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Underwater Search Continues for Flight 370; Putin's Next Move?

Aired April 15, 2014 - 15:00   ET

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

BROOKE BALDWIN, CNN ANCHOR: And we continue on here live in Boston. I'm Brooke Baldwin.

We will take you back to the significance of this day, of course. Here we are, feet from the finish line of the Boston Marathon.

But right now, the underwater drone is plunging deep into the Indian Ocean, hunting for any trace of Flight 370, search crews today moving the search area for the U.S. Navy's Bluefin after the first mission had to be cut short, so the Bluefin forced to resurface early, after reaching its maximum depth, the total underwater mission lasting just six hours. Compare that to the projected 20 hours it apparently was capable of.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CAPT. MARK MATTHEWS, U.S. NAVY: It aborted its mission at about the six-hour point. What this vehicle was programmed to do on this mission was maintain an altitude above the seafloor of about 30 meters while can it conducted its sonar search of the area.

Now, one condition that causes it to abort its dive is if it reaches its maximum operating depth of 4,500 meters. So, that's what happened in this case.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BALDWIN: Now, the limited information from the unmanned sub has been analyzed, with no sign of debris.

So to Perth, Australia, we go, to CNN's Will Ripley.

And, Will, do officials there -- we know the Bluefin is back in the water, but do they consider the six-hour mission a setback? How is their confidence level?

WILL RIPLEY, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, certainly, any time you have a mission, Brooke, that only completes 29 percent of its work before it has to abort, that's not necessarily encouraging.

But, look, what this shows is just how little we know about this remote corner of the Indian Ocean, the fact that we really don't even know how deep the water is in some of these areas that the Bluefin-21 is going to be searching.

This device is a pretty remarkable piece of equipment. It has a nearly three-mile failsafe before the pressure becomes too much for the Bluefin to handle before endangering equipment. The fact that it went down that deep, and the water was even deeper, too deep for the Bluefin to handle, could be concerning depending on what the terrain is in the area.

Obviously, if most of the area is above the 4,500-meter threshold, then the Bluefin will be able to do its job effectively. But if it keeps running into these situations where it encounters water deeper than what searchers expected and has to abort up, that could be a potential issue.

I asked Angus Houston at the press conference here in Perth whether he thought they were going to need to deploy additional assets to this area. And his response was, right now, this is the only technology available. And with the visual search, the search of aircraft looking for debris floating on the water, likely wrapping up in just a matter of days, with no piece of the plane recovered so far, all of the hopes right now are pinned on the Bluefin-21 as we have some uncertainty whether it's up for the full scale of this job.

BALDWIN: We will have to see as it's back in for mission number two. Will Ripley, 3:00 in the morning there in Perth, thank you.

Let's broaden this out. Let me bring in a couple of our expert, CNN analyst and ocean search specialist Rob McCallum joins me from Seattle, and CNN safety analyst and author David Soucie is in New York.

Welcome to both of you. Let's just -- let's kick this off with talking about the Bluefin, Rob, because as I mentioned a second ago, we know that this submersible is back in the water, you know, trying on mission number two. First attempt, as Will said, only managed 28 percent, 29 percent of its full capacity on that mission.

And we have nothing so far when it comes to possible wreckage or anything about the plane. So should we be disappointed? Or is it pretty typical in go number one?

ROB MCCALLUM, CNN ANALYST: I think what we have seen is a teething issue, I think, that once the device is reprogrammed, then things will run a little bit smoother on the second run.

But I am concerned that, you know, this AUV is operating at the very edge of its operational parameters, which doesn't bode well, because we are not very clear on the ultimate depth that the search area might run to. So we don't have a lot to play with here. We don't have any redundancy. We only have the one AUV on site at this time.

BALDWIN: Oh, that's news to me. I was wondering if we were throwing all resources. So one of these things looking for possible wreckage, looking obviously for the ultimate goal of the black boxes. Do we know, Rob, how deep this can go?

