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New Day

Search Through Wreckage of AirAsia Flight in Java Sea Continues; Possible Causes of AirAsia Plane Crash Assessed; Plane Search Called Off Due to Weather

Aired January 01, 2015 - 08:00   ET

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

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: A break in the weather has search teams scrambling to find more victims and the fuselage of Airasia Flight 8501.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We have the first formal identification of one of the passengers on that flight.

TONY FERNANDES, CEO, AIRASIA: The weather unfortunately is not looking good for the next two or three days, but it's slowing us down.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Waves of up to three or four meters in some places making it difficult if not impossible for divers to enter the water.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: There are conflicting reports from Indonesian officials about whether a sonar image has located wreckage.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The airline's CEO emphatically declared the plane still missing.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I think the Indonesians have done an outstanding job in pinpointing the crash site.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: Good morning, everyone. Happy New Year. Welcome to NEW DAY. I'm John Berman. It is Thursday, January 1st, 8:00 in the east. And the search for the wreckage of AirAsia flight 8501 and its passengers, it did resume this morning after a brief break in the weather, but the search has just been suspended. The conditions very volatile and nightfall setting in.

So far nine of the 162 people on board have been recovered. The first victim has now been identified. At this hour there are still critical questions about the flight's final moments, new questions, in fact. Did the pilots change in altitude captured on radar cause the jet to stall and perhaps simply fall from the sky? We're covering this story from every angle and all the key locations. Let's begin with Gary Tuchman live from the New Crisis Family Center in Surabaya in Indonesia. Good morning, Gary.

GARY TUCHMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: John, good morning to you. It has now been nearly five days since the crash of this AirAsia plane and nearly five days of miserable weather conditions for the search. There was a brief respite today for the ships and the planes that are out there, but right now we're experiencing monsoon-like rains all over this region. It's creating problems. But as you just mentioned, nine bodies have been recovered, but there are still 153 people to be found.

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TUCHMAN: From the air and on the water, this morning weather conditions improving enough to give search teams a small window to continue the arduous task of locating the wreckage in hopes of finding all the remaining passengers and of getting the plane's critical black boxes. At least eight bodies have been recovered. Authorities have now identified the first victim.

Medical personnel are at the ready to receive more victims, this as new questions are raised about the final moments of the ill-fated flight. About 35 minutes after takeoff, the pilot asked air traffic control for permission to climb to a higher altitude due to bad weather. That request was denied because of other planes in the area, and that was the last time air traffic control heard from the captain. Minutes later, flight 8501 dropped from radar.

GEOFFREY THOMAS, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF, MANAGING DIRECTOR, AIRLINERATINGS.COM: This particular flight had an altitude of 36,000 feet and climbing, but traveling at approximately 105 miles per hour, too slow to sustain flight.

TUCHMAN: AirAsia's CEO would not confirm reports that sonar equipment may have pinpointed the plane's location, but this morning he posted this tweet, "I am hoping that the latest information is correct. An aircraft has been found. Please all hope together. This is so important."

With each arrival of remains comes the hopes for families wanting to lay their loved ones to rest.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

TUCHMAN: Behind me is the headquarters of Surabaya police department, and the reason we're here is because these tents behind me have been set up for the family members of the victims. This is the New Crisis Center where family members can come for information, for compassionate care, for religious pastoral counseling, and they were going to the airport about an hour away from here as of yesterday. They moved them here today, and the reason they moved them here to this particular location is because we're about 100 steps away from a hospital, and that's the hospital where the bodies are brought for identification, for autopsies, and they want to have the families close by so when their loved ones are brought here they can go to the hospital and identify them.

That's all they have right now. That's all they want. That's the main question. We're being told by officials these people have come to terms with the fact their loved ones are not alive. They just want their bodies back. John?

BERMAN: All right, Gary Tuchman for us in Surabaya. That's got to be so difficult for those families, and recovering the bodies in the sea is just the first step. They need to get back to land, as Gary said, so they can be identified before being transferred to the grieving families. I want to go now to Borneo, where the recovered bodies are being taken. Our Paula Hancocks is there live. Good morning, Paula.

PAULA HANCOCKS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, John. This is turning out to be a fairly slow process. Nine victims at this point have been retrieved. And now we do know that about half a dozen have come through this hospital today. And basically what is happening is they come in from the ambulance that's picking them up from the portal from the airport, and then they are treated and put in a casket and basically cleaned up so the families can see them. And then they are given the initial identification.

So we're certainly seeing a pattern emerging here. The doctors and nurses and many volunteers are getting into a routine. They usually have three people working here on this kind of work. They now have 40, including 20 volunteers. They say that they are having caskets built around the clock, they're having them built onsite as well, making sure they have 162, one for every member of that, of the passengers and crew that were on that flight.

