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Families Lash Out At Malaysian Authorities; Search to Resume Within the Hour; How One Small Sound Could End The Search; Chinese Spot Debris in South Indian Ocean, Search Continues; Technology Could Help Track Missing Planes; Did Emergency Occur Before MH370 Disappeared?

Aired March 22, 2014 - 17:00   ET

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

JIM SCIUTTO, CNN ANCHOR: You are in the CNN NEWSROOM. I'm Jim Sciutto in today for Don Lemon. In about one hour as the sunrises on the Indian Ocean fresh leads could reinvigorate the global hunt for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. At daybreak in Perth, Australia, search crews will head out with several new clues to look for.

I want to show you this image, a potential piece of that missing jumbo jet. A Chinese satellite spotted this object floating in this search area on Tuesday. The object appears to be very large, 74 feet long by 43 feet wide. The new object was spotted roughly 75 miles from possible debris that appeared earlier on Australian satellite images and this could be another break. A visual spotter on an Australian plane reported seeing several small objects including a wooded pallet floating in that same search area. Meanwhile, families of the missing 239 people on board are frazzle their exhausted frustrated and demanding more from Malaysian authorities.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: We are here. (INAUDIBLE).

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SCIUTTO: In response to that, Malaysian officials are promising to do more for these desperate families. Here's what they had to say.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

HISHAMUDDIN BIN HUSSEIN, MALAYSIA'S ACTING MINISTER OF TRANSPORTATION: We will continue to engage with the families. We are working hard with Chinese authorities and the Chinese working group to create a more conducive environment for the briefings. I have instructed my team to do a review of both findings so that we can improve them. We appeal to all parties to be understanding during the extraordinary and difficult time. My pledge to all the families wherever they are is the same. We will do everything in our power to keep you informed.

(END VIDEO CLIP) SCIUTTO: We have teams of reporters covering every angle of the global hunt for Flight 370. In Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in Beijing, in Perth, Australia. We want to get you the latest right now from the ground.

CNN's Kyung Lah is live in Perth, Australia. Sunday morning there, not quite light, we can see behind you three hours from daylight and the start of Sunday's search. One question for you, and this is the key. You had the satellite picture a couple of days ago showing a big piece, similar size. Now you have the Chinese satellite data, similar-sized piece 75 miles away. Is the operating theory there that these are the same object? Is that a possibility they are considering?

KYUNG LAH, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Certainly it's a possibility. And that is certainly something the search crews are going to keep in mind as they head to that area. It was in the search area that the planes were in yesterday, Jim, as they were scouring over this particular area. But they didn't see anything. There was some debris spotted and when they had the military plane come out and look at it, it was first spotted by the civilian plane. When the military plane went out, they didn't see it, so they have sent a merchant ship out there to try to take a look, a little closer to see what the debris is.

But so far, they have found nothing. We are about one hour away from the first planes expected to take off. We are seeing more countries involved now, more planes taking to the air. What the Australians are doing is trying to get a larger number of planes into that area to try to whittle down the search area to try to figure out if what these objects are if they are any part of this missing plane, but so far nothing conclusive yet -- Jim.

SCIUTTO: Well, Kim, I'm glad you noted that that the Australians said that the planes that were up yesterday were in the same area as this new Chinese satellite photo. Now, when that happens, do they send search planes back to the area again just knowing that the seas are constantly moving things around or do they go once and then eliminate that area kind of move on to the next one?

LAH: No, they don't just go once, they go again and again, especially if they have an intriguing bread crumb like what the Chinese sent out. And the reason why is because if you think of the ocean, it's constantly churning. The temperatures are changing, debris moving in and out. Especially in this gyre, everything is circling. It's very possible for debris to pop up and then sink back down. So, that's something that they are constantly paying attention to. Especially the civilian spotters. You're using their eyeball.

They are not using radar, so they are going over these areas as more clues pop up. Something we should mention, Jim is that they are under an extreme time crunch this weekend because bad weather is moving into this area. In the southern corridor, a hurricane warning has been issued, there is a secondary storm also on top of that expected to move in and that certainly not going to help search crews that are out there. SCIUTTO: It's a great point. They have a short window of a few days of great weather and now that's going to end. So, that's a troubling development, but thanks very much to Kyung Lah joining us right outside the air base there in Perth, Australia where those planes are going to take off from.

