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Search For Malaysian Air 370 Resumes In Southern Indian Ocean; White House Warns Russia It Will Be Held Responsible For Ukrainian troops Hurt In Crimea; Is Satellite Image Part of MH-370?; Simulator Runs Through Fire Scenario; Search for Flight 370 Shows Technology's Limits

Aired March 22, 2014 - 18:00   ET

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

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

You are in the CNN NEWSROOM. I'm Jim Sciutto in New York today for Don Lemon. And we would like to welcome viewers watching around the world this hour on CNN international.

We are following the latest developments in the search for Malaysian airlines flight 370. We are also following this important story, confrontation in Crimea, Russian, armored vehicles crash the gates and take over a Ukrainian military base. Gun fire has erupted.

But first, any minute now the invigorated search for missing Malaysia flight 370 will begin as the sun rises over the Indian Ocean. Crews will fly from Perth Australia armed with several new clues in the aviation mystery that have befuddled the world for 16 days now.

New clues could be a big break. A spotter on an Australian plane reported seeing several small objects yesterday, including a wooding pallet floating in that same search area. And there is this, I want to show you this image, a potential piece of that missing jumbo jet. A Chinese satellite spotted this object floating in the search area Tuesday. The object appears to be very large, 74 feet long by 43 feet wide. And this new object was spotted roughly possibly 75 miles from possible debris that appeared earlier on Australian satellite images seen here.

Meanwhile, the families of the missing 239 people on board are frazzled, they are exhausted, frustrated and demanding more from the Malaysian authorities.

(VIDEO CLIP PLAYING)

SCIUTTO: And responding to that kind of anger, Malaysian officials promised the do more for those desperate families trapped in a heartbreaking wait for answers, waiting in agony now for more than two weeks. And we can't forget the search for the missing plane on land.

Right now, the Malaysian authorities are waiting for permission from Kazakhstan government to use the country as staging area for a search of the northern corridor.

We have teams of reports covering every angle of the global hunt for the missing jet in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in Beijing and Perth, Australia. We are going to get you the very latest.

And here is the very latest we gave from the ground. CNN's Kyung Lah is live in Perth, Australia. We can see the sun just coming up behind her there. It is morning there. The sun rises. This is the key hour when those jets can return to sky. What kind of assets are going to be up there today over that area where the Chinese satellite picked up this possible debris?

KYUNG LAH, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, Jim, we are on the cost of daybreak, and it is just now that we are anticipating that those turbo jets or the military planes should be charging up and just launching what will be the fourth day searching off of Australia, heading down about four hours southwest of where I'm standing.

And what we are expecting regarding those assets that you are talking about. We are going to have more assets in the air according to the Australian government. Two planes from China, two which -- one of which we saw landing yesterday at Perth international airport arriving from China, and that will joining the Australian hunt as well as the New Zealand planes, and the civilian planes.

On those civilian planes are spotters who are trained with the naked eye to scan the sea to see if there is any debris. So what they are going to be doing is trying to whittle down the search area, check out the seas, try to figure out if the debris that has been spotted is in fact connected to the missing plane -- Jim.

SCIUTTO: Kyung, I want to ask you. I have this curiosity. I'm sure some of our viewers have the same. When you look at the image, the Australian images from a couple days ago and this Chinese image today, as similar sized object. There are 75 miles apart but the currents are swirling down there. Is it the working assumption of the searchers that they are looking for the same thing spotted in the two different photographs?

LAH: Well, it is a possible. Certainly, they don't know. But they have the work on the fact that this is another clue. And it is these clues and the best possible lead that we have had since this jetliner simply vanished. It is yet another clue. And so what the search teams are trying to do is to chase this clue as aggressively as possible. If you talk to the people going up into the air, you sense the same thing that they keep saying even though they return without having found anything, they are driven by this desire and hope that they can give the families some answers, because right now, they don't have anything and they want to give that to them.

SCIUTTO: And now they have their own mission patch for the search for flight 370, and all of the folks taking part from so many countries.

Thanks very much to Kyung Lah, joining us from Perth, Australia.

And joining me now to discuss this developments, we have Les Abend, CNN aviation analyst himself, a 777 pilot, Tom Fuentes, CNN law enforcement analyst, former FBI assistant director and Steve Wallace, CNN aviation analyst, FAA investigator. So we have a number of folks here who have been investigating just these kinds of events.

