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Search Continues for Missing Malaysian Airplane; Court Rules Trainers Cannot Be in SeaWorld Shows with Killer Whales; New Virus Hits Social Media Sites; Stephen Colbert to Replace David Letterman on "Late Show"; CNN Hero Rescues Pets

Aired April 12, 2014 - 10:00   ET

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

CHRISTI PAUL, CNN ANCHOR: Rise and shine, sleepyhead, it is Saturday. And we're so glad to have your company. I'm Christi Paul.

VICTOR BLACKWELL, CNN ANCHOR: I'm Victor Blackwell. Always good to be with you. It's 10:00 here on the east coast, 7:00 on the west coast. You're in the CNN Newsroom.

PAUL: We want to begin with the intense and seemingly endless search for missing Malaysia Airlines flight 370.

BLACKWELL: Yes, nearly four days after searchers detected that fourth ping in -- or at least they think it's a ping -- in the southern Indian Ocean, now the only sound around is the sound of nothing, just silence.

PAUL: The big question is, have the batteries on the plane's black boxes died already? And is it now time to concentrate on that underwater search?

BLACKWELL: Australian Prime Minster Tony Abbott stressed again today he is confident the signals detected by a high-tech U.S. pinger locator are from one of the plane's black boxes. But the pings were detected within 17 miles of one other, and that means the 10 planes and 14 ships wrapping up today's search are focused on the smallest search zone ever.

PAUL: Which means you think we're getting closer here. To put the search zone in perspective, take a look at this map. You see Massachusetts and Connecticut highlighted in red there. That is the size of today's narrowed-down search zone. You might remember at one point the search area was about the entire size of the continental U.S.

BLACKWELL: Yes.

PAUL: So certainly progress is being made.

BLACKWELL: Certainly, a smaller area. But even with this smaller air to scour, time is running out. The latest underwater signals were detected four days ago. And now we expect the black box batteries, the pinger locator batteries, at least, are fading, and may already be dead. PAUL: Retrieving the black boxes, even once they get to that point, is a massive task, as the prime minister of Australia said. Here's why. The debris from flight 370 could be resting as deep as three miles below that surface, which means from where those signals are coming from, you'd pass the Statue of Liberty, the Eiffel Tower, and the tallest building in the world just to get down there.

BLACKWELL: And you have thousands of miles to go -- thousands of feet, rather, to go. Let's go to Perth, Australia, and CNN's Will Ripley. Will, the visual search is wrapped up by now. It's 10:00 p.m. there. We've got Matthew Chance. Sorry.

PAUL: We do.

BLACKWELL: Let's got to Matthew Chance. What's the latest there?

MATTHEW CHANCE, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, yes, you're right, it's Matthew, first of all. Secondly, the latest, it's difficult to come by any more information that's come out of the search area. Over the past -- of course, the past 48 hours, basically, there's been press releases that have given us basic details about the search continuing and the size of the search zone. You mentioned it had shrunk to an unprecedented size of 16,000 square miles, which, remember, is still a vast bit of ocean.

But in terms of, you know, concrete evidence that this is -- they're in the right place and there are more pings, I mean, we've heard very little. I suppose the real latest information is the further expression of confidence that we've heard from the Australian prime minister, who's on an official visit to China. He's been underlining his confidence in the idea that the signals that have been listened to over the course of the past week, four days ago were the last ones. He's been underlying his confidence that they are, indeed, from the black box flight recorders on board the missing Malaysian airliner. But apart from that, there's been very, very little in terms of concrete developments in this search operation.

PAUL: So, Matthew, thinking of that, have you heard any officials give any sort of timeframe as to when they may deploy some of these underwater drones?

CHANCE: They're not giving an absolute timeframe about that. But what they're doing is this. They're saying, look, while there's a chance that they can still detect any electronic signals from the black box -- the beacons on top of the black box flight recorders, the pings, they're going to continue trying to do that, because when they listen to these pings, if they can find one, it could help them triangulate exactly where in that area, the 16,000 square mile area, the black box flight recorders might be lying.