Joining me now to discuss these developments, we have Les Abend, CNN aviation analyst himself. A 777 pilot like that Malaysian Airline flight. David Soucie, CNN safety analyst and author of "Why Planes Crash." And also Bob Baer, joining us now, CNN national security analyst himself, a former CIA operative.

Les, as we look at this, is this object still likely to be on the surface? The trouble of course with these satellite images, it takes some time to analyze them. You know, you're looking at a lot of pictures. You come by the time they are released and you're deploying search teams, it's been a few days. You know, the current is going to move them or it could have sunk.

LES ABEND, AVIATION ANALYST: Your guess Jim is as good as mine. You know, just knowing that the wing structure, to some extent, I would think that a lot of sea water has gotten into it. Although I'm very surprised if indeed it's a wing like suggesting that, you know, that there's a chance that it may be even further submerged at this point in time, so. If it is indeed that, of course, you know, we can always go back to the old container theory that it dropped off a ship.

SCIUTTO: And there's a lot of garbage out there. I want to remind our viewers that when you see something in the water, it's does not necessarily mean, it's a piece of the plane. There are a lot of things floating out there. It's kind of sadly, sadly to say.

David, I wonder if I could ask you, you know, 14 days, it's two weeks, the Air France plane went at this period of the Atlantic, I believe it was four or five days after it went down that they were able to see some debris. You can remember that picture of the rear stabilizer that they found with the Air France logo on it. Fourteen days looking in the ocean. Is there any precedent for searching for a plane for this long without seeing a sign and just searching and searching and not finding anything?

DAVID SOUCIE, CNN SAFETY ANALYST: Not in this day of modern aircraft, no, not that I'm aware of at all. So, you know, but although we didn't have this kind of search capability either. So it is longer than any that's ever been recorded that I've known of a commercial aircraft being gone for this long thing, missing for this long.

SCIUTTO: It's a real challenge. Each day makes it more difficult. Bob, I wonder if I could ask you, because a lot of the clues that come through now, the first clues, they are coming from satellite data. There's been some thought, and I think some of it with basis, right? That you have so many countries down there with difficult, shall we say, relationships and concerns. You know, China to Australia, to the Southeast Asia countries about revealing all of their military capabilities including their satellite capabilities. Should we assume that these countries are releasing all their best satellite data or they're running it through a filter because of those security concerns?

BOB BAER, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY ANALYST: Yes, Jim, you're exactly right. They are not giving us --

SCIUTTO: You started there, Bob, I heard the start of your thought.

BAER: They are very accurate. They are very accurate, these satellite pictures. But there's no reason the Chinese should give us their best quality. They can just point out a location and go there, look there. So we're not seeing the best stuff.

SCIUTTO: OK, so but that's interesting. So, I assume that we could expect the Chinese to have studied these pictures though so that they had confidence it was worth looking at particularly after the false alarm more than a week ago with that initial satellite picture in the South China Sea. So, they would look at their own better view and then release kind of a grainier review to the public. But say, hey, thrust us, this is something worth looking at, is that an accurate sense of what they might do?

BAER: Exactly. And they are probably using infrared at this point. And, you know, if the weather is clear enough, you could read a license plate. It's not very often, but if there was some sort of a marking on this wreckage, they would have seen it by now. But that doesn't mean that they would actually take the actual photograph and give it to Malaysia or the United States. They simply don't want us to know how good they are.

SCIUTTO: Yes. And a lot of the U.S.'s latest military equipment on display out there as well, including that P8 Poseidon. Les, we have talked about this a bit, and you said it would be a mistake not to keep looking on land despite this huge deployment now and real focus in the South Indian Ocean. Why is that?

ABEND: Yes. I firmly believe that. Although, I'm not sure what the configuration of this particular 777-200 was, but I'm almost certain that the slide rafts, you know, in a ditching situation are provision with what they call ELTs emergency locator transmitters. And these ELTs, when they hit salt water, are activated. And once they are activated they should send a signal to both of VHF emergency frequency and HF emergency frequency and a satellite which would give them a lot long. We don't have that information even though they were --

SCIUTTO: So when these things hit the water, the ELT is they don't just send a ping in the water that you have to listen for with a ship or something or a plane. They would send a signal to a satellite.

