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GM CEO Offers Personal Apology For Company's Failure To Report Faulty Part; CNN Shadows "Ocean Shield" Across Indian Ocean; Plane Search Area Includes Uncharted Waters; Tabloid Questions Pilot's Mental State

Aired April 01, 2014 - 14:30   ET

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

MARY BARRA, CEO, GENERAL MOTORS: I have asked our team to keep stressing the system at GM and work with one thing in mind, the customer and their safety are at the center of everything we do. Our customers who have been affected by this recall are getting our full and undivided attention. We are talking directly to them through a dedicated web site with constantly updated information and through social media platforms.

We've trained and assigned more people, over a hundred, to our customer call centers, and wait times are down to seconds and, of course, we're sending customers written information through the mail. We've empowered our dealers to take extraordinary measures to treat each case specifically. If people do not want to drive a recalled vehicle before it is repaired, dealers can provide them with a loaner or a rental car free of charge.

To date, we provided nearly 13,000 loaner vehicles. If a customer is already looking for another car, dealers are allowed to provide additional cash allowances for the purchase of a lease or new vehicle. Our supplier is manufacturing new replacement parts for the vehicles that are no longer in production. We have commissioned two lines and have asked for a third production line. Those parts will start being delivered to dealers next week.

These measures are only the first in making things right and rebuilding trust with our customers. As I've reminded our employees, getting the cars repaired is only the first step. Giving customers the best support possible throughout this process is how we will be judged. I would like this committee to know that all of our GM employees and I are determined to set a new standard.

I am encouraged to say that everyone at GM, up to and including our board of directors supports this. I'm a second generation GM employee and I'm here as our CEO, but I'm also here representing the men and women who are part of today's GM and are dedicated to putting the highest quality, safest vehicles on the road.

I recently held a town hall meeting to formally introduce our new VP of safety. We met at our technical center in Michigan. This is one of the places where the men and women who engineer our vehicles work. They are the brains behind our cars, but they are also the heart of General Motors. It was a tough meeting. Like me, they are disappointed and upset. I could see it in their faces. I could hear it in their voices. They had many of the same questions that I suspect are on your mind. They want to make things better for our customers, and in that process make GM better. They particularly wanted to know what we plan to do for those who have suffered the most from this tragedy. That's why I'm pleased to announce that we have retained Kenneth Feinberg as a consultant to help us evaluate the situation and recommend the best path forward.

I am sure this committee knows Mr. Feinberg is highly qualified and is very experienced in handling matters such as this. Having led the compensation efforts involved with 9/11, the BP oil spill and the Boston marathon bombing. Mr. Feinberg brings expertise and objectivity to this effort. As I have said, I consider this to be an extraordinary event, and we are responding to it in an extraordinary way.

As I see it, GM has civil responsibilities and legal responsibilities. We are thinking through exactly what those responsibilities are, and how do balance them in an appropriate manner. Bringing on Mr. Feinberg is the first step. I would now be happy to answer your questions. Thank you.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Thank you, Ms. Barra. I also want to acknowledge all the families are here today. One Kelly Erin Ruddy of Scranton, Pennsylvania, is one of those that we offer sympathies to their families. We have all of you in our hearts.

BROOKE BALDWIN, CNN ANCHOR: All right, let's run this out in conversation. You just heard Mary Barra, the CEO of General Motors. Her mea culpa there in front of this House subcommittee, but really to the American public and specifically to some of these families here. In recent years, GM has released the figures 13, 13 deaths because of this faulty ignition switch that ultimately just totally shuts off the car.

We can't tell you whether specifically the families in that room or even in Washington today are among those 13. But still, a lot of frustration from families who say apologies are not enough.

Rana Foroohar, let me bring you in, our CNN global economic analyst. You know, in listening to Mary Barra today, we knew she would apologize. The news that I just heard is the fact that they're naming Kenneth Feinberg as the mediator, the compensation attorney because we know him from 9/11 and the Boston bombings and the BP oil spill.

But back to Mary Barra, you know, this is 2014. She's saying she's sorry. This dates back to 2004. She may not have been in charge, but this is her company and they messed up.

