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The Search for Flight 370

Aired March 28, 2014 - 15:00   ET

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

BROOKE BALDWIN, CNN ANCHOR: Now this. All right, here we go, top of the hour. I'm Brooke Baldwin.

You're watching live special coverage here of the hunt for Flight 370. After eight days in the Southern Indian Ocean, search crews find out, you know what, they have been looking in the wrong place. Incredibly, today, the search moved 700-plus miles northeast, a new analysis of old data suggesting that the airliner could never have made it as far south as previously thought.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MARTIN DOLAN, AUSTRALIAN TRANSPORT SAFETY BUREAU: The new information is based on continuing analysis of radar data about the aircraft's movement between the South China Sea and the Strait of Malacca before radar contact was lost. This continuing analysis indicates the plane was traveling faster than was previously estimated, resulting in increased fuel usage and reducing the possible distance it traveled south into the Indian Ocean.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BALDWIN: So the search moves, and just like that, possible debris is spotted.

And this is significant today, because we are not just talking about one bit of debris. Look at this here. This one -- the first picture we have really seen here of -- I don't know what that is. They will try to figure out. But you have five planes in total and they have each spotted something, multiple objects of various sizes and colors.

And for the very first time, one plane was even able to relocate something spotted by a previous plane. You have that today. Also, word of this new search zone and potentially wasted search days was too much for some of the family members of passengers on board the plane here who walked out of this briefing, this is Beijing, to protest this, leaving you see here row upon row of just empty chairs, while a representative of one of the relatives just berated officials there.

Now to this search area. Visual spotters on search planes are trained to constantly move their eyes in specific patterns while trying to spot possible objects and just think about it. Visual spotting is incredibly exhausting work. The monotony of the ocean can do some strange things to the human eye. Naturally perfect vision, by the way, is not required.

Some spotters can wear glasses, contact lenses.

With me now is our correspondent who has been working this story from the jumping-off point here, Perth, Australia. She did some visual spotting today on a search plane and also joining me here is former U.S. Navy SEAL Chris Heben, who trained in these search-and-rescue missions visual spotting. We will get to you, sir, in a minute.

But, Kyung, here you were on board this P-8, right, this incredibly sophisticated aircraft and you and the crews are looking down for objects. You saw objects. What was that experience like and did your eyes get tired looking for something?

KYUNG LAH, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: I wasn't in charge of anything, so my eyes didn't get that tired. I was actually noticing how incredibly difficult it is for the people and for the spotters who are aboard the P-8.

They have two giant windows and they are very similar to the windows we are seeing right now. But they are even bigger on the P-8. What happened was, as we were approaching the search area, remember, this is a little bit closer than the other search area -- as we were approaching, one of the spotters said I see something. Mark the spot.

And so that spot was marked, some white objects on the sea. We dipped lower and another spotter spotted something orange rope. Then there was a blue bag spotted. A bit of object finding by the spotters -- is it connected to the plane? We simply don't know, Brooke.

BALDWIN: We don't know, but it's interesting, Chris. She talks about marking the spot.

And here I am thinking of this enormous area, the Indian Ocean. You are trained to do this. I know we talked about grids and I'm sure longitude and latitude comes to play here, but how do you mark a spot in the ocean to return to?

CHRIS HEBEN, FORMER U.S. NAVY SEAL: There is a couple of things in play on an aircraft like that.

The P-8 is the latest and greatest and most advanced piece of aerial machinery when it comes to locating downed pilots and planes, et cetera. They have synthetic aperture radar. They have high- definition synthetic aperture radar, what is called ISAR.

This takes a picture of an area and then you can fly over the same area, and if anything changes, it depixelates that area. Marking a position is relatively easy when you are talking about 10-digit grid coordinates which are accurate to within five meters. Between eyeballs, synthetic aperture radar, the ability to take pictures through capture and not the exact position where it was taken, plus satellite data and other incoming feeds from other assets, you would be surprised how relatively uncomplicated it is to find debris and mark it and keep track of it.

BALDWIN: Uncomplicated. I will take your word for it, sir.

Kyung, back to you. We have been talking the last couple of days and what I found fascinating in talking to some of the searchers is they are really invested in finding this plane. Some of them were really frustrated that they couldn't go out on certain days because the conditions were so horrendous. How are they handling such a huge task?

(CROSSTALK)

LAH: What we are hearing from that is that they want to get out there. As you were saying, it was frustrating.

