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Family Keeping Hope; Search for Flight 370; Writing to Heal; Interview with Paul Stanley

Aired April 10, 2014 - 14:30   ET

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

BALDWIN: In the hunt for Flight 370. A possible new signal heard under water in this search area. Australian officials say a plane detected a possible black box signal from these sonar buoys. Here they are being thrown at some of these aircraft into the Indian Ocean. So if you're counting along with us here, this is now the fifth signal heard thus far in the past couple of days.

The signal detected today was not at the frequency consistent with the pingers from the flight data recorders. But it is in the range, it's in the ballpark if you will that suggests strongly that it is from something manmade. So, you know, experts, they're analyzing all this data. And as they do, the families of this 239 souls on board, they are really just holding on to their faith. Five weeks now into this.

Our senior international correspondent Nic Robertson sat down with a mother and a father whose only son was on that plane.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

NIC ROBERTSON, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Amirtham and her husband are in pain, watching every newscast waiting for word of their son.

The news the day we arrived, more pings increasing confidence from searches. They may be closing in on Flight 370.

AMIRTHAM ARUPILAI, MOTHER OF FLIGHT 370 PASSENGER: We have to see you our own eyes. Then we can believe it. But we have to see. We can't believe. What type of signal, we don't know.

ROBERTSON: Without proof of wreckage, it is too painful to comprehend. For weeks now they have been telling themselves he is alive.

ARUPILAI: My insides and my heart is telling, still they are alive. All the passengers are alive.

ROBERTSON: Her son, Puspanathan, was aboard Flight 370. An I.T. specialist, heading to Beijing to begin a new job, married with two young sons. To his parents he is everything.

"He provides for us both. Takes care of us," his father says. "What do we do now? Just the two of us in our 60s."

They do all they can do which is wait and hope. ARUPILAI: A woman telling us to wait. Wait only. With the good answer.

ROBERTSON: On television it's government officials keeping their hopes alive.

HISHAMMUDDIN HUSSEIN, ACTING MALAYSIAN TRANSPORT MINISTER: I have always said especially to the families, miracles do happen and we are just still hoping against hope because you need to hope and pray for survivors.

ROBERTSON: On this day, that faith helping them, calling her son for the first time in days, reaching his voice mail.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The number you have dialed is currently not available.

ROBERTSON: A sign they believe he must be safe.

ARUPILAI: I got it. My son is somewhere. I got it.

ROBERTSON (on camera): This was this morning.

ARUPILAI: This morning. Today morning.

ROBERTSON (voice-over): One day soon, though, the news on the other end of the phone may be a lot harder to bear.

ARUPILAI: We hope, all we do that he is coming back thinking I have got only one son. So he has to come back.

ROBERTSON: Nick Robertson, CNN, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BALDWIN: Nic Robertson, thank you.

And then to Washington we go to our Tom Foreman who again has this incredible virtual look at how the search area has narrowed.

So we talk a lot, Tom, right, about when you hear these possible pings and the process of triangulation, and drawing those lines and zoning in on where those black boxes may be, are they closer in finding them?

TOM FOREMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: They are closer. Yes. Because at one point they had three million square miles to search. Now they're down to maybe 560 square miles? That's still a good little space but look at how they've done this, Brooke, because it's really quite interesting.

There is that arc that came from the satellites that we've talked about so much. And if we zoom in on that, I can show you the actual path that the Ocean Shield followed when it picked up the second set of pings there. And you can see where all four of those main pings are that we've been talking about. This looks like a mess, Brooke. It really does. But this does help because what they've got here is the rudiments of this system where they basically put a grid on to the ocean. So what they do is they go back and forth and back and forth, one direction getting as many pings as they can. Then they go a perpendicular direction and get as many other pings as they can. They don't have as many yet. But they're trying to get more and more because by then zeroing in on the strongest of these pings, they can cut that big box down into a smaller one.

And, Brooke, they really have to do this before they go underwater here because they're going to such forbidding depths down there that they need better guidance because it's going to be much slower and much more difficult when they actually try to get photographs or sonic images of the wreckage as they can locate -- Brooke.

BALDWIN: That's exactly right. They're getting closer, they're getting closer and then they can send the Bluefin, the submersibles in there to hopefully have that sonar in use, switch it out with a camera and find the wreckage.

Tom Foreman, thank you so much. From Washington.