RANA FOROOHAR, CNN GLOBAL ECONOMIC ANALYST: That's absolutely right. I think that that's what you're hearing her say. She said, this is my problem now. It may not have started as her problem. And you know, frankly, most analysts think that she had nothing to do with it. She's the woman who said we're not going to build any more crappy cars. She's an engineer. She's known by people with many decades in the industry as being a very thorough and responsible person.

That said, the buck still stops here. So you can sort of split this story into two parts, or three parts even. There's Mary Barra, and this is a management challenge for her. I think she's being very transparent. She's really acting in a way that exemplifies this new GM, that she would like us to think is the company today.

And we'll see if it is when the facts come out. As she said, the facts will be the facts. But she's also dealing with these legacy problems and it's going to take some more investigation to know who knew what when and how far up the food chain in the company this went.

BALDWIN: Who knew what? Did they ignore it? Did they purposefully cover it up, right? That's the crux of this.

FOROOHAR: That's right. There are many things that could have happen. You could have had a culture of secrecy and sort of an unwillingness of different layers of management+. There were many layers of management in the old Detroit. That was part of the problem. There could have been an unwillingness to take bad news up the food chain and take responsibility for it.

This could have been a matter of engineers working on one particular part, not communicating well with others. We just don't know yet the extent to which the problem goes, how nefarious it is, how deep it is.

BALDWIN: Right. And as I mentioned a moment ago, really the new nugget that wasn't even necessarily in the pre-released transcript, her naming Kenneth Feinberg, compensation attorney for this specific issue with General Motors. Did that surprise you, Rana?

FOROOHAR: It didn't surprise me. I think that she is pulling out all the stops. I think that she is taking it very seriously. Everything from that appointment to the fact that she can doing more and more recalls. By the way, I think that's a good thing in the sense that history shows if you are going to do a recall, you want to get out in front of it all at once. You don't want to do it in drips and drabs. That's when you start to lose market share and public trust as well.

BALDWIN: OK, Rana Foroohar, thank you so much. I appreciate it.

FOROOHAR: Thank you.

BALDWIN: Coming up here, back to this missing plane. From his flight simulator to his political background, the pilot onboard MH-370 has been scrutinized. And now, his daughter is lashing out. She has some harsh words for some, questioning her father's motives. We'll share what she has written coming up.

Plus, can you believe we know more about Mars? The geography of Mars than the ocean. Chad Myers will explain next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BALDWIN: Welcome back to CNN's special coverage. I'm Brooke Baldwin. The Australian ship called the "Ocean Shield" is on its way to the Malaysian Flight 370 search area, and so on this ship, you have American equipment that will listen for those pings from the plane's data and voice recorders.

But the journey just to get there can be pretty tough because of rough seas. CNN's Will Ripley is shadowing the ship. He gives us a sense of what it's like to be out in the middle of the Indian Ocean.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

WILL RIPLEY, CNN CORRESPONDENT: We have moved about 12 miles off of shore here in the Indian Ocean to give you a sense of what the weather conditions can be like. Believe it or not, this is considered a clear day. We have swells. We have waves. You have to hold on to something on the boat just to stay standing. Captain Ray Ruby, I can't believe that this is a clear day.

CAPT. RAY RUBY, CHARTER BOAT PILOT: Yes. What you saw last time was like glass. This is just a normal day. I feel sorry for the guys on the "Shield" heading out to the area. We are at idle, running along about 5 knots. Those guys, so every wave is straight over the top.

RIPLEY: Even for a large ship like the "Ocean Shield."

RUBY: It will just be over the top at three times the speed we are doing.

RIPLEY: How large are these waves?

RUBY: These are only about 8-1/2 with the wind chop on top. They are not bad. When the guys get out further, they will be up to five, six feet of waves plus swells.

RIPLEY: Literally the waves that are the size of many buildings here. You certainly have to hold on. You deal with windy conditions as well. Just imagine if there were a storm moving in and all of the sudden, your visibility drops down to zero. You could have a ship very close to you that you can't even see in just a matter of seconds.

