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New Day

Debris Found Is From Missing AirAsia Flight 8501; How Submersibles Help In Underwater Recovery

Aired December 30, 2014 - 07:30   ET

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

MICHAELA PEREIRA, CNN ANCHOR: For the very latest in all these developments, let's turn right now to Andrew Stevens. He's live from Indonesia, where the country's president just spoke. What did we learn from what the president had to say, Andrew?

ANDREW STEVENS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, we learned, first of all, that there are three Indonesian naval vessels actually on site now. The president actually flew over the debris field and they obviously went in at quite a low altitude, because he said that there were three ships there. He described the conditions as foggy with high waves, two to three meters he said.

But of most importance to people listening to him here, let me set the scene for you. The president arrived here. He went and spoke briefly to the members of the families of people who were on Flight 8501. Then came out and spoke briefly to the press and has now gone back in once again to be with those families.

And what he said, he said that his priority is for the evacuation, in his words, of the passengers, basically the recovery of the passengers from 8501. And he said what he, what he had told the families when he went in to see them was that he felt the loss.

We all felt the loss, he said and we should all pray for us he said, to be given strength, strength in this hour of terrible anguish, of terrible pain, for families of 150 Indonesians on board that flight. There were another five of different nationalities plus the seven crew members, a very, very difficult time now.

Particularly here in Surabaya, this is the crisis center. The families are still locked in with the president as we understand behind me. The grim task of identifying bodies begins, at police hospital being set up here for the remains to be returned here.

Interestingly, the president as far as we know, did not speak of survivors. Obviously we can't rule this out. But it is very, very unlikely. The bodies will be returned here for identification.

Families now just in the last couple of hours, officially being asked if they can provide photos, documents, anything perhaps, something they could match a DNA test with. So it's going to be a very difficult few days here -- Michaela.

PEREIRA: Such painful time for those family members. Andrew Stevens, thank you for that -- Christine. CHRISTINE ROMANS, CNN ANCHOR: Michaela, while the debris discovery brings a measure of closure in the search, there's still much we do not know. Many of you have been sending us questions using the #8501qs.

Let's take a look at some of your questions with two of our aviation experts from CNN aviation correspondent, Richard Quest and CNN analyst and oceanographer, David Gallo, who played a big role in the search for Air France Flight 447. Gentlemen, thank you for joining us.

People are asking a lot of questions, a lot of really interesting questions. The first one, David Gallo, for you, why is it easier to find an iPhone than it is to find a plane? Do they have not more than one tracking device? What do you make of that?

DAVID GALLO, WOODS HOLE OCEANOGRAPHIC INSTITUTION: The case of the iPhone is that there are so many of them and we have cell towers all around and you know there's a system set up so that they can be found.

That's not so true. I think the technology exists to track the planes. But the system has not been put into place yet. It's a very good question and you'll hear an awful lot about coming forward.

ROMANS: We heard a lot about it in MH370. My iPhone I can find it in a heartbeat, why can't we find a plane full of people?

RICHARD QUEST, CNN AVIATION CORRESPONDENT: Because there aren't an enormous number of cell towers over the ocean. You won't find your iPhone over the Java Sea.

ROMANS: Right, good point. Richard, but live streaming data is expensive, why can't the black box send streaming data if there's a serious altitude or pitch adjustment. That's an interesting question. Why in an emergency, could the black boxes not stream data to authorities?

QUEST: The technology exists. There's a huge debate in the aviation industry over exactly how it should move forward. What information you should send? How frequently you should send it?

ROMANS: Is it expensive?

QUEST: Expense is one reason. That -- but that's not the only reason. With the sheer number of planes in the sky at the moment, there isn't the satellite capability. There isn't the bandwidth for all of these planes to be sending all of this information.

So the industry is looking and trying to get an agreement over what's necessary and what should be sent, and how much detail needs to be sent.

ROMANS: Does the airline industry want it or is the airline lobby against it?

QUEST: The airline lobby is not against it. The idea is that it's against it on the grounds of cost is nonsense. But you take an airline like Delta or American or United, that's got 800 planes. They've got to think first of all we've got to put it on the aircraft. It costs a couple of million dollars.

You write it off as a capital cost, but then you've got do run the system. Have you got enough bandwidth on satellites? What do you do with all this information? So it's a question of getting the right formula. Now are they moving fast enough to come up with a solution? No is probably the answer.