Today, we had some really good weather and they felt if there is anything out there, we are going to see it. I heard the chief pilot tell me that. The sense is that they want to get out there. This is a very different mission for these search teams. They want to find the debris for these families, because they understand. Being pilots themselves and being on a plane as their jobs every day, they have families at home and they want to bring this debris home for those families.

BALDWIN: I hear you, Chris.

(CROSSTALK)

BALDWIN: Yes, you agree?

HEBEN: That's a great point.

They are only -- they are limited by how long they can stay in the air, just constraints placed upon them. But, believe me, if it was pilot and I could play for 24 hours straight, I would do it.

BALDWIN: Just finally with you, Chris, how would your eyes not glaze over just staring down at the ocean for hours on end?

HEBEN: Well, you do it a lot, so you get used to it.

I have certainly on CSAR missions, on combat search and rescue operations, you take eyedrops, believe it or not. And give yourself every creature comfort in order to be more effective at your job. The eyes do get tired. You can shift from one side of the plane to the other so you get a -- quote, unquote -- "different scenery," even if it's just different scenery inside of the aircraft. You try to keep things fresh and new and keep the adrenaline going.

And believe it, it doesn't matter how tired you are, when you know that lives and family is waiting for your word, it drives you. It really does. It drives you to do things you normally wouldn't do if it was a less stressful situation.

BALDWIN: Kudos to the crews who are out there working tirelessly for the families.

HEBEN: Absolutely. BALDWIN: Chris Heben, thank you. Kyung Lah, thank you so much for sharing your experience.

Let's broaden the conversation out. So, joining me here, Les Abend, captain of a 777 and a CNN aviation analyst and contributing editor to "Flying" magazine. And also joining me, Tim Taylor, a sea operations specialist. Good to see both of you here.

(CROSSTALK)

BALDWIN: Tim, I want to begin with you, just because really the newest piece of information today is the new search area. Just because we focus so much previous days on the satellite imagery and the 300 pieces one day and 122 pieces the other day, are we just tossing that out the window?

TIM TAYLOR, PRESIDENT OF TIBURON SUBSEA SERVICES: I have to believe and speaking with Les a little earlier, that they are not telling us everything.

(CROSSTALK)

BALDWIN: Let's hope not.

TAYLOR: Let's hope not because...

BALDWIN: We don't have a lot.

TAYLOR: It leads to the confusion with the families. If you do this and if you bring out data and it's wrong, they have done that too many times already.

I would believe they are moving it for a good reason. I don't know that reason. I want to know just as much as everybody else does. Are they looking for the downed area where the plane went down? Because they are not going to find it near the debris field. The debris field has moved and it's in currents and it's in wind. If they believe that's the wrecked area where it went down, I have to say that's faulty thinking in the way I look at it.

BALDWIN: I see you nodding. What are you nodding...

LES ABEND, CNN AVIATION ANALYST: I totally agree with Tim.

We have to make it important to distinguish between the impact site where the wreckage will be...

BALDWIN: Actually is.

ABEND: Actually is, below the surface.

And we have to distinguish to the debris field. Right now, we have stuff out there that you had on the screen that maybe it's airplane stuff. It would be wonderful if it was. But it may be a total coincidence too. BALDWIN: Right. And again just to remind everyone, the process is so laborious and then they have to find the pieces and then make sure the pieces do belong to the plane and sort of backtrack those currents.

At least the good news we have hearing about the new search area. It is closer to land, which means more flying time for these search planes. And, two, the currents are not as horrendous or the conditions are much better.

Second question to you as a pilot is what do you make of the left turn and the news today that this plane allegedly sped up after that plane went off course and then slowed down? Does that tell you anything?

ABEND: Well, I think it's being misconstrued.

BALDWIN: How so?

ABEND: From the standpoint of I think they made an assumption using trigonometry and satellite. I won't go into all of that.

But with the pings, the determination was made or the assumption was made that the airplane was up at altitude, at high altitude, which it means it's thinner air and it can go much faster.

BALDWIN: Not burning as much fuel.

ABEND: Correct. It won't be able to burn as much fuel. But it will go faster for a longer distance. OK.

Now they are saying the airplane was going faster and therefore the engines were pushing it faster and therefore it was burning a little bit more fuel. That's correct, but my point is there was a radar sight that we still haven't totally disputed or discounted that said it went down to 12,000. If it went down to 12,000, it will burn a little bit more fuel and not as much as I had originally thought.

