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Mystery of Flight 370

Aired April 05, 2014 - 20:00   ET

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

DON LEMON, CNN ANCHOR: You're in the "CNN NEWSROOM." I'm Don Lemon. Thanks for joining us.

Top of the hour. A new day dawns in the part of the world where the Malaysian airliner is still missing. But today, something is different. For the very first time in several days, searchers ran across something this weekend that perked up their ears. According to reports in the Chinese media, ship board crews honed in on a series of pulses in the Indian Ocean just outside the search area. Nothing is confirmed. And so far, nothing links these pings to Flight 370. But in the words of one of our analysts, it's not out of the question.

Also from the air, Chinese searchers spotted a field of floating white objects about 60 miles from where those pings were picked up.

Now here's the time problem -- time problem here -- if a pinger still is working in the water somewhere, it won't be for very much longer. Its batteries are designed to operate for 30 days, maybe a few more days. That time is almost up now.

Live right now in Perth, in Western Australia, that's where senior international correspondent Matthew Chance is.

So, Matthew, are search planes in the air again now and have these reported discoveries by the Chinese changed the mission plans at all?

MATTHEW CHANCE, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: They don't seem to have. Certainly the planes are up in the air. You've got about a dozen planes that are flying now. Still scouring vast search zone to the west of Western Australia.

I was getting my directions confused a bit there. They're still up in the skies. They're still scouring that area of ocean. Some, you know, 80,000 square miles or so. They've identified a few areas that they're focusing on.

But it seems that none of them at the moment are the area where the Chinese vessel identified those apparent pings. What the Australians are saying, the Australians leading this search effort, remember? They're saying they don't have enough information at this point to commit resources to that area which is formally outside the actual search zone at the moment.

They've been trying to contact the vessel that actually detected these pings. But they've been unsuccessful in doing that. They've been talking to Beijing. They haven't got enough information yet to verify that any of these sightings or any of these detections -- I'm talking about the white objects that were also spotted by Chinese aircraft some 60 miles away from where they detected the pings -- that either of those things, anything whatsoever at this point to do with the missing Malaysian airliner.

So they want more clarification. More detail. Only then, they say, will they commit resources -- Don.

LEMON: OK, Matthew, thank you very much.

You have questions about the missing Flight 370. Throughout the hour here on CNN, we have the experts to help answer those questions. Keep tweeting me those questions @DonLemon and #370QS.

So, here to help out, Michael Kay, CNN aviation analyst, retired Royal Air Force pilot. Les Abend, CNN aviation analyst and 777 pilot. And David Gallo, CNN analyst and director of special projects at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and CNN aviation analyst -- aviation correspondent, I should say, Richard Quest.

Are you happy now that I said 777?

LES ABEND, CNN AVIATION ANALYST: Very happy.

LEMON: Earlier he said, stop saying 777, say 777.

All right. First question comes from Mark. Is it possible what the Chinese heard could be a submarine?

Michael, go.

MICHAEL KAY, CNN AVIATION ANALYST: I don't think it could be a submarine. I think there's lots of background choice. I think it could be something natural. It doesn't have a filter. The hydrophone doesn't have a filter on it. So I think it's incredibly difficult to know what it is.

Submarine, probably not.

LEMON: OK. David, how does ocean currents, tides and weather impact listening for the pings?

DAVID GALLO, CNN ANALYST (via telephone): Hi, Don. Well, you know, the oceans can play a lot of games with sound especially when we're talking about these water depths. We're looking at anywhere from 1,000 meters which is not so bad down to 6,000 meters. So they could have -- almost certainly has an effect. And the question is how much of an effect would it have in this area?

LEMON: OK. What does that -- what do you mean?

GALLO: Well, you know, it's one of these things you don't know until you actually get out there into the area and find out for yourself. It's tough to predict without having more oceanographic information. What's the thermal structure of the water, what does that look like? What do the currents look like? What does the topography look like? Where's the location of the pinger? Where's the location of the receiver?

And, you know, it's all that stuff. We don't have any of that information.

LEMON: Richard, we're looking at them -- put this microphone in the water like this. Very rudimentary. The Chinese are very secretive.

