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Legal View with Ashleigh Banfield

Latest on the Disappearance of AirAsia Flight 8501

Aired December 29, 2014 - 12:30   ET

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

DAVID SOUCIE, CNN AVIATION ANALYST: So I'm not looking towards that as a primary indicator or a primary cause at this point as far as what may or may not have happened.

JAKE TAPPER, CNN ANCHOR: All right. David Soucie in New York, Chad Myers in Atlanta. Thank you both so much.

This missing plane in Southeast Asia brings to mind for many people another plane, of course, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 which unbelievably is still missing nearly after 10 months.

What are the similarities and what are the differences in the searches for these planes? We'll talk about all of that just ahead.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

TAPPER: Welcome back. I'm Jake Tapper. I want to cut you off on the missing AirAsia Flight 8501. And it's now being 42 hours since the Airbus A320 bound for Singapore disappeared from radar in the midst of some terrible weather.

The head of the Indonesian search team says he presumes the plane and its 162 passengers and crew are on the bottom of the Java Sea.

The surface search will grow at first light from 7 zones to 11 zones between the islands of Borneo, Java and Sumatra. Four countries are taking part, soon to be six countries. Beijing now says Chinese ships and planes are on the way. And we've just learned U.S. assistance has now been formally requested.

The seventh fleet of the U.S. Navy is said to be in the area awaiting orders to move in. Here's some information about AirAsia. In case you've never heard of the airline, AirAsia is a Malaysian-based low cost airline. Headquartered near Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, the airline operates scheduled domestic and international flights through these 88 cities and many of the countries in Southeast Asia and also flies as far as Saudi Arabia.

In April, AirAsia apologized over a claim in the airliner's in-flight magazine that its flights will never get lost. Some people took that as an offensive joke, an allusion to missing flight MH370.

The independent reports the in-flight magazine said, "Rest assured that your captain is well prepared to ensure your plane will never get lost!" Notice the exclamation point at the end of that statement. The desperate search for missing AirAsia Flight 8501 is another grim

chapter and an already tragic year for aviation at least in terms of the number of casualties. Now, with another as yet, unexplained disappearance of a flight with more than 100 souls on board, it begs the question how does one lose a commercial airliner?

Joining me to talk about how this plane may have vanished and how it compares and differs from missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 is CNN Aviation Analyst and the former Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Transportation, Mary Schiavo and CNN Aviation Analyst and former FAA Safety Inspector David Soucie, thanks both of you for being here.

Again, Mary, what are the different geographic features of where these planes may have gone down?

MARY SCHIAVO, CNN AVIATION ANALYST: Well, in this area is -- now that two have gone missing there and before that, there was another in the area that was missing in the Java Sea for a number of months and it was found after wreckage washed up on the shore and that was a few years back. And it's geography just as you said that it's particularly challenging because you have lots of vast open areas of water and then you have small islands and archipelagos, literally thousands of them all over.

So it's -- flying across the United States, you don't have vast areas where you could get lost and of course, the entire United States is very well-covered with radar. So the geography just as you said also adds to the problem of being lost and plus, you have competing jurisdictions. You have radar coverage from one country, they don't admit to overlapping but of course it does and you have lots of different jurisdictions so it's kind of custom-made for turf warfare as well. So the geography does definitely add to the problem.

TAPPER: And David, what about these two different types of plane? How different are they in size, in tracking equipment, in anything else that might be significant?

SOUCIE: Well, the aircraft were type certificate under the same type certificates. So as far as the pilot flying from the inside, they're very similar by design, they're made to be that way. However, the difference that I've noticed, if you look at these photographs you see now, if you look at the antennas and especially the one in the back for the aircraft, they're (inaudible) finned.

This aircraft doesn't appear to me to have the Satcom installed and that's what we were talking about a lot with the missing 370 as the Satcom sending information. Now, this aircraft to me does not look like it's equipped with that type of communication which would've given a much better and clearer picture of where of the aircraft was, not only when they lost communication but following that after the proposed possible stall and the aircraft falling to the ground at that point.