ROMANS: David Gallo, this is a question from somebody on Twitter about who is responsible specifically about the weather in terms of avoiding the thunderstorm.

Is the pilot responsible for avoiding the thunderstorm or is that something that air traffic control is responsible for? It does appear as though weather was a very big factor here.

GALLO: Right. And I've heard several times now by other analysts saying that it's the pilot has the primary responsibility for the safety of his passengers. And then he can rely on air traffic control to help him out.

But that's initially the pilot's responsibility to do what he can to save himself and those passengers. And Richard will have more to say about that as well I'm sure.

ROMANS: When you look at those, Richard, when you look at the maps of the flight path and the weather, a huge, big thunderstorms, one of them I think 50 kilometers wide.

QUEST: The pilot has the advertent responsibility to pay attention and to actually notice where he's flying. He has or she has the absolute control to say to air traffic control -- I need to do this now. Now, if they then declare an emergency, air traffic control clears everybody else out of the way and they go about it but ultimately, the pilot.

ROMANS: In terms of storms, are airlines considering totally avoiding flights during stormy seasons?

QUEST: No, you look at the storm and you decide, or collectively, the meteorologists along with the safety officers of the airline, can we fly through this storm. Can we fly round it? In the U.S. it's very common to have delays as it is in Asia as well.

ROMANS: Flight delays because of stormy weather.

QUEST: No pilot is going to willingly knowingly, foolishly take their aircraft into a deadly storm. But these things happen quickly and circumstances change.

ROMANS: David Gallo, your thoughts on that for a moment here. Here you have a lot of stormy weather in the region. We don't know by the way, we don't know what causes this plane to come down, it could have been something very different. We just don't know. These early indications are the last word from the pilot was he wanted to climb, he was denied the clearance to climb because he wanted to try to get over this storm.

GALLO: Sure, that's the best evidence we have so far and we're going to have to wait until the black boxes are recovered and the data is analyzed to find out what actually happened. I've been in that area many times and been on planes around and in those kinds of storms, not in the worst of storms.

But many times we sit on the runway or avert a storm like that just what Richard said. I think it's pretty typical. We'll have to wait to see what happened to this particular flight.

ROMANS: David, final question from somebody on Twitter. If the plane crashed six miles from the location of last contact, the viewer wants to know why did it take so long to find the debris? Three days, it's a big ocean.

GALLO: It's a very good question because one of the things we learned with Air France 447 was to focus around the last-known position, that's why in the last few days, I've been saying let's start there, that's the place to start.

It's hard to understand if why they would have missed the debris field in that area. But they did. You know it is a big ocean when you get out there and we just heard that the seas were rough and we know it's been foggy and the visibility difficult.

So it's one thing to say sitting back -- but when you're out there on site it becomes a very difficult issue when you're actually trying to observe in those kinds of weather conditions.

ROMANS: Richard?

QUEST: And as David said, it didn't take that long. I mean, they could have got there. By the time you physically have got to get a boat and a plane safely to that location, in the manner where you're not going to endanger yourself and everybody else.

You remember, you can't just throw everything into this thing. It's got to be coordinated. For everything I've seen so far, in this particular example, or this particular case, seems to be textbook.

ROMANS: All right, Richard Quest, David Gallo, nice to see both of you. Thank you. We'll continue to answer those questions all morning long. You can tweet them to us using the #8501qs -- Michaela.

PEREIRA: All right, Christine, we are going to take a closer look at some of the technology coming up that could be key in finding the fuselage of AirAsia Flight 8501. We're going to take a look at the submersibles that are key to this mission right after this.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

ROMANS: Welcome back to NEW DAY's breaking coverage of the crash of AirAsia Flight 8501. Search crews now looking for more objects and ultimately the fuselage and the black box of the missing plane.

One tool that will be used will be massive underwater vehicles called submersibles. Gary Tuchman explains how they're huge help to investigators in underwater searches.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

GARY TUCHMAN, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): The names are intriguing, but they are potential to accomplish is amazing. The Remus 6,000, the Orion, the Triton, they are all autonomous underwater vehicles and remotely operated vehicles, AUVs and ROVs.

MARTIN STITT, ROV SUPERINTENDENT: The black box and not a problem at all for an ROV to pick it up in a basket and recover it.