ABEND: Correct. These new ELTs, they are designed for a ditching.

SCIUTTO: Fair enough. But we don't know that this particular plane, that's something we should look into.

ABEND: Well, I'm certain that there are other configurations for it, but I'm almost certain that they have slide rafts, 777s have slide rafts, in a ditching situation you deploy the raft from the fuselage of the airplane. Somebody in the raft will take that Velcro piece and drop it.

SCIUTTO: You'd have to activate that. It wouldn't activate on its own if the plane --

ABEND: If it sunk in the water, it would activate.

SCIUTTO: That's very interesting.

ABEND: And that's why I'm thinking if we didn't get that signal, we still should be exploring the land, possibility.

SCIUTTO: David, I wanted to ask you a question. Because if the plane, let's say that the plane is in the water because one of the key reasons you need to find the plane is just to determine what brought it down. You know, look for instance signs of an explosion. You know, could salt water, I assume salt water would contaminate and erode the evidence over time, makes it difficult over time to determine what brought the plane down. Is that correct?

SOUCIE: Oh yes, it definitely does. When you look at the metallurgy, a lot of the keys that we find in an aircraft accident have to do with the metallurgy to see if a crack in a particular component for example had started cracking or fatiguing over time. You'd have a certain wear pattern that you could look at through a microscope and see if that was earlier or if it was a sudden tear. It makes a different pattern on the metal itself. So all of that can be -- there's ways to get through that, but with salt water it can definitely degrade your ability to do a complete investigation.

SCIUTTO: Right. Well, the one key, the one thing that's clear, the longer it takes, the more difficult it is going to be to answer those questions. Thanks very much to Les Abend, Bob Baer, David Soucie, thanks for joining us.

And still ahead in this hour, what do you tell grieving families whose patience is nearly exhausted after two weeks of dead ends and false hopes. That's right after this break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

SCIUTTO: In less than an hour we're told, the intense search for Malaysia Flight 370 will start again in one small part of a giant ocean. In the spot where China says, their satellite spotted something. The families of the passengers showing their frustration and lashing out after two weeks already of false leads and dead ends and who can blame them.

With us now are, aviation Attorney Justin Green, as well as expeditions explorer Christine Dennison to talk about this, particularly the plight of the families. Justin, you have dealt with families who suffered through 9/11, other aviation disasters. How gutting is it? How traumatizing it is to go through this without any answers, two weeks now of really just no idea what happened and no closure.

JUSTIN GREEN, AVIATION ATTORNEY: Right. I mean no one can really know what they are going through until you go through it. And the other thing is there are also cultural issues on how people deal with grieving. But there are common issues. One of the most common issues is that they are not only dealing with the normal sense of loss, but they are doing it in a very public way. That 9/11 victims in New York, the families of the victims, every time they went to a store, every time they looked at a newspaper, they get reminded of their loss. Here on top of this media frenzy, you have not knowing what happened.

SCIUTTO: Right.

GREEN: And they really can't go on to the next process. I'm sure they are all hoping, you know, that something will come out, that this airplane has been taken, their loved ones are alive. And until they know what happened, they can't move to the next step. On top of that, I'm also hearing stories that Americans -- lawyers are over there chasing cases and so you have the media going after them, you have lawyers going after them and they don't have answers.

SCIUTTO: Not the help they need.

GREEN: Not the help they need.

SCIUTTO: If you heard from families there, they are saying they want media attention because it's keeping pressure on the governments. You heard that from some.

GREEN: Well, absolutely. I'm talking about when the family groups are in these meetings and being chased by paparazzi.

SCIUTTO: No, I hear you. Absolutely, we have seen some of those scenes. It's got to be extremely difficult to handle because you want to suffer that in private, I would imagine. Christine, you know, the search teams, they are under a lot of pressure. Right? I mean, they are under pressure from their governments, particularly China which lost more than 150 people on the crash, but there also must be self- imposed pressure. Right? Because they want to serve the families, they want to give them news. It's getting less and less likely it's good news but some news of what happened. How does that pressure affect the search crews?

