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Remote Underwater Vehicles; How to Salvage a Plane From Underwater; Flight 370 Joins Long List of Aviation Mysteries; Malay Officials Meet Privately With Families; Families Wait, Cling to Hope; Army Sergeant Searches for Son Lost in Washington Mudslide; Dow on Verge of Record Close

Aired April 02, 2014 - 15:30   ET

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

RANDI KAYE, CNN INVESTIGATIVE CORRESPONDENT: They're also outfitted with sonar to scout for debris. They are steered by two operators on board the ship above who use instant feedback from the salvage vehicle's cameras to direct the robotic arms.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: They can hover. They can move left, right, forward, and aft, and go to where they need, very carefully hover over a piece and pick it up if they need to.

KAYE: Remember Air France Flight 447, which crashed in the Atlantic Ocean in 2009?

Two years later, an unmanned underwater vehicle found the debris field for that flight 13,000 feet beneath the surface. The engines were pulled from the ocean floor. If Flight 370 is found, search teams are prepared to do the same.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: If it's small, like the black boxes, you can put a little basket on the ROV and the arms from the ROV can pick it up and put it in the basket.

KAYE: But the remote underwater vehicles can only carry about 4,000 pounds, so anything heavier, like a large piece of the fuselage, will have to be attached to a cable and pulled to the surface by a crane on the ship.

Keep in mind this could be happening miles below the surface, an incredibly difficult task.

Still, no doubt, salvage teams will keep their eyes peeled for the black box, hoping to get much needed answers first.

Randi Kaye, CNN, New York.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN ANCHOR: My next guest played a key role in the U.S. Navy's mission to salvage TWA flight 800 wreckage, so I want to bring in now retired Navy captain and diver, Bobbie Scholley.

Bobbie, the TWA 800 mission, you did know at that point roughly where the plane went down, right? But that's a lot more knowledge than Flight 370 researchers have right now.

CAPTAIN BOBBIE SCHOLLEY, U.S. NAVY (RETIRED): Yes, we did, Brianna. We knew where the Flight 800 landed. We had eyewitness reports, and we were on scene within hours of TWA Flight 800 going down.

The Coast Guard and the Navy were there immediately. As a matter of fact, Captain McCord, the person you just saw on that piece with Randi, was the first on the scene from the U.S. Navy.

And that aircraft went into only approximately 120 feet of water, instead of what we are looking at here with Flight 370, possibly 14,000 feet of water, so we have this huge order of magnitude difference in these two air crashes.

And so we used Navy divers on Flight 800, as you saw in the clip there. The Navy divers were actually recovering the wreckage of Flight 800 as opposed to the ROVs.

But it was still a painstakingly slow process. We spent four months off the coast of Long Island, recovering every single piece of that aircraft possible.

But we started out recovering the black boxes and then the victims.

KEILAR: And if you can talk a little bit about the depth here and why that poses such a challenge, we heard in Randi's piece that, when you are talking about the ROVs, it's an hour approximately per thousand feet to get down. That's just one way.

So, if you are talking about as much as 14,000 feet, that's 14 hours for one of these vehicles to get down, right, to the ocean floor?

SCHOLLEY: Yes. When you are working with the ROVs, you have to lower them down. They are attached to the ship by a cable that has the power. It has the hydraulics. It has all the resources to operate that ROV.

The operators, of course, are still up on the mother ship, and so it takes time to lower that ROV properly down to the aircraft so that we can operate it and it has all the sophisticated camera systems on it. And it takes all that time to get it down to the bottom to do the work we need it to do.

And then, in return, if we need to bring any of the pieces that those manipulator arms picks up, say the black box, it takes that same amount of time to bring it back up to the surface.

So that's going to extend the amount of time we're working.

KEILAR: And when you're looking Flight TWA 800, you said it wasn't in that deep of water, even though it was a painstaking process.

I think a lot of people might be thinking more of, say, the Air France flight that was going from Rio to Paris and it crashed. There was some wreckage that was found not too long after the flight crashed, after the plane crashed. But it actually took a couple of years to find, right, the black boxes? Could that -- could this be a more realistic case when you're looking at Flight 370 where you don't have a lot of information about where it went down?