TUCHMAN: This is the Triton XLS ROV based in Florida connected to a ship by an umbilical cord. There are the AUVs, which are not connected. This is the Orion owned by the U.S. Navy and run by a company called Phoenix International.

Vehicles like this sends sound signals to the sea floor, which paint a picture of what is on the bottom. Then there is the Remus 6000 also an AUV. The team from Massachusetts is already had dramatic success locating the wreckage of Air France Flight 447 two years after it crashed in the South Atlantic Ocean.

The discovery was only possible because of this AUV. This is the initial shot of the Air France debris captured by the Remus 6000.

MIKE PURCELL, WOODS HOLE OCEANOGRAPHIC INSTITUTION: They can go up and down mountains that are up to 40 degrees and slope. They are very stable so you get really good data almost all the time.

TUCHMAN: Another AUV that could be used? The Dorado based at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California where CNN's Stephanie Elam visited.

The other option is manned submarines or submersibles. This vehicle that resembles a space ship is a Johnson Sea Link based in Florida. This sub located wreckage in the Atlantic Ocean after the tragic explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1986.

(on camera): This sub is 24 feet long. It is about 11 feet tall. It weighs about 28,000 pounds. That has enough oxygen and provisions aboard for the people to survive under water for up to five days.

(voice-over): This sub is retired though. Other subs that can go deeper can be brought into action along with AUVs and ROVs ready to assist if asked. Gary Tuchman, CNN, Los Angeles.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

PEREIRA: Fantastic stuff there, Gary. Let's get more on the underwater technology and how the U.S. is helping with the search. From Tim Taylor, sea operations and submersible specialist, president of Tiburon Subsea Systems, he owns and rents these AUVs and ROVs and has reached out to help in this search for the AirAsia plane.

Good to see you again, Tim. Of course, you were instrumental in MH370. Good to have you back again with us. So let's talk about this area, first of all, to bring you up to date, the red area you're seeing here, Tim, is the original search area.

About the size of the state of Georgia to give us an idea of how big the area is and then we know this is the area in yellow where the debris was first spotted. What does that tell you when you look at that area and talk to us about the conditions of what this is like out there?

TIM TAYLOR, SEA OPERATIONS AND SUBMERSIBLE SPECIALIST: Well, obviously where they find the debris may not be exactly where the plane went down. They're going to have to find more debris, as much as they can and develop a search pattern for where the plane possibly is.

PEREIRA: in terms of a search pattern, let's look in here. You've got this technology. We just had a great look with Gary Tuchman in his piece. A couple of tools that you've used in the past, you've talked about with us here, ROVs and AUVs. Let's look at the ROVs, these remotely operated vehicles. Why are they key and how do they help?

TAYLOR: Well, remote operated vehicles are able to go down and stay down versus humans at depth. They're limited. They can't make it to these depths. Even at the shallower depths are great tools because they can sit down there 24 hours a day.

PEREIRA: So even when the folks have to go back up because it's too dark, et cetera.

TAYLOR: Lights on, change operators on the ship. One guy can come in start running. The other guy can go back to his rack, get some sleep and get some food. So you don't have the human element involved.

PEREIRA: And they can do camera, they do photography as well?

TAYLOR: Yes, but they are limited in scope as far as, they'll go down and they'll take pictures and they can do work and they can search a little bit. But the UAVs, the toad sonar systems, are the ones to look for the debris fields, map that.

PEREIRA: Right, and we'll get to that in a second, but further capability of this, they actually have these robotic arms that can collect debris.

TAYLOR: Yes. Manipulate the arms and they're all controlled by joysticks on the boat. You basically fly this thing like a video game. Find your stuff, pick stuff up and put it in trays and bring it to the surface. They are amazing tools.

PEREIRA: And then these other submersibles, these autonomous underwater vehicles, I think these are the ones that we just saw Stephanie Elam with. These are not connected to the ship, correct? TAYLOR: That's correct.

PEREIRA: So they operate remotely.

TAYLOR: Correct.

PEREIRA: Tell us about the key aspects of this.

TAYLOR: The industry hates to call them as drones because they actually think on their -- themselves have to make decisions and they're not piloted by anybody. But essentially in the larger text of the world, it's drone revolution.

These things run on their own, they scan the bottom, underwater, they're taking pictures or radar. They use sonar, sound travels through water. So they shoot sound out and are able to get images off the sound.