Absolutely search crews at this level, these guys are out there for a reason. They know what they are doing. They are just prepared to get in and do their job. At the end of the day --

SCIUTTO: OK. I'm going to ask you to hold that thought because we can't hear you for some reason, your microphone is not working. We want to come back to you. I'm going to ask Justin a question why we correct that problems, so our viewers can hear you. Justin, if I can ask you, you know, watching Malaysia Airlines handle this, I get frustrated. Right? And I often feel like, you know, officials in these situations they break very simple rules, which is, you know, tell people what you can. And, you know, apologize for what you can't say, but you kind of see them clamming up, which of course increases the frustration. What do you think is going on behind closed doors? GREEN: The most important thing is if you're going to release information, make sure it's the right information. Don't release information prematurely that you have to back up on later on. That becomes very, very frustrating to the families. Open communication, talking to the families and saying, look, we don't know is communication. You know, not telling them anything, not having meetings.

SCIUTTO: It's worse to say something.

GREEN: That's right. Absolutely. Especially if the families don't trust you. You know, if you say, look, the ACARS went off. In the next day, you say, well, you really might have gone off between these two different time periods, then the family's feel like something is going on behind the scenes.

SCIUTTO: Yes. And Christie, we're going to try you now. Because we want to hear your voice. Can we hear you? Just say a couple of words.

CHRISTINE DENNISON, OCEAN EXPLORERS AND EXPEDITION LOGISTICS EXPERT: I think we have her back now. OK, so, if we can -- we don't have you back. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry, I wonder -- Justin, do me a favor. We're going to share resources here.

GREEN: OK.

SCIUTTO: This is your microphone hear. We'll do it old school. You have it.

DENNISON: OK, thank you.

SCIUTTO: Here's live TV. Maybe just hold it like as if -- that's perfect.

DENNISON: You can hear me.

SCIUTTO: All right. We can hear you now. Let's go back to that original question I was asking you. The pressure on the crews. Because they want to find something. They want to give these families something they can help them through their grief, hard answers. How does that pressure affect them?

DENNISON: These are professionals. These are the best of the best at this point working on these rescue ops and teams. And so at the end of the day, they realize that there is potentially loss of life. And I don't think you can be conditioned, but they are certainly trained to be sensitive as best they can be working around the conditions that they are working under. So, I completely, I know from experience and I know that that is in the back of their minds at every turn.

SCIUTTO: What about the pressure of just keeping sharp? I have been looking at some and reading some of the stories about the hunt, hours and hours looking out a plane window. Your eyes must go blank. I mean, you're looking at a blank slate constantly. You know, how do they keep their sharpness up in the midst of what a very difficult and frustrating for them, frustrating mission?

DENNISON: Well, once again, these are professionals, experts and what they do is they rotate them on, usually eight or ten-hour shifts so that they don't get overly tired. But even so, they are 24/7 ops. So even though they are off after ten hours, it's not like you just can turn off and go to sleep. There's still activity. And if they are needed, they are on hand. They are all hands on deck.

SCIUTTO: Well, as you say, they are professionals. I think we understand they have their own patch now, they have their own mission patch for Flight 370. Kind of like soldiers we have when they go to war. But you know, sense of shared mission there. Thanks very much. Thank you for as we share our one microphone between you. Thanks for joining us. I hope we'll have the chance to speak to you again.

GREEN: Thanks very much.

SCIUTTO: Coming up, we'll tell you why this robot could hold the key to finding Flight 370 if it turns out it's at the bottom of the ocean. Right after this.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

SCIUTTO: The global hunt for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 may come down to one small sound, the ping from the flight data recorder. The ping may start to fade away about 14 days from now, so crews are frantically racing to find it before it's too late. And here's exactly what that ping sounds like.

(Pinging)

Correspondent Rosa Flores joins me now to explain the frantic hunt for that sound. And of course, my reaction, I'm sure a lot of my viewers reaction, your reaction as well, it sounds so quiet and low. I was imagining something louder, higher pitched, easier to hear. But I mean, is it, the equipment, I suppose, is attuned to listen exactly for that.

