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Planes Spot Objects in New Search Area; Lack of Imagination; Search Area Shift's Northeast 680 Miles; Sweet 16 Preview

Aired March 28, 2014 - 09:30   ET

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

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

It is day 21 in the search for Malaysian Airlines Flight 370. And a busy morning of new developments. Just minutes ago, we learned that several planes, five to be exact, have spotted objects in a new search area.

Overnight, officials abandoned their previous focus and shifted their attention to this new zone nearly 700 miles away. Now, this latest reboot of the search nearly three weeks after the plane's disappearance was too much for the families of those aboard. You see here, they walked out of a briefing in Beijing accusing the Malaysian government of wasting precious time and even covering up critical information.

So, let's talk about that new information.

CNN safety analyst and author of "Why Planes Crash", David Soucie, is here. Along with Peter Goelz, a CNN aviation analyst and former NTSB managing editor. Welcome, gentlemen.

DAVID SOUCIE, CNN SAFETY ANALYST: Hello.

PETER GOELZ, CNN AVIATION ANALYST: Nice to be here.

COSTELLO: Glad you're here.

David, I want to start with you. An Australian official says they've moved on from the old search area because they are no longer classifying earlier satellite images as debris. Is that a bad idea to totally abandon that old area?

SOUCIE: No. In fact what this tells me is that they've got real, credible evidence finally. I know we've heard that a hundred times. But this evidence is strong enough and they have enough confidence in it that they've said, we're no longer there, we're here. So, to me, it's encouraging that they're narrowing down exactly where they truly feel this aircraft could be.

COSTELLO: So, Peter, does that mean these satellite images that we've been talking about for the last several days aren't worth anything? GOELZ: Well, they may not be. But, I mean, what I know is that the NTSB and the investigative team have been really breaking new ground on the analysis of the Inmarsat data. It's like if you're working with a number that runs out to 15 digit points, they're working with the last three or four numbers, which are very small increments but it has given them a much clearer picture of where they believe this plane flew to and where it came down. And it's their best shot before the flight data recorder and the voice recorder pingers perhaps wear out.

COSTELLO: The type of debris that these five separate planes spotted in this new area sound promising. Richard Quest, our aviation correspondent, is with us now. Those five planes, they spotted rectangular shaped debris, some of them longer, some shorter, and they're all different colors. What does that tell us?

RICHARD QUEST, CNN AVIATION CORRESPONDENT: I think it's not so much - I mean, you know, one can hazard a guess and you can jump left, right and center and say, oh, it must be this or it must be that. But I think the significance is not so much the shapes and sizes at this point, it's the fact they've seen it. Now, if we go back to the old search area of the last week, the satellites were sending data and the planes were going over there and not finding anything. I think one plane found something gray and orange. But substantially, for the number of flights that were being sent, there was really nothing coming back.

Now we have this situation where the planes have been sent out and they were, by the way, they were over the new zone, the so-called impact area. They were over it while the announcement was being made. And within hours, we are getting multiple reports from several aircraft that objects have been sighted. So I think we have to take that as being very encouraging.

COSTELLO: And, David, there was even one plane who went back and then returned and spotted the debris again. So that sounds promising.

SOUCIE: Well, it's very promising. And, plus, it indicates to me that they've most likely dropped a sonobuoy there, which will track it. I understand there's not as much flow in that area. But nonetheless, to have a sonobuoy tracking this new debris field, if it is debris from the aircraft, is incredibly important to be able to do that.

COSTELLO: And, Peter, a Chinese ship is in the area. And, of course, the search is done for today because it's nighttime there in Australia. But how easy do you think it will be for this Chinese ship to find this stuff tomorrow?

GOELZ: Well, it's going to be challenging, but there is a real sense of urgency because time is running out or may have already run out. But there's a real sense of urgency and they are devoting all of the resources that they have to get to this debris field and get it identified.

COSTELLO: And, Richard, you know, on the subject of time, those batteries are dying in those black boxes that are under the water somewhere, so they don't have much time, and it makes you think that these satellite images they had, you know, those five satellite images and the planes were looking in that area and they weren't finding anything, it makes you think, so much time wasted.

QUEST: No. No. Well, you can look at it like that, Carol, but you've got to keep coming back to, as Peter was saying, and Peter's making a good point, you know, the data they are working with is at the extremities of understanding. So the prime minister of Australia said it, the transport minister of Malaysia has said it, time and again, they were doing the best they could with the information they had. And so, yes, it wasn't time wasted as such, it was time spent on the information they had. Now they've got better and more credible information.

So, should she have waited? They had no choice. They had to go with what they had in the same way that they're doing the same thing here. You've got information, it's credible, it's the best lead you've got.

Carol, how many times have you and I talked in the last week about this phrase, the best lead they've got. It's all they've got. And so that's why I think to characterize it as a waste of time is a little bit of a misnomer.

