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Mystery of Flight 370; Flight 370 "Ended in Southern Indian Ocean"

Aired March 24, 2014 - 10:30   ET

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

RICHARD QUEST, CNN AVIATION ANALYST: And frankly, the urgency now, despite the sadness of those involved but the urgency now to locate a substantial debris field so that you can locate the wreckage, if 447 was hard in the south Atlantic, they had the whole debris field. They knew roughly where it was.

Now, they have to locate the debris field to -- to establish where the plane will be. Because locating the debris field will help get the submersibles to find the black box, the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder.

So and of course time is running out for the pingers.

ANDERSON COOPER, CNN ANCHOR: Right.

QUEST: We're two weeks -- maybe a week, two weeks, two and a half weeks, three weeks maximum for the pingers to still be transmitting a location and where they've been --

COOPER: It's still possible to find black boxes in flight 447, Air France. They found them some two years after the plane went down. But it's a lot more difficult. They actually just go end up manually searching with submersible vehicles which in the pitch black at those depths --

QUEST: And it was the third -- it was the third attempt that they have with 447 and it was almost the last day of the search window.

COOPER: But Richard let's just take a moment here now that we have this -- sort of this focus on this area. What do we now know for sure about the flight itself? About the flight -- we obviously don't know why this occurred. But what do we know -- we know the turn was real.

QUEST: We know the ACARS stopped transmitting. For six or seven hours and nothing more was heard.

COOPER: Right the 1:07 a.m. was the last transmission.

QUEST: We know the turn is real, because of the evidence this morning. We know the transponder was off. Why? Because it never came back on again and we now know the route and somebody would have seen it. We know it went south southwest back across Malaysia. We know it was tracked by military radar. Sources have said it went down to 12,000 feet. We haven't had that confirmed.

COOPER: If that is true, that does indicate some sort of manual control of the flight.

QUEST: Completely.

It means that the plane came down to 12,000 feet but we don't know for what purpose whether it was because of a decompression or because of intentional nefarious means.

COOPER: Right.

QUEST: To avoid other aircraft while you are flying back against yourself. We know it must have gone back up to altitude again.

COOPER: Because it could not have flown at 12,000 feet at that distance?

QUEST: No not at the weight of that plane for that distance because to get to that distance, it was virtually flying at its normal speed of 500 - 550 miles an hour. So to burn that much fuel, it had to be at its optimum altitude, which would have been up in the high 30s.

COOPER: And to get to that distance that means the flight was going on for six to seven hours correct?

QUEST: Absolutely. Absolutely now this raises the whole question, which one doesn't want to be unseemly bearing in mind 239 people have just been told -- the families have just been told their loved ones are dead.

But this raises the whole ghost ship theory -- the whole idea of a plane flying without anybody at the controls right to the top. Because to fly for that length of time without any form of mayday, without any form of qualms (ph), having flown back across Malaysia and Indonesia, where there were places where you could have landed on route, you have to now put the ghost ship theory back on top.

COOPER: I want to read you -- we just received this are -- this was a text message that Malaysia airlines sent out to family members of those on board Flight 370 before formally briefing them in Beijing and Kuala Lumpur.

So this was a text message that family members who were waiting for word of their loved ones received before this formal briefing in Beijing and Kuala Lumpur. It said, quote, "Malaysia Airlines deeply regrets that we have to assume beyond any reasonable doubt that MH370 has been lost and that none of those on board survived. As you will hear in the next hour from Malaysia's Prime Minister, we must now accept all evidence suggests the plane went down in the southern Indian Ocean."

No sense on if they got a warning that this horrific text message was about to be received by them. But this was a text message, confirmed, sent out by Malaysian Airlines.

QUEST: My understanding would have been that the families would have known that urgent information would have been --

COOPER: Coming.

QUEST: -- would have been confirmed, would have been sent by text. They would have been told very early on in the process, a system is -- a system is being set up, do you want to receive information by text and they would have -- they would have received it. It sounds very blunt to send a text like this.