ROSA FLORES, CNN CORRESPONDENT: You're absolutely right. We talked to a company called the Phoenix International and they told us, you know, there's a lot of ways for you to find an aircraft, but a TPL or a Towed of Pinger Locator is usually what's used and exactly it does what the name says. So it's a piece of equipment that is equipped with a listening device. It's specifically listening for that ping. And then of course you have experts on the other end listening for this ping. So what this does is the ping narrows your search. It isolates an area where you know that the wreckage could possibly be, where your debris field could be. And then you bring in an AUV, or an autonomous unmanned vehicle and this is what it looks like, folks, and this is what it does. Take a listen.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

FLORES (voice-over): Unmanned probes like this have searched the ocean for plane wreckage before. It took years of sweeping the ocean bottom, but it found a downed plane carrying Italian fashion designer Vittorio Missoni, his wife and four others off the coast of Venezuela last year. It helped find Air France Flight 447 after it went missing, locating the wreckage and hundreds of bodies on board. It has found ships that sunk decades ago like the Ark Royal and these probes even allowed for detailed imaging of the titanic.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: The smaller ones are only going to down to about 5,000 feet. The next class is a much more expensive, much larger device that's 15 by 25 feet. It's very large because it adds a lot of battery capability and a lot of hydraulics capability.

FLORES: The autonomous under water vehicles, AUV does their calls, can go as deep as 20,000 feet sending acoustic pulses to the sea floor to find debris and then maps are drawn to guide search teams. They can even find things up to 300 feet under the sea floor. The search zone needs to be narrowed down first. This AUV can only search eight square miles a day. It would take four days to search an area as big as Manhattan. The equipment works around obstacles so it doesn't get damaged and maps them so divers don't get hurt.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Underwater obstructions are always a concern. We tend to fly the AUV at about a 45-meter altitude above the bottom. It keeps us usually out of the way of any obstructions.

FLORES: These types of searches can take months or years but the payoff is high. Wreckage that gives clues about what happened, data recorders, and the thing that matters most, the fate of the people on board.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

FLORES: So the AUV narrows your search, it finds the actual wreckage and then you step it up with something called an ROV, a Remote Operating Vehicle. And what it is, it's a robot that goes underwater, it has high definition cameras and little hands or claws that would actually help you retrieve critical pieces of the wreckage. Jim, in this case, of course, those voice data recorders that would give us the answers, so many answers that right now everyone has around the world.

SCIUTTO: It's incredible what a success that search has had before for planes on the bottom of the ocean. So, sounds like the right tool for the right time. Thanks very much to Rosa Flores.

FLORES: To another major story we're following. Russian troops today smashed their way into a military air base in Crimea. They broke down the gates with armored vehicles and soldiers with rifles at the ready marched on to the base. It's just one day since Russia formally annexed the Crimean Peninsula against the wishes of Ukraine's interim government. Russian troops then raised their flag over two military bases there today. Western observers will be in Ukraine in the coming days to keep an eye on the human rights situation there.

Now NASA is rolling out a new plan to help look for missing Malaysia Flight 370. Our next guest, an astronaut, says a new space tool in the works may prevent this type of problem from ever happening again.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

SCIUTTO: A big piece of something, say the Chinese, floating in the southern Indian Ocean is the only thing resembling a clue right now in the disappearance of an airliner with hundreds of people on board. It's not a perfect picture, but Chinese officials say one of their satellites took it a few days ago, and the white thing might be wreckage from the 777 that vanished more than two weeks ago now. Search crews are only now able to get started again as the sun comes up in the south Indian Ocean scanning the area where the object was spotted. They can only search when there's daylight. That image taken from space.

Joining me now, a man who lived in space for five months as commander of the international space station. He's NASA Astronaut Chris Hadfield and author of the "New York Times"-best seller, "An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth."

Chris, you have looked down on space from hours to this part of the world from orbit. Help us understand how big and remote a part of that ocean is. And also with this question, how well covered or not well covered is that part of the world by satellites? Is that something that helps explain why they haven't been able to spot it yet?

CHRIS HADFIELD, FORMER ASTRONAUT & AUTHOR: Well, the space station is a tremendous place to see the world in a new way. I have spent as much time as I could spare, as is the crew up there now with the big cameras looking down at the world trying to understand the surface. That part of the world is not a place we normally photograph because it's stormy, unpopulated ocean. And it tends to all look sort of the same and often it's quite cloudy. So I've looked through the lens there during the daytime. There's a few remote islands there, but mostly it's a vast, really untapped, untraveled expanse. And the immensity of the sea -- sailors know about it, but even people on the space station can see just how large that is. And I know that NASA and the crew on board are looking, using what they have on board to see if maybe we're the people that spot something useful down there.