MCCALLUM: Well, when you look at what bathymetric information is available at the site, it sort of runs from the high, you know, 2,500 to 2,800, all the way down to over 5,000 meters. The Bluefin is rated to 4,500. It may be possible to squeeze, no pun intended, squeeze a little more out of that. But, you know, ultimately we probably would prefer to have a 6,000-meter rated asset on site.

BALDWIN: David, we know potentially, presuming at this point that the battery life on those pingers is gone, using the Bluefin, but still so much is unknown. I keep going back to so much of the Indian Ocean there on the ground, the topography is unknown. Is there even an effort to map the ocean floor here?

DAVID SOUCIE, CNN SAFETY ANALYST: You know, Rob might be better to answer that question. But from what I have talked over the last few weeks about this, I have gotten quite an education about it, really.

But from what I understand, there's just no maps available right now. Typically, with this Bluefin, they have told me that they have a map to start with. They kind of have a feel for what the depths are, what they might encounter, and that they can map it out from there. But, in this case, I'm not aware that they have any maps to do that from.

BALDWIN: Rob, question -- let me ask you that question. Can you map the ocean floor in this part of the world?

MCCALLUM: Yes, it is possible to map the ocean floor anywhere now. You know, there are tools around that can provide bathymetric information down to full ocean depth.

But there hasn't really been a requirement in history to do this. Humans have really only been interested in bathymetric information down to maybe 100 meters or so, because we're primarily interested on hazards to navigation. We wanted to know what bits were sticking up that ships could bump into.

Now that bathymetry and oceanography is science-driven, there is a drive to go deeper into the ocean, and there are the tools that are available, and will increasingly be available to do that.

BALDWIN: David, search teams say that the surface search by planes and ships is nearing its end. It's been a month. Why is...

SOUCIE: Well, they have probably exhausted it. There are a couple of options. One is that it's so spread out that they're just not able to find it, or they're looking in the wrong area. And then the other is that the aircraft actually went down as substantial size pieces, in which case there would be very little debris and nearly impossible to find, especially at this late date, after all the wind and weather that's gone through this area.

I think it's a smart thing to just hold off on that. Most of the clues are going to be found under the water. The ones that were floating, you know, from an accident investigation point of view, the real clues as to why this happened are going to be found in the bulk of the wreckage, which would be underwater, not what's floating.

BALDWIN: A lot of hopes it sounds like now pinned on this one Bluefin being used with its sonar to find hopefully wreckage and those black boxes.

David Soucie, Rob McCallum, thank you both so much.

Coming up next, it has experts, like so much of the story, scratching their heads. The co-pilot's cell phone turned on after the jet lost contact. But was his the only cell detected? We will talk about that, and what about passengers' cell phones?

Also ahead, all eyes on Vladimir Putin, as Ukrainian troops reportedly surround a pro-Russian city. What is Putin's next move as tensions rise?

I'm Brooke Baldwin here in Boston on the one-year anniversary, a day of remembrance.

You're watching CNN's special live coverage from Boston.

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BALDWIN: Welcome back. I'm Brooke Baldwin live here in Boston on this one-year anniversary of the bombing.

But, really, it's a moment for everyone to just take time, remember, reflect, and honor those.

Meantime, investigators trying to determine the significance of that signal picked up from the co-pilot's cell phone. This happened near Penang, Malaysia, after the plane made that suspicious left turn, suggesting the plane was flying low enough to connect with a cell phone tower.

And our technology analyst, Brett Larson, is here with me now.

So, Brett, last week, two senior sources involved in the investigation told CNN that there was some information, some data that suggested this plane dropped to somewhere between 4,000, maybe 5,000 feet. Is this how low you have to be flying to pick up some sort of cell phone tower connection? What does this mean to you?

BRETT LARSON, CNN TECHNOLOGY ANALYST: Yes, you know, this is a significant development, Brooke, and it's odd to me that it took them so long to pass this information long, that they kind of sat on this for the 40-plus days that we have been learning more and more about this.

The way cell phones work, and a lot of us have probably maybe done this, if we have been on a plane, we have forgotten to turn off our phone and you get in flight and you maybe glance down in your bag and you see that your phone is on. It may or may not have a cell phone signal. That's the critical point here, because cell phone towers are -- by design, they're only going to give you coverage for anywhere from one mile to a few miles.

