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Mystery of Flight 370; Search Area now the Size of Alaska; New Proposal Restricting NSA; Exxon Valdez: Spill that Poisoned Alaska

Aired March 25, 2014 - 09:30   ET

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

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CAROL COSTELLO, CNN ANCHOR: Good morning. I'm Carol Costello. Thank you so much for joining me.

Stormy weather ended search operations today. Terrible news in light of the fact investigators have now narrowed the search for Flight 370 to 469,000 nautical square miles in the Southern Indian Ocean. Still they're searching for debris that has sunk to the bottom of the ocean.

The other challenge, searchers don't know what wreckage to look for because they don't know how the plane crashed. Did it glide and then crash or did it nose dive into the ocean? More now from CNN's Martin Savidge and pilot, Mitchell Casado.

MARTIN SAVIDGE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning Carol. What we're going to demonstrate for you now is the approach to make a possible water landing. We're not going to actually put it in the water. A simulator can't do that. But we're going to get you down close to the water and talk about that possibility. Because you see, even if this aircraft ran out of fuel, it had the range to glide quite some distance, right Mitchell.

MITCHELL CASADO, PILOT TRAINER: That's right. If you align like this, it could glide for a very long time depending on the altitude.

SAVIDGE: And if it's a glide and assuming that you still have someone in control of the aircraft, in theory you could or would try to set it down on the water.

The miracle on the Hudson, of course, is the perfect example of how that is done. But that was done with an air bus --

CASADO: A 320.

SAVIDGE: 320 -- which is a much smaller aircraft than this plane which is really considered to be a jumbo jet. Here are the alerts that you would get. And what the plane is trying to tell you if you're this low, why don't you have the landing gear down. The reason we don't have the landing gear down is --

CASADO: Is because they -- it would make the airplane flip. I mean you want to land on the belly, nice flat surface.

SAVIDGE: Right. The wheels in this particular circumstance would be a detriment. Now, you can see how the sea state here would be crucial. If it's really rough, is there any way to land on that?

CASADO: If you had to, you had to. You would just have to try to compensate and adjust for it. But it wouldn't be easy.

SAVIDGE: And would you try to keep the plane right at stall, in other words, slow, slow barely --

CASADO: The minimum speed as possible. Yes.

SAVIDGE: The key would be to set the tail down first and the rest of the body to drop afterwards. You want to keep the wings level because if you don't, if you tip, you cart wheel. And a cart wheel would be devastating and destructive. And the problem is without fuel, without the engines running, you get only one shot to do it.

We have no way to know if that was attempted. We're demonstrating this airplane could have tried even if it was out of fuel. All right. Let's take it up then.

That's a look at how a water landing might have happened -- Carol.

COSTELLO: Not likely though, right? Again stormy weather a big factor today -- it was too dangerous for search and recovery operations. With me now, Chris Curl, he's the senior captain at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Welcome sir.

CHRIS CURL, SCRIPPS INSTITUTION OF OCEANOGRAPHY: Good morning.

COSTELLO: Would it help to know exactly how the plane crashed in looking for debris in this vast ocean?

CURL: Well of course, the larger pieces would make it easier to locate something on the sea floor, but you're still talking about very small object on a very vast area. You're running against time to locate the black box.

COSTELLO: Absolutely. There's a lot of equipment in the area -- some 12 planes, ships, six more on the way. Six countries are involved. That's a lot of competing interests. Does that make things more difficult for those searching?

CURL: Well, I think they're all on the same team. I'm sure they're all pulling together to ultimately find any wreckage and hopefully maybe survivors. I think the more assets you can throw at a problem like this, the better.

COSTELLO: Even with all this equipment, is it likely they'll actually be able to find debris?

CURL: Well, I really think it's very unlikely, myself but there's always that hope.

COSTELLO: Well, I want to be realistic because it seems impossible. Stormy weather today, rough sea, a remote part of the world -- it just seems like it's going to be impossible to find anything.

CURL: Well, yes. It's a very big area they're looking in for very small pieces of debris. Yes. It's a very difficult task.

COSTELLO: The reason I'm asking you is why not just narrow the focus of the search further using those satellite images and high-tech tools to find the black boxes? Like skip the debris and just focus in on a smaller area and then search for those black boxes using those high- tech ping detectors?