It's really incredible the conditions out here. They are conditions that the "Ocean Shield" is facing right now as they move towards the search zone. Will Ripley, CNN, off the coast of Western Australia.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BALDWIN: OK, Will Ripley, thank you. So that's one side of the story, right? The rough seas that these crews have to deal with. But then you have what lies beneath and Chad Myers, I'm going to bring you in for this discussion. We've said this before, but now we have illustrations to prove it. We know more about the surface of the moon, of Mars than we know about the bottom of this ocean.

CHAD MYERS, AMS METEOROLOGIST: Because telescopes don't work under water. You can take a telescope and point it at the moon. We can take two and see how deep the craters are. But you can't do that because you can't see through the water that deep. So you have pingers. If you ever been on a fishing boat, you said yes. Not catching any fish, but all of a sudden the pinger goes ping, ping, ping, it sees the bottom, whatever.

We're looking for the bottom. We don't care about the fish here. It's the width of the cone and how slow you have to go, and how big the ocean is. Let me just give you an idea. Let's just say that this thing -- and there are different width beams, I get it. This one here at its depth is going to be one mile. If the shore, or the bottom of the ocean is here, then it wouldn't be one mile. If the bottom of the ocean was 12,000 feet farther, the cone could get wider and wider and wider.

But the ship can really only go about five miles per hour or so to get a really decent ping if you're trying to map the bottom of the ocean. Try to go faster, but here's what happens. When you ping and then you wait for it to come back, if you're going too fast, the ship is here and ping won't get to the transducer on the bottom of the boat. So five miles per hour. One mile width. That's 5 square miles per hour of the ocean.

There's 130 million square miles of the ocean bottom. I did the math. I divided it all up. If you never stopped for fuel and you never stopped for new sailors, it would take you 2,955 years to map the ocean with one ship.

BALDWIN: Wait, that's all of the earth's oceans or that is specifically the area where they're searching.

MYERS: The area where they're searching. I mean, the whole entire 70 percent covered in ocean water would take this long. Clearly, it wouldn't take that long to do the Southern Indian Ocean. But here's the deal. We would love to have a pattern here in the past that looks something like what a lawn mower would do. Back and forth, back and forth, every couple miles. We don't have that. What we really have are these lines where a ship went that way and then a ship went that way. But there's an awful lot of blue in between all of those spots.

And that's the 95 percent that we don't have mapped across the Indian Ocean. Do the same thing for the U.S., it's a lot better because of NOAA. On the way back and forth through Hawaii, down here, off the Coast of Mexico pretty good, it's because of the remoteness of that ocean that we simply don't know what it looks like.

Here's what a serial graphic picture looks like of the moon. Two pictures side by side. We know how deep this crater is. We even know the size of it back and forth. We also know there's a crater inside the crater. Probably the meteor hit it. So yes, there's a lot more -- a lot easier to map something with a telescope than with a sonar.

BALDWIN: That is an incredible parallel. Chad Myers, thank you, sir.

MYERS: You're welcome.

BALDWIN: Coming up next, you keep asking the questions, we have experts to answer them, including can pilots just dump fuel from the cockpit and should investigators be flying back over the same route looking for any clues? We'll answer those and more. Plus, the daughter of this flight's captain is quoted online as saying her dad had been acting disturbed and distant. But now she's blasting the web site, defending her father. We'll share her new comments with you right here.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BALDWIN: You have questions about the search for missing Flight 370. We have experts here to help you answer those questions. Keep sending them to me @brookebcnn is my Twitter handle. Here to help us answer some of these questions, we brought them back, John Ransom, retired airline pilot and aviation safety specialist with safety operating systems, and Shawn Pruchnicki, air safety expert at Ohio State University and accident investigator for Flight 5191.

So, Gentlemen, Shawn, I'm giving you the first one. This is a question from Michael. Has anyone flown the route back over Malaysia to see if there is any ground wreckage, maybe other data is incorrect? We don't know the answer, but do you think that they should do that? Fly back over the route, retrace?

SHAWN PRUCHNICKI, FLIGHT 5191 ACCIDENT INVESTIGATOR: Yes, it's actually a pretty straight forward question. That would be someplace that you would go back to your last known points, points in time and place, and retrace some of those steps to see if that's exactly where you might find some evidence.