COOPER: Right.

QUEST: But if you are the families.

COOPER: Sure.

QUEST: You actually want to receive this information as soon as it becomes available.

COOPER: Yes Jim Sciutto is standing by as well for us in Washington D.C. -- Jim?

JIM SCIUTTO, CNN CHIEF NATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT: Well, it's clearly a heartbreaking situation. I think that in my experience in China, people send a lot of information by text message. And like Richard said to get the information quickly and before it's out in public or leaks out to reporters before the Prime Minister announced it in as cold a method as it seems. I think the key here probably from their perspective was to get it out quickly before the Prime Minister spoke.

But you can judge by the reaction of the families there in Beijing, that no matter how they received this news, it was heartbreaking. And it's really -- it's really heartbreaking frankly -- frankly to watch it as it happens here.

And you also hear from those reactions something that's been a continuing angle in this story -- that those families in Beijing immediately shouted out, cursing literally the Malaysian government. And that's where they are directing their anger here, in two ways. Right? One, it is a Malaysian flagged airline. So they blamed the airline in effect for the loss of the plane for whatever happened to it and two for this long and frustrating and sometimes misleading investigation.

You remember, the search started -- a lot of resources were focused in entirely the wrong location early on, right, just to the east of the Malay Peninsula. And now you know hundreds and possibly thousands of miles away. So that anger -- that's not going to dissipate quickly by any means and it also continues to be anger between governments right because China -- the Chinese government has been upset and expressed that frustration with the Malaysian government over this investigation as well.

So those tensions continue.

COOPER: And it is 10:35 in Perth, in Western Australia. 10:35 at night. Searches will resume with the intensity obviously during daylight hours for -- you now there's obviously radar use in all of these searches, a variety of different kinds of radar.

But they're really are focusing on -- on getting eyeballs of human beings actually looking on the water. That's essential.

QUEST: Because of the nature of the waves, the nature of the topography of the water. Yes getting people to see what is there is crucial.

HMAX the Australian naval ship (inaudible) is on sight. Now the British ship HMS Envoy I think is on the way because it's crucial to get the thing out of the water. And we've had two piece of debris Anderson that the people are looking at. One is circular, gray and green, which would be the color of frankly a fuselage and/or internal parts of the aircraft and the second is orange which would be the color of life rafts and life vests. Getting there and then reverse drifting, you've heard this phrase a few times.

COOPER: Right.

QUEST: Working out which way the tides have moved it so that you can work out where the larger, more significant debris field must be and then getting in there as fast as you can to try and find whatever else is left.

COOPER: And our Kate Bolduan and Andrew Stevens are in Perth in Australia at 10:37 in the evening. It is fascinating to me that even if they are able to just recover and it is crucial that they actually recover as quickly as possible a few pieces of debris, they can start looking at those pieces to see if that gives any clues to what happened to the aircraft, how the aircraft actually entered the water. They were able to do that with Air France Flight 447. They were beginning to understand how it actually impacted the water.

KATE BOLDUAN, CNN ANCHOR, NEW DAY: I mean first off, the one thing they are obviously looking for is just to find any debris that can point to an area, a debris field of what happened to this flight. That's first things first.

But then of course, the moment they get any piece, they can begin that analysis and they can gather a lot of information from how that debris looks, if it's floating on the surface or be at very, very deep in these waters. What is it? Three miles.

ANDREW STEVENS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Three miles deep.

BOLDUAN: Three miles deep in some of these places here in the southern Indian Ocean. And they can start putting -- trying to piece together this puzzle. Because we have so many pieces, it seems, Anderson. And they just don't fit together.

The one thing and maybe I am being overly cautious because we've lived through the story and you have to be because there have been so many false leads is I'm wondering we have the Prime Minister who comes out to make this statement on the very same day that we have these pretty significant leads and objects that are on there, that have been spotted on the water. We don't know yet. It hasn't been confirmed yet, that these two things are connected. I would assume that they are.