And until they're absolutely convinced that there's no chance at all of any more electronic pings being detected, then they say they're going to continue this operation until that point. Only after that will they resort to other equipment that they've got available to them, like the submersible Bluefin 21, which can go down to the deck, which is believed the black boxes are at, and do a more active search for the black boxes.

But that search will be very, very slow, indeed, and it could take days and days and days, possibly longer than that. And so they're doing everything they can to make sure there are no more pings, no more data they can glean from using that technology before they move to the next stage of the search.

PAUL: All righty, Hey, Matthew Chance, thank you so much. We appreciate you getting us apprised of what's going on there today.

So we want to talk to our experts about this as well. With us now we have Jeff Wise, CNN aviation analyst, who's also a pilot. And author of "Extreme Fear," and Captain Van Gurley, a senior manager at Metron Scientific Solutions and a former naval oceanographer, as well.

BLACKWELL: So, Van, first to you. We know that there is one Bluefin 21, this drone that can go down and kind of take pictures and scan for these items. Why not send it down now? I mean, the last ping was on Tuesday.

CAPTAIN VAN GURLEY, SENIOR MANAGE, METRON SCIENTIFIC SOLUTIONS: Well, Victor, you have to go back to how the Australians have approached this operation since the very beginning when they really took the lead for the southern search. They've been slow. They've been deliberate. They've been methodical. And they're doing it the right way.

So what Air Chief Marshal Young has said is they want to make sure they hear every possible ping before they move to the next phase, because once you move to the next phase, you can't hear any more pings. Those are sort of mutually exclusive issues.

There is some confusion on the size of the search area they're facing for the Bluefin 21 because it's actually much smaller than what's being reported. Based on the four pings we already have, the search on the bottom is somewhere between 75 square miles and about 600 square miles, depending on how they finally process those four pings, and that's a difference between a couple of weeks of Bluefin operations and maybe two months. So they want to give every chance to hear any more pings, if there are any, before they start the Bluefin, because that will shrink the timeline much smaller if they can hear anything more.

PAUL: OK, Jeff, you know, there are a lot of people on social media asking why isn't a submarine being used? Is there a safety issue that we're not hearing about? Does it come down to money?

JEFF WISE, AUTHOR, "EXTREME FEAR": Well, you know, I don't know if a submarine is really the appropriate technology to use in this situation. An attack submarine, for instance, is designed to go out underwater and listen for other enemy submarines. These are machines that are themselves moving around, trying to be evasive. What we've got now is a stationary target that's emitting a ping that's intended to be heard, so it's quite a different game, really. And so, really, the kind of technology they're using right now is the most appropriate. And it's not the kind of situation where you can just throw more assets at it and hope for better results. In fact, the reverse would happen. You'd get ships getting in each other's way, perhaps picking up each other's acoustic signals and muddying the waters. You want one ship tows one pinger locator and try to keep it simple.

BLACKWELL: Captain Gurley, I've been wondering this for a couple of days now. You have 26 countries involved, some of the most advanced nations in the world with militaries with lots of resources, Australia, British, Chinese, of course the U.S. There's only one Bluefin? I mean, I'm sure this company made more than one, sold more than one. Where are the rest of them? And do these countries have any other pinger locators or resources that they can offer that are deployable?

VAN GURLEY: Well, again, I think what this comes down to is how the Australians and Malaysians have requested services, because every country's that has stepped up is doing more. Yes, more than one vehicle in the world inventory that can do this. The issue then comes down to the logistics of having lots of vehicles out there, because, you know, you can only put one or two of the vehicles on a given ship. You can't just load up the Ocean Shield. So it increases the complexity greatly when you get more assets there.

Again, I'm confident that with where they're looking at now with the pingers and the locations where they've heard the pingers, they've got the area down small, and it's tractable with the Bluefin when they get it in the water. But the nature of these types of operations are excruciatingly slow. It's very slow, very deliberate. And this is going to be a test of everyone's patience.