Do we know about their technology? If so, is their technology advance enough to find this black box?

RICHARD QUEST, CNN AVIATION CORRESPONDENT: Well, I don't know about their technology. I have no reason to assume they haven't got the technology. I mean, you know, to find the black box. They've certainly got the equipment with them on the variety of ships, Don, from that point of view.

Is David still there?

LEMON: Yes, David is here.

QUEST: David Gallo?

GALLO: Richard?

QUEST: Yes, David, while you're talking, we're just looking at the picture of the video of the Chinese sailors putting the hydrophone into the water. Give me your thoughts on the sort of rather rudimentary way in which it's being done for sophistication of finding a black box.

GALLO: First, you know, the TPL-25 which we've all been hearing about for a week or more, is a towed system designed to be towed deep in the ocean. This one obviously they had on the end of a pole.

We found out that it's made by Benthos. It's called the DPL-25, diver finger locator. It's meant to be used by divers in the water.

I had a chat with Thomas Altshuler, who's the vice president of Teledyne. And, you know, he said that like we all have been saying all along, it's not impossible that they're hearing the pingers, but he's got his team looking at the numbers to see if they can -- if there is a window in the water column where they might be able to hear it at such great depth from the surface.

LEMON: Mike Kay, what do you want to know?

KAY: I was just going to say, Don, I think even though we are questioning the validity of what we've heard, I think it would be incredibly sensible for the air chief marshal to make sure that this is eliminated from the search or at least corroborated. So it would make sense to send proper sensors to see if we can eliminate it from the search, or not, as the case maybe.

LEMON: Geoffrey Thomas is with us, editor in chief of airlineratings.com. We love having Geoffrey. Geoffrey is in Perth.

Geoffrey, considering the new information, does this change the search plan?

GEOFFREY THOMAS, AIRLINERATINGS.COM: Look, indeed, I agree, absolutely we should absolutely verify this one way or another. I mean, this is another bizarre twist in what is without doubt the most bizarre airplane disappearance in history. And we would absolutely have to verify this and it may well be that the Chinese have found the most extraordinary way of finding a needle in a haystack.

LEMON: Les, you know, should we be listening for two pingers, not, you know, not one since both flight recorders are equipped with pingers? Would it be the one tick, tick, tick? Or --

THOMAS: Well, I mean, the assumption is they're both together. That probably is not the case. May be the case that the battery on one has been diminished to the point that it can't be heard, or damaged.

LEMON: Yes. You know, before the show, we were sitting here as we were about to go on.

You know, Geoffrey, if you want to weigh in on this. You said it was extraordinary. Or even David.

But Richard and I were sitting here saying this is the most extraordinary story -- one of the most extraordinary stories that we have ever covered. A month after an airplane goes down in this day and age, and still, I know we've been saying this from the beginning, but still, a month later, it was a month yesterday. And still no sign of this plane. It's almost unfathomable to me, Geoffrey Thomas.

THOMAS: Look, indeed. And every almost of this, the transponder turning off, the ACARS. We had the guys with the passports, the false passports. We've had military radar tracking it.

We've had more conspiracy theories than you can ever imagine. Some of them are almost believable.

This is just -- this rewrites the whole book on aviation disasters and they'll be talking about 370 for decades and decades to come as changing the rulebook of aviation.

LEMON: Go ahead, Mike.

KAY: Yes, I mean, I just think we need to look at this in a broader context. We first crossed the Atlantic Ocean in airplane in 1928. We're 85 years down the road. In that 85 years, we still haven't developed the technology to make that journey failsafe. So I think we've got to look at the human mind is always, and the human psyche has had aspirations beyond what it can do technologically. And I think that's what we have to consider with this.

QUEST: It's an irony this event has taken place in the very year that commercial civil aviation celebrates its centenary. The first paid flight by a customer in Florida, I think it was across the Tampa Bay, was in January of '14, in 1914. So the fact that 100 years on, a massive modern state of the art jetliner can be lost in such circumstances is a very sobering reminder of the risks that can still exist.