COSTELLO: OK. And, last question for Peter, and I want you to put this in perspective. Is this -- because it seems so chaotic to us because we've never been intimately involved with such an investigation, but you have, is this normal?

GOELZ: Well, there's always a sense of chaos at the beginning of an accident. Now there is the fog of war, so to speak. But, remember, these guys are trying to work with very little data. They're trying to work against a 30-day deadline. They are working around the clock and they would be negligent if they did not track down every satellite picture, every potential lead. They now believe this is the best information they've got. They've got about a week to go before the pingers stop. They want to give it everything they've got. So I think - I think Richard's right. I mean this is -- this is the best shot. They're going to go at it. It apparently has gotten some positive feedback. Hopefully we'll know within 24 or 48 hours what we've got.

COSTELLO: I hope so. Peter Goelz, David Soucie, Richard Quest, thanks so much.

Still to come on the NEWSROOM, does the search for Flight 370 lack imagination? We'll talk to a member of the 9/11 Commission and ask whether there are any parallels between the missing jet investigation and a previously unknown tidbit of information. We'll be right back.

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COSTELLO: Crews investigating Flight 370 are now focused on a new area nearly 700 miles closer to the Australian coast than originally thought. But while the search area has narrowed, investigators are certainly no closer to finding out what happened to that plane, and that may be due to a so-called lack of imagination. It's a term best known from the 9/11 Commission which found our leaders, Bill Clinton and George Bush, could not believe terrorists would actually hijack a plane and then crash the plane into a building, but now we all know that's an entirely possible scenario.

Flash forward to today. Could a lack of imagination be at play in the disappearance behind Flight 370, too? Joining us to discuss is Jamie Gorelick. She was a 9/11 Commission member and is a member of the Defense Department's legal policy board. She practices law at Wilmer Hale.

Welcome, Jamie.

JAMIE GORELICK, 9/11 COMMISSION MEMBER: Hi.

COSTELLO: I'm glad you're here. You served on the 9/11 Commission. Could you talk about that failure of imagination and how you guys arrived at that conclusion?

GORELICK: Well, what we saw was that policy makers - and it's really not much attributable to actual presidents, but people who work for them over a period of years, just could not imagine a plot of the complexity and terrorizing quality that happened on 9/11. So when we went back to look at what had occurred, we saw people who imagined lots of things but they didn't imagine what had occurred here. And I think the folks investigating this accident, or this event, are going to have to do the same thing. They're going to have to think about what might have happened.

COSTELLO: Yes, I was just going to ask you, you know, the disappearance of Flight 370 isn't as great a tragedy as 9/11 - I mean how can you put any qualification on that, so I'm not even going to go there. But tell me about the parallels you see.

GORELICK: Well, you know, there are as many parallels to 9/11 as there are to TWA 800, which was another plane that fell out of the sky and no one knew whether it was caused by a terrorist event or an accident. There one could fish most of the wreckage out of the -- out of the water since it was in the waters surrounding New York, and we had a lot more data. And even there, disagreements persisted for a very long time about what happened. And all you had to do in that circumstance is make sure that every possible idea is vetted against the facts.

There are going to be people who will never believe what the facts show no matter what happens. There are people who believe today that George W. Bush himself ordered the destruction of the twin towers and himself sent a rocket into the Pentagon. And they will always believe that no matter what the facts show. But you have to hugh (ph) to the facts and test those facts against every hypothesis.

COSTELLO: I think they have so few facts in this instance. Yesterday I talked to Tom Fuentes about this very thing. He's a former FBI guy. He says, of course they're considering all possibilities. Of course they are. He doesn't believe there's a lack of imagination at play in this scenario. But he's an investigator. He's with the FBI. Investigators tend, you know, to be - I mean they're not going to come out and say, no, we're not considering every possibility. That's not even possible. What do you think?

GORELICK: Well, I don't know what the investigators are currently considering and I don't know that they are using their full imagination, but the way you get the full testing of every hypothesis is to get people with different points of view and have them examine each other's hypothesis and the facts. As you point out, the problem here is a real dearth (ph) of facts. I mean this plane went down in a hellish environment, as you have been reporting constantly. And whether there will be any facts to debate is still a very open question.

COSTELLO: Do you think when all is said and done, and I'm hoping that they'll figure it out, I hope so. And if they do, should there be some sort of international coalition put together so that, you know, the experts can sit down and determine what happened, why it happened, and determine a way in which it will never happen again?

GORELICK: The way in which we become safer as a country and as a world is to examine our flaws and our faults in a very clear-eyed way. That's what we tried to do on the 9/11 Commission. It led to reforms that were fairly universally accepted by the American people and then the Congress of the United States. And there's no reason that that couldn't happen here. I mean our military has a wonderful tradition of looking at events in hindsight to develop the lessons learned and to proliferate those lessons. Companies do this. Our regulatory agencies do this. And this one prompts that question on an international level.