Steve, if I could start with you. So search planes returning to the sky now just a few minutes. How can they make the best use of the daylight hours because the other challenge they have, it takes them four hours most of these aircraft to get to the point, the search area. They only have a couple hours on site and they got to turn around to come back. How do may make the best time there so they maximize their chances of seeing something?

STEVEN WALLACE, CNN AVIATION ANALYST: Well, just note at the outset that, you know, we are 12 times under way approximately, and this is the time of the year when the days are of equal length in northern southern hemisphere. So basically, you know, if it is daylight in New York, it is dark there, and vice versa. So I would assume they might take off in the predawn darkness and get there when the light first becomes available.

You know, they just have to zero in, I mean, we have all looked at those images, a lot of us as Captain Abend there has said looks too big to be a typical floating piece of structure. I think it is simple as getting a closer look. You know, now if it is airplane were run so that all of the fuel was out, I might be a little more inclined to accept the possibility that it could be the wing of the airplane which would be buoyant and the engine might shear off so possibly could be a floating wing.

SCIUTTO: Steve brings, Les, if I could bring you in, a fair question there. A plane hitting water at speed is like hitting concrete. And a lot of the pilots have said difficult to imagine a piece that large. There are the possibility -- collection of pieces, right? You know, it is tangle up in wire from the plane, this sort of thing.

When you look at those images, do you look at them and say, it is possible that it is part of the plane?

LES ABEND, CNN AVIATION ANALYST: Absolutely it is possible. It depends upon what angle, you know, the airplane hit the water and how fast the speed. The interesting thing is that if indeed it is a wing, that fragment, you can start the accident investigation process by just looking at the fragment where it came off of the fuselage of the airplane and how fast it hit the water, so.

SCIUTTO: And also looking for the other signs and soot, for instance, signs of an explosion, you can test for residue.

ABEND: Absolutely.

SCIUTTO: But you have made the point before the longer these pieces are in the salt water, you know, the degradation of the evidence in effect.

ABEND: Yes, of course. SCIUTTO: Tom, I wonder if I could bring you in, Tom, You know, your experience as the assistant FBI director in a number of investigations. There is a lot of frustration with this investigation from the beginning. First of all, looking in the wrong place, right, for a long period of time, but also sharing of intelligence, satellite photos, radar, tracking information, and that kind of thing.

Do you get a sense that the sharing, that the organization, the leadership is getting better in the hunt for this plane?

THOMAS FUENTES, CNN CONTRIBUTOR: Jim, you know, I sure hope so. But every aspect that you mentioned was really the sharing and coordination between the aviation services, their military, their civil aviation authorities and the technicians looking at the radar data and the satellite data. That is a different matter than the level of law enforcement cooperation that started day one, and has working on this case all along with the FBI, the permanent office that is in Kuala Lumpur. The agents invited immediately into the command post the very night that the plane disappeared. So that coordination and cooperation has been ongoing and very, very good.

It is just the confusion that is really the result of whether it was mechanical failure or pilot or hijacking or the plane flew, you know, thousands of miles or destructed, all of that is the technical part of the condition of the aircraft and where it may have gone.

SCIUTTO: I'd like to -- since we have the international viewers joining us now, just invite you the tweet questions to me @Jimsciutto. We have a number of opportunities over the next couple of hours to discuss these questions, so please do send them our way.

But before we finish this segment, Les, if I could come back to you. The world is now focusing on the South Indian Ocean. That is where most of the resources are, but they have not given up on the northern corridor that goes over land. You made the point that it is important to keep the focus on the possibility that this plane ended up on the ground? Why is that?

ABEND: Absolutely. Just by virtue of the emergency locator transmitters not sending out a signal which they don on very strict (INAUDIBLE) satellite by inning saltwater and saltwater will activate them. We never got those signals that I'm aware of unless they were being monitored. But they do send out and latitude and longitude.

SCIUTTO: All right. And we did know that Malaysian authorities today have asked Kazakhstan to look as well. So they haven't given up on that northern corridor, although the bulk of the assets are now down in the South Indian Ocean.

Thanks very much. Les Abend, Tom Fuentes, Steve Wallace, thanks for joining us. I know we will come back to you.

Besides playing debris, investigators are looking for a certain sound to help them find the flight 370.

Up next, we will explain why that sound is so important and why investigators need to find it as soon as possible.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

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

Right now, it is daybreak on the Indian Ocean where the search for missing Malaysian airlines flight 370 is just getting under way for another day. Several new clues may transform the mission to find the airliner with those 239 people on board.