LEMON: I don't know -- there's this part of the CNN.com story that Rose Arce (ph), one of the producers here put together, and it's a plane. You can see we did 370, that same jet across the world. People have taken pictures of it. You wonder how a plane like this, a 777, so huge, and one of the most sophisticated flying machines, Les Abend, can just disappear.

ABEND: I mean, we have to remember, you go back to the days of the DC-6, even with DC-3 would island hop to a point. But I mean, there have been occasional disappearances but more or less we've had reasons to find it. And now, like you said, we have a sophisticated airplane with sophisticated systems. We can't find it. It's incredible irony. It absolutely is.

LEMON: Back in a moment.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

LEMON: One hundred fifty-three of the 227 passengers on Flight 370 are from mainland China or Hong Kong. So, there's no question every step of the search operation is under intense scrutiny there. It was a media outlet run by the Chinese government, Xinhua, that reported that a ship picked up pulse signals.

Let's go to CNN's David McKenzie live in Beijing now.

So, David, what more are officials saying about the pulse signals that a Chinese ship detected?

DAVID MCKENZIE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, Don, the signals as you described were first announced by Xinhua state media, also Chinese state television. They have reporters onboard that coast guard cutter which has a device that has been testing for pulse signals. They say they heard a signal for at least a minute in an area outside of the officially designated search area. Some questions being asked why did we learn about this from state media? Why wasn't an official announcement through the chain of command?

It does appear that the Chinese search teams talked directly be here in Beijing before they move information on. So a little bit of friction, potentially, but pretty quickly after that initial announcement, there were more announcements by government sources here in China saying, you know, no concrete evidence yet that this is linked to flight MH370.

So pretty quickly, they dialed back on that initial report. We have had false reports out before from China. So, everyone just is putting out the -- you know, the requisite amount of caution at this point but certainly a lead that everyone is following very closely -- Don.

LEMON: How are those families of Flight 370 reacting to this news? I would imagine with some skepticism?

MCKENZIE: Yes, that's right. And they are numb at this point to new information coming out. I think unless they had something very concrete, for want of a better word, something they can hold in their hands or see or get a sense, you know, irrefutable evidence that this is the plane that their loved ones perished, they are really skeptical about any information including frankly what comes out from official Chinese media.

So the ones we've spoken to overnight here in Asia have said they want to see more information. They say they've been here before and they want to wait for something more concrete -- Don.

LEMON: All right. Thank you, David McKenzie. Appreciate that.

You know, you have questions about the search for missing Flight 370. Today's news of a possible signal hard by a Chinese ship.

So, here to help us, Geoffrey Thomas, editor-in-chief and managing director at airlinesratings.com. And Mary Schiavo, CNN analyst, aviation analyst and a former transportation department inspector general, also representing families of airline disaster.

So, let's tackle some of these questions. This one is from James, if the pinger locator gets a hit, how long does it take to deploy the rest of the technology needed to find MH370? Ms. Schiavo?

MARY SCHIAVO, CNN AVIATION CORRESPONDENT: Well, it just a matter of getting the ships there. It depends how long it takes to get the ship there and get other pinger locaters put there, and there they will be. So, probably a day or two to get the ship there and they can do it.

LEMON: OK. What do we know about the Chinese technology and the hydrophone? You talked about this a little bit earlier, Geoffrey, but what more do we know?

THOMAS: Well, Don, we don't know an awful lot. We are getting fragments of what technology they have onboard. I don't think we should underestimate the technology they have onboard. But they haven't been forthcoming giving us the fine detail of that.

This particular ship was launched, I think, in 2006. It's actually the U.S. equivalent of a coast guard cutter. And it has been deployed to the search area.

But, you know, I think the Chinese are probably pretty well up there with most as far as technology is concerned.

LEMON: OK. What else is out there that would send out a signal that could interfere with the pinger, Mary?

SCHIAVO: Well, I disagree with some of the guests. You know, the pinger signal is this cyclical once every second, you know, a ping, we call it a ping, but it sounds like a tick, and besides, it's really for electronic signaling and to be picked up electronically.