SCIUTTO: I want to get to a question I've heard from a lot of viewers and I had myself. If you look at something like Google Earth, you can count the tiles on the roof of my house. Now you have these images and they look so grainy and hard to identify. As you said earlier in this broadcast, you can assume that China and other countries that are releasing these images aren't showing the full clarity. But you also explained it's about the angle of the satellite, because they are not right above this area because there's not a lot going on in this area, they are taking these pictures through a lot of atmosphere. Explain how that makes a difference.

HADFIELD: Well, it's sort of like the difference between the sun when it's just setting and the sun when it's directly overhead. You get so much more of a sunburn with the midday sun because there's so much less atmosphere as a filter. It even changes color. There's so much atmosphere in the way. You see it at a sunrise and a sunset. It's the same effect to try to take a picture either as a crew member on the space station or any of the satellites with cameras looking diagonal through the long atmosphere, like looking through a puddle or looking across the water. It just messes up the view. And what we want to do is be right above there when there's no cloud in the way and the sun is giving us good light. That's where we want it to take the pictures. That doesn't happen every single pass over the south Indian Ocean or anywhere in the whole search area.

SCIUTTO: Chris, I have to ask a question. And I hope this isn't a silly question, but is there a way that the space station could help by -- I don't know enough to know where that orbit is in relation to that part of the south Indian Ocean, but are there tools that could be directed at a patch of ocean like this?

HADFIELD: Absolutely. And of course, if you were the crew member on board, just as we were on the station, when there was a volcano threatening a land mass, we would do our best to get pictures of that. This is the same thing. We have video cameras staring at the world. There's a company called Earth Cast that has two cameras staring at the world mounted on a platform. And the crew members will be looking with hand-held cameras. And just recently through Nanorax (ph), a company called Planet Labs has released 28 remote cameras that are free flying in different orbits all tipped up to be able to look that far south. All of them just looking their best down there. But it's unfortunately a huge area, a great big world and it's weather dependent. We're joining in on the effort, but it's not that easy and it's a huge, empty sea to look into. I sure hope somebody sees something conclusive soon.

SCIUTTO: It's a fascinating possibility you raise, the idea the space station getting involved in the hunt. NASA has offered their help as well.

Thanks very much, Chris Hadfield.

Stick around. Coming up, we could have known days ago what happened to flight 370 if it had a device that's already used in some planes. We'll show you that equipment right after this.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

SCIUTTO: We want to give you a quick update on the NCAA basketball tournament. The number-one seeded Florida Gators have reached the sweet 16 for the fourth straight season. They beat Pittsburgh today, 61-45. It's the Gators' 20th consecutive victory. More big games to come. Later today, number-four seeded Michigan State will be taking on Harvard.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

SCIUTTO: Welcome back. I'm Jim Sciutto, in New York.

Much of the information about what happened to Malaysia Airline 370 is lost along with the plane. Even if the plane is found, it could take years for the information to be recovered, but could that be prevented in the future?

Here's CNN's Money tech correspondent, Laurie Segall. (BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

LAURIE SEGALL, CNN MONEY TECH CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): When Malaysia Airlines flight 370 disappeared, the story of what went wrong vanished. The answers might be in the black box. What if we had those answers all along?

RICHARD HAYDEN, DIRECTOR FLIGHT: We would know where the aircraft has gone, where it is, and we would have information on what happened in the meantime.

SEGALL: Canadian company Flight makes live-streaming data recorders that send information in real time. It's part of a satellite-based system that monitors the exact location, engine conditions and more.

HAYDEN: The system transmits every five to ten minutes on a normal flight.

SEGALL: If something goes wrong like the plane deviating from the route, the system will start streaming live second-by-second data.

MARY SCHIAVO, FORMER INSPECTOR GENERAL, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION: That kind of information is not only life saving, but it adds a tremendous measure of security for our country.

SEGALL: There are several mechanisms that transmit a plane's data, but Hayden says, unlike those systems, the technology behind Flight is more extensive sharing a tremendous amount of information. So much information, critics say it could be difficult to monitor and analyze if widely adapted.

