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Thai Satellite Spots 300 Floating Objects; Captain's Son Speaking Out; Japanese Satellite Spots 10 New Objects; At Least 24 Dead in Washington Landslide

Aired March 27, 2014 - 09:00   ET

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

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

CAROL COSTELLO, CNN ANCHOR: Happening now in the NEWSROOM, breaking overnight. New satellite images. And new hope for the families.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The satellite images could be invaluable.

COSTELLO: Three hundred new objects found floating in the ocean.

DAVID GALLO, CO-LED SEARCH FOR AIR FRANCE FLIGHT 447: So whether it's a ship or the aircraft, it's hard to say until they actually pick up a piece.

COSTELLO: And this morning, defense for the plane's pilot growing louder.

JIM CLANCY, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: You knew Captain Shah. Some people point a finger at him.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He was an excellent pilot. And I think also an excellent gentleman.

COSTELLO: For the first time, the captain's youngest son speaking out, addressing those who call his father a political fanatic or a hijacker.

This morning's search called off.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Shut it down and packing it up.

COSTELLO: The wicked weather.

KYUNG LAH, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Zero visibility means nothing. Right?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Nothing.

LAH: You couldn't see anything out the windows.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes. I may not even be able to see the wingtips of the aircraft.

COSTELLO: Grounding all flights as Malaysia Airlines speaks to families. The full-page ad from Malaysia Airlines. Words of support. Deeply saddened. Sincerest condolences. Will never be forgotten. A special edition of NEWSROOM starts now.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

Good morning. I'm Carol Costello. Thank you so much for joining me. Developing news this morning. New satellite images taken by Thai authorities. Take a look. This picture taken on March 24th. It shows a debris field with 300 objects. Couple that picture with the next two images. They were taken by Australia on March 16th. The fourth image was taken on the 18th. The Chinese satellite snapped an unknown object.

And this past Sunday a French satellite spotted another large debris field. The common denominator in all of these pictures, they were all taken roughly within the same area. Some 1600 miles off the coast of Perth, Australia.

Tom Foreman is in Washington to map it all out for us.

Good morning, Tom.

TOM FOREMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Hi, Carol. You're actually hitting on the main point there. That really is it, right, that they're all kind of in the same area.

You look at all these images out here and you see the immense job of trying to reading into these. Bear in mind this isn't being done just by human beings. There are computers actually being used to scan all these images to see anything that bears closer scrutiny. And now just as you mentioned, patterns are emerging.

Let's go to the bigger map here so you have a sense of what we're talking about here. This is Australia up here in the corner with Perth. And if you travel about 1600 miles, you can see it gets easily lost because you just go out into this vast expanse of emptiness.

Here are the earlier findings of where the spots were. And there's the brand new one. That was just reported now. So it's hard to have your bearings out here. But that is within a relatively limited area. So that's why this is such a big important find, Carol. Now I have one caution here.

Do bear in mind, all of the ocean out in here, according to all the people who know it, has the real potential to have different types of debris fields. So it doesn't necessarily mean this is from the plane. But if you go beyond that, Carol, here's the other thing that makes it hard to figure all of this.

This is a map from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration imposed upon the world here with time lapses of it and the movement of different waves down here. And currents in the waters. So the area we're talking about is actually right in the edge of this churning area in here. So you can see that it's very hard to reverse engineer where this came from. And that's going to be the burden here.

Even if you can say, all of this stuff is right here, how did it get there in all of this pattern of churning? And was it up here originally or was it over here? Generally moves to the east. But up here moves a little bit toward the west. That's going to be the big challenge.

So first challenge, get to this general area of debris and find some of it. Put it in your hands and find out if it's the right thing. Second challenge go back through that maze and figure out where it came from -- Carol.

COSTELLO: Tom Foreman, reporting live in Washington.

For the first time this morning, we're hearing from the immediate family of Flight 370's captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah. With no physical evidence to explain the flight's presumed crash, some have speculated that the captain may have hijacked his own plane. But his son, 26- year-old Ahmad Seth Zaharie, tells the newspaper, the "New Straits Times", that this father was neither suicidal nor a political extremist.

CNN's Andrew Stevens is in Perth, Australia, with a closer look.

Good morning.

ANDREW STEVENS, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Carol. Just want to start by telling you about some news we just received here. This is from Japan's Kyoto News Agency. And it's saying that they -- its government satellite, Japanese government satellite spotting 10 square shaped objects in waters about 2,500 kilometers southwest of Perth which would put it right in that target range that Tom Foreman was talking about.

So another link to the -- to the growing picture if you like, taken from satellites of debris all around the same area. Now as we know, planes could not fly in the later afternoon over that area because of bad weather. Planes did get out there earlier. They didn't report seeing anything. We're expecting them to be back in the air at some time tomorrow, depending on weather conditions, Carol.