Correspondent Sara Sidner is breaking down the significance of the new clues.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

SARA SIDNER, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Malaysian officials break the monotony of the daily briefings that normally reveal almost nothing new with this.

HISHAMMUDDIN BIN HUSSEIN, MALAYSIAN ACTING TRANSPORTATION MINISTER: The Chinese have received a satellite image of objects in the southeast corridor, and they will be sending ships to verify.

SIDNER: Moments later, China send out this satellite image. It shows an object floating in the Southern Indian Ocean. Its size, 22.5 meters by 13 meters, not much different from the size of the 24 meter long object captures on this satellite image on march 16th and released by Australian authorities on Thursday.

The Chinese say that the object they spotted is about 130 kilometers southwest from the Australian sighting. That is a very short distance considering the vast area that is being search in the Indian Ocean.

The families have been in agony as they follow every detail, emotions are spilling over time and time again. And because nothing has led to the true whereabouts of the plane carrying their sons, daughters, grandparents and spouses.

HUSSEIN: The briefing (INAUDIBLE) yesterday went very well. The briefing in Beijing, however, was less productive despite the tension (INAUDIBLE).

SIDNER: This is the third satellite image dangled in front of the officials and the suffering families which might have something to do with the missing flight MH 370 which disappeared more than two weeks ago with 239 passengers and crew aboard.

The first one also came from China. This image of debris released March 13th off of the coast of Vietnam. But China said that the pictures were released by mistake, the search turned up nothing.

March 20th, as Australia said they had found the best lead yet in the search for the missing plane. The Australian image sparked a shift in the deployment of military assets and all ships and the aircraft were sent to the Southern Indian Ocean to hunt down the objects in the pictures. Now China is deploying its assets in the middle of a category I cyclone trying to find the match to this image its satellite discovered.

Meantime, the families will have another night of uncertainty forced to wait and wonder for a 15th straight night.

Sara Sidner, CNN, Kuala Lumpur.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

SCIUTTO: Those search crews have more reasons to be concerned about the passage of time. Emergency electronics designed to help locate the place will not last forever. And right now, search crews are desperately listening for this sound.

That's the sound of the pinger. Rene Marsh is here. She is our aviation correspondent.

So Rene, just a first question, why does the pinger give a simple tone. I think we all kind of imagine it to be louder or higher pitched or something, not just a simple click like that.

RENE MARSH, CNN AVIATION AND GOVERNMENT REGULATION CORRESPONDENT: Right.

And you know, Jim, I'm so happy that we have finally have this audio. We have been talking so much about pingers, pingers, pingers. And finally now we know what we are referring to here. Now, that audio is exactly what the pingers aboard flight 370 would sound like if it is detected by underwater technology. Normally, you can't hear it with the human ear, but the manufacturer helped us to convert it to an audible signal.

Now the pingers, of you remember, they associated with the data recorders, and it helps the crews essentially locate those recorders. And the flight recorders are so critical, because it will help the investigator understand what happened, what went wrong. The locator pingers are attached to the black boxes and they are likely emitting the sound that you just heard.

But here is the problem. The battery life on them, probably about 50 percent drained by this point. And when that battery dies possibly around April 6th, the job of finding the so-called data recorders or black boxes, it gets extremely hard. What they use is something called the hydrophone to locate them. They simply drop this equipment down into the water so that they can detect that sound that we just heard within a two-mile radius.

And just on Friday, Malaysian aw authorities said that they need this technology. They have asked the other countries, including the United States to help providing more underwater technology, Jim.

SCIUTTO: And all right. So that is a challenge under the water listening for that pinger. You know, on the surface of the water, you have another challenge -- I mean, you know, what do experts say about how long assuming that the plane did hit the ocean, how long wreckage would stay floating on the surface?

MARSH: Right. So it really depends upon the part of the plane. There are pieces of the plane in which you would expect this far along more than two weeks now for it to be still on the surface.