SCHOLLEY: With the Air France flight, there was a lot of debris floating on the surface, and that's the debris that was brought back right away.

And the search started immediately on the ocean bottom. They had a much better idea of where to start the search because they did have that debris on the surface.

But it still took two years. They were unable to find the pingers within that first search from the floating debris, and so, it still took two years using the side-scan sonar.

So that's a scenario we have.

KEILAR: Yeah, no doubt, whatever the outcome here, if this debris is found or the location, there is a better sense of a location, it will be a very painstaking process.

Bobbie Scholley, thanks so much for being with us.

SCHOLLEY: Thank you.

KEILAR: Now, with technology, GPS, radar, it's hard to imagine losing track of a plane, but our next guest says this has happened dozens of times. It may have -- many of these have never been found.

Next, we are taking a look at the biggest plane mysteries of all time.

Plus, families of passengers aboard MH-370 get to meet face-to-face with Malaysian government officials and investigators.

What happened at that closed-door meeting depends on who you ask. Our Sara Sidner was outside the room. We will go live to Kuala Lumpur, coming up.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

KEILAR: Welcome back. I'm Brianna Keilar, and we are now entering Day 27 in the search for Flight 370, and as the days pass, thoughts like this one grow louder.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BILL SCHOFIELD, RESEARCHER, HELPED DEVELOP "BLACK BOX": There doubts about how high the plane was flying and how long before it ran out of fuel. And the chances of finding it without knowing where the aircraft went in, I think are very remote indeed.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KEILAR: If Malaysia Air's plane carrying 239 lives is never found, it would join a long line of mystery that started in the skies and presumably ended in the ocean.

And joining me now from the Netherlands to talk about this is Harro Ranter. He is the president of the Aviation Safety Network that tracks aviation accidents.

Harro, thanks for being with us. And tell us a little bit about from your database, how many planes are we talking about that have never been found?

HARRO RANTER, PRESIDENT, AVIATION SAFETY NETWORK: Well, our database covers about 5,600 fatal airliner accidents since about World War II, and 88 of those aircraft have never been found, not even a single trace, not as an oil slick, not a tiny piece of debris has been found of those accidents. And they are still missing.

KEILAR: Nothing, 88 flights, 88 planes and no hint of them. Do you -- when you look at these, do any of the plane mysteries resemble this that we are talking about, Flight 370?

RANTER: It's very difficult to compare this particular missing aircraft with all the others because most other aircraft have gone missing in the 1960s, 1970s, and most of these were not passenger planes. They were cargo planes, military transport planes.

There is nothing really which is resembling this Malaysia 370 flight, so no.

KEILAR: And when you look at the planes in your database, is there a certain that you find most intriguing, or do you think this flight could be the one considered the most intriguing if we never find any debris and never find the plane or the wreckage?

RANTER: Well, given the number of people on the flight, which is the most number of people on the flight that has gone missing, the previous highest number was about 100 people that were missing when the Super Constellation transport plane crashed in the Pacific.

So I think this one will really be one thing that people will always remember, although there have been missing aircraft in the very recent past which also entailed a massive search effort, like, for example, a small aircraft that went missing in Russia a couple of years ago.

Some drunk Russians took the airplane for a joyride and never returned. A massive search was launched to find those people back, but it was impossible at first because there was a large amount of forest area that needed to be covered, and it took them five months of almost continuous search, and they called it off.

Accidentally. that aircraft was found by sheer luck by a hunter who wandered around a forest and stumbled upon the aircraft.

KEILAR: Wow.

But 88 planes never accounted for, and the question is, might this be one of them?

Harro Ranter, thanks for being with us to explain to us some of these other instances. We appreciate it.

Now, family members have been demanding answers, you can imagine, some even accusing the Malaysian government of hiding information.

Today, some of the families got a face-to-face meeting with investigators behind closed doors. It was a rather long meeting, and CNN was there to talk to family members right after it.