But this is the missing link. We're getting more and more of a picture build-up by these satellite pictures. But we still haven't had any firm identification of any of that debris. What it could be. No link to this being something from MH-370. This is the haystack that the Australian officials say they haven't found yet. If they can get some firm I.D. on a piece of wreckage or some part of that plane, then they can start building up the model to where the rest of that plane, the main part of that plane may be.

This stage, it's frustrating because we have these sightings, we have satellite pictures. But we still can't narrow it down enough to actually get to those objects in the water.

COSTELLO: And can we go back for a minute and talk about this -- these, I guess, new revelations by the son of the captain of Flight 370 because we have no clearer picture of him either. What did his son say? STEVENS: I'm afraid, Carol, I can't add to that. But we're down here in Perth looking at the search area. I know the son has been very obviously supporting his father. A very difficult time, obviously, for the family. Remember, we're 19 days into this. There have been so many people, so many investigators looking into the lives of both the pilot, the -- and the co-pilot. The captain and the first officer.

But we still haven't reached any conclusive idea of whether there was anything nefarious going on in the cockpit involving one or both of these two. The son coming out today very much supporting his father.

COSTELLO: All right. Andrew Stevens, I appreciate it. Just going back to that newspaper article from that Malaysia newspaper, the son was interviewed. He's a young man in his 20s, he said his father wasn't fanatical. He does not believe his father hijacked the plane and he tries to ignore all of the reports coming over the Internet and in other publications about his father. He said I've read everything online but I've ignored all the speculation. I know my father better.

So with renewed focus on the Flight 370 crew, we wanted to take a closer look at what we know about Captain Zaharie Shah. The 53-year- old pilot has been with Malaysian Airlines since 1981. Logging more than 18,000 hours in the cockpit. He's married. He has three children and one grandchild. He lives in a gated luxury community in the Kuala Lumpur suburbs. He's described by colleagues and friends as an aviation geek.

He also owned that in-home flight simulator. And Shah was politically aware, supporting Malaysia's main opposition parties.

David Soucie is a CNN safety analyst and former FAA inspector, Peter Goelz is a CNN aviation analyst and former managing director for the NTSB.

Welcome, gentlemen.

PETER GOELZ, CNN AVIATION ANALYST: Thank you.

DAVID SOUCIE, CNN SAFETY ANALYST: Welcome. Thank you, Carol.

COSTELLO: David, U.S. officials tell CNN that no smoking gun has been found in regards to the pilot's flight simulator data. Frankly, this pilot seems like a normal guy, doesn't he?

SOUCIE: You know, I've heard the term aviation geek. And I guess I fall into that category as well. So, you know, I have an aviation simulator at my house. It's not like what he has, but, you know, I don't see anything suspicious about that. And I really don't think they're going to turn much of with that evidence.

COSTELLO: Wow. So, Peter, presumably investigators have been looking into Captain Zaharie Shah's background for weeks and weeks. No suicide not has come to light. No enormous family strife. Nothing from his flight simulator so far. So in your mind, do you agree? Do investigators know more than they are saying or are they in the wrong place?

(CROSSTALK)

GOELZ: Well I think there is no --

SOUCIE: Oh, I'm sorry.

GOELZ: There is no evidence that is shown that this captain was involved in anything nefarious, as you say. What we do believe is that something occurred in the cockpit that caused the transponder and the ACARS system to be turned off and to be turned off manually. That's the only bit of solid evidence that we have.

And I think the report out of Malaysia from the police -- the unsourced police spokesperson is probably a very poor lead and has been talked down extensively by CNN's law enforcement analyst and others.

COSTELLO: David, some theorists say the co-pilot could be to blame because he was too inexperienced to make that sharp westward turn. Could you argue the 9/11 hijackers were way inexperienced, too, and they managed to hit their targets, sadly?

SOUCIE: You know, I think that's going into speculation again. There's a lot of danger in doing that. In my history with investigations is when you start starting to try to find conclusions, all the facts come along and try to support that. So it really can lead you in the wrong direction. So I've tried to stay away from kind of speculating about why or who. But rather the what.

COSTELLO: Rather the what. Go ahead.

GOELZ: The person sitting in the right seat can fly the aircraft completely competently. That's why they're there. That's why you have two pilots. Any indication that the co-pilot might not have the skill to fly the plane on this southerly course, simply foolish. I mean, he's there in case the pilot becomes incapacitated. He flies the plane a significant amount of time. He's a perfectly competently trained pilot.

COSTELLO: The other question I had, is we haven't really heard much about the 10 flight attendants on board that plane or the some 200 passengers. Why aren't we hearing more about them, do you suppose, David?