Take a listen to this one expert. He kind of flushes out what you would expect to be on the surface this far into the game here during the search. Take a listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BILL WALDOCK, EMBRY-RIDDLE AERONAUTICAL UNIVERSITY: Most of the cabin furnishings, for example were made out of a variety of plastics, and thermoplastics and some composite materials, things like the overhead bins, the seat cushions, the cosmetic bulkheads, all of those typically should be still floating,. In a lot of cases, they are going to be actually intermingled with wire and other debris, so you may have smaller pieces mixed in which might look like a larger piece from a satellite or the air.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MARSH: All right. And speaking of those satellite images there, we just saw is it. To his point, that one satellite image that we saw is roughly 74 feet, he is saying that, you know, you never know. You have to really get up close to it to know are these a bunch of small pieces that are very far away to be one big large piece, we just don't know until we find the actual object that is floating there, Jim.

SCIUTTO: And a lot of more planes will be up in the air today to look and to get that closer look.

Thanks very much, Rene Marsh in Washington.

And up next, new details in another big story we are following an that is crisis in Ukraine. Russia has Crimea under its control, and the tensions and the concerns there now growing there. Right after this break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

SCIUTTO: Welcome back. I'm Jim Sciutto in New York, and we will get back to the search for Malaysian airline flight 370 in a moment.

But first, important developments today in another part of the world. Russian military forces today are taking whatever they want and going wherever they want on the piece of land they now claim belongs to them.

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SCIUTTO: This is an air base inside Crimea. Until today, it was a Ukrainian base, now though, the Russian flag flies over it. The Russian troops took over two bases today much in the same way, by force.

Shortly time ago I talk to CNN's Ivan Watson in Kiev.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

IVAN WATSON, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: We actually talked to the commander in the base about an hour before the Russians made their assault. And he said, listen, we are surrounded by pro Russian militia, by Cossacks and then Russian military units in the back of those kind of the civilian groups, and he vowed to fulfill his oath to his country, to the service. He said he was going to try to use fire hoses to keep the crowd back.

Well, then, what clearly happened according to the security camera footage that was feeding out remarkable live images was that a Russian armored personnel carrier basically bashed down the gates of the air base and then the Russian troops stormed in.

Now, fortunately, there have been no reports of loss of life. Instead, what we saw was the humiliating scene of the Ukrainian troops basically having to bring their flag down and walk out of the barracks with their belongings, abandoning it to the Russian military. That is a scene that has played out again and again, day after day, at different Ukrainian military points across the Crimean peninsula, as the Russian military not only has annexed that entire peninsula, but it is now summarily pushing the Ukrainian military out from one base to another.

It is really dramatic. There has been one loss of Ukrainian life so far. A soldier who was shot to death while in his guard post in a guard tower. That was a couple of days ago -- Jim.

SCIUTTO: Ivan, we have been watching pictures as you are speaking there of those Russian armored personnel carriers, breaking, busting through the gates -- I mean, it looks like an invasion of the military takeover, I wonder as the discussions continue over, you know, gradually escalating the sanctions against Russia, what is the reaction of Ukrainian people there in Kiev and beyond? Do they feel that they are getting the support that they expected from Europe and the U.S.? Do they feel abandoned? What is their level of concern now?

WATSON: It is huge. I mean, I have been hearing of the past week talk of war, and we have been watching the Ukrainian men of all ages to sign up to either be in the reserves or an active duty in the armed forces in the National Guard. The government has called up for 20,000 more troops in the armed forces and another 20,000 in the National Guard. And I have been hearing the men who were signing up say that I have to protect my country from this enemy, and the enemy, they say, almost all of them is Russia.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

SCIUTTO: Thanks to Ivan Watson in Kiev.

Russian president Vladimir Putin made it official yesterday. He signed a treaty formally annexing the Crimean peninsula as part of Russia. Ahead here, the latest on those new clues about what may have happened to Malaysia flight 370? Our aviation experts will share their insights on what these clues could mean.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

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

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 space officials say one of their satellites took it a few days ago and that the white thing there might be wreckage from the Malaysia Airlines triple-7 that vanished more than two weeks ago now.

Search crews are only now able to get started again for the day, scanning the area where the object was spotted, and they can only search, of course, in the daylight. And so today is day 16 since Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 took off from Kuala Lumpur with 239 people on board. Is this latest object, seen by a Chinese satellite, a piece of Flight 370? We're going to look into that now.

We have CNN aviation correspondent Richard Quest here at the studio in the New York studio. Also in Washington, CNN aviation analyst Miles O'Brien.

Miles, if I could start with you, and this is something I've asked of all of our aviation experts as they look at this, because there have been some doubts expressed in the past about pieces this large being possible from a plane to hit the water. When you look at those satellite photos, to you, does that correspond to a possible section of a Boeing triple-7?