For them to have dropped down to that lower altitude, and then gotten that signal, it does beg the question if they did that on purpose. BALDWIN: Right. So that's one question. Second question is, and correct me if I'm wrong, I feel like weeks ago when we were talking about passengers' cell phones, Brett, I thought we were told nothing really came of that. We have these GPSes, or that there were not even any pings. Are you telling us that they maybe could get information from passengers' cell phones that might not have been in airplane mode?

LARSON: Well, and this is -- and that's a great question.

And it also -- to me, it seems completely unbelievable that on a flight of more than 200 people that only the co-pilot's phone was left on. This is the person who goes through a checklist before that plane is pushed back from the gate. And part of that checklist is to turn off your cell phone.

It's not part of the checklist for the passengers. We are told to do it, but many of us either forget that we even have it on us, or it's somewhere where we're not really able to get to it. I find it odd that it's just the co-pilot's cell phone that pinged on the tower.

And what we don't know also is -- and they're not telling us this -- and telco could tell us this from the cell phone service provider, is if he attempted to make a phone call. So far, the sources that have told CNN have said that, no, he in fact wasn't trying to make a call, just that his phone was picked up on that cell phone tower, did that hardware handshake that our cell phones do as soon as they find a tower to talk to.

BALDWIN: What kind of information could investigators get, if they do determine that there were, I don't know if ping is the right word, but that passengers' cell phones had communicated with towers?

LARSON: Well, it would definitely tell us that either the passengers left their phones on, or that the passengers were trying to turn their phones on to communicate.

And a really quick way that they could figure out whether they were left on, and this includes the co-pilot, is going back to the airport where this plane took off, and seeing the cell phone towers that are in the path of that takeoff, in the flight path, if you will.

And if it was pinged -- if any of those towers on that path got that cell phone signal, and did a handshake with that phone, then it's very easy to conclude that these were just things that were left on and this is really just another blip on our radar as we research this story.

BALDWIN: OK. Brett Larson, a lot of good questions still. Thank you so much, sir, for joining me when it comes to the cell phone issue on that plane.

Just ahead, more of our special coverage. CNN spoke with the manufacturer of the robot looking underwater right now. We slapped a GoPro camera on one of these, took it underwater. We will show you what happened. Plus, as the city of Boston here, a very rainy, windy Boston here, marks one year since the attack at the city's marathon finish line, just down the way from here on Boylston Street, I want to focus today on the recovery, the healing here in this really special place. We're talking about the red flags that were missed, including a misspelling on a security list. Stay right here. You're watching CNN's special live coverage.

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BALDWIN: And welcome back. I'm Brooke Baldwin.

Tensions are rising in eastern Ukraine. National Guard troops dispatched today to oust pro-Russian militants from buildings they seized last week. As we reported, some of these troops are apparently being harassed along the way by pro-Russian Ukrainians. Thus far, there are no reports of violence, but also no indication those Ukrainian troops have moved against the armed pro-Russians guarding the buildings and holed up inside.

CNN's Nick Paton Walsh is live for us now from the Ukrainian city of Donetsk.

Nick, as I understand it, you went today to one of those towns where troops have supposedly been sent to try to retake the buildings. Tell me what you saw.

NICK PATON WALSH, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, it's been a day, really, Brooke, in which we have seen Ukrainian military, absent for much of this crisis in this area of Donetsk, moving into the area.

Ourselves in the rural kind of farmland to the west of these key towns that pro-Russian protesters have taken, we ran across a large column of Ukrainian armor, armor personnel carriers, supply vehicles, paratroopers traveling with them, light artillery.

Not clear where they were headed. They would not tell us, but a substantial amount moving alongside the towns of Kramatorsk and Slavyansk. Now, Kramatorsk is particularly interesting because we arrived there this morning and saw how the police station, which had been overrun by protesters a matter of days ago, was now back in the hands of the police. But the police were saying they now work with the people.