I don't think that a lot of things out there sound like a pinger. It was intentionally not supposed to sound like whales or sea life or, you know, plates shifting. It is supposed to unique and different from nature because of the rhythm. And it's not like a rhythm in nature.

And so, I don't think it sounds like a submarine, and I don't think it sounds like sea life. I think just maybe the Chinese are on to something.

LEMON: Geoffrey, do you agree?

THOMAS: Yes, look, I do agree, but it also raises questions, are they conducting their own search outside the Australian search criteria? And, of course, the other thing is, they should have relayed that information to the Australian authorities in the first instance, not channel it through Beijing to be announced.

So, there are a new irregularities in all of this. Having said that, if they found it, wonderful. Fantastic. We'll ask the questions and get the answers possibly later.

LEMON: All right. Thanks so both of you. Thanks, Geoffrey. Thanks, Mary. We'll see both of you of course on CNN until we get to the bottom of this mystery.

Investigators looking at the simulator taken from the flight pilot say they found curious things. Next, we'll take you inside our flight simulator to discuss what investigators discovered.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

LEMON: All right. News of Chinese ship detecting a pulse signal deep in the Indian Ocean comes on heels of the flight data obtained from the pilot's flight simulator. It reveals he practiced emergency landings, plus other scenarios.

Let's go live now to CNN's Martin Savidge and pilot Mitchell Casado inside our flight simulator.

So, Martin, is anything unusual about what was found on the pilot's simulator?

MARTIN SAVIDGE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: You know, as we've always talked about, the pilot simulator, computer essentially would have a great deal of information that could be valuable to trying to figure out if any way he had practiced the scenario for the disappearance of Flight 370.

So, you see pilots practicing emergency landings, uninitiated, you may think, oh, he was preparing for something like the unexpected. So is that a bad thing?

MITCHELL CASADO, PILOT: No, it's actually a really good thing. That's proving planning and it's very telling that he's a professional pilot.

SAVIDGE: So, it isn't necessarily that he was planning because he was going to do something bad, he was just preparing himself in case something bad happened.

CASADO: Exactly, and the fact that he's doing this in his spare time. We do that on a regular basis as part of our job. But you're doing that on your spare time, that's very telling, very professional.

SAVIDGE: So, is the simulator good for that kind of practice?

CASADO: That's exactly what a simulator is for.

SAVIDGE: OK. So, if I said sudden decompression, something like that?

CASADO: Let's do it.

SAVIDGE: Go ahead. Set us up. Tell us what happens.

CASADO: All right. We're at decompression, the airplane, we got a warning saying there's decompression problem. Rapid or otherwise. We're basically going to try to get down as low as we can where the air is thicker and breathe without the oxygen masks.

SAVIDGE: Right, we would have put masks on.

CASADO: Exactly. Everything as per the checklist, in a real flight deck, this is all briefed beforehand, before the flight, of course. We all know our duties. And we're basically getting down to below 10,000 feet where we don't need the mask to breathe and finish off the checklist, talk to air traffic control and get to a safe landing.

SAVIDGE: So, the idea is to practice this over and over with a simulator to where it becomes almost automatic, you can do it under the worst of conditions?

CASADO: That's exactly the point.

SAVIDGE: So, Don, for him to have that inside of the simulator would suggest you're talking about a very conscientious pilot who was very concerned for the safety of his crew, of this plane and of the passengers.

LEMON: And last night I read a bit of that breaking news on the air. Richard, you were there. You said, Don, that's exactly -- you said, Don, that's exactly what a pilot would do.

QUEST: Mitch, Mitch and Marty, that is a exactly what a conscientious --

LEMON: That's how he said it.

QUEST: -- pilot would have done. Isn't it? I mean, you want to practice those things. All this idea of them having alternate airport. Well, there's no point, Les Abend, there's no point in practicing the airports, Kennedy, Heathrow, and all the ones where you go into. Is he going to expand --

LEMON: That's the ones you land all the time. QUEST: You're going to want to try something different.

LEMON: Yes.