Just ahead, new today, if the plane -- this is the if. If the plane did indeed skirt radar but then came back up dozens of miles later, what does that mean for the fuel consumption? Would it have burned more, faster, or wouldn't someone had to have been at the controls for this?

My experts answer that question and more. Stay right here. Send me tweets if you have question on this plane @brookebCNN.

You are watching CNN's special coverage.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BALDWIN: Think about it. As an adult if you are really sick it can be incredibly stressful. But for a teenager, it can be even more difficult.

Here now is CNN's chief medical correspondent, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, with this week's "Human Factor."

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN CHIEF MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): For Schuyler Ebersol, high school started pretty normally, but his luck quickly took a turn for the worse.

SCHUYLER EBERSOL, SUFFERS FROM LYME DISEASE: I would have sometimes difficult breathing. I'd have severe dizziness so that I couldn't really walk or see straight for days at a time. I would faint randomly and I would go to sleep some night not sure if I'd wake up in the morning.

GUPTA: At first he just chalked it up to stress, but Ebersol quickly realized something was really wrong.

EBERSOL: And no one knew what was wrong with me and there were all sorts of hypotheses.

GUPTA: Home from school for months at a time, away from his friends and his world, and very sick, Ebersol desperately needed an escape, and he found it in writing.

EBERSOL: I just started writing. And I would get lost in this world. And I identified with this character. And it was just a way to keep me going while everything else in my life wasn't so great.

GUPTA: And then after several months, doctors finally discovered the cause of his symptoms, a rare form of Lyme disease. And at the same time, his scattered pages started to gel into a book.

EBERSOL: The book is called "The Hidden World." It's about a main character who has a heart attack, he slips into a coma, and when he wakes up he turns into a wolf in the hospital room.

GUPTA: Sound familiar?

EBERSOL: I didn't really intend for there to be a lot of me in the main character, Nate Williams. But it sort of happened that way.

GUPTA: "The Hidden World" was published last December, with more in the works. And Ebersol says, through it all, writing saved his life.

EBERSOL: You really just have to find something that can sustain you and keep you mentally strong. For me it was writing and then the quest to get published.

GUPTA: Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN, reporting.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BALDWIN: And police need your help to find the driver of an SUV that rear-ended this car sending it smashing into a daycare center. This is Winter Park, Florida, near Orlando. Several children were hit as the car plowed into the front of the building. A 4-year-old girl died, 14 children were hurt.

The driver of the car stayed at the scene but the Dodge Durango that hit him kept on going. Police believe the driver of this SUV is this man. Take a good long look. 28-year-old Robert Corchado. He allegedly ditched the Durango up to the crash and may be driving a rented Mazda SUV.

Coming up next, back to our special coverage of Flight 370. We're answering your questions including the surprising new information about altitude changes here. How much more fuel did the jet use? Does that change the search area?

Tweet me @brookeBCNN.

Also ahead, this is actually the reason I'm here in New York today because I along with this guy and a lot of other people are going to the Rock N' Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony in Brooklyn. This band, Kiss, anyone? Being inducted tonight. And Paul Stanley has a new book out. "Face the Music: A Life Exposed.' We'll talk about everything from his child hood, his missing right ear to the reason why he is furious with the rock hall. Live interview. Next. Don't miss it.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BALDWIN: All right, here we go, new questions on the mystery that is Malaysian Flight 370. Stunning new revelations today. A senior Malaysian government official tells CNN that the nation's military did in fact scramble search aircraft after the plane was first reported missing. Also according to this source, Flight 370 disappeared from Malaysia's radar after 120 nautical miles. It's approximately flying for 12 minutes or so, likely dipping in altitude. Could have been a controlled decent, we don't know, as low as 4,000, 5,000 feet.

So got a lot of viewers. Let me bring in aviation analyst Mary Schiavo, former inspector general of the U.S. Transportation Department, and aviation analyst, Les Abend, a 777 captain.

So shall we? Let's get right to the viewer questions.

Mary, this first one is to you, and this is something that's certainly come up in the last couple of weeks. "If the Malaysian government was giving out misleading information before, why should we believe them now?"

How do you answer that?

MARY SCHIAVO, CNN AVIATION ANALYST: Well, we really don't have any reliability check. What we want to believe and what we want to accept as evidence is hard evidence. If they release, for example, the Inmarsat satellite data, that's hard evidence. We believe that. The transmissions that they released with their traffic control, finally that's hard evidence, we can believe it.