Were they satisfied with the answers that they got? We are live from Kuala Lumpur, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

KEILAR: Welcome back to CNN's special coverage of Flight 370. I'm Brianna Keilar.

And today the families of 18 Chinese passengers met privately with investigators and Malaysian government officials in Kuala Lumpur.

This meeting was supposed to clear the air and answer questions about the investigation, and our senior international correspondent was outside of that meeting earlier with a whole lot of reporters, Sara.

And you talked to these officials and certainly some of these family members. Did any of them tell you about what happened here behind closed doors?

SARA SIDNER, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes, the family members have been shying away from the media. Their frustration is, frankly, off the charts. You can imagine why.

It's been nearly four, full weeks now. We are just a few days away from four weeks, a whole month they have been waiting for the answers to two questions. One, what happened to the plane with their loved ones aboard, and two, why did it happen? What created this plane's disappearance?

They do not have the answers to those questions, but they have more than a dozen questions that they wanted to ask Malaysian officials. And these are the Chinese families, some of whom have come back to get direct answers from officials.

We heard from a couple of people inside of that meeting, the family members still frustrated, but at least there is an open line of communication, they say.

But let me let you listen to what some of the officials from the Malaysian side said as we tried to get more information out of them as they came out of that meeting today.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

AZHARUDDIN ABDUL RAHMAN, MALAYSIAN DEPARTMENT OF CIVIL AVIATION: We had a meeting with the next of kin just now, the next of kind from China. There are 29 of them from 18 families.

It is a closed-door meeting. We had a very good meeting with them. We answer all their questions, and I cannot give you the specifics.

SIDNER: Is there anything new in the investigation you were able to share with family?

RAHMAN: That is a technical question. I'm not going to answer that question.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SIDNER: So a lot of frustration on the media's part, too, and we noticed that there were a heck of a lot more media, both local and Chinese media, outside that hotel, hoping to hear some more information.

We do also know that the families in Beijing were listening to this particular meeting between Malaysian officials, which did include some of the military, as well, but the family members in the end are still frustrated.

And why are they frustrated? Because they don't have the answers to two simple questions, and they really just want to know where their loved ones are at the moment.

KEILAR: Of course. And you sympathize with them so much, Sara, many of these Chinese families as you mentioned traveling back to Malaysia to try to get answers, remaining unsatisfied.

Sara Sidner, thank you so much.

It's really hard to imagine that suffering that these families are going through, their husbands, mothers, fathers, wives, kids simply gone in an instant.

Some accept the tragedy. Others are holding out hope for a miracle.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

LEE KHIM FATT, HUSBAND OF FLIGHT ATTENDANT, FOONG WAI YUENG: She has been flying with Malaysia Airlines for the past 18 years. She's a lovely lady, a lovely wife, a very caring mom for my two kids. Yes.

LOKMAN MUSTAFA, BROTHER OF SUHAILI MUSTAFA: She's the glue that holds things together, my sister. It's a roller coaster ride. It's difficult for the family members. We are hoping there will be survivors.

If it, indeed, ended somewhere in the Indian ocean, we hope that there will be survivors. We hope Suhaili is among the survivors, yes. That is the only thing that we can do. We hope that there is a light at the end of this tunnel.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I definitely miss him. He's a very committed professional pilot.

If something had happened to this flight, I would think -- in fact, I would believe that she would have made sure of the safety and welfare of everyone else before he thinks about himself. That's the kind of person that he is.

That's why I would choose him as his pilot. I just cannot imagine how the family feel, not just the captain's family but the rest of the passengers and crew.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

KEILAR: The death toll in Washington state's massive landslide is up to 29 now. Twenty people remain missing. Search crews are using heavy equipment to comb through tons of sludge and debris.

And remember this 4-year-old boy who was rescued in the hours after the slide? Well, there is a desperate search under way for his stepbrother, and leading the hunt, the child's own father, who's a sergeant in the U.S. Army.

Here's more from our Seattle affiliate, KCPQ.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)