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What Next for Flight 370 Search?; Ferry Disaster Search

Aired April 22, 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: Top of the hour. Hour two. I'm Brooke Baldwin. Thank you so much for being with me here on this Tuesday.

We begin with this, a potential massive break for the search teams off the coast of South Korea, site of that capsized ferry. Rescue divers have now finally entered that ferry's cafeteria. And this is big news simply because they believe many of those passengers were eating breakfast at the time the ship began to list.

The bittersweet, the tragedy is the fact that the possibility of survivors is growing increasingly grim. Investigators believe this is where a lot of those -- remember, a lot of high school students and teachers were when the ferry started to tip over.

Also new today, we know that the criminal investigation is growing. Two more arrests here in this case. So that brings the total number of crew members detained to nine, including the captain, four of them appearing in court today. You see the man in the middle of your screen, face covered, hat down, a lot of them obviously not willing to show their faces.

These are the people accused of causing deaths due to abandonment. And, tomorrow, I can tell you this, that the students' high school will be holding a memorial for the victims. The latest numbers we have now, 121 bodies have been found; 181 are still missing.

Joining me by phone from Jindo, South Korea, is our correspondent there on the ground, Will Ripley.

And, so, Will, now that we know the divers have finally gotten into this cafeteria section of this boat, what happens next?

WILL RIPLEY, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, sadly, Brooke, we're afraid what will be happening next is what we're watching right now.

And I want to roll for you some video that we just sent in a few minutes ago. These are Coast Guard ships that we're seeing come back to shore. We saw at least two bodies wrapped in white cloths, loaded onto ambulances, which then turned their lights on, but stayed silent as they drive slowly through the tent where these bodies are identified.

And then there's a man who speaks into a microphone and describes the gender, what the person's wearing. He gives as detailed a description as possible to families, which still at 4:00 in the morning here at Jindo are anxiously awaiting for word if their loved ones are among those who are being brought back. So it's just really a heartbreaking scene unfolding here, Brooke, one that we expect will be repeated in the coming hours and days, especially now that the divers are in the cafeteria where there were so many young people have breakfast, as you said.

BALDWIN: As the death toll then will likely continue to rise, we also are learning, Will, about the phone call, the distress call that was made from the ferry, initially not coming from the captain, correct, but from one of the students?

RIPLEY: A young boy described by the government, telling us that the first call came at 8:52 a.m., a boy whose voice sounded very shaken saying something has happened on the ferry. We think it's sinking. There were actually 20 calls made by students, frightened students on that ferry.

The first call, the time 8:52 a.m., is significant, because that is three full minutes before the first official mayday call from the ferry's crew. So, a lot of questions, why the delay, why were students able to call from their phones minutes before there was actually an official call made that there was trouble on this ferry.

And, Brooke, I just have to say, too, I'm sitting here looking out over at the search area right now. Every few minutes, they fire up these flares to illuminate the area. There are hundreds of divers out there that have been working tirelessly around the clock, going down to the area, risking their lives in dangerous conditions searching for survivors.

And so to sit here and look out there, and see those flares, and know what is happening, after having been out there myself, it's a quiet grief. It's a feeling that we can feel here as observers, and certainly that these families are feeling here right now.

BALDWIN: Beyond gut-wrenching. Will Ripley in South Korea, Will, thank you so much. Keep asking, keep pressing for answers.

And when hearing about this ferry tragedy, another maritime disaster immediately comes to mind, 32 lives lost when the Costa Concordia cruise liner crashed into a reef off the coast of Italy. Remember, this was back in January of 2012. Witnesses said the captain jumped into a lifeboat to get away to safety, even though hundreds of passengers were still on board the cruise.

Francesco Schettino is right now on trial on charges of manslaughter. He still maintains he did nothing wrong.

But joining me now from Los Angeles, Georgia Ananias. She and her family survived that Costa Concordia disaster. She has also written, co-written this book, "SOS Spirit of Survival: One Family's Chilling Account of the Costa Concordia Disaster."

Georgia, welcome.

