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Searching Ocean Floor for Flight 370; Russia Provoking U.S.?

Aired April 14, 2014 - 15:00   ET

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

DON LEMON, CNN ANCHOR: Hello, everyone, Don Lemon here. It's the top of the hour, in today for Brooke.

Thank you so much for joining me.

Breaking news on missing Flight 370. CNN has learned a cell phone tower detected the co-pilot's phone after the plane vanished from the radar. A U.S. official with firsthand knowledge of the investigation says there is no indication he was making a call, but it means the phone was on and flying low enough to obtain a signal from a cell tower near Penang.

That's after the jet lost contact. As for the search, crews are giving up on hearing another possible ping from the pilot's black box -- from the plane's black box -- and no longer believe a debris field will be found.

This search now going underwater with the help of the U.S. Navy's underwater drone the Bluefin.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ANGUS HOUSTON, CHIEF SEARCH COORDINATOR: The deployment of the autonomous underwater vehicle has the potential to take us a further step towards visual identification, since it offers a possible opportunity to detect debris from the aircraft on the ocean floor.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

LEMON: The Bluefin uses sonar to map a section of the ocean never before explored, but it's painfully slow, taking two hours to even get down there, taking 16 hours to scour just 15 square miles before heading back to surface.

The absence of any plane debris on the searches means the visual searches are soon to be called off. This is despite the fact that an oil slick has been spotted, liters of fluid possibly from the plane now being examined. The pinger locator is out. The Bluefin submersible is in the water. What does that mean now?

CNN aviation correspondent Rene Marsh is in Washington with the very latest on the developments.

What does it mean, Rene?

RENE MARSH, CNN AVIATION CORRESPONDENT: Well, Don, what it means is a very, very long process likely ahead.

Remember, Bluefin moves at about walking pace. Right now, we do know that it's focusing on the roughly 500-square-mile area where those four pings were detected. You're looking at that area right there on the screen. It will only scan though about 15 square miles in its first 24-hour mission. That's just how slow Bluefin moves.

It takes as you said two hours to reach the ocean floor, 16 hours to scan the area, then another two hours to return to the surface, and then it takes about four hours to download the data. And remember the data is not streaming live. They have to wait until Bluefin returns to the surface to view it.

It can produce 3-D maps of the ocean floor similar to what you're looking at there. Again this could be a long haul. Just for perspective, Air France, the wreckage was nearly 7.5 miles from the plane's last known position.

That doesn't sound terribly far, but it took two years for them to find it. That's how difficult these deep-see searches are. We do know once they have launched Bluefin, the pinger locator was retired. They weren't able to detect any more pings. The last ones that were detected six days ago -- they believe the batteries finally died -- Don.

LEMON: Rene Marsh in Washington, appreciate your reporting. Thank you very much.

Let's discuss now the new information about the co-pilot's cell phone. Joining me now is CNN aviation analyst and author Jeff Wise right here in New York, and oceanographer and explorer in resident at the National Geographic Society Sylvia Earle. She is in San Francisco.

Jeff, what does this new information about the co-pilot's cell phone tell you? Anything?

JEFF WISE, CNN AVIATION ANALYST: Well, it's coming rather late in the day to get this kind of information. It's a kind of a shocker that this is very significant, if true.

Remember we heard recently that the plane was reported to have descended to an altitude of 4,000 or 5,000 feet. That could be consistent with this kind of cell phone reception, because you have to be down low in order to connect between the cell phone and the cell phone tower.

LEMON: But they tell people to turn -- you can leave your phone on at least here in the United States but it must be on airplane mode. Is it unusual for a co-pilot to have his phone on and in working mode?

WISE: Well, yes, you're not supposed to have it on at altitude, in part it confuses the cell phone towers and it really messes up communications on the ground.

So it implies if it's true, again, that the co-pilot alone amongst all the people who were on the plane had turned on his phone. And so none of the other phones that might have been in people's pockets were...

(CROSSTALK)

LEMON: What is the possibility though that the co-pilot's cell phone is the only one on, even if he forgot it on, and no one else out of 239 people left their phone on by accident?

WISE: We don't really know. We can use our imaginations to come up with a couple scenarios.

One, perhaps he was in on it with the captain, had turned on his phone in attempt to perhaps coordinate with other co-conspirators elsewhere on the ground. Or conversely maybe he wasn't in on it, knew what was happening, perhaps he had been locked out of the cockpit and he wanted to try to put out word.