COSTELLO: Jamie Gorelick, thank you so much for joining us this morning. We appreciate it.

GORELICK: My pleasure.

COSTELLO: The investigation into the disappearance of Flight 370 has focused special attention on the captain, his political affiliation, his personal life, even his hobbies. One of those hobbies garnered a lot of interest his in-home flight simulator.

CNN's Saima Mohsin, talked with the man who helped build that simulator.

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SAIMA MOHSIN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: (voice over): It's a high tech piece of equipment that's been the subject of much intrigue, concern, even suspicion. The flight simulator Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah had built in his home. Police searched the homes of the pilot and co- pilot of MH370 taking away the simulator for investigation.

CNN has spoken to Thomas Kontogiannis who writes a blog on flight simulators. He sold the captain additional parts and helped him put it altogether.

THOMAS KONTOGIANNIS, FLIGHT SIMULATOR ENHANCEMENT: He wanted to build a platform that can recreate the real motion of the plane in a degree. It has its units.

MOHSIN: That's done with a chair or platform that moves as though the pilot is seated in an actual plane to give the sensation of flying. Kontogiannis and Captain Zaharie exchanged at least 15 e-mails which have been shared with CNN. They mostly discussed technical details -- the pilot looking for guidance on setting up his simulator.

(on camera): It's a passion that extended beyond the job. Captain Zaharie often invited his friends over to tryout the simulator. They say they saw nothing sinister in his hobby. But investigators still have to ask tough questions and files from the simulator have been sent to the FBI for inspection.

KONTOGIANNIS: It's very normal for pilots to have something like that to practice themselves.

MOHSIN: Malaysian authorities mention concern over some deleted files, something Thomas Kontogiannis says is normal, like deleting data from a game driver computer. Kontogiannis says he never discussed with Captain Zaharie what he used the simulator for, but he wasn't concerned.

KONTOGIANNIS: Because I think that's a -- that's actually someone that we know it was really devastated for us, we feel pretty sad about it. And on top of that, we couldn't believe all the things that were said about it, that it wasn't close to true. I mean we couldn't believe -- I couldn't believe that the man had passion for simulation like that and wanted to build it, like to go extra miles to build something like that, would do something stupid, or you know like sinister.

MOHSIN: Captain Zaharie seemed to have nothing to hide but his enthusiasm for flying. As one of his friends told me if we were on a plane in trouble he would want a pilot as passionate as Captain Zaharie in the cockpit.

Saima Mohsin, CNN, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

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COSTELLO: New in the next hour of NEWSROOM, families waiting for days and days for any real news about what happened to their loved ones aboard that flight.

Ahead in the next hour, the psychological toll that takes and how they're coping. Sanjay Gupta will join us to talk about that.

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UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The type of wreckage or objects that we're looking for is so close to the waterlines that our radars would not be able to pick it up so we are very reliant on lookouts, who use binoculars --

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ANDY SCHOLES, BLEACHER REPORT: I'm Andy Scholes.

Well the clock has not yet struck midnight for this year's Cinderella team. The 11-seed Dayton Flyers are soaring into the elite 8 for the first time in 30 years. Now the Flyers have already upset Ohio State and Syracuse, pulled off another one last night beating Stanford, 82- 72. Once the final buzzer sounded the party started again in Dayton. Check out the scene on campus. It seems like with each win the party just gets bigger and bigger but yes it's --

COSTELLO: Oh, wow.

SCHOLES: I would love to be at that party. It is going to be tough for them to keep that going to the weekend though.

Up next, for the flyers the match up with the top seed in the tournament, Florida the Gators cruise to an 11-point win over UCLA last night. And Wisconsin also punched their ticket to the elite 8, the Badgers beat the Baylor Bears, 69-52. They now move on and face top seed, Arizona in the regional finals.

And even better than the Badgers; play was the post-game celebration. Take a look at 6'10" center, Evan Anderson. Cutting the rug in the locker room, the big man has got some moves.

COSTELLO: Well, not really.

SCHOLES: So the game to watch tonight is the matchup between Louisville and Kentucky. This end state rivals we know they don't like each other. Kentucky they just handed Wichita State their first loss of the year.

Meanwhile Louisville hasn't played a team as good as the Wildcats in the tournament thus far. So it's bound to be a barn burner just not a couch burner or at least Louisville hopes it's not. The university is actually handing out this flyer reminding students that couch fires aren't cool. And you should respect your couch. That's hilarious.

All right the sweet 16 continues tonight with another great double header on our sister network TBS at 7:27 Eastern. UConn and Iowa State will square off. That game is followed by Michigan State taking on Virginia. It should be another great night of basketball.

NEWSROOM will continue with Carol Costello after the break.

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