GEORGIA ANANIAS, AUTHOR, "SOS: SPIRIT OF SURVIVAL": Thank you. BALDWIN: I would like to just begin. I know that you -- your heart aches. I read that your heart absolutely aches. All of our hearts, of course, ache for the families with loved ones on that South Korean ferry. But you are angry as well. Tell me why.

ANANIAS: I'm angry because this is what happened when -- on the Costa Concordia, when this happened, I was hoping the world would stand up and we would make changes, so that something like this would never happen again.

We have been fighting for that for two years. We have been working hard. But people around the world need to really take a look at this. This is what we didn't want to happen. This should never have happened in Korea, should never have happened on the Costa Concordia, but it did, and we didn't learn from our mistakes. And we have to make change.

BALDWIN: I want to talk about those changes in a minute, but just to your personal story, and it was night number one of what was supposed to be this month-long vacation for your family. You are sitting in the lower dining room when you feel this -- I don't know it was a thud or something larger than that. But describe the immediate -- your word was pandemonium.

ANANIAS: Absolutely.

The first minute that it happened, everything just started to shake like a mini-earthquake. And then all of a sudden people just started screaming, and things started falling from the -- it was a two-story dining area, so everything from the top was falling below to everything. People were trampling each other.

That was in the first minute-and-a-half of the disaster.

BALDWIN: How do you know where to go? How do you know where to crawl? I imagine it's dark. You're avoiding, as you mentioned, things falling from the ceiling and falling glass. How do you survive?

ANANIAS: You know what, it's a minute-by-minute project, and for us it was five-and-a-half-hours of that, and we just -- we had a lot of experience being on cruise ships. So we were able to try to think together. We stayed as a group. There were four of us in the family. We stayed together as a group.

We made decisions, just split-second decisions. You only had split- second decisions in the final part of our journey where we had to jump into a moving lifeboat. We looked around and we said, OK, we can stay on this ship, sink with the ship, or we can jump for our lives. And we jumped 20 feet into a moving lifeboat.

You do what you think you can never do in life.

BALDWIN: Describe that moment when you decide to jump.

ANANIAS: It was -- because it was four of us, my one daughter went first. And when she jumped, she landed on the roof. And to watch your own daughter try to leap for her life is just treacherous as a mom. And then I was next. And I ended up on the top of the lifeboat. How I got there, I don't even understand. You do what you have to do to survive.

And I feel so badly for the children that were there, because I'm an educator, a former principal, and to see that the kids went on a field trip and they didn't have the knowledge you had. And they were told, again, like the Costa Concordia, they were told, given false information, and that could have prevented them from surviving.

BALDWIN: We have heard the speaker system from that ferry saying, don't move. And many of them didn't defy that, and they didn't move, and many of them are now being found with life vests on. And they chose to not move and follow direction.

We also know about a lot of text messages back and forth from these young people, a lot of them only children, to parents are who are clearly grieving now, messages from students saying, I love you, messages from students accepting the inevitable. And you accepted -- at one point, I understand you accepted your own death.

ANANIAS: Yes. We absolutely did. We knew it.

My husband was a former Vietnam veteran in the Navy. And he turned to us, and finally he said to us, this is it. It's over for us. And at that point, we just started praying and crying. And we said our goodbyes to people at home on the ship, even tried our cell phones.

There are so many similarities in what happened on that ferry, and what happened on the Costa Concordia. We tried desperately to use our cell phones. But other passengers actually notified the Coast Guard before the captain and the bridge notified them on the Costa Concordia.

People were told, go back to your cabin, the worst thing they could do. They knew that tons of water was coming in on this vessel. And yet they told them to go back. Those people died. And we have not learned.

BALDWIN: That's what I want to get back to. Let's take the conversation full circle. My final question to you, in terms of mistakes made, in terms of the lack of changes, in terms of maritime law, and what you're fighting for, what is change number one, in your opinion?

ANANIAS: First of all, we have got to hire competent people on these vessels. And there has to be cross-training. And there has to be more regulatory -- and a regulatory agency around the world in regards to vessels, because everybody has different laws and different rules, and we need those kinds of things.