CURL: Well yes, if you have a place to look. But, you know, they don't really have a good area to look for right now. And I understand the equipment that picks up the signal for the black box needs to be towed at a very slow speed. And generally to do a complete search, you have to what's called mow the grass and go back and forth over the area. And that all takes time and that's a small commodity right now.

COSTELLO: I know. And as I said the batteries in the black box will to start dying in two weeks. So hopefully the search goes on tomorrow.

Chris Curl, thank you so much for your insight. I appreciate it.

CURL: You're welcome.

COSTELLO: Still to come, the enormous search in one of the most remote places on the planet. We don't even know what we're -- we don't know if we're looking for the needle in the right haystack.

Tom foreman helping us map out the search area. Good morning Tom.

TOM FOREMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning Carol. And you know what your guest just spoke about, they're trying to get this big space down to a smaller one. That really does matters underwater. We'll explain how that's done in just a moment.

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COSTELLO: Just because the search area for Malaysian Flight 370 has now moved south does not mean it will be easier to find the missing plane. Dozens of ships must now search an area bigger than the state of Alaska all in one the most remote area on the planet.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

AIR MARSHAL MARK BINSKIN, AUSTRALIA VICE CHIEF OF THE DEFENSE FORCE: We're not searching for a needle in the haystack. We're still trying to find where the haystack is.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is extremely remote part of the world. It is, you know, 3,500 meters deep. 2,500 kilometers from Perth. It's a massive logistic exercise.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COSTELLO: Certainly is. CNN's Tom Foreman joins us now us with more. Good morning.

FOREMAN: Good morning. How are you Carol? You know you talked about the size of this place -- 621,000 square miles. This is five times as big as the search area for the Air France crash which, as you know, that took a long, long time to find. So how do you narrow that down? How do you make anything any smaller?

This was the most recent search area that we have data for and look at this. Even here you have different flight paths based on this satellite data and slight variations in speed and how much difference that can make. They think they have a good idea of the speed but not really precise.

You have drift patterns that follow afterwards. And when you start talking about this idea of underwater searching Carol, this is a whole different ball game. And people have to bear this in mind. Once you try to fly down through the atmosphere over the surface of the water and get down where you're a mile or two miles deep under the water, it's a very tricky maneuver out there.

Yes, you can bring in things like side scan sonar which can effectively map the floor and show you anything that might show up down there as an anomaly on the floor. That will produce pictures essentially that you can study and try to see if you see anything there that looks like part of a ship.

Again, I cannot stress enough how much this is a limited technology and that you don't deploy it over 621,000 square miles. You deploy over a much smaller area. The same thing is true to a degree about things like hydrophones if you're trying to listen for the signal out there. You've got to get them close to the target.

How do you do that? You do that by basically making a grid out of your area and assigning values to it. What's most likely for where the plane might be? What's least likely? And as you search areas, you adjust those values over and over and over again in the hopes that mathematically by statistics you can close in on where the plane might actually be. It will take time though, Carol, a lot of time potentially.

COSTELLO: Tom Foreman, many thanks. More on the investigation of Flight 370 in just a minute.

But first, the way the NSA does business could drastically change. That's according to a new proposal from the Obama administration.

Michelle Kosinski is at The Hague in the Netherlands. Tells us more Michelle.

MICHELLE KOSINSKI, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT (via telephone): Well we're talking about legislation that could affect every single American every day because it aims to change how the government collects and stores our phone records. Coming up.

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COSTELLO: More on the investigation of Flight 370 in just a minute. But first this morning the NSA is in for a big overhaul if the Obama administration gets its way. Officials tell CNN a White House proposal would end part of the agency's bulk collection of telephone data which has sparked both scrutiny and privacy concerns.

White House correspondent, Michelle Kosinski, is traveling with the President in the Netherlands. Tell us more Michelle.

KOSINSKI: Hi, Carol. Right well the way things have been done is that the NSA collects all of this bulk phone record data from Americans. They would gather it themselves. They would store it for five years. And what's been really controversial in the past is that they would essentially authorize their own searches.

So if they saw a number that was suspicious, they could pretty much in-house, start that search process and do its own surveillance from there. Oversight has always been a question here once this came out of course with Edward Snowden's revelation.

So what the White House has been doing is working with Congress -- senior administration officials confirm this morning -- and that soon, they want to propose a law so that all the collection would be done by the phone companies themselves. Then, they would store it or it would possibly be stored by a third party and the White House wants to make sure that in authorizing a search, the NSA would have to basically get that stamp of approval from a judge.