MILES O'BRIEN, CNN AVIATION ANALYST: Well, if you overlay that piece, 70-some odd feet in one direction, 40 feet in the other, against the schematic of a Boeing 777, it's kind of hard to figure out what piece it is. Maybe the horizontal stabilizer, which tip to tip is 70 feet. That's the wing that's in the back part of the plane.

Maybe it's some portion of the main wing section, but here we are two weeks later, and this particular aircraft is almost entirely aluminum; I think only 10 percent carbon materials. And it's hard to imagine a piece of wing still floating two weeks later.

The other thing that I think mitigates against this being a piece of the aircraft is there's no other flotsam nearby. I mean, what you really typically would see are seat cushions at the very least. And maybe the resolution of the satellite doesn't allow us to see that, but I don't see anything else in that area, so I'm a skeptic.

SCIUTTO: Fair skepticism. Richard, I wonder if I can ask you: Are you convinced they're looking in the right place? Sixteen days later? You remember it was a few days ago when suddenly the resources were really focused in the south, and officially they say they haven't given up on the so-called northern corridor. But do you have confidence that the best that we know puts them in the right place?

QUEST: You have to go with the evidence that you've got, and it's as slim as it might be. And truth be told, Jim, the pickings are very slim.

But in Kazakhstan, Miramar, India and all the countries in the northern corridor say that they have no radar trace of that plane. And you've searched the immediate area, it would be perverse to keep searching that northern corridor when you've got evidence or at least potential evidence of what was in the south -- the southern corridor.

And that is why, yes, you keep an open mind, yes, you're prepared to go back if there's further evidence up in the northern corridor, but so far, there's no reason to deploy large numbers of assets north.

SCIUTTO: It's incredible, 16 days later, just operating on the best guesses, right? I mean, suppose it's a typical investigation?

QUEST: Well, they're not really typical. Miles might agree with me.

SCIUTTO: Well, certainly, atypical that -- it's atypical just because you go on the best clues you have, right, and there are no hard answers.

QUEST: Absolutely. And there's so few of them here. And the clues that we do have are tenuous. They are pings. They're extremities of science. They're extrapolation.

SCIUTTO: Yes, grainy satellite pictures.

Miles, I wonder if I could bring you in, and this is a question that came through Twitter, but I think a fair question. It comes from Ziyad Matti (ph), who asked, "What can commercial airliners do to ensure customers there won't be an MH-370 repeat in the future."

We don't know the cause of what brought it down, but at least the difficulty in finding this plane. What changes could airliners take to make it easier to find a place under -- a plane under circumstances like this?

O'BRIEN: There is simply no technological or really financial reason that we don't have constant communication between any aircraft in flight, and the ground, one way or another. Telemetry. Think about what the space shuttle has with Mission Control. That's an elaborate version of what I'm talking about.

These aircraft are -- there's less known about them than a tractor trailer that drives across this country. So in this day and age, when we are so wired and so connected and, in fact, as we sit in the back of the aircraft we're surfing the Web, the idea that this plane isn't tracked, you know, to a very precise level at every moment is actually astonishing to most people, and it's a reflection of how the aviation industry works.

Frankly, it's a lot of old technology that works. The aviation industry is reluctant to embrace new technology because of the safety issues, understandable. But it needs to push into the 21st century, and this is a good, classic example. I think of those poor families wondering where their loved ones are, and this is completely avoidable.

SCIUTTO: All right. I think that just holding my cell phone here, I am more tracked, maybe, than that plane.

O'BRIEN: Yes, yes.

SCIUTTO: But I wonder if we could ask you. We had Laurie Segall on earlier, you know, CNNMoney tech correspondent, and she did some research and said that the system cost about 100,000 bucks. It's 0.1 percent of the cost of a plane, maybe 1 -- 0.01 percent. Is cost the issue? Do you think that's for all those airlines?

QUEST: Well, it is not the total issue, but it's not an insignificant. I'll give you an example. It's not the cost of the $100,000. Why do I know this? Because they're putting satellite dishes on the roof of planes for Wi-Fi and for Internet connectivity, and they cost $1 million to install on each aircraft. And if you're a major U.S. carrier, and you've got 700, 800 planes, that's a sizable sum.

The real cost involved is the data. You're going to have to use a data link up to the satellite. You're going to have to have a data stream, and then you're talking about thousands of dollars a month per aircraft.