TAPPER: Mary, as these crews from several different countries look for this plane, they are obviously looking for the plane itself, they are also sadly looking for a possible debris field. What would a debris field in the ocean look like?

SCHIAVO: There would be two kinds of debris field. And since we've talked a lot about the fact that it appears and it appears only because it's the only evidence we have and it might be wrong, but it seems as though the flight may have had a stall and then have fallen to the ocean. And if that's the case, the debris field would be rather contained and it will have a stream of debris that will follow the ocean current.

If it had a breakup in the air which is of course extremely rare for a commercial jetliner at altitude, even in a horrendous thunderstorm, then the wreckage field would be much more widely dispersed and it might have different current patterns.

But here, I think that the crews that are searching will be looking for a stream of wreckage and once they find it, they will do what's called the ocean grid. They will chart the currents and they will follow it back to the likely point of impact.

But with the plane entering the water, pretty much intact and then breaking apart upon entry into the water, the debris field will be contiguous and contained.

TAPPER: All right. Thank you so much Mary Schiavo and David Soucie. I appreciate it. So how does an airliner just go missing? Why don't we track passenger planes? In real-time, why don't we use better black box technology?

We'll talk about that coming up.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

TAPPER: Welcome back. I'm Jake Tapper. Pinpointing the so-called black box, the flight data recorder, that could be key of course in locating the missing airliner. Data recorders transmit pings which could lead crews to the airplane. CNN meteorologist Chad Myers joining us from the CNN Weather Center in Atlanta. Clive Irving is a Senior Consulting Editor at Conde Nast Traveler specializing in aviation and also a contributor for The Daily Beast if you read an article suggesting airlines could do more to help locate lost planes when they ditch in the water.

Chad, let's go to you first. Black boxes, how exactly do they work and how long can these pings transmit a signal?

CHAD MYERS, CNN, METEOROLOGIST: They can ping for about 30 days. And wouldn't it be great if we still have pinging going on from MH370 now that there are so much more traffic in the area?

But this is a black box. It records data. This is the data recorder that's also a voice recorder. This data recorder, people joke about it, why don't they just make the whole plane out of the black box and then we'd be fine? Well, this thing weighs 30 pounds. I'm not kidding you, 30 pounds for this black box.

There's the pinger right there. The battery is inside and the data recorder records up to and then it gets reconditioned or almost records over out of a read-only memory kind of thing over and over and over. And then eventually, you'd take this little top off right here, you plug in your connector right there and all those pins record all the data that the plane was doing from the pitot tube, from the distance to the surface of the ocean, the altitude, the land speed, the ground speed, the winds, everything that that pilot sees on that screen is basically in this box and will be in this box until someone plugs that data recorder entry into that position right there.

TAPPER: Clive, something interesting I learned from you. The military's black boxes are deployable. They eject when a military aircraft hits water. Why don't commercial airplanes have that same capability?

CLIVE IRVING, CNN METEOROLOGIST: Well, it's true. The military do. And it seems to be what you've just shown in that black box in fact because we have to remember that that black box is receiving all the information about the vital signs of the plane through the flight. It's receiving constantly all the time.

Now, what can -- if you don't accept the idea of the ejectable one which is used by the military is practical of the commercial airlines, we have the technology already available to do something which is in fact far more efficient which it will not only tell you where the plane went down but what was happening to the plane before it went down.

The information you've just demonstrated that goes into the flight data recorder, you can take a chunk of that. If there's a system now where if something begins to go wrong, the moment the plane deviates from its assigned flight path, this will pick up that sign of a change and start recording all the vital elements of the plane second by second and if there's a gap between when that starts to begin to happen and when the plane hits the ground or the ocean, then all that data will have been streamed because it will have a -- and this packet of information will be given over -- the satellite communication system will be given a preemptive priority according to protocol.