I looked at Boeing charts that I verified with a Boeing -- very credible Boeing source that said, no, indeed that's the correct fuel numbers. But at the lower altitude, you have thicker air and it will go slower against that thicker air and it will travel less distance because it travels at a slower speed.

I'm thinking they are getting to the right impact point, but perhaps for the wrong reasons, because I think they are establishing that one spot by 35,000 feet as opposed to 12,000. That's my -- and the terms that you refer to may be just turns because the pilot or the captain put in the diversionary airport and began that turn and then things got bad in the cockpit, enough that it disabled them and the waypoints that they indicate may just be that they went near those waypoints.

BALDWIN: OK. I keep coming back to, Tim, the notion that heaven forbid for these families they don't find the black box.

Let's say they do find some pieces of debris and they do link it to the plane, but they never get to really the key as to what happened. Could they extrapolate enough to come to a sort of conclusion as far as what happened?

TAYLOR: If they find debris, it will have to have telltale signs of what happened, burn marks, how the plane separated, how it hit the water, and potentially what happened on the inside of the plane if there was a fire or anything of that nature.

Yes, debris and finding it whether it's on the beach a year from now will be extremely important in figuring out what happened, any little clue that you can find. And like Les said, there is an impact and there's debris sitting somewhere on the bottom of the ocean. Pretty much everyone has agreed on that.

There is a debris field floating throughout the ocean, in the South Indian Ocean and hitting different currents. If this plane went down in the Florida Keys, we would be looking off of North Carolina or Maine. So, to give you an idea of the difference, so if you are in the search area, what exactly are they looking for? That I think is debris, because that's what the families need.

They need to know that a plane is where it is. They may never see their families again. We worked on a project that discovered a World War II submarine in 70 feet of water 70 years -- 600 feet of water and 70 years after the war and the families still had that same feeling. It's not -- it's 70 years later, but it's still there.

BALDWIN: They got it.

(CROSSTALK)

TAYLOR: But they knew that the submarine was sunk. These guys need to know something..

(CROSSTALK)

BALDWIN: Let's hope this isn't 70 years later for these families.

(CROSSTALK)

BALDWIN: But it's incredible so many years later you could do that.

Tim and Les, thank you both very much.

We are going to stay on the story here because we have these images from satellite showing us these possible objects and maybe debris from the plane. We don't know.

But you know we have talking a lot about satellite. You see them here from this Google Earth image, hundreds of satellites orbiting the Earth as I speak. Why can't we use them to zero in on the items in the ocean to determine if they are actually from this plane? We will explore that next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BALDWIN: Welcome back. I'm Brooke Baldwin. Big news today, because there are new sightings of possible debris in this new search area for this missing plane. Why don't they just use satellites to zero in on the debris to determine what the heck it is?

Well, we have plenty of them. Take a look at this. It shows hundreds of satellites spinning round and round the Earth right now, but with all of this incredible technology here, no one has been able to take a good clear photograph of any of this possible debris floating out there in Southern Indian Ocean.

Chad Myers, tell me how all of these -- I have an elementary understanding obviously of how satellite work, but why can't they take those pictures?

CHAD MYERS, AMS METEOROLOGIST: There's not a spy satellite that we know of in that area that can focus that far south.

Think about this. You are 45 degrees south latitude. If you have a spy satellite or any satellite that is above the equator, because that's where most of them fly, you would only get about a 45-degree angle at the view of the what we're looking at anyway, if you're not looking straight down at it.

BALDWIN: So, not a full shot.

MYERS: Not a full shot.

The angle, it can be reflection, it can be wave action and a lot of things have gone wrong here. We have a couple of different types of satellites. One literally stays in the same spot and takes a picture, picture, picture and rotates around the Earth as the Earth rotates there. It stays in the same place.

So, as the Earth goes around, it's still in the same place, even with the rotation. There are others that do this. They go to the poles and just keeps going around and around and around. You think that is not going to work. It's just going to keep taking the same picture.

No. Guess what? The Earth rotates underneath it. It actually takes a picture every hour all the way down one, two, three, four, five, or every 90 minutes depending on the flight plan, 520 miles above space. Those are called polar orbiters. The ones that we get our weather data from, at least most of it, are 22,000 miles in space. They are the ones that stay over the same spot, 42 times away.

Think about the zoom lens you have to get to zoom down to something which is 42 times farther away.