But to be careful, we don't know if the Prime Minister coming out to talk about this new data, that they have come and the conclusion they have unfortunately had to reach from it. If they are connected with what we are hearing here from the Air Force base and these objects are being spotted, right, Andrew?

STEVENS: Absolutely. I mean at the moment, the Prime Minister is talking about INMARSAT. But it does seem to be linked. Everybody is now. And we have been talking about how desperate the search and rescue operation has been for so long everybody is very much now is on the same page about putting together.

You know we've got the Chinese Air Force planes sitting on an Australian Air Force base here. So it's all working in the same direction. But then to make you've got an enormous amount of work as Kate says it's three miles deep, this part of the ocean around there. There are big currents, there are big tides, there are big seas. I mean this is a very rough, rough stretch of water and so, so remote.

There are vessels going there. The vessels are going to be absolutely critical. Now Richard was talking about the vessels success of the Australian Navy vessel. That is there. There are 200 plus crew on that ship. And I was told a little earlier this evening that every man who was available was on deck, looking, eyeballs, binoculars. They are going to be doing exactly the same thing in time for that six or seven hours from now and they are going to keep doing until they find it.

BOLDUAN: And there are two -- we think two Chinese vessels that are also on the way.

STEVENS: On the way.

BOLDUAN: And they will get here Tuesday.

STEVENS: Tuesday -- three Chinese vessels and two search and rescue vessels as well, plus the British vessel.

BOLDUAN: So maybe even before we kind of talking about this, maybe even before we got the official confirmation that the focus was in the southern corridor Anderson. If you are watching where the assets are moving and really the focus of the search, it seems that everyone involved has assumed that the focus is right here in the southern corridor, without saying that they are not worrying about the northern corridor anymore. It sure has I guess in essence been the de facto decision.

STEVENS: There was a lot of raised eyebrows when the Australian Prime Minister a few days ago came out and said, that there was credible new information about the search and new satellite images coming through. And people there are saying that he was putting -- putting his -- out on a limb there a little bit.

BOLDUAN: Putting out a little --

STEVENS: Yes but it all now obviously seems to be falling into place -- Anderson.

COOPER: All right Kate, Andrew, we're going to have more from you. We're going to take a short break. Our coverage continues.

We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

COOPER: Welcome back to our continuing coverage of the breaking news this morning.

Flight 370 ended in the Southern Indian Ocean according to Malaysian authorities who are citing British officials as well as INMARSAT, satellite officials who have been analyzing satellite information. They now say definitively, that southern route that the plane took was accurate. The plane ended up in the water, far, far away -- deep in the water far away from any possible landing site.

I want to bring in our Pauline Chiou in Beijing where families were informed about 30 minutes or so before Malaysia's prime minister made the announcement earlier at the top of this hour -- Pauline.

PAULINE CHIOU, CNN CORRESPONDENT (via telephone): Anderson, it has been an awful, awful scene. I'm on the second floor of this hotel, the Lido Hotel where we have been coming every day for the past 17 days and where the families have come to this briefing room.

About 35 minutes ago, they learned the news that there are no survivors. And we heard many people screaming and wailing from inside the room, all the media was outside. And then different people would come through the doors. One woman started screaming and she said, "I've lost my son and daughter-in-law. I'm desperate. I've asked the Communist Party to help." She fell with the news on the floor.

It is just awful. It's profound, profound grief. Just about five minutes ago, Anderson, a woman was taken out on a stretcher. She had a couple of relatives running behind the stretcher after her. She's being put into an ambulance.

So many of these people I have been talking to over the past two and a half weeks. And while their hopes have diminished, some of them had -- still held on to hope that perhaps this has been a hijacking. I even talked to families today who said that was still the best case scenario for them. And they thought that perhaps that even if it were an act of terrorism, perhaps their relatives are alive.