ABEND: I agree, absolutely agree. We don't know specifically what type of emergency procedures they practiced. Emergency landing can cover a lot of things which was demonstrated with a decompression. But it could be an engine failure to landing --

QUEST: There are a lot of exotic emergencies you don't get to practice in your recurrence. I mean, you always practice engine failure on takeoff and certain ones --

LEMON: Also if you're doing this, it's your passion to fly, you want some fun in it, right? Don't you want to try something you wouldn't normally try? I'm just asking.

Also, Mike Kay wants to talk about the effects of decompression, Mitchell and Marty?

KAY: Yes, I mean, when we go through training, we're put in a compression chamber and taken up to 35,000 feet. So, we rapidly decompress to 35,000 feet in a space of a couple of seconds. The cabin is actually pressurized for around 7,000 to 8,000 feet.

So, when you're at 35,000 feet and get a rapid decompression, it's a very violent action. All the air expands inside you and you get stomach cramps.

So, what these guys are talking about in terms of the procedures you would undergo in terms of descending, getting the oxygen masks on is well under a benign environment. But under decompression, it's multiplied by 10, 20. It's very difficult.

LEMON: Mitchell?

CASADO: I'm sorry?

SAVIDGE: He was just saying that practicing this for real in a decompression chamber magnifies the effects which I think goes back to why you want to get this down automatically to where you can do it without even a thought because if you're suffering the physical side effects of rapid decompression, you're going to need every help you have.

CASADO: That's right. Up at altitude, you only have between 10 and 15 seconds before you start to feel the onset of those bad symptoms.

So, it has to be automatic. That's why we train in the simulators. It's got to be second nature. Get down and finish the checklist from there.

LEMON: Standby, guys. Appreciate that.

Chinese crews said they heard pings in the search area. Is anybody else going to check out their claims? Well, some officials have issues with the information China is putting out. We're going to talk about that, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

LEMON: Quick update on the search for Flight 370. It's Sunday morning in Australia, where officials overseeing the search say they cannot verify a Chinese media report that a ship detected pings consistent with a so-called black box. The plane's black box pings, wherever they might be, could end soon. The batteries only last month or so which means they could fail in a matter of days.

Chinese media also report that one of their search planes detected white objects floating in the ocean near the search area. No confirmation on that report either. Btu previous objects turned out to be trash or other debris.

Meantime, search efforts are back under way. Military and civilian airplanes, 13 in all, crisscross the search area on Saturday. While 11 ships worked on the ocean surface.

The investigators have played the recording of flight 370's air to ground conversations for friends but not the families, of the pilot, of the first officer, if an effort to identify the speaker.

I want to bring in now my panel of experts, Michael Kay, CNN aviation analyst and retired Royal Air Force Pilot. Les Abend, CNN aviation analyst and a 777 pilot. Richard Quest, CNN aviation correspondent and Mary Schiavo, CNN aviation analyst and former Transportation Department inspector general. We'll have another guest joining us in a bit, Rick Gillespie, who's executive director of the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery. He'll join us in just a bit here.

First to Mary, though. How reliable is this information from the Chinese, both the objects and the signal, Mary?

MARY SCHIAVO, CNN AVIATION ANALYST: That's a big unknown. We have no way of knowing how reliable it is. The equipment isn't what you would usually use. The biggest mystery of all is how did they know to look where they're looking?

And so, you know, you can theorize perhaps they had their own separate investigation of going on, crunch some numbers, come up with a hypothesis and said we're going to go look ourselves and in which case would probably be pretty reliable. But since we don't know any of that, it could just be a lucky break or could be nothing. So, we can't judge the reliability. We can only hope that it's reliable and that they were on to something when they headed out to that spot to look.

LEMON: All right. Let's go to Ric Gillespie now. He joins me. He joins us now.

It's a new day in Perth, Mr. Gillespie. New opportunity to find this plane. How can search teams use this information from the Chinese? And they should. RIC GILLESPIE, EXEC. DIR., INTL. GROUP FOR HISTORIC AIRCRAFT RECOVERY: It's very frustrating. Lead after lead, may be wreckage, turns out to be trash. May be pings. But it doesn't make sense for this ship to hear pings from what I understand.