So things that are released with the reliability factor or something that we can, you know, touch, see and hear? That's reliable and we'll believe it.

BALDWIN: OK. Les, here's the question for you. This is a question from Charles. And I know you don't like the word dipped but this is what he uses. "If the plane dipped to 4,000 feet altitude, then went back to cruising altitude, what happens to the shortness of the fuel burn?"

It's a good point. If you're going up and down.

LES ABEND, CNN AVIATION ANALYST: Yes. It's a good question. I mean, the whole transition makes no sense to me. But the fuel burn would increase just for the climb alone, you know, let alone being at 4,000 feet which makes no sense to me because if they had some sort of smoke in the cockpit situation or a depressurization they wouldn't need to go all the way to 4,000 feet. Ten thousand is a number that sticks in our head. Makes it breathable for everybody.

BALDWIN: But whether it's 4 or 10, again, you are still thinking that that would have been maybe on distant to land.

ABEND: Correct.

BALDWIN: OK. That's where you still stand.

Mary, this next question is for you. This is from Jay. Jay's question is, "How much water pressure can the black boxes withstand if they are on the ocean floor? Could they be destroyed by the pressure?"

Is that possible?

SCHIAVO: It is possible, but black boxes are rated to 20,000 feet water depth and most importantly, so are the pingers, so we have a pretty good idea that they are with standing it and they're not in over 20,000 feet of water because the pingers appear to be working so the black boxes should also be fine. Twenty thousand is the magic number that they're rated for.

BALDWIN: OK. Mary Schiavo, Les Abend, thank you two very much. We will come back to our special coverage.

But coming up here, you see this book? You recognize this guy? Paul Stanley, his new book, "Face the music: Life Exposed?" It's pretty incredible. But we decided, come here. Look who's here. We're going to talk to him. This is the night he is inducted into the Rock Hall of Fame.

PAUL STANLEY, AUTHOR, "FACE THE MUSIC: A LIFE EXPOSED": Unbelievable.

BALDWIN: Unbelievable stuff. We have a lot to talk about. We're going to go there, Paul Stanley. Deal?

STANLEY: You and me?

BALDWIN: You and me.

STANLEY: OK.

BALDWIN: Next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BALDWIN: I mean, who doesn't know that song, rock out to that song? I mean, look at these guys, full make up, skin tight leather, sky high platform boots, they are the unmistakable Kiss. And they are hours away from being inducted into the Rock n' Roll Hall of Fame. One hundred million albums sold. Four decades of hits and 15 years of Hall of Fame eligibility.

The rockers finally made the cut but for Paul Stanley, the front man of the original Kiss lineup, maybe it's fair to say a bitter pill to swallow here. He's just written this memoir, which we're going to get into, it's called "Paul Stanley: Face the Music, A Life Exposed."

So it is such an honor and a pleasure to meet you.

STANLEY: Thank you, thank you, thank you.

BALDWIN: Boom. So here we are. This is a big day for you.

STANLEY: OK.

BALDWIN: OK. It's kind of a big day.

STANLEY: Yes.

BALDWIN: Because the issue is that the Hall of Fame is inducting the four original band members.

STANLEY: Right.

BALDWIN: And you have been very vocal in being livid at the Rock Hall and I think it was an hour or so ago you said that, you know, this will be -- that Kiss tonight will be a big nightmare for the Rock Hall. Why? What's your beef?

STANLEY: I think we're the bitter pill that they had to swallow. At some point their credibility is so in question because it's 14 years since we've been eligible. If I've done anything, I hope that I've shown people the little man behind the levers in the "Wizard of Oz" because the Rock n' Hall of Fame is not the hall of the people. It's a small group of guys who decide who they want and who they don't, and then they decide what the rules are for you that don't apply to anybody else.

So they wanted the original four guys to make the pill a little smaller, but we've had many members who've played on multi-platinum albums and played to millions of people. And it wasn't even a subject for discussion. They told me that it was a non-starter. That's arrogance that I don't have to put up with.

BALDWIN: Here at CNN, I got to show the other side. Let me just read the statement, I know you've probably read it before.

STANLEY: Absolutely.