Now I'm not suggesting for a moment you put a price on lives. What I am saying is the airline industry -- and Miles again may agree with me on this -- the airline industry, the -- the margins are razor thin. They are literally coppers on the ticket.

SCIUTTO: Yes. You have airlines in Europe charging to go to the bathroom, right?

QUEST: Yes.

SCIUTTO: Almost.

QUEST: They're literally coppers on the ticket. And so if you suddenly say to an airline, you're now going to spend another 6 to 10 grand a month per plane for a full state of stream, then you're going to get airlines saying, "Well, do we need it?"

SCIUTTO: Right.

QUEST: "How relevant is it? Is it a cost we want to undertake."

SCIUTTO: Well, and then we wonder after something like this, is the pressure so great that they're required to. But that's a debate just beginning now.

Thanks very much to Richard Quest here in New York. Miles O'Brien in D.C., we're going to talk to you again in a few minutes. We're not going to let you go. As the search for Flight 370 now focuses on a new location, we'll take you inside a flight simulator to show you what could have happened to that plane. Right after this.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

SCIUTTO: One possible scenario in the disappearance of Flight 370 is that the crew became engrossed in handling an emergency, possibly a fire in the wheel well or in the cargo hold. Our Martin Savidge is with triple-7 trainer Mitchell Casado in a Boeing simulator outside of Toronto, a cockpit just like the one on this Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.

Martin, I know you've been running through these scenarios there, how they would pan out. Walk us through a scenario whereby -- where the crew might have been overwhelmed by smoke and fumes, how quickly it would have happened, what their steps would have been. Walk us through it.

MARTIN SAVIDGE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Right, well, to give you a very broad sort of look at how it might have happened -- we're not saying this is absolute with 370, but it could have. And we've set up this aircraft simulator to emulate everything we know about 370. In other words, we would be up at altitude. This is the part of the flight where the seat belt sign has been turned off.

We also have loaded the fuel up the same way they would have loaded up. The only difference is it would have been night time. For the purposes of visualization, we made it daylight.

OK. So they're up in altitude and everything seems to be going fine when all of a sudden, there would be an alarm in the cabin. And it would sound like this. That's the fire alarm, and instantly, you know we've got a serious problem. Fire is about the worst thing that can happen on an aircraft. And this is probably one of the scenarios that pilots train for most.

Immediately, Mitchell is the captain. We've delegated he's the one flying the plane. I'd be assisting navigating. He is trying to get this plane down on the deck, and while doing that all these alarms are going off, because basically, the plane is saying, "Wait a minute. You're descending way too fast."

You want to get down fast, because you need to open the windows to try and get rid some of the smoke that's building up.

At the same time, I'd be firing off the extinguishers, which are in the cargo hold, dumping fire retardant, hopefully suppressing the fire. No guarantee that that works completely. And we'd have oxygen masks on, which we can't simulate. And something else, we'd be communicating.

MITCHELL CASADO, FLIGHT INSTRUCTOR: We'd be communicating within three or four seconds.

SAVIDGE: I mean, we talk about, you know, there is the whole scenario of first you've got to navigate or you've got to --

CASADO: Aviate, navigate, communicate.

SAVIDGE: Right. So you're doing that, and even though calling on the radio is the last thing you might do, we're talking seconds, because you need to get help on the ground. You want to alert the airport you're coming back. We've turned. We're on our way with an emergency.

The scenario progresses with the plane now getting stabilized again and going on automatic pilot, which you see Mitchell is setting up here, but this time on a heading completely 180 to Beijing.

And then, in that process, the smoke just overwhelms us, and we either go unconscious or we're just incapacitated. And the plane with its whole load of fuel, at least for seven hours, now has six more hours to fly on its own, and it doesn't need a single hand to guide it. And eventually runs out of gas, Jim.

SCIUTTO: Now Martin, that is all seems plausible except for that missing piece, you know, the third leg there, aviate, navigate, communicate. And I know that Mitch trains pilots, as well. Can you imagine a scenario where that wouldn't be possible? I mean, where the crew gets incapacitated so quickly that they were not able to communicate, but as Mitchell said so that it seems farfetched?

CASADO: Very farfetched. Very, extremely. Those things would be in very quick succession, aviate, navigate, communicate. If you had -- took a -- I don't want to be -- to be blunt about it, took a bullet to the head. They both had heart attacks. You'd start getting into weirder, weirder scenarios, but in anything in the more realm of normalcy, no. I can't imagine.