PAUL: OK, so on that note -- because it's a very good point, Captain Gurley, that you bring up -- Jeff, let me ask you, how long do you think other countries -- like Australia and the U.S., I would think China is in it for the long haul because so many passengers were from that country -- but how long will we have this multinational team there? Is there a point where you might see some of these countries saying, we're out?

WISE: Well, I think that's really the million-dollar question because we're facing a long slog. And what's really unique about this case is that, remember, we have no wreckage, no debris, no real firm physical evidence of any kind, remarkably, after having -- this is on course to be the most expensive search in history, and we have nothing. And what's more, there's really no hard, physical evidence that this is really even in the southern ocean at all. And the longer that we go without finding any wreckage or debris on the surface, without any kind of human intelligence or radar returns that indicate it went to the south, the question is going to start to increase, I think, whether this thing is really in the water at all.

PAUL: So, OK, we only have --

BLACKWELL: Wow. I wish we had another 10 minutes there.

PAUL: You're telling me that you think, it's possible this thing landed somewhere?

WISE: Well, I don't know. I think at some point we'll have to go back to our baseline assumptions and say, what did we take for granted? What did we assume as true that might not be true, because really, there should be some wreckage? There should be some sign of an airplane. You know, I think it's going to be -- there's going to be a real turning point, when we get to the bottom of the ocean, when we look at this spot where these pings were found, if we don't find anything, or we find something that's not the black boxes, this is really -- this evidence has really been touted by the Australians as, you know, very -- we're very confident it's MH370. If that turns out not to be the case, we'll be back to square one, and I think we'll have to ask hard questions, and one of them being, how much longer will we spend millions of dollars sending ships and planes to search this stretch of ocean?

BLACKWELL: Well, some would argue further behind than just square one, because you've searched now for more than 30 days and have no idea of where it is. Jeff Wise, Captain Van Gurley, thank you both. We'll continue this conversation, of course, throughout the hour and throughout the day. And Jeff Wise brought up something that I know my Twitter account and yours, as well, will be lighting up --

PAUL: Because people on Twitter are already asking me, what if the thing handed? I had somebody asked that today.

BLACKWELL: Yes.

PAUL: It's still out there, folks.

All righty, a setback, too, for SeaWorld after a new court ruling. See what the decision means for the embattled park where a killer whale took the life of a trainer four years ago.

BLACKWELL: And some big-name websites, you use them every day, they are scrambling to patch this so called heart-bleed bug. We'll tell you what it does and how to protect yourself.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

PAUL: It's 16 minutes past the hour right now. We want to make sure you're on time this morning. We have so much for you on the search for Malaysia Airlines flight 370.

BLACKWELL: Yes, but first let's get to Nick Valencia for a look at other stories making news this morning. Nick, good morning.

NICK VALENCIA, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning. Lots of news to catch you guys up on. We'll start in California with some new information on that deadly bus crash in northern California. CNN affiliate KOBR spoke with witnesses who said the FedEx truck was on fire before it rammed into the bus. The bus was carrying students on their way to Humboldt State University to visit the campus. Ten people were killed five of them students, and more than 30 were injured. Among those, newly engaged couple Michael Myvett and Madison Haywood, who were chaperoning the students. They just got engaged in Paris around Christmas time. Look at the beautiful couple there.

One of the survivors says he escaped the burning bus by jumping out of the window. Eyewitnesses say the FedEx truck company sideswiped another car before crashing into the bus.

Investigators are searching for a motive in this week's stabbing attack at a Pittsburgh area high school. An attorney for Alex Hribal said some type of bullying may have been a factor, but an FBI agent discounted that theory, calling the suspect, quote, "disaffected by not bullied." Hribal faces four counts of attempted murder and 21 counts of aggravated assault.

A federal appeals court has ruled that SeaWorld trainers still cannot get into the water with killer whales during shows like they once did. After the death of a trainer in 2010, OSHA barred staffers from performing with orcas in water unless there were barriers between them. The publicly traded company has yet to decide if it will appeal to the Supreme Court.