Right now, technology is only fitted to 350 planes, run by 40 operators. It could be installed for $100,000. Normal data transmission cost carries between a few dollars to $15 per flight hour and goes up for continuous streaming in a rare emergency.

SCHIAVO: They are very cost sensitive and will not add safety measures unless mandated by the federal government.

SEGALL: As investigators look for high-tech clues into the search for flight 370, the high-tech data recorder is getting a second look.

HAYDEN: The technology exists. It's economical and the question now is how to get more widespread use.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

SCIUTTO: CNN Money tech correspondent, Laurie Segall joins us now. Also we have Astronaut Chris Hadfield back to joins us.

Laurie, if I could begin with you. The technology seems like a no- brainer. Does it come down to cost? Is that why it hasn't happened?

SEGALL: I asked that question and I said $100,000 is a lot. He said, this is about .1 percent of what it would cost to run an airplane in general. What they did tell me tht the industry is pretty cautious about new technology. This is no small feat. You're installing this on the plane, you have to ground the plane for a couple days. There has to be a thorough evaluation of it. And it's a relativity new technology. The newest version of this has just been in the market for the last couple years. They are saying they are just now beginning to see a little bit of traction. Obviously, events like this puts this into focus.

SCIUTTO: The other question is how much data is this and would it overload systems to be sending this constant stream? I suppose you could simplify the data.

SEGALL: Sure. The one thing they will say about the data is they start really doing the live streaming if the plane veers off. If something --

SCIUTTO: If there's an issue.

SEGALL: If there's an issue. Also when you think about it, my question to the guys in Flight is, if they were able to turn off the transponder, why wouldn't they just be able to turn this off? What they told me was it's difficult to find the kill switch. It's not in the cockpit. They wouldn't tell me where it was, and it also goes into battery power. If there's a big power outage or something t starts running on battery. That's kind of behind the technology. They didn't want to tell me exactly how it could turn off in instances like this.

SCIUTTO: Fair enough. I suppose you could say take away the power to turn it off. Although, I have been told by pilots that they need to turn things off in case there's a short circuit.

Chris, I want to ask you -- sorry, we lost Chris Hadfield.

But we have Laurie here to talk about this.

(LAUGHTER)

If cost isn't an issue, overload isn't an issue, does it sound like -- is it just the size of the task? Thousands of planes in the air, it would take a long time?

SEGALL: It would. And look, everyone is looking at different types of technology. And there is the idea that -- let's say that all different commercial airlines were using this type of data. They weren't just using it if the plane veered off. This would be a lot. This could potentially cause satellite interference. And this specific case, they like to say it's not used unless the plane veers off. But if this technology were being utilized by airplanes --

(CROSSTALK)

SEGALL: Yeah. Every time, this is something you would have to look at.

SCIUTTO: When you have accidents like this, there are fixes that come afterwards. They will have to look at something. There's been a major airliner lost for 14 days. The question is, what will they do.

Thanks very much to Laurie Segall, CNN Money tech correspondent.

A "CNN Hero" collected hundreds of messages in a bottle in a push to remove 700 million pounds of trash in rivers across the U.S. We'll have his story, after this break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

SCIUTTO: We will have more on the missing plane in a moment. But first, they are romanticized and written about in movies and songs, but it turns out that people really do send messages in bottles. Let's meet the "CNN Hero" this week who has collected some of the very special river refuse.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED CNN HERO: This is the special message-in-a-bottle collection, and we have collected it over the years. It is cool to find one, because you don't know where they come from or how they were found.

This is cool from the 1993 flood with a flag on it. This is a bunch of lottery tickets, and I don't know if they are winners or not, but obviously not.

Here's one. This is cool. It is a picture of Bill Clinton. Pretty neat.

Some of them have been found three or four time and then passed on and down the river, and down the river and people sign them and date it.

This one had money in it with postage so you could send it back to them. We haven't done that yet, but we probably should. Stamps went up since it was sent though.

This is a voodoo one, and it is better not for me, but nails in it with a note and a string tied on it. It is said "You are bound now."

There is a lot of them that are heavy and written to lost loved one. And you know, I want to keep it because it was meant not to with be kept.