LEMON: Is this a significant development to you? Because obviously conspiracy theorists are going to say, the last question I said, what are the odds, the co-pilot's cell phone, the only one that is on out of all those people, he must have been in on it. You know what I mean?

WISE: I do know what you mea. It's just so hard. Since this whole event has begun to unfold, five weeks ago now, we have had little dribs and drabs of information that have come out that are leaked, not official -- from the official investigation. So we're left to make a judgment for ourselves, do we believe this information, is it correct, has it become garbled in the translation?

LEMON: Right. Or maybe they have reached the point in the investigation where they figured out the co-pilot's phone was on and maybe some other phones were on in the plane as well, and we just don't know yet.

WISE: Just don't know.

LEMON: We just don't know yet.

I want to go to Sylvia now.

Sylvia, let's talk about Bluefin. It's searching the Southern Indian Ocean right now. What type of information is the Bluefin gathering and what will teams be analyzing?

SYLVIA EARLE, OCEANOGRAPHER: Well, sonar images, seeing with sound beyond where cameras can actually reach.

It seems like a small area, as reported, but in fact it's a much broader area than is possible if you were just down there using your eyes or using cameras because it's only so far -- remember it's really dark down there. And sonar is the tool of choice to try to locate where this thing might actually be, but it's so difficult.

It's an area that is little known. The maps are very thin in terms of the information that we have, like most of the ocean. Only about 5 percent has been mapped with the same degree of accuracy that we have for the land or for the moon or for mars, for that matter, and the Southern Indian Ocean is part of the high seas.

It's way beyond the jurisdiction of any nation. Therefore it's really in some of the wildest part, least known parts of the planet.

LEMON: It's not just that it's mapping the ocean floor. It can take pictures, right, but it's not traditional type pictures that one would think of with the camera. It uses -- I guess it would -- it's sonar, right, it's sort of bumping up against things to take an image.

EARLE: Put a beam of sound into the water, and it's like the way dolphins see with sound. They scan the area and visualize. We don't know what a dolphin sees, but we do know what we can see.

These sonar images, they are actually pretty good if you get down to the right resolution. Most of the ocean does not have the kind of fine resolution that the Bluefin is providing here, but it has to move slowly and it can only go over a relatively small area.

It may take a long time to cover even the search area. We're not sure that we are in exactly the right area. At least with the Air France catastrophe, it was known pretty much where the plane went down. Here, we're just guessing.

LEMON: No one knows, yes. There is a mathematical probability that has been used to try to figure this out.

The question is to you, Jeff. It's painstakingly slow, as Sylvia said and most of us, most of the experts have been saying. But now you get an indication of just how vast and just how unknown the ocean is, especially in that area. And you heard Angus Houston say last night this is unmapped, uncharted territory. There are no maps. There is nothing to guide them. They are doing this blindly.

WISE: Right. Right.

They have been able to determine using other kinds of sonar that they have been able to broadly characterize the nature of the seabed. It's not mountainous. It's like rolling hills. That's a good thing. It's not really, really difficult terrain.

When you talk about the size of the search area, that's really an arbitrary number. Remember, what we're looking for is these pings. There are four pings. Two of them were lines and two of them were essentially dots that were found early last week.

So that's what they're going to be looking for first. That area right where those pings were heard is actually fairly small. It's about 12 miles by 12 miles. That's the kind of thing that might be able to be searched in a matter of days or perhaps a week.

So if you go to the biggest, the strongest pings and search there first, you should be able to rule out most of the possibilities or find the wreckage, let's be positive, really pretty quickly like in the next day or two. I'm thinking if they are as positive as they were last week that this is MH370, they should be able to have some positive information within a day or two. LEMON: We see will, though, cautious optimism, cautious optimism. We hope so.

Thank, Jeff Wise. Thank you, Sylvia Earle. We appreciate both of you.

And just ahead, patents for black boxes are skyrocketing because inventors are racing to sell the next generation of flight recorders. Hear what they have that the current ones don't.

Plus, tensions are rising as a Russian jet flies near an American ship a dozen times, this as a very important deadline expires.

And the white supremacist accused of killing three people at two Jewish facilities, including a 14-year-old boy, I will speak live with the organization that studies this hatred and knows all about the suspect's chilling past.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

LEMON: Welcome back, everyone. I'm Don Lemon.