We're getting a first look at the woman who three a shoe at Hillary Clinton during a speech in Las Vegas. Her name, Allison Ernst. You're looking at her there. And she was identified as a protester, though it's not clear what she was protesting. For her part, Clinton laughed off the incident which happened during an address to a recycling trade group. She said she had no idea it was happening and had no idea waste management could be so controversial. Check out the moves by Hillary Clinton.

It's being called one of the biggest security threats the internet has ever seen and some big-name websites are still working on a fix. It's called the heart-bleed bug. The security hole allowed bugs from a security feature that was supposed to keep online communications private. Google and Facebook have already fixed the patch, and they're now urging users to change passwords. I don't know if you change your passwords, but on that news, I changed my password last week.

PAUL: I'm with you.

VALENCIA: So far, no problem. Vince you have to get on board.

BLACKWELL: No. I use the easy ones. I shouldn't have said that.

PAUL: Yes, why are you announcing that for?

BLACKWELL: I won't say which easy ones.

VALENCIA: Victor1.

BLACKWELL: Yes, right.

(LAUGHTER)

BLACKWELL: Thanks, Nick.

Just ahead, the story that's still developing even overnight and into today, the search for MH370. The searchers are now looking to pinpoint the underwater pings, and a lot more than just deep water to deal with. How the water temperature actually can affect the search.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BLACKWELL: Welcome back. If the search for 370 is zeroing in on the right place, it's a challenge to say the least in that stretch of the Indian Ocean. And we want to give you some perspective about just how deep we're talking about here. At the very top of this animation, that is sea level. And when people go scuba diving for recreation, they go down about 130 feet. The empire state building by comparison is just over 1,200 feet. And the bottom of the Grand Canyon, just over 5,200 feet. The deepest diving sea mammal gets to more than 9,800 feet. Even further down, the wreckage of the Titanic was found at a depth of 12,500 feet.

And the towed pinger locator that we've been talking about, which listens for signals from the black boxes, that's at about 10,000 feet below the surface. And the pings that have been picked up in the search for the plane are more than 13,000 feet below the surface. So although Australian officials are optimistic that they're now looking in the right place, there are challenges when we're talking about these kinds of depths, about three miles down, in darkness, with silt that can be incredibly thick. It's a difficult environment to be sure. And it's been said actually that we know more about the surface of the moon than the bottom of the ocean. Christi?

PAUL: And that's something.

We talked a lot about the search for the pings from flight 370's black box. To find them, searchers have more than deep water to contend with. Tom Foreman walks us through this. Good morning, Tom.

TOM FOREMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Hi, Christi. Hi, Victor. We've been talking about the devices that have been put into the water there to try to locate where these pings are coming from. The towed pinger locator, that's produced four solid hits so far. There've also been attempts to put in things like sono-buoys to listen to see if they can pick up anything.

But any listening device in the water here is going to face one real challenge out there, at least. They have to get around it somehow. The challenge is what's called the sound fixing and ranging layer. This is about a half mile down. It's a naturally occurring phenomenon, and it's a layer where the sound moves less quickly than it does in the ocean below or above it.

A lot for different reasons -- salinity, water pressure, temperature, but the results are something really to contend with. If sound is coming up here, and it hits this layer, because this is slower, it could essentially bend that sound and make it go to a different angle than it was a moment ago, and then it may come out where you don't expect it at all.

Also, in some cases, it may come up, hit the layer and start ping- ponging between the top and the bottom of it. And by some theories, particularly with lower sounds, it may go many, many, many miles before it comes out. This may explain why a pinger that shouldn't be heard more than three miles away is being located in a range of some 17 miles, because as it's coming up, it's possible that these anomalies -- these strange things that happen to sound in deep water -- are affecting that signal. And they've got to overcome that and crush it down to the actual location before they go under water and start mapping very much. Victor, Christie?

BLACKWELL: Tom Foreman, thank you.