It is fun to find them and fun for the volunteers, but it is a unique collection, because who else finds this many, this h many messages in a bottle. So it is really pretty cool.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

SCIUTTO: As the search for flight 370 now focuses on a new location, we will take you inside a flight simulator to the show you what could have happened to the plane before it went missing right after this break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK) SCIUTTO: One possible scenario in the disappearance of flight 370 is that the crew became engrossed in handling an emergency such as a fire in the wheel well or the cargo hold.

Martin Savidge is again with 777 trainer, Mitchell Casado, in a 777 simulator outside of Toronto.

Martin, I know you've been studying this. Can you walk us through what would have happened in the cockpit if the crew was overcome with smoke or fumes or had to handle an emergency like that?

MARTIN SAVIDGE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, what we will show you is what should happen and then you will know the differences of what we know of 370. And like 370, of course, on the route to Beijing and taken off from Kuala Lumpur and we would have reached that point in coming out of Kuala Lumpur where you turn off of the "fasten seat belt" sign. So we're at cruise altitude, just made it. And everybody in the back would be relaxed. Up here, it's likely we get something like this. First indication of the problem. That is the alarm. And we get a readout on our screen that says where the fire is located. And for this scenario, it's probably located, say, in the forward cargo area. At the same time, the delegation would be to the captain. Mitch would be now trying to get us down as low as possible, because smoke could come into the cockpit. We want to get to a place where we can open the cockpit window to let the smoke out. We would have oxygen masks on. I would be launching here, because this is what is firing the extinguishers in the cargo hold. At the same time, the plane is descending and we would be banking. And this is the turn that is perhaps trying to get back to Kuala Lumpur or to the airport to try to get this on the ground. We would also have oxygen masks on, which you don't have for the simulator here. And one last thing, we would probably be communicating. That's one of the first things that you would do once you have control.

MITCHELL CASADO, PILOT: Absolutely for sure.

SAVIDGE: And so the only thing that we can think of in this scenario is that perhaps the crew was able to stabilize it at some point -- just as Mitchell has been able to do -- and resets now on the new course south the automatic pilot, which means that we are flying straight and level. But in this point in this scenario we would have been passed out and been unable to anything else to the aircraft, and because it was loaded for the flight to Beijing, maybe seven hours of fuel, for six hours, this aircraft would have fly straight until the fuel ran out and it went into the ocean. That's the fire scenario -- Jim?

SCIUTTO: Now, Martin, the pilots have said that the priority is to stabilize the plane and navigate before they communicate back with the ground. But would there not be any opportunity in there just to make it clear to those on the ground that something was happening or would there even with be an automatic signal to the ground that there was an emergency on board?

SAVIDGE: Well, both of those could have happened. The ACARS system if, it was working is an alternate communication system, it should have signaled these kinds of problems with the aircraft automatically. And the thing is that every time you run the scenario, we cannot understand why there is no radio call. In Value Jet, when that plane went down in just under three minutes, they still managed to make several calls, and they had a horrific fire. And the same battery fire in Dubai on that UPS plane in 2010, they, too, were able to regularly communicate on the radio.

Why was there absolutely no messaging?

CASADO: That is very telling, extremely telling, and really important.

SCIUTTO: It is the one thing that probably says that the fire scenario did not happen.

And also, because they did not descend rapidly. They had a turn, but no sudden descent. These are the kinds of things that they -- it doesn't seems like a fire by the actions of the aircraft.

SCIUTTO: And quickly, did you run through the possibility of a sudden decompression?

MARTIN: We've run through as best we can. It is going to be a similar sort of thing, slam it down on the deck as quickly as possible.

The other thing to remember is the oxygen bottles that you have -- how long do they last?

CASADO: They don't last very long. Depending on the aircraft, 15 minutes. A rapid decompression, you are talking on the radio. That's another thing. Yes, navigate before communicate, but it does not happen to aviate, navigate and communicate 10 minutes later. In aviate, navigate, you're talking five seconds, you are on the radio, yes.

(CROSSTALK)

SCIUTTO: Well, thanks very much to our Martin Savidge -- well, thanks very much to our Martin Savidge and Mitchell Casado inside of that 777, exploring all of the possibilities that could have happened inside of a real cockpit.