This is grasping at straws. I think there needs to be some reassessment here of what information has led us to this area and these assumptions that we've made. There's something wrong.

LEMON: Les, let's get a viewer question in here for you. This viewer's name is Alex. Alex says, since Inmarsat technology is so new, how can they be so sure about the handshakes with 370? I feel it's not perfected.

LES ABEND, CNN AVIATION ANALYST: Actually, I had the opportunity to speak with one of the Inmarsat people last night because I kind of doubted the technology.

But the technology is not new. It's old technology. We've been using it for years. It's just the calculation that was utilized and through his explanation, without getting into it, they did some pretty thorough research on it and it's amazing how they got to the point that they're in.

I'm more confident after talking to him.

LEMON: Yes. Mike, it's been 30 days. You know, 31 days as a matter of fact. Does any of this matter anymore? We're talking about, you know, the battery and all that. Does any of this matter? Is it time to --

(CROSSTALK)

MICHAEL KAY, CNN AVIATION ANALYST: It absolutely does matter. In an investigation where we've had practically zero leads, we've got to follow up on everything that might lead to something. What this does, Don, this is what is making me quite cross, is the fact it throws something in the works. What it does is it casts doubts over the analysis that we've got. We've got those assets deployed on the two 150-mile tracks but don't have many assets. We've got Tireless, we've got Ocean Shield, and we've got Echo.

What this now does is it casts a doubt in Air Chief Marshal Houston's mind, and says, well, I've got my assets deployed where the Inmarsat technology has taken us. Now, do I have to redeploy one of those? And if I redeploy one of those and it's not very good information, not a hoax, but not corroborated information, he's taking away assets from where the initial search is. It's frustrating from that perspective as well.

LEMON: Where would you like to see this go?

RICHARD QUEST, CNN AVIATION CORRESPONDENT: I'm looking at where they're searching today. I'm looking at the map. We just received from the map in Perth about the three search areas where they're going. And the planes are going -- right, this is the search area today. And we can't really toggle between this and put on to where the ping location, but it's basically below the lower box, or so. All the boxes.

So they're not planning to send -- these are the three search areas where the planes are going to be heading out. Now, the best that I can see, the pinger from the Chinese is somewhere where it says 2,200.

LEMON: Right here?

QUEST: Just a bit further up.

LEMON: Right here.

QUEST: Yes. But they're clearly not going to look over that area today.

LEMON: Right.

QUEST: The planes. Now, I agree, what we were saying earlier, what's the point of sending planes to look if it's under water? You're looking for debris.

They also said they saw these white pieces on top 90 kilometers away. So, it's leading me to -- I guess it's leading me to conclude that at the moment, the JACC is not putting a huge amount of credibility into what the Chinese are saying.

LEMON: What is all this? This is where -- were these previous search areas or this is where they found debris?

QUEST: Yes. What you've got here, this is where we originally started.

LEMON: Right.

QUEST: Then you move it up to here. And all of this is the total search area that has existed from Tuesday the 18th to Saturday the 5th. So we started down here. And then we got that new information.

LEMON: Right.

QUEST: It moved up to here. Then they moved it around in different places. Where the planes are going today are here, here and here. By my reckoning, the pinger, Chinese pinger information for want of a better phrase, is about right about there. We can get it up on the map later. The planes are not going over there.

LEMON: Hmm. Interesting. Interesting. Go ahead.

KAY: No, I was just going to say, if I'm the commander in charge of this operation, and someone's told me they've heard a 37.5 kilohertz pulse and it's not been corroborated, it's going to cast doubt in my mind. I've got my assets of the two 150-mile tracks and they're doing a good job. They have not found anything yet. It's an arduous task, a slow task. There's still going to be something in my brain saying we need to send an asset down there just to make sure this is not what they're saying it is.

QUEST: Except, that's exactly what happened with the Chinese satellite -- sorry, Don. That happened with the Chinese satellite pictures right at the beginning when they found satellite pictures on the Friday night in the South China Sea and everybody was off to the races.

KAY: I think this is more specific, though, Richard, 37.5 kilohertz. There aren't many of those knocking around the ocean. I'm just saying, operational commander, it would cast doubt in my mind. And I wouldn't be able to sleep unless I corroborated it.

