very turbulent.

It is fully conceivable that if a plane went down there, you had wreckage on the surface. The currents there alone could be moving it at pretty much a regular walking pace. So over the time, since the day the plane disappeared until today, it could have moved 1,000, 1,100, maybe even 1,200 miles. When you talk about thing beneath the surface, I know you've been exploring that a little bit, it gets even more complicated, Carol.

Because the currents on the surface and the winds on the surface obviously, but the current on the surface are not necessarily the same as the currents below the surface. So then you have another layer of if it is sinking or if is partially under the water as these pieces are supposed to be, is it being subjected to different forces? Yes. You can go down there with this technology, like side scan sonar and you can go over the ocean floor and you can look for things.

That will create a 3D picture of the ocean floor. With that 3D picture, you can go in and square by square, mile by mile, inch by inch, you can look for anything that tells you something might be there. Again, to get to this point, to use all those tools, you have to narrow it down. If they can't master those currents up there and complete the search of everything in that area, they are going to have no business going down here, because they simply -- it is useless. You are trying to search too big of an area with too small of a tool -- Carol.

COSTELLO: Understand. Tom Foreman, many thanks. Talking about those tools, though, Malaysia is tweeting for help. The minister tweeted an SOS for high-tech hydrophones. The minister tweeted, "will also speak with the U.S. secretary of defense tonight to further request special assets." Now a hydrophone is basically a microphone for underwater use.

The main part of a hydrophone is the transducer. The transducer convert sound waves into electrical energy that can be amplified making it easier to listen for the pings from those black boxes. The United States has such equipment, but as you heard Tom Foreman say, it is useless unless the search area is greatly reduced to about 5,000 feet. You know where to put those hydrophones in the water. So we do remain hopeful.

Still to come in the NEWSROOM, if search planes do find any sign of that missing jet, the search will proceed to the depths of the sea. Coming up next, we'll look at the technology used to comb the ocean's floor.

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COSTELLO: A U.S. war plane is taking part in the massive search operation for Flight 370. The P8 Poseidon aircraft is normally a sub hunter that looks for submarine, but in its current mission, the Poseidon is using its underwater detection capabilities in other ways, like dropping sonar buoys into the sea to locate debris. Sam Lagrone joins us now by phone. He is the editor of "U.S. NI News" for the U.S. Naval Institute. Welcome, Sam.

SAM LAGRONE, EDITOR, "U.S. NAVAL INSTITUTE NEWS" (via telephone): Thanks for having me on. COSTELLO: Thanks for being with us. One of the frustrations is, it takes four hours for these planes to get to the search site. They can only fly two hours and then they have to turn around and go back. That's a big frustration, isn't it?

LAGRONE: It is. It has to do with the nature of the aircraft and what they are designed to do, which is mainly to hunt submarines, both the Australian P-3 and the one from the U.S. You are asking them to go beyond what they are ordinarily designed to do.

COSTELLO: Would it be nice to have an aircraft carrier closer to the debris site?

LAGRONE: Believe it or not, that wouldn't be as effective for the aerial search, because the P-8s are too large to be used on an aircraft carrier. They are a terrestrial aircraft for the most part.

COSTELLO: Wow. So tell us how they can spot things underneath the water so far down.

LAGRONE: Well, the P-8s are designed for submarine warfare. There are a couple of things that they have got on board to help them find submarines. They have essentially got a censor that can detect metal, like steel. That's one thing they have. They have a really big radar mounted on board. It is the AP-Y10, which is a very sophisticated radar that only searches the surface, however.

Then, they also have what's called an electro-optical infrared censor. Essentially a very sophisticated video camera that's underneath the airplane that can zoom in very close to objects on the water. One limitation that they do have is they are designed to find submarines, which are noisier than regular debris lying on the ocean. So all of their sonar equipment, which is what you would use underneath the water, is more or less not going to be terribly effective looking for anything underneath the water.

The assets that they have are set up in the submarine finding mission to look for, for example, a periscope that's on the surface. The wake from at periscope on the surface or surface ships on the move. They are probably the best aircraft available probably in the world to do this mission, but it is still not what they are primarily designed to do. So they are pinch-hitting for lack of a better term.

COSTELLO: We often see, like we've been on one of those planes. We often see members of the crew looking out the door of the aircraft and then they drop these buoys from the plane. What are they doing?

LAGRONE: Well, those buoys in context to this mission probably are markers to let them know where they have been before. I don't know enough about the context of which they were dropping them. Ordinarily, they would be used to find submarines. Essentially, they are great, big microphones that are connected by radio to the aircraft. So you would drop the sonobuoy in a place where you think a submarine might be.

It would either send out a sonic signal through the water and listen for it to bounce back off the submarine or it would be a highly sensitive microphone that would pick up, folks, the cavitation of a submarine's propeller or engine noise or anything the submarine would do in the water that is able to be picked up on a microphone and transmitted back by radio to the aircraft.

COSTELLO: And you know, I know these guys are expert flyers, but I personally always worry about everyone's safety. This is a very windy part of the world, with very choppy seas. How low do they fly? I just wondered how the wind affects them.