We need competent people, we need a regulatory agency that can monitor that, we need to put passengers' safety at the forefront. And we need to do it now. It's already too late. We have lost too many people.

BALDWIN: It sounds like common sense. But, apparently, it's not.

Georgia Ananias, thank you so much, your book, "SOS Spirit of Survival: One Family's Chilling Account of the Costa Concordia Disaster."

Thank you.

ANANIAS: Thank you.

BALDWIN: When we come back, as the search for missing Flight 370 enters its 47th day, the Bluefin here, this underwater drone, has fewer than 15 percent of the search area left to survey. What if when it's finished it brings up nothing? We will tell you what's next according to the search leaders here, new information on that today.

Also ahead, that teenager, 15 years old, hid in the wheel well on that plane from Hawaii -- from California to Hawaii, he's safe. What happens to him long-term, though, the fact of losing consciousness, brain issues, organs? We will look into that next.

You're watching CNN.

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BALDWIN: Welcome back. I'm Brooke Baldwin here.

And time is really running out in the search to find this missing Flight 370. You have the cyclone barreling down on the Indian Ocean, and then this Bluefin-21, this underwater drone, hours away from completing its weeklong scan of the narrow search zone.

So, if the U.S. Navy's underwater drone comes up empty in its final mission, where do they go from here? Well, Australia is hammering out the details of a plan. It's a framework first put forward by Malaysia. CNN has just learned some of the details of that.

Joining me with said details, CNN's Miguel Marquez live from Perth, 3:14 your time.

Miguel, and talk to me about the plan. It's early, and we appreciate you. The three areas of focus set to be finalized next week, talk me through those.

MIGUEL MARQUEZ, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Yes, look, two things are happening at the same time. One, they're making plans if that search does not turn up anything this week.

They're also still believing that they're in the right area, that they will find something eventually, looking forward to the possibility that there will be the debris of the plane and the remains. The Malaysians have put forward a plan that the Australians are now considering, and all of the entities that are taking part will have to consider at some point, regarding how the debris will be treated, how it will be mapped, where it will go, where it will be processed. Same thing for the remains. Those are the victims that they can bring up eventually from Flight 370, where those will be processed and identified and how they will be handled. I can tell you we have talked to several of the -- almost every forensic pathologist across the country in recent days, and all of them believe that they will be at some point involved in the identification and the processing of those remains.

The other piece of this is something that the U.S. Navy is also talking about, which is, if Bluefin-21 does not come up with anything this week in this most promised area, where the strongest ping was heard back on April 8, then they will have to go to a wider plan.

They will probably reset the search. They will look either for a different area to search with the Bluefin or they will go to different technologies, whether it's a towed locator that will take a bigger picture of the ocean floor, or as in the case of Flight 447, the Air France flight that went down over the Atlantic, will they have sort of simultaneous and multiple autonomous underwater vehicles going all the same time trying to locate this plane, Brooke?

BALDWIN: All right. It sounds like pretty soon we should know whether any of this changes as far as expanding the search, throwing more resources at this, et cetera. We watch and we wait. Miguel Marquez in Australia, Miguel, thank you.

And barely enough oxygen to breathe and cold that would leave you frozen, how could someone survive that for hours and hours after smuggling themselves into the wheel well of a plane? We will ask.

And Malaysia Airlines could face a wave of lawsuits over the disappearance of Flight 370. But the partner of one passenger has a personal message for the government, one you have to hear.

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BALDWIN: Here's what we now know, no criminal charges for that teenager all experts agree shouldn't be alive.

A 15-year-old boy snuck into the wheel well of this Hawaiian Air flight that flew 2,300 miles from San Jose, California, to Maui. He defied death and the odds and the airport security at the Mineta San Jose International Airport. And just in this last hour, we here at CNN have learned that this stowaway had plenty of time to find his hiding place.

Listen to this. A federal official tells us he jumped the airport fence at 1:00 Sunday morning. The jet didn't even take off until seven hours later. Reportedly, the stowaway went for the first plane he saw.

What did he do next?