In the search for Flight 370, we're going to continue to follow that. This is not the first case where investigators have spent significant time trying to locate black boxes. It took nearly two years after Air France Flight 447 crashed into the Atlantic Ocean before crews were able to bring up the plane's recorders.

That 2009 crash sparked a surge of patents for finding lost planes.

CNN's Zain Asher is here to tell us all about some of this technology.

What do you have?

ZAIN ASHER, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Hey, Don.

Basically after 447, after Flight 447 crashed into the Atlantic Ocean, as you mentioned, you have inventors and engineers trying to come up with ways that help black boxes be retrievable faster and also develop other flight safety mechanisms as well.

One of them, I want to go through with you. It's Honeywell engineers basically patented a method of capturing and audio in a cockpit, converting the audio into text using voice recognition technology, and then if there is some kind of warning on board or some kind of an emergency on board the aircraft, it would send the last few pages of transcript to computers on the ground, so that obviously it takes some time to find the cockpit voice recorders.

And in the interim, they would have a method of basically allowing investigators to do some work with some of the data possibly on the cockpit voice recorder using some of the transcript from the audio.

Also Air France, as we know, crashed partly because of pilot error, so one inventor was actually motivated to create an app that essentially would allow pilots to review their performance after single flight. So, basically, the app uses GPS and uses parameters about the flight, such as your speed, altitude, acceleration and that kind of thing, as well as outside factors like weather, turbulence, wind speed.

And every single time the pilot lands the aircraft, he would get a report about his performance. That would help if pilots were consistently making the same errors over and over again.

And lastly, one that I found interesting was a patent by L3 that allow technicians on the ground to wirelessly monitor the health of the batteries in the black box's pingers before takeoff and possibly during flight as well, Don. So, a lot of inventors and engineers rushing to find...

(CROSSTALK)

LEMON: That all sounds great, especially for pilots to be able to correct their mistakes sort of in real time. You see it every day.

Why is the industry so slow to embrace all these technologies, these new technologies.

ASHER: OK. So, one reason of course is always going to be cost factor.

Any time they invent or create new safety measures or devices, that means the cost of flying for you and I obviously is going to increase.

LEMON: Right.

ASHER: I certainly don't mind paying more if it means that the planes are safer.

But if the airline chooses to absorb some of that costs, their razor- thin profit margins are going to get even thinner. So, they will be unwilling to do that unless it is mandated by the government. And also just quickly, a lot of pilots and engineers that I speak to constantly talk about industry inertia, just how long it takes for regulation, for new rules to pass. So, those two combined, that's why it's typically quite slow to have any new changes made.

LEMON: Great information. Zain Asher, thank you. Appreciate it.

Just ahead, more of our special coverage. CNN spoke with the manufacturer of the robot looking underwater right now. We put a GoPro camera on one and we took it underwater. See what happened.

Plus, just ahead, just into CNN, and as the standoff escalates between Russia and Ukraine, we're getting word that a Russian jet flew near an American Navy ship a dozen times. It is the most direct confrontation between the U.S. and Russia in years. Fareed Zakaria joins me live next.

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LEMON: Welcome back, everyone. Troubling new signs of rising tensions between Russia and the U.S. over Ukraine. The latest spark? A Russian air force plane made 12 passes near a U.S. Navy warship in the Black Sea over the weekend, a move the Navy is calling provocative and unprofessional.

Earlier today, pro-Russian demonstrators took over another Ukrainian government building. It's at least the 10th city in the region where buildings are now held by pro-Russian activists.

I want to bring in Fareed Zakaria and get some insight from him. He's the host, of course, of "FAREED ZAKARIA GPS" right here on CNN.

This incident involving the Russian plane and the U.S. Navy plane, something like that doesn't just happen, right? Is Vladimir Putin sending a clear message here or are we reading too much into it?

FAREED ZAKARIA, CNN WORLD AFFAIRS ANALYST: No, you're absolutely right. These things don't happen by accident.

But I think that rather than a clear message, the way we should think about this is, Putin really is playing a game where he's pressing and pushing and trying to see what reaction he gets. It's almost like a wrestler that is trying to throw you with a couple of fancy moves and scattering them around.

The most important set of moves are the ones in Eastern Ukraine that you were talking about, Don, where he is trying to figure out how much trouble can he foment there. How can he...