PAUL: So just in the last couple of minutes, we had Jeff Wise on, one of the aviation analysts, who mentioned something that I actually got a tweet about a little while ago. Diane said, "Is it possible the aircraft landed on land ever since it went missing and it could still be intact?" That is a theory people will not let go of. He said it could be possible, still. So we're going to talk to him and our panel about that in a moment.

BLACKWELL: We've asked him to stick around. He was scheduled to leave, but we said, stay. We want to talk about this more.

Also, how do you retrieve wreckage that's deeper in the ocean than the height of the tallest building in the world, several thousand feet deeper? Coming up, we'll ask ocean explorer Fabien Cousteau.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

PAUL: Bottom of the hour right now on this Saturday morning. I hope it's been good to you. I'm Christi Paul.

BLACKWELL: Pretty sure it's a good start. I'm Victor Blackwell.

The Australian prime minister says he's confident four signals detected by a high-tech U.S. pinger locator are coming from one of the flight 370's black boxes.

PAUL: The signals were all detected within 17 miles of each other. Here's what that means. The 10 planes and 14 ships wrapping up today's search are focused on the smallest searched zone to date, which makes you think we're making progress here.

BLACKWELL: Let's put that into perspective. Look at this map of the U.S. Massachusetts and Connecticut here, they're highlighted in red, that's the size of the narrowed search today. Now, at one point, it was the size of the entire continental U.S.

PAUL: OK, David Soucie, a safety analyst and the author of "Why Planes Crash" joining us now.

BLACKWELL: We've also got Mary Schiavo, a CNN aviation analyst, former inspector general with the U.S. Transportation Department, Jeff Wise, CNN aviation analyst who perked our ears up a bit a couple of moments ago. He's a pilot and author of "The Extreme Fear," also Tom Fuentes, CNN law enforcement analyst, and the former FBI assistant director. PAUL: OK, so, Mary, you probably heard what Jeff said a little while ago, you know, Jeff saying, which I don't know that anybody would completely dispute. If we don't find anything, if they don't find anything in this search in the southern Indian Ocean, do we have to reopen the possibility that this plane landed somewhere? Because I can tell you, people on social media, they believe that that is what happened. What do you say?

MARY SCHIAVO, CNN AVIATION ANALYST: Well, I think we have to go back to the Inmarsat satellite data, because we simply just can't search the earth, unless we resort to crowd sourcing, which isn't a bad idea. But we'd have to go back and re-find the Inmarsat data again, because other than that we would not have any clues. It would just be down to that.

BLACKWELL: Jeff, it's interesting, because Christi is getting the people who believe that this landed. I'm getting tweets from people who are quite critical of your comment, and they're asking you to defend it. We've been convinced, many people have been convinced over the last few weeks, that because of Inmarsat, and there's a northern corridor to southern corridor, and there's no way the plane went over China, went over Afghanistan, those areas, and it wasn't detected by radar. So I'd like you to just take a couple of seconds and explain.

WISE: OK, I think it's important for people to remember why it is we are searching in the southern Indian Ocean. And the reason is solely based on -- as far as we know, unless there's some other information we don't know about, but based on the information made available, it's all entirely based on an analysis that was carried out by Inmarsat and released by the Malaysian government. And this analysis was based on a new kind of mathematics the Inmarsat said they were able to device, and based on that new math, they were able to determine that the flight to the south looked more like the data that they got than a northern flight would take, would have looked like, OK?

Now, they did not release the underlying data and they did not release the method by which they were able to determine this. So we're really taking it on Inmarsat's authority. However, they didn't say it fit better. They didn't say it was impossible to go to the north.

However, the Malaysian prime minister then took this statement and used it as the basis for a late-night announcement, saying that he and the authorities had determined that the plane must be in the south. So really what it's based on is Inmarsat's authority, the authority of the Malaysian prime minister saying it must be here. We, as the public, don't have any information that we have that would say it has to be in the southern ocean, but we've rely on the weight of the authority, of various governments, OK?