CNN's Gary Tuchman shows us what climbing into the landing gear of the Boeing 767 really looks like -- Gary.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

GARY TUCHMAN, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: This is Southern California Aviation Airport in Victorville, California, in the desert where airlines all over the world bring their planes they are not using any more. We'll demonstrate how someone would get in a wheel well of an aircraft. This is a Boeing 767 that used to be used. This is the door that's closed. There's a way to get in.

Here's how the process starts according to experts here. Someone who wanted to get in the wheel well gets on one of the two tires. Step on the bars right here. Climb to the top right here. This right here is where an opening would be to climb into the landing gear wheel well. Once someone climbs through that hole they end up here. I will show you what happens after they climb through the hole.

Again, in this area, this is the wheel well area. We're told there's only one place to sit where you could possibly survive because when the wheels move in, the two huge wheels, they come right here there's no room except for right here in this spot. This is where he would have to sit with knees close to you, two tires right here and this is the only place where you could possibly survive. Nothing stupider in the world to do, but this is where you can do it.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BALDWIN: Are you kidding me? Let me pick my jaw off the floor after that. Gary Tuchman, thanks for that.

And he did this for how many hours? So, as you saw, this stowaway, this 15-year-old basically had no room to move, no oxygen to breathe, no buffer from the subzero temperatures at 38,000 feet in the air. And yet, we are told, surveillance video shows this 15-year-old emerging from the wheel well weak. Yes, he was weak, but on his own two feet.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MARVIN MONIZ, MAUI DISTRICT AIRPORT MANAGER: He was weak. He hung from the wheel well, and then he fell to the ground and regained some strength and stood up and started walking to the front of the aircraft.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BALDWIN: OK.

Dr. Peter Hackett, executive director of the Institute for Altitude Medicine, is on the phone with me now.

Dr. Hackett, that really hit it home, seeing -- I don't know if you have a TV in front of you, but seeing our correspondent trying to climb into a wheel well.

Here's my first question to you. And I know the surveillance exists of this kid hopping the fence, some 105 known cases from the FAA of people stowing away; 25 survived. What is your -- for lack of a better phrase, your Spiny sense -- what does your Spiny sense tell you about this? Do you believe that this happened?

DR. PETER HACKETT, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, INSTITUTE FOR ALTITUDE MEDICINE: Well, it seems to be well-documented.

So if we assume it did happen, the only way that he could have survived is if there was a drop in his temperature, his core temperature, or blood temperature, so that his brain cooled enough that he could tolerate those extremely low oxygen levels.

BALDWIN: So I'm clear, I mean, he was exposed to all of the elements for this whole flight from San Jose to California -- to Hawaii?

HACKETT: Yes. He was exposed to extremely low oxygen levels, because the wheel well isn't pressurized like the cabin is.

And there may have been some heat being transferred through the aluminum from the cargo hold into the wheel well, so that it wasn't quite as frigid as the outside air temperature. But there would not have been any air, pressurized air transferred across there, of course.

So he definitely suffered from lack of oxygen, which undoubtedly caused him to go unconscious fairly quickly. And then the only way he could have survived that is if he cooled quickly, and, therefore, his brain didn't need as much oxygen.

BALDWIN: We heard, yes, he was weak, but he was walking on his own two feet. He appears to be OK. But I'm wondering long-term, what about the invisible issues? What about his organs? What about long- term brain damage? Possibility, or no?

HACKETT: Yes, it's a possibility. You're exactly right, it's the brain that is the organ to be concerned about.

And he may have come away unscathed, just like some people with cold- water drowning or climbers on Everest without oxygen. He may have come away unscathed, but he may have suffered some minor brain damage as well, which could be long-term. And only time will tell.

BALDWIN: Doctor, final question, if you had this kid in front of you, what would be your question to him?

HACKETT: I would ask him if he ever thought he'd like to do that again.

(LAUGHTER)

BALDWIN: Let's hope not. Dr. Peter Hackett, thank you so much for joining me. I appreciate it. And it is absolutely stunning that this young man has survived.

Coming up, could the captain of the South Korean ferry actually face murder charges? We will talk to an expert in maritime law what kind of charges the captain and crew could ultimately face after this tragedy.

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