So every phone number that they want to look into, a judge would have to agree that it could be in some way linked to terrorism. Obama started to make those changes in January. He also kind of narrowed the search parameters so that they call it like three stops away from that initial phone number. How many other phone numbers associated with that phone number they could then search? Well, President Obama narrowed that to two stops away from that initial phone number that had come under scrutiny.

So if this legislation does pass and that, itself of course is going to be a process, it would basically take the NSA out of the business of collecting and storing that data but, of course, obviously, they would still be able to get access to it when needed, Carol.

COSTELLO: So Edward Snowden continues to win. I don't think there's any doubt about that. Another question for you though, many U.S. allies have slammed the surveillance on world leaders. Has the President's trip helped to sooth any of their concerns especially in light of the big G7 which used to be the G8 meeting?

KOSINSKI: Yes right lots of big changes here, right. Well no one has said what exactly was discussed along those lines. But we know that that has been a topic of discussion. We know that the U.S. discussed that with the President of China, for example and cyber security was a big issue. Because just yesterday, when the President was going to meet with the President of China, new information came out from Snowden saying that the U.S. may have been looking at a large cell phone company's records in China. So we know that that was a topic. How exactly it soothed or didn't sooth world leaders, we're not sure at this point. But remember, other European countries like Germany, like the U.K., they too have been gathering this kind of bulk data of phone records and other materials. So not just the U.S., Carol.

COSTELLO: Got you. Michelle Kosinski, reporting live for us this morning thank you.

We'll have more on the investigation of Flight 370 in a minute.

But first the Exxon Valdez oil spill, believe it or not, it happened 25 years ago and it remains one of the worst environmental disasters in U.S. history. Now, CNN has tracked down the ship's captain for a rare interview about what went wrong.

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COSTELLO: We'll have more on the investigation into Flight 370 in just a minute.

But first in here at home, this week marks the 25th anniversary of the Exxon Valdez oil spill one of the worst environmental disasters in U.S. history. As 11 million gallons of crude oil spilled into Alaska's Prince William Sound thousands of animals and fish died, some 1,300 miles of shoreline damaged. And despite cleanup efforts, some of the area's remote ecosystem is permanently damaged.

In a rare interview with the ship's captain CNN's Kyra Phillips took a closer look at what went wrong or who was responsible for this terrible environmental disaster.

KYRA PHILLIPS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: I'll tell you what. You know me pretty well. And I can -- and I was telling you, this was an intense interview with this captain. He is quite, let's say, deep and interesting individual. And he has carried a burden for 25 years.

You know, this didn't become an international story just because of the environmental disaster. But he was vilified as a drunk. Reporters revealed he had -- he had a history of drinking. He abused -- he abused alcohol. He admits that to me. But there is so much more to this story on what went wrong and it starts with his interview.

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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Exxon Valdez, Valdez traffic.

PHILLIPS (voice over): March 24th, 1989, Captain Joseph Hazelwood's emergency call to the Coast Guard.

CAPT. JOSEPH HAZELWOOD, EXXON VALDEZ: We've fetched up hard aground north of Goose Island off Bligh Reef and evidently leaking some oil.

PHILLIPS: What's it like to hear that 25 years later?

HAZELWOOD: Still pretty difficult.

PHILLIPS: Captain Hazelwood has maintained a stoic silence for years, rarely talking about the details of that night.

(on camera): Why did you decide to talk to me?

HAZELWOOD: Well just to show that I'm a human being. I think I probably just wanted to be heard.

PHILLIPS (voice over): A thoughtful and private man accustomed to a solitary life at sea, Hazelwood flies home to find his picture on the front page of "The New York Times".

What were you thinking at that moment?

HAZELWOOD: This is going to really suck.

PHILLIPS: When word got out that the captain of the Exxon Valdez had been drinking that day the target was on his back.

How much did you drink that day?

HAZELWOOD: I had three drinks.

PHILLIPS: And you carried so much responsibility, a crew, millions of gallons of oil. Why have even one drink? Why take that risk?

HAZELWOOD: I didn't think it was a risk. I thought I was drinking moderately.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We are all extremely disappointed and outraged that an officer in such an critical position would have jeopardized his ship, crew, and the environment.