It is just -- don't know how else to describe it. It is just an awful, awful scene. And we've also seen -- I have also seen people turning a little bit violent. One man lunged at the media and police officers had to pull him back. A man started shouting and screaming about Malaysia. And it's just devastating. True, true devastation.

COOPER: Malaysia's prime minister said he hoped the families would be given their privacy. I certainly hope that is the case as well. Obviously, this is the worst possible moment in their entire lives. Let's hope they are given the privacy that they deserve. Families were brought to that hotel, told to expect bad news. A text message was sent out by Malaysian Airlines before that meeting. They wanted to at least get word to the families as quickly also as possible before it started to become known publicly.

I am here with Richard Quest. One of the things Richard, that is just fascinating as the search for debris now intensifies in this area now that they know for sure this is the area where the plane went down. There is a lot -- even if they only find two or three pieces of debris, depending on what those pieces of debris they are, they might be able to give some indication of what happened to the aircraft.

QUEST: Huge amounts of information. In Flight 447 the initial pieces of debris told them an enormous amount about it. It was a toilet door. It was a galley cart. All the early pieces of debris told them whether or not the plane had broken up in mid-air or gone into the water intact, had lunged on the water intact. It told them the nature of the way the plane had been flown.

Yes, it is crucial, not only to find the black box or the cockpit voice recorder and the data recorder but from that debris, let's assume the explosives theory which seems to be remote, they'll be able to look -- TWA they will be looking for any sign of explosives residue.

If there was a fire, you would be looking to see sooting to see if there is any streaking, anything like that.

COOPER: Even what sort of stresses were placed on the pieces of the outer (inaudible) of the aircraft?

QUEST: Absolutely. Because you can see the way any metal or any items are bent. Now this is the absolute art of aircraft investigation. The NTSB are brilliant at it, the AAIB in the UK, the BEA in France, the Australians are all very, very talented and experienced at doing it. The Malaysians, incidentally, this is almost certainly now going to be a Malaysian investigation.

It is in international waters, which becomes the state of occurrence. There isn't one. Therefore, the investigation is held by the state of operator and state of registry, in both cases, that is Malaysia.

COOPER: I want to bring in Bobbie Scholley, a retired navy captain. She's also a consultant of maritime diving and salvage, knows an awful lot about obviously salvage and diving -- spent a lot of time in the water. Bobbie, in terms of the focus now, how critical is it to get those pieces of debris as quickly as possible? Is there a lot of concern that over given with each day that passes, the debris could sink?

BOBBIE SCHOLLEY, A RETIRED NAVY CAPTAIN: Yes. We really need to be focused, get those ships out there in that debris field, in that part of the ocean and try to get those eyes on any debris that we can find before that debris sinks and we lose that part of this search forever.

A lot of that aircraft debris will sink -- will float for a long time. With TWA Flight 800, we found that a lot of the debris did end up on the shore of Long Island, of course. So some of this debris may go on forever and end up washing ashore eventually but by that time, it is just too late for the investigation.

We want to find it now so that we can go backwards and try to pin down where the aircraft entered the water. I think now that we have this new information, we can really start funneling down to where we need to search eventually with our underwater systems. And that's where we -- the point we really need to get to as quickly as possible. To be to the point where we can bring in those underwater systems and get to the aircraft where it is on the bottom.

The debris that's floating is valuable. It can give us some information for the investigation. But we really still want to get the priority, which are the black boxes, of course, which will be on the bottom.

COOPER: Right.

And you talk about the underwater systems. It is obviously too large an area to just bring those in now just to kind of randomly search the sea floor bed at this point. How difficult a task is it to once some debris is spotted and located, hands on it, to actually then triangulate back to where the crash might have occurred.

I bring up Air France Flight 447 again because my understanding is even once they found debris, the area that they calculated the plane wend down was actually in the complete opposite direction from where the plane actually was found.

SCHOLLEY: Yes. You know, it is not easy to go backwards with the debris floating. We try to calculate the set and drift of the debris based on the currents and the winds and the tide and so forth. It is not a precise art. So the quicker we find it, the better that calculation is going to be.