But of course, it is a slow process because of the weather. Those waves that we understand from the search and rescue agency are three to four meters high. You can just imagine how difficult it is to try to retrieve the body from the water if you're being winched from the helicopter with those waves, and obviously for the divers the visibility is dreadful to get down below not only to find the victims of this crash but also to try and find some of the debris so they can figure out exactly what happened and give those families some answers. John?

BERMAN: Very difficult process both technically and emotionally, no doubt. Paula Hancocks for us on Borneo, thank you so much.

For more now let's bring in CNN aviation analyst and PBS science correspondent Miles O'Brien. Also joining us here CNN safety analyst and former FAA safety inspector David Soucie. David is also the author of a new book "Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, Why It Disappeared and Why It Is Only a Matter of Time before This Happens Again."

David, I want to start with the situation on the seas today, the weather problems they're dealing with, rough seas, four-foot waves, choppy, rain coming in and out. It's monsoon season there. It get in the way, it slows down this recovery process. Might it make some things impossible or does it just make it a longer process?

DAVID SOUCIE, CNN SAFETY ANALYST: Both, both, John, really, because it's difficult in that you talk about a 10, 12-foot high wave going up and down every single second. And trying to figure out how to get the debris off of there, you just give up on it. You have to allow that debris to settle, you have to allow the weather to settle. But by that time everything is so widespread that the clues that we may have had on the surface are pretty well gone as far as locating the aircraft. There's no way to predict where that thing came from.

BERMAN: Some evidence may never be found if it continues like this.

SOUCIE: That's very true, or it may wash up onshore months from now.

BERMAN: Some officials have said they will start looking on the beaches because of how quickly some of this debris is moving.

SOUCIE: That's right.

BERMAN: Miles, I want to talk to you about a report in the Sydney papers in Australia this morning suggesting that what they have seen is some data showing that this plane was taking an incredibly, almost impossibly steep path up in flying in an almost impossibly slow speed, and that is ultimately what caused it to fall into the sea. Would that make sense? We had some indication of that earlier.

MILES O'BRIEN, CNN AVIATION ANALYST: This is a very interesting scenario. We should all keep our eye on this one, John. It's very possible that this crew was clear of what you would call classic thunderstorm cloud near a thunderstorm and got caught up in a very severe updraft, which would have brought much warmer temperature air obviously upward to the aircraft. And that does a couple of things. It undermines aerodynamic capability of the airplane very quickly. The warmer air is less dense, number one. And of course as it's coming upward it defeats the aerodynamics of the airplane and can very quickly put an airplane not only into steep assent, but also into a stall, an aerodynamic stall. So all the data that I've seen there, it's not proof of it, but it doesn't disprove it either and it's something that I'm sure investigators are homing in on right now.

BERMAN: I'm glad you're explaining this to us in a way that I can understand, Miles. So what happens here with this warm updraft, it would literally lift the plane up or help it go up at a rate which it simply could not sustain and it wasn't flying at a fast enough speed to pull the whole thing off?

O'BRIEN: Yes, you can imagine kind of the mother of all turbulence here, just a huge up-swell. This is a giant thunderstorm that they're in and around, monsoon season, you can imagine the amount of energy that is associated with these storms, not just in them but also around them, because there is this cycle of air associated with thunderstorms. And if you get caught in one of those, you're going for a ride. And it can be very difficult at that point, these are fly-by-wire aircraft flown by computers essentially. The computers very quickly give up the ghost and say hey, pilot, it's your airplane. You deal with it, because robotic aircraft are great in routine situations. They're not so good at figuring out what's going on in the outside world in a situation like this.

So you look at the Air France 447 scenario, lots of bad things happened to the airplane, the computers quit. It was dark in the cockpit and all of a sudden the pilots were in control, and you have to make split-second decisions with very narrow performance margins, so it's very difficult to recover. BERMAN: David Soucie, based on what you've seen from where they found

the debris, that they have found the bodies that they have found, does this scenario make sense to you, and does it indicate anything about what decisions the pilots may or may not have made?

SOUCIE: Well, with regard to the debris, it doesn't make a lot of sense to me, because the fact that if this was what happened, then there would be a large debris field and we wouldn't have found just -- from what we understand on the site they're only finding bodies and a few other pieces of debris, not pieces of metal, not honeycomb structure, not cabinets and things we know would float from the aircraft. So it's difficult to put this together.

However, from this report, as Miles said, to fly at that, and the mother of all turbulence is a great way to put this, except it's the mother of all turbulence with one big turbulent event. It's not like all the bounces would you experience here. We're talking about one singular lift that would take the aircraft and also explain those reports we had of the aircraft going to 36,000 feet when they didn't have clearance because in this type of event to go from 32,000 to 36,000 can happen extremely rapidly.