(CROSSTALK)

MYERS: I know there is a lot of stuff out there, but truly there is a lot of satellite activity out there, but what we didn't have is clear skies. Many of these times where these satellites were flying over, they only fly over once a day going up and once a day going down. There were clouds there. They can't see through the clouds to see the debris. That's the issue we have had. This is what a polar orbiter looks like. You get stripes -- picture here, that's one hour. That's the next 90 minutes. That's the next 90 minutes. That's the next 90 minutes.

You only get one or maybe two pictures a day from any one spot as the satellite goes around. We had a great day yesterday, it couldn't have been better. The skies were absolutely crystal-clear and very dry. Not a lot of humidity in the air. And so I believe we will have great pictures coming up in a day or two as they analyze the satellite flyovers from yesterday.

BALDWIN: Good deal. Let's hope so, Chad. Thank you.

MYERS: You're welcome.

BALDWIN: We keep talking about this new search area. Coming up next, we will take a closer look at the reasoning behind it and why this whole thing moved. New analysis shows the plane was actually flying faster than previously thought.

Did the pilots do this on purpose? What could have happened in the cockpit? We will actually demonstrate some possibilities inside of this flight simulator.

Also ahead, the families, family members there in China making a statement today. Here they are getting up and leaving, frustrated with the Malaysian officials at this briefing scheduled today. CNN's chief medical correspondent, Sanjay Gupta, will join me on the physical and mental toll clearly this story is taking on their loved ones and how they handled this, this waiting game. We will talk about that next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BALDWIN: Welcome back. I'm Brooke Baldwin.

For days and days now, the families of those passengers on board Flight 370 have been sitting, waiting, listening to briefings held by Malaysian authorities, but many of them have complained that they are just downright being lied to.

Well, today, they stood up, united and here they are walking out of this briefing, hearing the search area shifted again. They say Malaysian authorities are hiding the truth. Malaysian officials maintain that their loved ones, all lives are lost. That was the phrase we heard.

But some families say they will not accept that until the wreckage is found.

Let me bring in our chief medical correspondent, Dr. Sanjay Gupta.

Sanjay, listen, we have seen them angry and weeping and wheeled out on stretchers, almost throwing punches at members of the media and officials in these briefing rooms. But all of this, what is the physical toll this emotional is taking on them?

DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN CHIEF MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Let me say something about what you were just talking about.

And that is that this idea that these families are sort of banded together, obviously, they're going through this very, very unique, tragic situation. And in many ways, they can provide a sense of comfort for each other.

But what we also find is that everyone who is not within that band of family members is somehow -- they're a bit more suspicious of. Taking a punch at a cameraman, for example, obviously, that person has nothing to do with this particular issue, but there is just so much anger at everyone who is not inside the band of family members.

There's a physical toll, Brooke. Some of it is just obvious. You are not eating, you're not sleeping well. You can collapse from fatigue alone, but also things like your cortisol levels, your stress hormone levels. Typically, normal people, they go up and down. In a situation like this, they never really come down as much.

Your heart rate, your blood pressure, but also just harmless threats you see as more potentially dangerous. You are living on edge, and it's a hard thing to sustain for a long period of time, Brooke.

BALDWIN: There is that cliche, hope for the best, prepare for the worst. What would you or what are experts, would you say in this kind of situation to these family members?

GUPTA: I would say two things.

One may be obvious. And that is that I think hope and optimism at least in this period of time, the short run, there is some benefits to it. People who are more hopeful and optimistic tend to cope better and they tend to deal with their grief better.

Here is the flip side, though, Brooke, as you may guess, is that many psychologists refer to this as sort of the heroic period. Right? You think about from the families' perspective, in many ways, the whole world is looking for their loved ones. That can buoy you up and that can raise your emotions somewhat and make you feel better about things. You are not as isolated.

On the other hand, Brooke, when the heroic period ends, when the media attention starts to fade, the searches slow down or get called off, then there is a greater fall even. You have the loss, the initial loss, but then you come down from this heroic period as well, and that can be very, very tough for those folks.

BALDWIN: Cannot begin to imagine.

GUPTA: Heartbreaking.

BALDWIN: Sanjay, absolutely. Good doctor, thank you so much for joining me. GUPTA: You got it, Brooke.

BALDWIN: Coming up next, the search area for the missing plane as we have been reporting now shifting 680 miles northeast. The new area has much different weather conditions and ocean currents here.

So, coming up next, we will give you this virtual view of this new search location and explain exactly how this changes the search itself.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)