The more debris that we find, we would like to find a large debris field, not just one or two pieces that would make it a better calculation. So that's not an exact art. I think we need to make it a two-pronged approach. We still need to try to refine any of the electronic data that we have, both from satellite imagery and all the other inputs that we're getting from the scientists with Air France.

They had a better path to work with and they eventually went back and scrubbed the data better. So that third look that they made to pick up the black boxes was based on some data that they had already looked at but went back and re-evaluated and had a better spot to look at and eventually did get the black boxes. So you have to look at that data maybe a second and third time to really give you a much better point to start at.

So we can't put the underwater search equipment in prematurely. Right now, it is just too big of an ocean.

COOPER: Right. Bobbie, I do appreciate your expertise. We are going to be checking back with you throughout the day no doubt -- Bobbie Scholley.

I want to bring in David McKenzie, who is joining us live in Beijing, where the families were informed about an hour and a half ago about the fate of their loved once -- David.

DAVID MCKENZIE, CNN CORRESPONENT: Well, that's right, Anderson. And behind me here, an ambulance has pulled up. I have already seen several ambulances pull up with their lights flashing. One elderly woman put on a gurney, put in the ambulance and rushed --

COOPER: Obviously, lost David's transmission. Rene Marsh is also joining us. Rene, obviously, the situation now changes greatly based on this announcement this morning.

RENE MARSH, CNN AVIATION CORRESPONDENT: Absolutely. Anderson, you know, before, as far as looking to looking for that debris, it was under different circumstances. We had two corridors. Those were the two different possibilities for where this plane could be.

Now the purpose of finding this debris has really shifted after we get this announcement because it is not about proving that the plane may have gone down in the South Indian Ocean. We now know that. So now the debris is now important just to maybe answer more questions about what could have gone wrong.

Looking at the debris, if they do identify some of these objects to be a part of Flight 370, there could be some information that they may be able to learn about it by just simply examining that debris. They can possibly determine if there was a fire on board, if there was a bomb that exploded.

Also, by looking at how it was damaged, they may be able to tell if the plane was intact before it hit the water or did it explode mid-air and then hit the water. These are all things that they may be able to gather based on the debris and when they find it, Anderson.

COOPER: Richard Quest, you know, the information that Malaysia's Prime Minister today was giving out, it doesn't come from Malaysian officials. Just from British officials working with INMARSAT, this satellite company.

QUEST: Right. INMARSAT stands for International Marine Satellite -- INMARSAT. They have been around for many years. They are the organization that most satellites do not look over the water, because there is nobody there to receive the signal. Over the United States, there are many, many satellites that are designed to transmit data and television pictures to people on the ground.

INMARSAT is a series of satellites specifically designed for the shipping industry and for over-water use. Airline industry uses it too -- International Marine Satellites. What INMARSAT did is it took the pings from the aircraft, the antenna pings, the hand shake that we heard about earlier in the week. It has managed to triangulate and work out the distance and clearly has now gone that one stage further and worked out exactly where that plane would have been.

The AAIB, the Air Accident Investigation Branch which is the U.K. equivalent of the NTSB, they are enormously experienced.

So the fact that these two organizations --

COOPER: And the amount of data that they must have been going through for the last two weeks is extraordinary.

QUEST: Not only the data, absolutely huge amounts, but it's the integrity of it. They know the moment they say, this is what we say happened, we have just seen. They said the South Indian Ocean and suddenly, 26 ships and 50 odd planes move halfway around the world.

COOPER: Based on what they are saying, it is Malaysia now coming out and saying this plane ended up --

QUEST: Exactly.

COOPER: -- ended up in water.

QUEST: Exactly. So they better have an exceptional high degree of confidence in the data that they are reporting as accurate.

COOPER: We are going to take a quick break. Our coverage continues right after this.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

COOPER: Hello. I'm Anderson cooper. I want to welcome the viewers in the United States and those working around the world.