BERMAN: All right, we want to explore more in a little bit, but David Soucie, Miles O'Brien, thanks so much for being with us, helping us understand the latest reports on what's going on with 8501.

We want to take a look now at more of your headlines. New Year's Eve celebrations, they turned deadly in Shanghai in China. A stampede along the city's historic waterfront just before midnight led to at least 35 deaths and nearly 50 injuries. More than a dozen of those injuries are considered serious. China's official news agency reports people started scrambling for coupons being tossed out of windows. Apparently the people thought it was money.

Breaking overnight, Kim Jong-un announcing he is open to a high-level summit with South Korea. In a new year's address the North Korean said he is willing to resume talks with the South Koreans if they are serious about resolving differences. South Korea proposed resuming negotiations earlier this week. Government officials in both countries say the reunification of the Korean peninsula is a top priority.

Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush certainly seems to be moving closer to a 2016 presidential run. He has resigned from all of his remaining board memberships, even parting ways with his own education foundation. The move does not affect business interests where the former governor is a principal partner or owner. Last month he announced his intention to what he called actively explore a White House bid.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CROWD: Five, four, three, two, one!

(CHEERS)

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: Welcome to 2015. About 1 million people ushered in the New Year with the annual ball drop in times square and marked the occasion with some hugs, some kisses, some people got emotional, a teary moment. Now that the countdown is over, it is a huge cleanup in Times Square, so much confetti streamed down along with the ball.

For the eighth straight year, Anderson Cooper and Kathy Griffin were part of CNN's New Year's coverage. As always there were some colorful moments. Look at this one, what Kathy did to Anderson's hair during the live broadcast.

KATHY GRIFFIN, COMEDIAN: Just trust me, this is temporary, and it shows how fantastic you are. All right, open. Yes!

ANDERSON COOPER, CNN ANCHOR: You got to be kidding me. Oh, my god, what have you done?

GRIFFIN: I dyed your hair.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: It was patriotic at least, red, white, and blue on Anderson's head. He went on to wear a hat, though, for the rest of the show.

All right, about 13 minutes after the hour. Was it a stall that sent the jetliner plunging into the Java Sea, flight 8501 with 162 people on board, and what challenges lie ahead in finding the wreckage and its flight data recorders? Our coverage of the AirAsia accident continues right after this.

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BERMAN: Stormy weather again slowing the search for the wreckage of Flight 8501. The skies, they did break long enough Thursday to give crews a chance to resume their search for a time. But it was called off again at night fall. Nine bodies have been recovered. More than 150 people remain missing.

How will this rough weather affect the underwater part of the search going forward?

Here to discuss that and the latest developments, David Gallo, CNN analyst and director of special project at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. And here in studio with me, Les Abend, CNN aviation analyst and commercial airline pilot, also contributing editor at "Flying" magazine.

David Gallo, I want to begin with you. This weather, the choppy seas, the winds, the monsoon, the currents here -- what happens to whatever debris and wreckage might be underwater at this time including perhaps the fuselage?

DAVID GALLO, CNN ANALYST: Well, you know, at the depths we're talking about, there's going to be some movement of debris on the bottom. So, but not knowing exactly what the current profile is, we're not going to know how much movement there will be. It will affect visibility, but the most important thing it is going to affect operations at the surface.

Even autonomous vehicles, these things that you've launched and recovered, are going to have -- they're going to have a hard time getting those in and out of the water. So, it's not the best of situations at all.

BERMAN: David, I asked David Soucie earlier -- is this a timing thing or does it create the possibility that some evidence, the key evidence might never be found?

GALLO: No, I'm confident. You know, you need several things. You need the right technology. Seems that they have that, the right talent, seems that they have that. They've got to have a good game plan and leadership, but most importantly you need luck. You need the weather to be cooperative.

And as Tony Fernandes says, a little hope and a lot of prayer doesn't hurt. So, you know, all those things if they come together I'm confident that we'll have some answers here fairly quickly. And quickly might be a week.

BERMAN: Quickly might be a week. We're talking to David about what's going on underneath the water.

Les, I want to talk to you about what might have happened in the air, because there is this report out of Australia, some people there is saying the data is showing this flight in its last moments was flying at an impossibly steep incline at an impossibly slow rate of speed, suggesting maybe some kind of super cell or they hit some kind of updraft in a storm system there.

Does that make any sense to you?