LEMON: I have to go. Do you need me to separate? They are separate --

(CROSSTALK)

LEMON: What did he say earlier? Tittle tattle? What did you say the -- tattle tittle? Yes, I don't remember. And you say mingling, I don't know what these things are. Brits.

All right. Even if crews can't figure out where Flight 370 went down, the big question is how much can be salvaged? Up next, we're going to take a look at some of the challenges that may be ahead.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

LEMON: The most difficult search ever in history. That's how Australia's prime minister describes the race to find Flight 370. Even if crews can pinpoint where the plane went down, how much can be salvaged?

Randi Kaye takes a look at the technology and challenges involved.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

RANDI KAYE, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): This is what it looks like trying to recover an airplane in the ocean. You're watching a U.S. Navy salvage team gather pieces of TWA Flight 800 which went down off New York in 1996. Here divers are maneuvering among pieces of the twisted wreckage.

RET. CAPT. CHIP MCCORD, FORMER U.S. NAVY SUPERVISOR OF SALVAGE: The U.S. Navy actually has recovered an intact helicopter from about 17,000 feet. So they have the capability. They've done this before.

KAYE: Retired Navy Captain Chip McCord has been involved in at least 50 ocean salvage operations, including TWA 800 and Swiss Air Flight 111, which crashed in 1998 off the coast of Nova Scotia. Those were both in water much shallower than the Indian Ocean. But the Navy has remote underwater vehicles designed for deepwater salvage operations.

They can go as deep as 20,000 feet, but the deeper the recovery the slower the process.

MCCORD: It takes about a thousand -- an hour for every 1,000 feet that you need to descend. So if you're going to 11,000 feet, you can count on 11 hours to get down.

KAYE: At those depths, it's pitch black. So the underwater vehicles are equipped with lights and cameras. 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.

MCCORD: 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 ocean's surface. The engines were pulled from the ocean floor. If Flight 370 is found, search teams are prepared to do the same.

MCCORD: 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.

(on camera): 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 some much-needed answers first.

Randi Kaye, CNN, New York.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

LEMON: Thank you, Randi.

Stay with us. After the break, I'll bring back my panel to discuss more potential challenges of salvaging 370.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

LEMON: All right. Let's look ahead now.

Some parts of the Indian Ocean near the flight 370 search zone, it reached depths of over 20,000 feet. So, if you want to compare that to something, Mt. Everest is 29,000 feet.

So what does it take to salvage a plane that could be sitting on the ocean floor? It's a very good question.

I'm going to turn now to Ric Gillespie, executive director of the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery. Also with me now, Mary Schiavo, former inspector general of the Department of Transportation, who represents victims and families in aviation disasters.

So, Ric, if the plane is found and it's at the bottom of the ocean, just transporting the amount of cable need would be a challenge. Would it be cable if they do it that way? Would it be robotics?

GILLESPIE: Well, it would probably be cable. The best way to do this would be with manned submersibles, but the depth is prohibitive for most manned submersibles.

When you're working that with an ROV, seeing what you want to see is kind of tricky. It's like looking through the roll of a toilet paper tube, but you can do it, but it's better if you have people down there, the human eyeball, man submersible, but they probably won't have that capability at these depths.

LEMON: So, Mary, if it's founded at those depths, what's the best way of pulling it up? Is it cables, is it robotics, is it submersibles? What?

SCHIAVO: Well, it depends on what they're going after. What they will do if it's really down at that level is they will use a submersible to get the key parts they're going to need. First, the black box. And then, they're going to evaluate what else they need and bring in ships like the USS Grasp and Grapple, which were ships used for TWA-800. But TWA 800 was in shallow water.

So, unless, it's a situation where they cannot solve the mystery with the key parts and with the black boxes, then they will have to do what they did in TWA-800, other than 9/11 was the most expensive investigation in history and will have to bring up as much of the plane as they can.

But if the black box solves the mystery, I don't think they will. I don't think they will bring it all up.