So now, when the Australian prime minister comes forward and says he's very, very confident that this is the plane, that it's there, that we will find it within a few days, if that promise turns out to not bear fruit, then we have to start asking some questions, Not only, OK, where is the plane, But, also, how much trust have we invested in these authorities who have assured us that they know what the situation is, And yet, their previous assurances have come up empty. PAUL: Tom Fuentes, he brings up a good point. There have been transparency issues with the Malaysian government. There have been things that they've come out, you know, authorities have come out and said, yes, we think this is it, and there has been no credence to them. What do you say about the possibility that if they come up with nothing, we're starting from scratch?

TOM FUENTES, CNN LAW ENFORCEMENT ANALYST: Well, first of all, Christi, I don't think this is a transparency issue. I think they're being open about the fact that these calculations were made. But, you know, honestly I don't have the expertise to agree or disagree with the way the numbers were crunched and how they came up with this. This one, we are relying on the mathematicians from Inmarsat and the other advisors that have come up with this idea of where this plane landed -- or crashed, I should say.

BLACKWELL: David Soucie, you wrote "Why Planes Crash." What do you think about Jeff's questions about this plane -- the flight ending in the water?

DAVID SOUCIE, CNN SAFETY ANALYST: Well, I'm really glad that we have Jeff to bring these points up, because it's so easy to get on a one- track mind and just look at the one thing you think is the conclusion. So that's really important.

But I would have to disagree with Jeff. It's neither math nor is it new. The concept of the north versus the south hemisphere is based on a concept that's been around forever, which is Doppler shift. And Doppler shift has been used for many, many years to determine range and various effects. The Doppler shift is different in the northern hemisphere than it is in the southern hemisphere, and so that's the reason these were used. It wasn't based on a mathematical figure. It was based on the difference in the Doppler shift, which is a sign wave, basically, that shrinks or grows with the direction it goes.

So while I respect certainly Jeff's opinion, and I think it's really good that it's being questioned -- because, who knows, maybe it wasn't done properly, since it wasn't released to us how they got this. But I'm just glad he did that. But I'm convinced that it is in the south, and I'm still convinced these are pings from the aircraft and from the black box.

PAUL: Hey, Mary, you know there's a belief that certain countries may be holding information that they have close to the vest because they don't want other countries to know what resources they have with some of the information they have come up with. How prevalent do you think that has been in this investigation? And how much do you think all of these countries are holding back from releasing, how much information?

SCHIAVO: Well, I think they are holding back, and that's why I'm glad that Jeff did bring this up. I mean, I don't agree. I think it's in the ocean. But I like that Jeff brought this up, because it's very clear we have some big holes and problems, and a bit of a cover-up over the Malaysian radar and the Indonesian radar. Now, we've heard disconcerting disconnects between civilian radar coverage, control and military in Malaysian. And then just recently they said we tracked the plane -- we did see the plane head over the Malacca Straits, and then the Indonesian radar information is that they completely went around Indonesia and headed to the south.

Now, if that isn't true, or that's in dispute -- and believe me, there's been so many different stories -- I mean, I think they have a credibility problem. But if there is no such radar tracings, et cetera, then, you know, Jeff's story would have more credence. But I think the biggest problem is we haven't been given all the information on those radar tracks through Malaysia and Indonesia.

BLACKWELL: I want to go to David Soucie, this Bluefin, apparently there is one in this arena, this theater. Is it time to send it down? I mean, the last ping was four days ago.

SOUCIE: Yes, I think it is. I don't quite understand why it is they're taking so long to put that Bluefin in, because at this point, there's no pinging going on. They're back tracking where the Ocean Shield has been going on the marine tracker. And you can see that it's just kind of going around in the same areas within 20 miles or so, looking for pings. They're not there anymore. It's been four days, let's move on.

PAUL: All righty, Mary Schiavo, Tom Fuentes, Jeff Wise, David Soucie, we so appreciate your expertise and perspective. Thank you for taking time with us.

BLACKWELL: Thank you.

So imagine standing on a mountain and trying to spot a suitcase all the way down on the ground, and now imagine doing it in the dark. That's the kind of challenge the search crews are up against as they try to find the black boxes from 370.