LES ABEND, CNN AVIATION ANALYST: It does make sense. I mean, I'd certainly want to get some verification on the credibility of that data because it seems a little implausible. However, thunderstorms in that area of the country we've been talking about the inner tropical convergence zone is pretty severe stuff, but it indicates to me there was a pilot with 20,000 hours that wasn't in control of his aircraft. If it was me that was in that situation, I think by then I would have the autopilot disconnected and making an attempt to control the airplane and it doesn't seem to be any indication that was occurring.

But, you know, indeed that rate of climb within a building thunderstorm cell is certainly possible. The ground speed is suspect. It shows a very slow ground speed with my understanding. So, you know, I don't hold a lot of water on that particular data.

BERMAN: If you're flying a plane, though, Les, what gets you into the situation where all of a sudden the plane goes up like that?

ABEND: Well, it's a building thunderstorm with primarily updrafts and most thunderstorms in their developing stage also have downdrafts. So, the airplane is subjected to some very nasty turbulence sometimes. But it's a controllable situation. This is an airplane designed to handle that kind of situation.

BERMAN: Well, you say it's controllable. Does it ever get so bad it's not controllable?

ABEND: Well, there are things called, you know, we rate turbulence from light to moderate to severe and even to extreme, where you don't have control of the aircraft. So, the short answer is yes. It's not a very, it's a very, very extremely rare occurrence.

BERMAN: David, let's go back underwater for a moment here. There were those reports early yesterday that perhaps they had some kind of imagery suggesting that they had spotted the fuselage underwater. They weren't sure yet. Now, we're 24 hours after the fact and still no confirmation of it.

Is that something that concerns you?

GALLO: Well, what concerns me is we're starting to get conflicting information and brings me right back to Flight 370. You know, the kinds of words they were using they saw a shadow. There's shadows involved with sonar, but normally, people in the biz don't talk that way. So, I don't know the credibility of that source.

I hope like Tony Fernandes is that's true. One thing they need to do is get a camera on the scene so they can have what we call ground troops. Sonar is a shadow -- an image made with sound and they need cameras to ground truth it.

BERMAN: And that's why they need the weather to clear. David Gallo, Les Abend, thanks so much for being with us. Really appreciate it.

Up next for us, CNN got rare access with a grieving family of the doomed flight's pilot. How the family is coping with all this uncertainty and grief. More of our continuing coverage of the clash of AirAsia flight 8501 right after this.

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BERMAN: Good morning, everyone. Welcome back to NEW DAY. I'm John Berman.

I want to get to the latest developments in the search for AirAsia Flight 8501.

Crews were able to get back out on the water, thanks to a break in the bad weather, but they had to retreat again as rough conditions returned. Nightfall arriving.

Nine bodies have now been recovered, 153 souls remain missing. The first victim has been positively identified. Two more bodies are being flown back to land at this moment. Right now, questions are emerging about what radar data shows about the flight's final moments, and a big change in altitude that could have led to a stall ultimately sending the plane plummeting into the Java Sea.

We're covering the story from every angle beginning with Paula Hancocks live from Borneo where the recovered bodies are being brought to be identified.

Good morning, Paula.

PAULA HANCOCKS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Hello, John.

Well, half a dozen bodies have been through this hospital in the past 24 hours. They're here to be treated and the preliminary identification of course are very important factor for those families.

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HANCOCKS (voice-over): Sirens in the night announce their arrival. Victims of flight 8501 on dry land and rushed into this hospital at Pangkalan Bun. The next morning, two more bodies arrive. Red Cross and hospital workers take them to a private wing to be prepared for the next stop, identification by distraught families.

The hospital director says he's here 24 hours a day to give the deceased the respect they deserve.

"Because they've been in the water some days", he tells me, "the bodies are swollen, but otherwise they're intact."

Patients look unsomberly, their own ailments forgotten in the face of such tragedy. Coffins are being delivered to give dignity to those who lost their lives so suddenly.

(on camera): This hospital has never had to deal with a tragedy on this scale before. They have about two dozen caskets at the moment that are being built as we speak. The hospital director says they will have 162, one for every victim of this crash.

(voice-over): Final player for each soul, leaders of six different religions take their turn. The victim's religion may not be known but customs must still be observed.

"Their time on earth is over", says this pastor, "so many of our prayers are for the family. We ask God to receive their bodies and give the families strength."

One step closer to their final resting place.

So few victims have been found and treated, so many more still wait to be pulled from their watery graves.

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HANCOCKS: Fears now are that that number could dwindle even more. Officials saying over the next few days the weather conditions will not be good, so all the search and rescue teams can do is sit, wait and hope for a break in the weather -- John.

BERMAN: It has to be so frustrating for them. Paula Hancocks for us on Borneo Island -- thanks so much.

Hundreds of friends and family members are clinging to hope this morning, refusing still to rule out the possibility that their loved ones could still be alive, including the family of the doomed flight's pilot.