SAVIDGE: It's the real red flag of some kind of emergency, because with communicating on the radio would be essential. It would be almost automatic, and the fact that that didn't happen is why, as plausible as the fire theory is, when we run it through the simulator, it just doesn't add up. It seems more like maybe a cockpit takeover. That would explain, if you've got a gun to your head, why you can't communicate.

SCIUTTO: Well, Martin Savidge, thanks very much. Mitchell Casado, in what are now familiar surroundings for you, inside that triple-7 simulator. Thanks for walking us through it.

Now, the search for Flight 370 is revealing technologies many of us didn't even know existed. Next, what the Malaysian government is asking to borrow from the U.S. government.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

SCIUTTO: As we come back, we've just received this update that at this minute, in the next several minutes, a U.S. P-8 Poseidon aircraft will take off from Perth, Australia, scheduled to take off and head out to the search area where these new satellite photos have been found. This P-8 one of the most advanced American surveillance aircraft and a key part of the assets now searching the southern Indian Ocean.

And the search for Flight 370 is testing the limits of crews in the skies and on the sea, but it's also testing the limits of our technology. Joining me here now, CNN technology analyst Brett Larson.

So Brett, you know, there's a whole host of countries taking part, a whole host of assets on the surface of the ocean, in the air, in space, indeed, in space, satellites.

But the Malaysians now are asking for specific things from the U.S., particularly advanced technology. What are they asking for and why?

BRETT LARSON, CNN TECHNOLOGY ANALYST: Well, one of the things that they're asking us for and help with is the hydrophone, and it's a microphone that's specifically designed to hear in water. You know, you can't just put a microphone in the water. You can't just drop something in there in some sort of waterproof housing. It's not going to -- not going to hear as well as the hydrophone microphone, which is designed to sort of work in that high pressure of water environment.

SCIUTTO: And to listen for the ping?

LARSON: And to listen for that ping sound that they need to --

SCIUTTO: And what -- what kind of distance can it do underwater?

LARSON: Well, we've heard everywhere from 5 miles to 10 miles on that. But that means they have to be near it, and also take into account if it's, if it's in a part of the ocean that's very deep, that -- and it's down there at the bottom, that signal has to go pretty far.

SCIUTTO: You have to think, because you're talking about thousands of square miles. You can't just drop it in --

LARSON: Right.

SCIUTTO: -- and kind of drive around. You have to -- and that's the importance of finding the wreckage --

LARSON: Exactly.

SCIUTTO: -- which is already 16 days later. So then they have to extrapolate, based on where the wreckage is, as to where it might hit the water.

LARSON: Exactly. And also, you know, you're working with ocean currents that can keep things moving if it doesn't -- it doesn't sink all the way.

And what we remember back with the Air France plane that went down in the ocean, it took them two years to find that black box. and in that amount of time, the ping had stopped, so they actually had to use underwater submersibles to just keep looking for it, almost the way we looked for the Titanic wreckage.

SCIUTTO: And the Malaysians are also asking for remote ROVs.

LARSON: Yes.

SCIUTTO: Remotely operated vehicles, as well.

LARSON: Remotely operated vehicles that can go underwater.

SCIUTTO: Particularly advanced ones.

LARSON: Right, and they're going to need that kind of stuff, especially as this goes into deeper and deeper parts of the ocean where humans can't -- I mean, obviously, we can't send divers down into the ocean to look for that. It wouldn't really work out.

SCIUTTO: We had a piece on earlier that Rosa Flores did. She showed some pictures of this, and these things have had success in the past finding lost ships --

LARSON: Yes.

SCIUTTO: -- airplanes, et cetera, so they have a track record.

LARSON: Yes, they do. And they have some pretty impressive technology on board them that gives them the ability to see underwater with various things.

You know, it's -- one of the problems that we've been facing over the past couple of weeks with this is that it's in an area of the world that doesn't necessarily have the best technology at their disposal, and so a lot of it has to be brought in. And of course, as the -- as it went from a giant search area down to a smaller, it's also dealing with that.

SCIUTTO: And it's been one of the frustrations, right, is that you know, you almost wish these requests came in sooner, right? And then you'd be closer to the point when the plane -- when the plane disappeared.