SOUCIE: Well, I know that they are being looked at. I know that they are checking all that. It's just that some of the information that they're finding there isn't getting out. And rightfully so. Until there's some conclusive evidence, there's really no sense in sending that information out. I'm surprised that they did send information to this degree out on the pilots because until it's proven, it's just pure speculation and in an attempt to try to figure out where this airplane may have gone, which is healthy. It's a good thing to do but to release it in this way is not a good thing in my mind.

COSTELLO: And, Peter, last question for you. Is it possible that investigators have had a failure of imagination? In other words, are they not thinking of something because they're stuck on all these established theories?

GOELZ: No, I don't think that's true. I mean, the way in which this investigation has evolved, you are now seeing major roles played by the Chinese, the Americans, the British, the Malaysians, the Australians, even the NEW Zealanders. I don't think there's any failure of imagination. I think there are enough trained investigators who have real skills, who have done this sort of thing before that they're not going to go put on blinders at this stage.

They are going to get to the bottom of this. It's going to take a long time, but they're going to get to the bottom of it.

COSTELLO: I hope so. David and Peter, thank you so much for being with me. I appreciate it.

SOUCIE: Thank you, Carol.

GOELZ: Thank you.

COSTELLO: Still to come in the NEWSROOM, the investigations of Flight 370 and the speculation that hangs over the cockpit. We'll hear from the founder of Malaysia Airlines and hear what he has to say about those pilots.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

COSTELLO: All right. You heard Andrew Stevens just minutes ago. We learned Japanese satellites have spotted more possible debris from Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. There are about 10 objects in the water described as square shaped and up to 25 feet long.

Now, this news follows this morning's announcement from Thailand's government. Thailand's government says satellite images from Monday show some 300 objects floating in the southern Indian Ocean. It's the latest satellite evidence with all of these pictures taken in the same general area about 1,600 miles off the coast of Perth, Australia. Of course, until crews recover the objects, investigators will not know if they are actually connected to that missing plane.

As investigators continue to search for any physical evidence to explain the disappearance of the plane, much of the speculation turns to the cockpit. Did one or even both of the pilots deliberately bring down that plane?

"USA Today" is reporting Malaysian authorities are now focusing on the flight's captain. But U.S. investigators say there is no such evidence jumping out at them.

Jim Clancy is tracking the investigation in Malaysia's capital, Kuala Lumpur.

What have you found out?

JIM CLANCY, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, you know, what I can tell you for sure is that people here in Kuala Lumpur are looking with great anxiety, with great expectations that some debris will be found. Something will be found to lead them to that black box because they know only that will clear up in everyone's minds what actually happened in the cockpit. Who or what might have been responsible for the disappearance of Flight 370.

Take a look.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

CLANCY (voice-over): In a vacuum of evidence, media reports persistently point to the pilots as those likely responsible for the disappearance of Flight 370. They had the skill. They were the last ones who controlled.

Government officials refuse to comment. But the former head and founder of Malaysia Airlines said he personally knew senior Captain Zaharie Shah from the time he was a cadet 30 years ago.

(on camera): You knew Captain Shah. Some people point a finger at him.

AZIZ ABDUL RAHMAN, FORMER MALAYSIA AIRLINES CEO: He is an excellent pilot, and I think also an excellent gentleman. I think going the wrong way if they are pointing finger at him.

CLANCY: You also knew the co-pilot. What can you say about him?

RAHMAN: His father learned the Koran by heart, so he also learned the Koran by heart. He's a good Muslim. And I know that captain is a good Muslim.

CLANCY (voice-over): At times, accusations against Captain Shah have been colored with politics. He was a life-long supporter of the opposition political party and its leader Anwar Ibrahim.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Some people in the government saw this as an opportunity to link Anwar Ibrahim to the pilot and that's the reason it became a controversy.

CLANCY: It's been reported Captain Shah was in the courtroom hours before the flight when Ibrahim was sentenced to five years in prison on sodomy charges. Charges the opposition insists are designed to eliminate Anwar Ibrahim from politics.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I am quite clear about it. Zaharie wasn't there that Friday afternoon, right up to the point the sentencing took place.

CLANCY: As a multinational search effort closes in on the suspected resting site of Flight 370, Dr. Aziz hopes the flight data recorder will be located and with it, the evidence to clear the pilots.

RAHMAN: The black box. Once we get the black box, then we can have the answers. If we can't find all of those, then we will start pointing fingers and so on. They will say all sorts of things. And it's very difficult for us to defend.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

CLANCY: Captain Shah's family has gone into seclusion. They did talk voluntarily with the police but they want to avoid all the media scrutiny. That's why it was important that his son Seth came out today and talked with local media telling them, forget all of this speculation. I know who my father was -- Carol.

COSTELLO: Tom, we hear this all the time that Malaysian politicians, officials investigators said, don't want to be embarrassed -- you know, they would be embarrassed, culturally if these pilots were somehow to blame. Is that your sense? Is that a real concern?