BALDWIN: From the CEO of the Rock Hall, because he says he understands your perspective but he says, "I can't think of another band outside of Gwar that has members that are dressed up in costumes. You basically have these new members that are replicating exactly and playing the music that was created by the two other members that are being inducted."

I know you guys are not performing tonight.

STANLEY: Let me say in response to that.

BALDWIN: Go for it. STANLEY: This is absolute nonsense because we weren't talking necessarily about current members. We're talking about members who didn't wear makeup and played on platinum plus albums. So their smoke screen may work in the press most of the time but I'm a little too articulate to take that kind of nonsense.

BALDWIN: Will you be saying anything tonight that might irk them further on stage?

STANLEY: I think I couldn't irk them anymore than I have.

BALDWIN: Interesting.

STANLEY: So maybe it's just time to celebrate.

BALDWIN: But as we celebrate, I'm also celebrating your book. You know, I've been reading it off and on, on the airplane the last week or so. And I mean, you get right into it, that very first chapter when you talk about -- I don't think a lot of people realized you were born -- you don't have a right ear.

STANLEY: Correct. I don't have a right ear and I was deaf.

BALDWIN: Yes.

STANLEY: I'm born deaf on that side. And I had to deal with a whole lot of ridicule and taunting as a child. And I grew up in a family that not meaning to be was very unsupportive. So like a lot of people I dealt with a lot of things. I believed that fame would make me whole, would make me feel great.

I was lucky enough to become famous and realize that fame didn't do that so the book is really about finding what makes you happy.

BALDWIN: You were born poor in Queens. You are actually born Stanley Eisen. And I think, you know, a lot of people know that Gene Simmons comes from a family of holocaust survivors but your parents avoided the Nazis.

STANLEY: We weren't poor, I would say, we were --

BALDWIN: You weren't affluent.

STANLEY: We were far from affluent. We -- we lived in a one-bedroom apartment. And my dad made ends meet. But my mom had come to America after fleeing Germany, leaving everybody behind going to Amsterdam and then winding up in New York City and my dad was first generation from Poland.

BALDWIN: But you were surrounded growing up with survivors?

STANLEY: Yes.

BALDWIN: Right?

STANLEY: And I think that that plays well into who I am. And -- BALDWIN: How?

STANLEY: Well, because you have a choice in life. You are either a victim of circumstance, victim of the cards that you're dealt or you pull yourself up by the boot straps and you make a life for yourself. You either live a miserable life and blame other people or you get your stuff together and live a beautiful life. I couldn't have written a book that this revealing if it didn't have a happy ending. I've got a fantastic wife, four beautiful children, and a great band. It's really about the totality of life, not about what you have to hide.

BALDWIN: It is one of the most epic band, I think, in existence today. Four decades later. And I just have to ask you about Gene Simmons because I have read a lot of quotes. I've read a lot, you know, that you've said about his ego, et cetera. And there are a lot of great bands where, you know, you have this creative geniuses sort of working together in tandem on stage but you also butt heads. I mean, do you get along?

STANLEY: Very much so. Very much so. I think there is no substitute for the fact that we have been together 44 years. It doesn't mean we always agree with each other. But he's my brother. He truly is the brother I don't have and whatever sibling rivalry we have or back biting we do, it's all to a good end. I think our hearts are both in the right place.

BALDWIN: Tonight, at the Barclay Center in Brooklyn, I'll be there just as a big music nerd and fan taking this all in. You will be there. And I just have to ask, I mean, you've met a lot of people in your career and in your lifetime, but is there any one particular person, any one particular band, who you might actually, Paul Stanley, be star-struck by?

STANLEY: I don't know that star-struck is the word but there are so many people that have inspired me. Regardless of what I think of the Rock N' Roll Hall of Fame, to be in the presence of people who shake up the world musically and also inspired me is a terrific thing. I can't --

BALDWIN: Can you name one person tonight who you've thought about you want to find and shake his or her hands?

STANLEY: Peter Crisp, Ace Fehley, and Gene Simmons.

BALDWIN: Thank you so much.

STANLEY: My pleasure.

BALDWIN: Congratulations.

STANLEY: Thank you so much.

BALDWIN: Congratulations. Again his book is "Paul Stanley: Face the Music, A Life Exposed." Can't wait to see you tonight.

And we will take you back to our special coverage of Flight 370 here in just a moment but first let's go there.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)