So a complex situation there, but it seems like local law enforcement have come to an accommodation with the protesters. Not sure how long that will last, because, hours later, according to the Ukrainian president, Ukrainian troops landed in at airfield near Kramatorsk, slightly on the outskirts used by the military.

Now, there were reports of gunfire potentially when pro-Russian militants approached near that airfield. When we got there, we saw a crowd of locals amassed talking, shouting sometimes abuse at the Ukrainian troops there, others simply just fascinated about what was happening in their otherwise quite quiet town here in Ukraine.

One man tried to approach those Ukrainian troops, and we heard warning shots fired in the air. I should stress at this point, despite this increase in Ukrainian military presence here, we are simply not seeing large reports of casualties, or evidence, or being told by bystanders or witnesses that there have been loss of life or people injured in these instances.

It seems Ukraine's military is moving in here in substantial numbers, but at this point we're not seeing clashes. The question is, how does Russia react to this? They have 40,000 troops just across the border -- Brooke.

BALDWIN: Nick, as you paint that picture, and, again, no violence yet, I want to play some video, because we can almost see the potential for these jittery troops, here it is, being confronted by angry civilians. Is there a danger that someone, again, no violence yet, but is there danger that if someone fires a shot, and the Russians use this pretext to then go in, to invade?

WALSH: Well, certainly. The video you're seeing is on the outskirts of Slavyansk. It purports to show -- we cannot see -- verify it ourselves because we weren't there, but it purports to show a civilian lying down in front of a Ukrainian tank.

Now, scenes like that just go to inflame some of the sentiment we have seen where the Ukrainians here who are pro-Russian who feel the Ukrainian troops sent to try and restore the control of central government in Kiev here are somehow traitors towards them.

It's causing great, deep fissures in Ukrainian society. Many -- one protester I spoke to saying he wasn't sure if the east and west of Ukraine could live together again after instances like this. We're waiting potentially to see the Russian military reaction.

They have 40,000 troops just across the border. There have been clashes. There have been reports of people being injured. At this point though we know of one Ukrainian security official killed trying to get into Slavyansk a few days ago now. We're just trying to piece through lots of confusing media reports, some of them from Russian media, about allegations of injury.

But we haven't heard firm evidence from people we have been speaking to on the ground about that as yet, Brooke.

BALDWIN: Find the truth for us.

Nick Paton Walsh, thank you in Ukraine.

Just ahead, as the investigation and the search continues for missing Flight 370, a major setback involving the Bluefin here, and it proves crews have no clue what the bottom of this part of the ocean looks like.

Plus, back here live in Boston, I will talk with someone, actually, two people, writing a book about what happened here exactly one year ago, from the bombing, to the manhunt, to the missing -- red flags that were missed that could have possibly prevented this. We will have a frank and candid conversation, "Boston Strong," the book, next.

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BALDWIN: And welcome back. I'm Brooke Baldwin live here in Boston.

We have got a guest standing by. We will talk about this new book called "Boston Strong" in a minute, but other news here today.

Take two of the U.S. Navy's underwater drone. This Bluefin is back out scouring the depths of the Indian Ocean looking for any sign of wreckage, any sign of Flight 370. These searchers are hoping they have picked a search area not quite as deep as the last one.

Keep in mind, this Bluefin pushed to its deep sea limits, was forced to resurface on its first mission. As for the whole question over who handles the black box, when and if the two black boxes are found, Malaysia is now conferring with the International Civil Aviation Organization to figure out exactly which country would have custody of those boxes. It's an issue Malaysia's defense minister shrugged off.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

HISHAMMUDDIN HUSSEIN, MALAYSIAN TRANSPORT MINISTER: I don't think it's important who gets custody as far as I'm concerned. And this is my own personal position. It's finding out the truth. And when we want to find out the truth, definitely, we have to review what's in the black box.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BALDWIN: Here's the news today.

Malaysia agreed to set up an international investigation team to help solve this aviation mystery.

And the man accused of killing three people in Overland Park, Kansas, will face at least two charges of murder.