So it will go immediately so you will have two things by the time the plane is in the water. You'll have a description of what went wrong in the plane which is incredibly valuable to have and then you'll have the positioning of where the plane went down into the ocean.

Now, I went to the people called Ingress (ph) after in London who were the people responsible for the one 38 (ph) of linking between the loss of A370 in the ocean. It was their satellite that picked this up. Those people explained to me how this technology is already available in any plane equipped with satellite, Satcom connection.

And one of your previous guests, I noted, seems to think this plane didn't have that connection, that may well be likely because in those (ph) systems, they're on 80 percent of the (inaudible) fleet in the world but they're not on the narrow-body fleet (ph) (inaudible). But nonetheless, the technology exists to do this and if one must wonder after all this time why it's not deployed, and this would be effective over land, I mean, these emergence (ph) are about things (inaudible) water. But that first part of the information about what went wrong would still be valuable over land too.

TAPPER: Chad, if the plane is at the bottom of the sea, how likely is that the black box will work as we saw earlier this year with MH370? They don't always work.

MYERS: Well, the graphic behind me I think really shows what's about to go on. The water we're talking here is not the Southern Indian Ocean. It is not 15,000 feet deep. It's 40 meters. It's 130 feet deep. So this ping, as they drag locator ping listeners over this, we'll find this black box I believe pretty quickly compared to where we are with MH370.

But I want to go to the other guest, that ejectable box that you're talking about the military have, does it float when it hits the water?

IRVING: Yes it floats and then you get the immediate signal sent from it, the same as the pinger that you've just been describing. That signal -- as soon as it hits the water, that signal is sent and so they have a position record straight away and that's when all the helicopters, all the military aircrafts -- ironically, those planes that are being used now in this search, the planes that were used in the Malaysian 370 search, they all had that equipment.

But of course, the plane we've (ph) be lost and still can't find didn't have the equipment.

TAPPER: A bitter irony. Clive Irving and Chad Myers, thank you so much.

Now, to our other big story today, passengers flock from the decks of a ferry stranded at sea after a huge fire breaks out on board. Hundreds were stranded, some did not survive. You're looking at live pictures of a ferry that has brought some of those who were trapped at sea back to shore.

In Greece, we're going to have more on this story right after the break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

TAPPER: Welcome back. I'm Jake Tapper. I'd like to welcome our viewers in the United States and also around the world. Eight are dead, 427 people have been rescued from a burning ferry in the Adriatic Sea near Greece. According to the Italian Navy, a fire broke out in the ferry's parking bay on Sunday stranding the boat and leading to a massive rescue effort. The coastguard tell CNN it is inspecting the ship and deciding how to transport it as authorities begin their investigation into what went wrong.

You're looking right now at some live pictures of people getting off the boat. They were rescued on this ferry. 427 people total were rescued from this ferry after the fire broke out.

A Virgin Atlantic plane that developed a technical fault en route to Las Vegas has landed safely at London's Gatwick Airport. The airline says the plane had developed a fault and that emergency services were put on standby purely as a precaution. Virgin says the issue was with the plane's landing gear.

Two Los Angeles police officers were shot at last night while they drove their patrol car. The officers returned fire. Thankfully, no one was injured in the shooting. The attack sparked a manhunt in South Central Los Angeles. One suspect was arrested, the second suspect remains on the run, is considered armed and dangerous.

After 13 years and more than 2,000 U.S. casualties, the President of the United States announced that the combat mission in Afghanistan is history. U.S. and NATO forces officially transferred combat command operations to the Afghans on Sunday. President Obama saying the war on Afghanistan is coming through a responsible conclusion though of course, some 10,000 American troops will remain in Afghanistan. The President said they will be there to advise and assist Afghan security forces and also pursue counterterrorism activities.