LARSON: Exactly. And that that wreckage would be closer to land so we didn't have to fly so far or go so far out into the ocean to find it.

SCIUTTO: Yes. They really at the limits of their -- their range here, right? The plane is going to fly four hours. They only have a couple hours on site, and then they've got to turn around.

What about the satellite photos, because it takes a long time. You know, it will be whenever they're released, including this one today, this photo was taken four days ago. Why that delay between the photo taken and released and then assets deployed?

LARSON: Right. It's interesting the way, you know, the satellites feed these images back to us, and that comes down pretty quickly. But the interesting part that takes place over the next couple of days is people actually have to go through this stuff and look at it. Computer programs -- yes, there's computer programs that can flag the different things, like in this image, you can see there's definitely a lighter spot in the Indian Ocean.

SCIUTTO: Could you -- could you put a setting in there and say, you know, scan for all things bigger than X-dimensions?

LARSON: Right. But then you're going to come up against things like ships. You're going to have issues with clouds. I mean, it is a very serious science in finding and looking through these pictures.

And then when you see a picture like that, you're talking about an area that's actually quite small. And I mean, 90 percent of the world is covered with ocean. So when we're looking in this 1,000-square- mile area, it's a lot to look at.

SCIUTTO: And one of the other pilots told me that, you know, TWA 100, which crashed very close to shore, and they knew exactly where it crashed, but he showed me a picture of the 747, the four-square-mile search area, and it looked like a little dot, you know? So now you imagine that dot in thousands of square miles --

LARSON: Exactly.

SCIUTTO: -- it's just a real challenge.

LARSON: And again, you're dealing with weather, and all kinds of things even with satellites.

SCIUTTO: All right. Well, thanks very much, Brett Larson, walking us through the technology which is clearly going to be so key to finding this plane as we move along.

Well, satellite images of possible plane debris have sparked hope in the search for Flight 370, but the task of actually finding those objects as we've been saying here, will be daunting.

Coming up next, we're going to show you why this part of the ocean is making it so much tougher on investigators.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Stand by.

SCIUTTO: A fresh search for the missing Malaysian jumbo jet has just begun. A U.S. Navy-based P-8 aircraft based in Perth, Australia, was said to have taken off just a few minutes ago, headed for that search area. Crews flying from Australia will look for any trace of the missing airliner in the remote and turbulent waters of the southern Indian Ocean.

Correspondent Alexandra Field is taking a closer look at the brutal challenges involved in the search.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ALEXANDRA FIELD, CNN CORRESPONDENT: It's one of the world's most remote and punishing regions.

TONY ABBOTT, AUSTRALIAN PRIME MINISTER: It's about the most inaccessible spot that you could imagine on the face of the earth.

FIELD: Massive waves and high winds, some of the conditions that have hampered searchers scouring a daunting swath of the south Indian Ocean for any sign of Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 and its 239 passengers.

More than 1,400 miles off the coast of Australia, the aerial search can last just a few hours at a time before pilots have to head back to refuel.

CHRISTINE DENNISON, EXPEDITION LOGISTICS EXPERT: That is really in the middle of nowhere. And so they're working with weather patterns that can really hamper any operation, any sea operation.

FIELD: A NASA simulation shows currents and turbulence. If the objects seen in three satellite images are part of the missing plane, these water conditions could push them farther east and likely farther apart.

Some oceanographers estimate those objects, some of the strongest leads in this case, could be anywhere in a 15,000-square-mile area. That's roughly the size of Belgium.

Below the water's surface, an even murkier picture. The sea floor sits more than 9,000 feet down, deeper than most submarines can go. The mid-ocean ridge rising from it, making the search even more difficult.

(on camera): The depth is a factor here. The terrain is a factor.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes, yes.

FIELD: Explain what it would look like down there?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Like the Rocky Mountains.

DENNISON: It's so challenging, and for so many people, it's so hard to get -- sort of wrap their mind around what they are doing and how difficult this is.

FIELD: If the objects in the satellite images can be found, if they're from Flight 370, if researchers can use the ocean's currents to zero in on the plane's data recorder, finding it among those peaks and valleys could be even harder still.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: If it's in one of the deeper channels, that's going to be more of a challenge.

FIELD: Alexandra Field, CNN, New York.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

SCIUTTO: You are in the CNN NEWSROOM. I'm Jim Sciutto in New York today, in for Don Lemon. And we'd like to welcome viewers watching around the world this hour on CNN International.