LEMON: I love, Mary. It's all right there right in your -- not in your memory banks. Top of mind for you, you know all the ships, and exactly what they'll need.

But, first, you're right, I think in your experience, right, and the most common sense thing would be get the black boxes first and then everything after that. My question is, even if it's intact, though, let's say it's intact, don't they want to bring it up intact as intact as possible? First, Mary, then Ric.

SCHIAVO: Well, if it's intact, absolutely. I mean, because it would be such -- it's an amazing thing. They would want to know, especially Boeing even would want to know how it is it did this because it's such an amazing feat. It would speak, to use a bad pun, it would speak oceans about the plane and how tough the plane is. But if it is intact, the ship, you know, the Grapple and the Grasp, with these huge cranes and cables could bring it up. It would be able to bring it up in one piece, most likely, if it's all intact. LEMON: Ric?

GILLESPIE: The only way it's going to be intact is if it was a controlled ditching -- is the terminology -- an intentional landing under human control in the ocean. And that is as difficult to imagine as why the airplane did what we think it did, anyway. You know, fly seven hours to eventually crash. None of this is making any sense.

If the plane went down in the Indian Ocean because of fuel starvation, I wouldn't expect pieces bigger than my desk.

LEMON: Hmm, interesting. And every single person sitting here, all my experts, correspondents and analysts are nodding their head in agreement when you said it would be a controlled landing and chances of that are pretty slim in none.

ABEND: Even if it was, there's still a chance of it breaking up.

LEMON: OK. All right. Thank you.

Malaysian authorities are changing up their plans on how to handle the disappearance of Flight 370. Up next, we head to Kuala Lumpur for an update.

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LEMON: You know, for the first time people who are not investigators are listening to the recordings of the final conversations from the cockpit of Flight 370 to air traffic control. CNN's senior international correspondent is Nic Robertson. He joins us now from Kuala Lumpur.

So, Nic, who exactly listened to these recordings and why?

NIC ROBERTSON, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Friends and colleagues of the first officer and captain is what we've been told by officials here. We understand from air accident investigators this would be normal procedure that people familiar with these two men would listen to those conversations between the cockpit and the air traffic controllers in the first 50 or so minutes of the flight, the reason being to try to identify who was speaking and when.

We know that one the ground. It would be the first officer speaking. In the air it could be either the first officer or captain speaking. What officials are saying at the moment is they still cannot determine which of the two men made that final, final communication, the "Good night, Malaysian 370."

So friends and colleagues of the two men is what we're being told, Don.

LEMON: So why weren't the families allowed to listen to the recordings first? Or now?

ROBERTSON: That is -- or now? And that is something, indeed, that the families here have been asking investigators. Why not let the families listen? They would be the ones who would be, one would imagine, most easily able to identify this crucial piece of information, who did make that last communication?

Certainly, we've been told here in the past, over the past few weeks that it is sensitivities, why investigators have been leaving a little bit of time before they went to talk to the families to try to get background about these two men. Is it because of sensitivities? Is it because they're afraid of leakage from the investigation? We know that these families are not speaking openly to the media, but could that be concern that they would then go and speak?

Of course, the other piece of the puzzle here is, Don, this could be hugely painful for one of those families if they learn that it is their husband, their father, who may have been the one who made that last communication and all the implications that follow on from that, Don.

LEMON: You know, Malaysian government forming three committees, Nic, to help coordinate efforts with families and the search. Why now, and why not do this a month ago?

ROBERTSON: And a lot of people, again, have been asking that question. We hear talk about missteps all along. We heard the transport minister yesterday, Hishammuddin Hussein, saying it seemed everyone was still under investigation, passengers and crew. And one of his staff later refined that to say it was just the crew members who were still under investigation.

It does seem that the Malaysians have taken a long time to get their, if you will, act in gear, as many people would see it and would put -- that would be the perspective they would have. But, of course, this is no normal investigation, an international one that's caused many problems, many ripples, for this government.

So why so long? Well, their answer would be now we've done it, now we're moving forward. Three different commissions that are being -- four ministerial commissions. Two of them fall directly, if you will, under the control of that transport minister, Don.