Flight 8501 is the second passenger plane to go missing in Southeast Asia this year. Has this year been worse than other years for airline disasters? We'll look at the context of all this, coming up.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

TAPPER: Welcome back. I'm Jake Tapper. I'd like to welcome our viewers around the United States and the world. It is almost six hours until the sun rises in Indonesia. Search aircraft will then be able to resume flights over the Java Sea.

CNN's Paula Hancocks reports from the staging area for the latest on the search.

PAULA HANCOCKS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: The search and rescue operation for the missing AirAsia plane has definitely grown in size this Monday. We're at the airport on the island of Belitung and you can see the military helicopters have been coming in all day. Also, some search and rescue helicopters.

What they're basically doing is going out on sorties. They're coming back here to refuel, have a briefing to find out where they should be going next and then heading off. This is becoming one of the staging areas for this search and rescue operation.

Now, this island is one of the closest areas to that last point of contact that the plane had. And this is the area that much of the search and rescue operation is focusing. According to one official we just spoke to, the search area now is 240 by 240 nautical mile, so a very large area that coordinating it off, sectioning it off to make sure that there's no overlap to make sure they don't miss any areas. They're doing this very systematically.

Now, I did speak to First Marshall Supriyadi, he's in-charge of the search and rescue operation in this area. And he says that at this point, they haven't managed to narrow the search down.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

(SPEAKING IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE) (END OF VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We're still searching all areas. Later, if we get new data that leads to a specific location, then we can narrow it down.

HANCOCKS: I did asked the First Marshall if he believes there's the possibility of any survivors still. He said that if the plane crashed in water, it is unlikely. But if it managed to crash on land, maybe in the jungles to the east of here, then survivors are possible.

Paula Hancocks, CNN, Belitung island, Indonesia.

TAPPER: And now, thanks to Paula Hancocks for that report.

Now, you would not know it from the headlines but it's the truth that 2014 is actually seen the fewest aircraft accidents in decades. But it also is the year that has had the most fatalities since 2005. CNN's Rene Marsh looks at the context.

RENE MARSH, CNN CORRESPONDENT: The disappearance of 162 people onboard AirAsia is the second missing passenger plane in Southeast Asia in less than a year.

PETER GOELZ, FORMER NTSB MANAGING DIRECTOR: It is eerie, it is unusual or it's just kind of spooky that this would happen in this area. But we don't know the facts yet.

MARSH: After nearly 10 months, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 and the 239 people on board have still not been found. Authorities are convinced the Boeing 777 crashed in the Indian Ocean.

STEVEN WALLACE: FORMER FAA ACCIDENT INVESTIGATION DIRECTOR: Malaysia 370, I think there's good evidence to indicate that it was flown a long, long ways. And again, most likely as a criminal act either by a rogue pilot or an intruder or something like that whereas, we have no indication of anything like that in this case.

MARSH: Just four months later, July 17th, Malaysia Airlines would suffer another loss.

Pro-Russian rebels are blamed for shooting MH17 out of the sky using a surface-to-air missile. All 298 people on board that Boeing 777 died.

One week later, more than 100 people perished after Air Algerie Flight 5017 crashed. The aircraft disappeared from radar after changing its flight path because of bad weather.

The disappearance of AirAsia Flight 8501 is the fourth high profile commercial plane disaster of 2014. But the former Managing Director of the NTSB says the skies are still safe.

GOELZ: I think when you look at the overall picture, there may have been 600 fatalities this year in aviation. That is a relatively low rate when you compare it to the massive numbers of people who are flying today. TAPPER: All right. Thanks to Rene Marsh for that report.

What happened to Malaysia Airlines Flight 370?

Tonight at 9:00 p.m., CNN investigates the disappearance in VANISHED: THE MYSTERY of MALAYSIA AIRLINES FLIGHT 370.

Thanks for watching. Join me back here for The Lead at 4:00 eastern time.

Brianna Keilar now picks up our special live coverage on the missing AirAsia jet. Thanks for watching.