CLANCY: Not as much, I think, as, you know, people from the outside looking in think about it. They want the truth to come out. They want to know themselves. They know how important it is for Malaysia, for Malaysia Airlines, for the entire aviation industry. They want the truth to come out.

They don't believe that the pilots are capable of this. They think the pilots with this much experience would have never put the passengers at risk. If someone wanted to commit suicide, why take along a whole plane load of passengers.

All of the theories are out there. All the speculation is out there. But the solid record of these two men seems to defy all of it. And we have to take that into account. Just like everyone on that flight is in one way or another a suspect. But all of them have to be judged on the evidence, not innuendo, Carol.

COSTELLO: Jim Clancy reporting live from Kuala Lumpur -- thank you so much.

Sixteen people confirmed dead, 90 others missing after Saturday's landslide in Washington state, as families struggle through devastating loss. Some are asking if this tragedy could have been prevented.

Ana Cabrera is here.

ANA CABRERA, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Carol. The search continues for the missing in what is now becoming one of the worst natural disasters in this state's history. And the questions about was there a warning ahead of time? More on that when we come back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

COSTELLO: We'll get back into the investigation in Flight 370 in just a minute.

But, first, officials say the number of people missing in Washington state's landslide has dropped dramatically to 90 from 176. At least 24 people were killed Saturday when a massive hillside crashed down on towns in the Cascade Mountains. Eight bodies have been found, but still not recovered. I guess they've been detected but not recovered. Some are asking if this tragedy could have been prevented after a nearby landslide in 2006 and expert warnings about new construction. For victims' families, the focus is on coping with this.

Here's more from CNN's Ana Cabrera.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

CABRERA (voice-over): This morning, a mother's unspeakable pain after her son pulled the body of her daughter from the debris.

RAE SMITH, LOST HER DAUGHTER IN LANDSLIDE: My heart is broken. It's broken.

CABRERA: Summer Raffo was driving on a state road at the time of the slide. Rescue workers continue their mission five days after the side of this hill came cascading down on Snohomish County.

Peter Selvig, a volunteer with the state's Incident and Response team knows this community well. He's lived here for 40 years. Familiar places on this map have a new somber reality.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This guy lived and his wife died. We were on the school board together for about 30 years.

CABRERA: The heavy equipment used to breakthrough concrete and lumber continues to unearth personal tragedies.

ERIC FINZIMER, FIREFIGHTER: We can't lose hope. We're here to find those people.

CABRERA: Governor Inslee telling CNN he expects the death toll to rise significantly.

GOVERNOR JAY INSLEE, WASHINGTON STATE (via telephone): I don't think anyone could reach any other conclusion. The force of this landslide just defies imagination.

CABRERA: This daring rescue of a 4-year-old boy plucked from the mud on Saturday is one of several miraculous stories of survival. The man who helped saved him telling CNN, he saw his own grandson in the boy.

RANDY FAY, SNOHOMISH COUNTY HELICOPTER CREW CHIEF: I see myself thinking about Eli when that's going on. So, you want to help and so you kind of carry that.

CABRERA: An event that has touched so many here showing both how fleeting and precious life can be.

PETER SELVIG, RETIRED FOREST SERVICE WORKER: I always told my kids, you know, after you -- after you call them, it's kind of hard for me, but say "I love you" because that might be the last time you're going to see them.

(END VIDEOTAPE) CABRERA: The people in this community clearly have so much love for each other, which is helping people to get through this and to at least begin some of the healing process. As soon as daylight arrives, we know there will be 200 emergency responders back out there scouring this one square mile of unspeakable devastation. Continuing to look for any sign of life and also trying to get answers for those families who are missing their loved ones, Carol.

COSTELLO: All right. Now we have to talk about the tough stuff. There was a landslide there in 2006. In 1999, scientists did this study saying there was a possible risk of a catastrophic land -- you know, mudslide, landslide.

Was anyone listening?

CABRERA: Well, you know, officials say they were aware of the danger to a certain extent. We've been asking a lot of those tough questions to the emergency responders, to state authorities, to federal authorities and the local authorities. And they admit, you know, there are more questions to answer but still want to stay focused on the task at hand and said, we'll get to the bottom of all of that later.

Here's what we do know as we've been continuing to research what this area entails. We do know there have been smaller slides dating back to the 1950s, 1951, 1967, 1988 and then the 2006 slide that you mentioned. There has been damage in those slides but no loss of life.

And so, people who moved into this area did have, I think, an understanding to a certain degree that landslides were possible but again, was there a specific warning as to what ended up happening that it could happen? We know there was a 1999 study that suggested it was possible, but nothing that happened maybe just before and the days before that we know of that would have given people time to evacuate before the land just ripped away.

It certainly sparked a conversation, though, about whether homes should be allowed to be built in these landslide prone zones.