BALDWIN: What could they look for? What would they see?

PRUCHNICKI: Well, basically what you're looking for is obviously the wreckage, but in areas for example on land where it's heavy forestation or jungle, maybe you'd see a large destruction path of a path with a lot of trees down. But that could indicate that there's wreckage in that area. So those would be what you're looking for from an airborne perspective.

BALDWIN: OK. Captain John Ransom, sir, you get the next one. This is from Betsy. She asks, why do they say "Good night" anyway? Why is communication over at that moment? What's your answer?

JOHN RANSOM, RETIRED AIRLINE PILOT: Well, each time they say good night, they're actually changing controllers. They're talking to different people.

BALDWIN: So it's not goodbye.

RANSOM: No. It's we'll see you next time. For example, when they left and went to Lumpar to radar, those were two different people. When radar changed them over to Ho Chih Min, that was the last time the guy was going to talk to him for the evening so they say good night.

BALDWIN: See you, kind of thing. Shawn, Matt wants to know. We talked about crowd sourcing. Crowd sourcing of raw data to independent experts may prove useful. Do you think this can be a possibility? Do you think it could be? PRUCHNICKI: Well, it's rather hard to say. The problem is we just have so few data points, right? And more and more interpretations of limited data just yields more and more speculation that's not really on solid ground.

BALDWIN: OK. One more for you, captain. This is from John. Does the Malaysian Flight 370 have the ability to jettison or to dump fuel while in flight? If so, do you think it could throw off anticipated flight and speed versus fuel distance, and the plane may be nowhere near the current search?

RANSOM: Well, certification standards are such, that if the max certificated landing weight, for some exceptions you do have to have a fuel jettison system. Usually it's very good at getting rid of a lot of fuel very quickly anywhere from 5,000 to 6,000, 7,000 pound a minute. It doesn't make the airplane lighter. It will change the distance it will fly and also change the altitude to which it can climb.

BALDWIN: If someone had sinister intentions, is this something someone would do to throw something off course or no?

RANSON: You wouldn't throw it off course, you'd just change the weight of the airplane, make it able to climb higher than you might be able to do otherwise. But it also will severely limit the amount of miles you can travel with the fuel as well.

BALDWIN: Right, the distance. John Ransom, Shawn Pruchnicki, Gentlemen, thank you very much and thank you for all your questions. Keep them coming @brookebcnn #370qs.

Coming up, more than 70 years ago, a World War II battleship sank in the very same waters crews are now searching for this missing plane. Hear how one man found it after decades under water.

Plus, in the cockpit, could the last words be from someone other than the pilot or co-pilot? We'll talk to a forensics expert because we know they're investigating this here about the voice analysis. This is CNN's special coverage.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BALDWIN: Since Flight 370 vanished on March 8th, no one on that plane has been examined really as closely as the pilot. But that critical investigation has thus far gone nowhere. It has turned up nothing that would suggest he had a hand in the plane's disappearance, and now his own daughter is defending him against the worst of those accusations. Here's CNN's Sara Sidner.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

SARA SIDNER, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): A daughter lashes out at a British tabloid that uses her name to cast doubt on her father's mental state. Isha Zaharie's father has become synonymous with Flight MH-370. Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, the pilot of the missing flight. According to the "Daily Mail" article, a family friend quotes her, saying her father wasn't the father I knew. He seemed disturbed and lost in a world of his own.

Captain Zaharie is among many being scrutinized during the investigation into the plane's disappearance. Investigators searched his home and pored through data on his flight simulator. But no evidence of wrong doing has been found. His heartbroken daughter is incensed and says the article is flat-out false.

On her Facebook page, she posted an open letter to the "Daily Mail" saying, quote, "You should consider making movies since you are so good at making up stories and scripts out of thin air. May God have mercy on your souls. You can bet your -- I will not forgive you." We have reached out to the "Daily Mail" and are awaiting comment.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

SIDNER: As Zaharie's family aches from his absence, they have shied away from media attention and they say all the attention and suspicion surrounding their father is, quote, "torturing them." Sara Sidner, CNN, Kuala Lumpur.