PAUL: We're talking with explorer Fabien Cousteau, Jacques Cousteau's grandson, next about the challenges of searching the deep sea. What he says about this part of the country -- or the world, rather, that we need to know about.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BLACKWELL: It's a race against the clock for search crews trying to find missing Malaysia Airlines flight 370. The Australian prime minister says that he's confident that four sounds, four pings potentially, detected by the Ocean Shield are from one of the plane's black boxes.

PAUL: But the hard part, the signals are coming from about 15,000 feet below the surface.

BLACKWELL: Now, let's bring in ocean explorer, Fabien Cousteau, who's speaking exclusively with CNN. You'll recognize the last name. He's the grandson of famed pioneer Jacques Cousteau. Fabien, good to have you with us.

PAUL: Good morning.

FABIEN COUSTEAU, OCEANOGRAPHIC EXPLORER: Good morning.

BLACKWELL: I wonder if you could describe for us, because few people know deep-water exploration like you and your family. What is the terrain there? What's it like that deep under water?

COUSTEAU: Well, I wish I knew. I don't think very many people do know, and that's one of the big challenges is even knowing the topography in that area is something new to everyone, and all the people that are searching for the plane. You know, the oceans represent about 3.4 billion cubic kilometers of volume within which we've only explored less than five percent. So this is one of the most remote areas that we just don't know anything about.

PAUL: So this is truly new territory for explorers. What kind of tricks does water play that deep on what you hear and what you see?

COUSTEAU: Well, sound travels quite a bit further under water. And with the topography and the terrain being as varied as having very deep canyons and high mountains under water, there are all sorts of reverberations that can trick our technology. And that just further complicates the issue. And of course different temperatures of water at different levels also bends those sounds.

BLACKWELL: It took decades to reach the wreckage of the Titanic, two and a half year to get the black boxes from the Air France crash. How does this compare to those?

COUSTEAU: Well, this is just as complicated, if not even more so, because we don't even know that we're searching in the right place. And although there are many countries and many private organizations that are pitching in and putting all their resources into this, it's like looking through the front-door keyhole to see what's going up in the attic. It's a very, very difficult endeavor, to say the least.

PAUL: Speaking of a difficult endeavor, I understand you've got one coming up, I would think, Mission 31. You are going to live under water for 31 days in June? Tell us about this.

(LAUGHTER)

COUSTEAU: Yes, so we just announced it this week. We're splashing down June 1st, and I'm taking a team of six aquanauts to live and work underwater in the only undersea marine laboratory in the world for 31 days. And we'll be going out and diving 10 to 12 hours a day to bring back all sorts of wonderful -- wonderful news, I hope.

BLACKWELL: I'm sure the news and the discoveries will be amazing, but what does it do to your body?

COUSTEAU: Well, and that's one of the things that we'll be looking out for. There's just a lot of unknowns. There have been fewer aquanauts in history than astronauts. And one thing that NASA astronauts do nowadays is train at this marine laboratory first, so that they can feel and experience similar parameters to what it's going to be like to live in outer space. So you can call this the inner space station, with one exception. We can actually communicate via Wi-Fi through Skype in the classroom and our Nokia Lumia devices to go and share in real-time with the world, with the public, what's going on down there in our new discoveries. So we're really excited about that.

PAUL: How big is your team?

COUSTEAU: The total team is about 24 people. So for every six people down below, you have about 18 people topside to make sure everything goes just right. We have to, of course, train hard physically beforehand and, of course, make sure that we're ready to be in a -- living in a small, enclosed environment, akin to a New York apartment.

PAUL: Oh, hey, listen, really quickly, we only have a couple of seconds left. I did want to ask you, based on everything you know about flight 370 and the investigation into it, do you believe that they're searching the right area?

COUSTEAU: It's really hard to tell. You know, the evidence just isn't there yet, and although they've found some pings, it's still very disparate information, and I certainly hope so considering the vast efforts and money put toward this, and of course for the families who have lost loved ones.