(CROSSTALK)

LEMON: He is pushing around the edges to figure out...

(CROSSTALK)

ZAKARIA: Right. The Eastern part of Ukraine, lots of pro-Russians there, lot of Russian ethnics there. He's trying to see, how much chaos can I cause? What will the government of Ukraine do? Will they be able to get control over that place?

Or can I then step in and say, we need to look after Russians because, in the Ukraine, they're being discriminated, they're being persecuted? And so maybe the Russian army moves in. Maybe he tries to negotiate some kind of separate autonomy. All of these are sort of moves to create chaos, which he can then say the Russian army is the solution to.

LEMON: How much should we look back to Crimea? Because most people say Crimea is not coming back. Right? Because everyone is saying, oh, you see what happened in Crimea and the invasion and what happened. Now this will happen with Ukraine. Is that a lesson here? Is that fair to look at Crimea and...

ZAKARIA: I think it's pretty fair in the sense that watch those pictures that we have, the reporting we have out of Eastern Ukraine. A lot of these people who are the center of it are well-organized, but they have no army uniforms, they have no markings. They are wearing kind of black clothes, often have ski masks on. This is exactly what happened in Crimea. It is essentially a kind of KGB special op. It's not the army, but it sure as hell isn't just random people who are pro-Russian.

(CROSSTALK)

LEMON: With the same guns as the military.

(CROSSTALK)

ZAKARIA: Working on a schedule with military precision.

One of the things Nick Paton Walsh has been saying is, these guys seem very organized. They know what they're doing. They have weapons. They have instructions.

LEMON: I want to talk about the pro-Russian activists. They take over more buildings. The Ukrainian government gives them a deadline to get out and then nothing happens. Has the Ukrainian government already lost control of Eastern Ukraine?

ZAKARIA: I think that is the crucial question. So far, what they're doing is they're trying to see if there are ways in which they can get control without doing something so bloody or overt that they have to clear out squares, they have to use tear gas.

LEMON: Is this a done deal?

(CROSSTALK)

ZAKARIA: I don't know if it is a done deal, but here is what they're worried about.

Remember, Eastern Ukraine is right next to Russia. There are 40,000 Russian troops waiting on the other side of that border. If the Ukrainian government goes in and opens up these buildings and clears the activists out, what if there are a lot of deaths?

The Russian army will then have the perfect pretext it wants to go in. That's the game they're playing. But I think the Ukrainians need to get a little tougher here. They have got to get control over their country. There's very little people from the outside can do if the government cannot even get control of 10 office buildings in Eastern Ukraine.

LEMON: Fareed Zakaria, thank you, the host of "FAREED ZAKARIA GPS" here on CNN. Of course you can see it on Sunday here a CNN -- or do what I do. DVR it as well. Thank you very much. We appreciate it.

I want to stay with the story, get more on this incident involving the Russian plane and the U.S. Navy ship in the Black Sea.

Our Pentagon correspondent is Barbara Starr. She joins me now. Barbara, do U.S. officials believe the USS Donald Cook was threatened in any way?

BARBARA STARR, CNN PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT: Well, not militarily threatened, but certainly harassed, Don.

U.S. officials are telling us this is one of the most significant encounters they have had with the Russian military in years. You know, this SU-24 Russian air force fighter, unarmed, nonetheless spent 90 minutes making 12 passes right near the Donald Cook in international waters in the Black Sea, going low and fast, 500 feet above the water, 1,000 yards off to the side of the ship, not exactly the safest flying circumstances to be next to a Navy warship.

The Navy tried to call the plane during those 90 minutes and said back off and got absolutely no answer. The Pentagon is saying this was provocative, aggressive, unprofessional, all of the words that you would expect. They think really, Don, it was a message from Moscow. And today the Pentagon is sending back a message of its own a little bit: This wasn't a very good thing to do, so back off -- Don.

LEMON: Barbara Starr, Pentagon correspondent, Barbara, thank you very much.

Coming up here on CNN, more on our special coverage of missing Flight 370. Breaking this afternoon, the cell phone, the co-pilot's cell phone was turned on in the cockpit. But what does this mean for investigators and why are we just finding out now?

Plus, we will take a closer look at the reports of an oil slick detected by the Ocean Shield ship in the search area. Could it be from the missing plane or would any oil have evaporated by now 39 days into this search?

Stay with us.

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