By running patterns back and forth they can take large swaths of pictures and we can look for debris and narrow down on that, take higher-resolution sonar images and eventually cameras and bring the ROVs back.

PEREIRA: It's really amazing this technology that we have. And again, no toad pinger locators, we don't have to use that? Why?

TAYLOR: You do want to use toad pinger locators, but we do not need the huge systems for Flight 370 because the pinger doesn't weigh much. But when you drop it down two miles or three miles, it's steel cable and electrical power and telemetry that weighs and it gets huge.

So these smaller systems, we have hand-held systems and we have pingers on our robots. If we happen to lose a robot, we can put a pinger off the side of the boat and find it ourselves so they're common.

PEREIRA: Real quick, I want to talk about this area again, is the size of the state of Georgia. It's a heavily traveled shipping route. We also know that there have been other incidents, disasters, sunken ferries and passenger ships, the battle of the sea of Java happened here. There's a lot of debris already under there. How complex will it make their search efforts?

TAYLOR: That's really part of the next step. Once you put the sonar down, get the images and you have to go down, I.D. hits and locations, because trash or old World War II artifacts and parts of the planes can look very similar.

It's a process, you take the big picture, you go down and narrow it down and get the little picture and you send down cameras and make sure it is what it is. Once you narrow the crash site. It's much easier probably it's going to be in that general area. But could be a lot, you find a lot more. You can find ancient old ships too.

PEREIRA: The priority is the debris of this airplane.

TAYLOR: Well, the priority is actually the debris and the people.

PEREIRA: Absolutely, those families need closure here. All right, Tim, good to have you again with us. The question is what could have caused this crash that brought down AirAsia Flight 8501. The debris is being recovered. Victims' bodies are being pulled from the water. We're going to bring you the latest developments ahead.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

ROMANS: Welcome back to NEW DAY. We'll have more on the crash of AirAsia Flight 8501 in just a moment. But first some of today's other top stories.

New York Congressman Michael Grimm plans to resign after pleading guilty to felony tax evasion. It's a change of heart for Grimm who had said he would serve after being reelected in November.

Meantime, another representative is facing backlash after it was revealed he spoke before a white supremacist organization back in 2002. Athena Jones live in Washington with more -- Athena.

ATHENA JONES, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Christine. These are not the kinds of headlines the Republicans want to see as they prepare to take control of this new Congress. But as you say Representative Grimm is stepping down January 5th next Monday after this guilty plea.

That may be one headache that maybe ending for the GOP, but then they've got this other problem with Representative Steve Scalise. He is the number three Republican in the House. He did speak at the 2002 event before the group called the European American unity and rights organization or Euro for short.

Now a source in Scalise's office said that he was traveling all around the state as then state representative speaking to anyone who would listen about his opposition to a tax increase on middle class families and that he simply didn't know that this group had any links to white supremacist ties.

But EURO was founded by David Duke, who is, of course, the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and an avowed long time neo-Nazi. Scalise told the "New Orleans Times-Picayune" that he did not know this group was a hate group.

And that "I detest any kind of hate group. For anyone to suggest I was involved with a group like that is insulting and ludicrous." So that's the response we've seen from Representative Scalise. He said he did not know the group was white supremacist.

He wouldn't have spoken to them if he had known. The question is how could he not know about David Duke's long history of white supremacist and his link to this group? So another headache Republicans have to deal with in the coming days -- Christine.

ROMANS: All right, Athena Jones in Washington, thank you, Athena.

Today, New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio will meet with several police union leaders in an effort to ease tensions between city hall and the NYPD. The move comes a day after De Blasio was booed and heckled while addressing recruits at a police graduation ceremony.

Police union leaders have blamed De Blasio for the city's volatile climate following weeks of protest in the Eric Garner case and assassination of two NYPD officers in Brooklyn.

The first person diagnosed with Ebola in the U.K., is now in a London hospital's isolation unit. The woman had been working with "Save The Children" in Sierra Leone and flew back to Scotland, Sunday night after stops in Morocco and London.

The second woman who was had been in West Africa recently is now being tested in Scotland for Ebola. Health officials say the risk of transmission from the first patient is extremely low because she was diagnosed early. She was a nurse working there as a volunteer.

PEREIRA: All right, Christine, thanks for those headlines. We'll have more of our coverage of the flight downed in the Java Sea when we come back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)