BLACKWELL: Absolutely. This technology is being used in ways it was not designed to be used. Fabien Cousteau, thank you so much for talking about 370, and good luck on Mission 31.

PAUL: We'll be watching.

COUSTEAU: Thank you very much.

PAUL: Thank you.

So, Stephen Colbert is somebody else I know you'll be watching, because he's making the switch from cable when he takes over for Letterman on "The Late Show" next year. What do you think this means for the show?

BLACKWELL: Hmm, what does it mean for Colbert? Will we see the character or the real Stephen Colbert? A live report next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BLACKWELL: Legendary comedian and talk show host David Letterman says he is retiring from the "Late Show."

PAUL: And a lot of people are wondering what this means for Stephen Colbert. How is he going to change things up? Is it going to be the right thing?

BLACKWELL: A lot of people are questioning it. Alexandra Field joins us live from New York. What are you hearing?

ALEXANDRA FIELD, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Hey, Victor, Christi, the truth is a lot of us most of us doesn't know much about Stephen Colbert because he has kept himself in character for so many years. We hear he will be dropping that character. Ever since 2005 when he started his show "The Colbert report" on Comedy Central, he has played that conservative pundit that we've all come to see so often, a guy that's attracted a lot of fans. When he takes over the "Late Show" sometime in 2015, he says he'll be just showing us the real Colbert. And a lot of fans are starting to wonder who that guy is and what the show will be about. Here's what the fans are saying.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I trust that he'll still be great. I've seen him out of character before, and he is great. He's terrific.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It will be really nice to see him doing his own personal character.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

FIELD: All right. Letterman announced his retirement, and just a week later, the "Late Show" announced Stephen Colbert would be taking over. Letterman is not stepping down until sometime in 2015, so a lot of people thought that the announcement would take a little longer. People were throwing around different names of who would take over. Colbert is not really a shocking pick. He is certainly one of those names that were bandied about.

There are some critics. Rush Limbaugh is saying that he is a partisan comedian who could alienate some of CBS' viewers. Clearly CBS does not think that's going to happen. However, we really don't know a lot about what Stephen Colbert's "Late Show" will be about. They haven't named the producers, they haven't named the location, and they're talking about the creative elements, so we have a lot to still find out.

BLACKWELL: Yes, we don't know which day Letterman will leave and the next day Colbert will start. He said sometime next year.

PAUL: Sometime.

BLACKWELL: Alexandra Field in , thank you.

PAUL: Thank you, Alexandra.

So, you know, when disaster hits, a lot of time people forget about pets.

BLACKWELL: Yes.

PAUL: And see how our CNN Hero steps in to help when their owners cannot.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BLACKWELL: When a fire forces a family from the home, they can often depend on Red Cross or other family members.

PAUL: What about pets? They don't have that option. That is where this week's CNN Hero steps in.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JEN LEARY, CNN HERO: I was a firefighter in Philly for seven years. You get to the scene, and the firefighters are there to put out the fire. The Salvation Army and Red Cross assist the people once the fire is out. But there just wasn't anyone there to help the other part of the family. And I would see how upset the people were about their animals. You know, where is my pet? And then, where is it going to go? These are people's children. They've just everything, they shouldn't then be forced to lose their pets, as well.

We have a dog displaced by a fire, a Chihuahua. I'm headed to the scene now. We respond 24/7, 365 days a year. We do for pets what the Red Cross does for people. We went into the basement, and found the dog hiding behind something. Once the fire's under control, we're able to look for the animals and bring them out.

Hi, baby. Come here.

The headquarters is my house. We've helped close to 1,000 animals. The owner said she's pregnant. Everything the animal need, we'll handle for free for them. When we reunite the families, it's a good thing. It's like this void has now been filled.

My hope is that it's a fresh start, that they can move forward together. After going through such a sad thing, it's so good to have a happy ending.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

PAUL: Bless her heart. They are our kids. We're so glad that you watched us today.

BLACKWELL: Thank you so much for being with us. We'll turn it over now to our colleague Fredricka Whitfield now for more in the NEWSROOM. Hey, Fred.