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New Day

AirAsia Pilot's Family Speaks; The AirAsia Search Continues; Questions Remain About the AirAsia Crash

Aired January 01, 2015 - 08:30   ET

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

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: 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.

CNN's Gary Tuchman got rare access to the pilot's family. He joins us now live from Surabaya with their story. Hello, Gary.

GARY TUCHMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Hello, John.

One hundred and fifty-three people are still missing, one of them is the captain of the AirAsia plane. So just who is this man? We talked to the people who know them best - know him best. We talked to people who love him very much. We talked to his wife, his parents, and his children.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

TUCHMAN (voice-over): This is what it looks like today in the home of the captain of AirAsia Flight 8501. This is Captain Iriyanto's 24- year-old daughter Angela and wife Widiya, his seven-year-old son, Arja (ph). This is his father. This, his mother. And a house full of family and friends. A house so full that more people are outside in front of the home, as well as out in the street. This is a liat (ph), the Indonesian name for the traditional visit made when there is a death in the family. But Angela still talks in the present tense about a father she adores.

ANGELA (through translator): He is kind, wise, and humorous. He's easygoing. He's intelligent. He never raises his voice. He's never angry. I'm very proud of him.

TUCHMAN: Family and friends occasionally glance at the TV that stays on with nonstop coverage of the AirAsia crash. Pictures of Iriyanto are all over the home, a wedding photo, a picture when he was an air force pilot. He went from the air force to one of Indonesia's airlines for 13 years and then moved on to AirAsia six years ago. One of Iriyanto's friends paying his respects. He's a pilot for another airline.

TUCHMAN (on camera): What kind of pilot was your friend?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through translator): He is a very responsible pilot. We used to be in the air force together. He's very loyal. He's very kind. In his work environment, he's very kind to his co-pilot, his cabin crew, his ground crew and all the people who fly with him.

TUCHMAN (voice-over): Model planes of jets Iriyanto flew are part of the decoration of the house. His wife says the outpouring of support at their home is invaluable right now.

RR. WIDIYA SUKATI PUTRI (through translator): I'm happy so many people are here. It gives support to me and my family.

TUCHMAN: Like so many families of AirAsia victims, there was significant hope of survival among members of this family, when the wreckage was still missing, but Iriyanto's daughter doesn't want to abandon all hope, at least until her father's body is found.

ANGELA: Of course I still expect that he's alive, but at the same time I have to accept the reality.

TUCHMAN: And that's why many of these same family and friends will be back here tomorrow and for days after, offering their support and their love.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

TUCHMAN: In addition to this being horribly difficult, it's also a very personal time, so we very much appreciate the family letting us in the home to tell the story.

You know, I mentioned that his name is Captain Iriyanto. Many people in Indonesia only have one name. They don't have a last name. So that is his whole name, Iriyanto. And he has a lot of people, family and friends, who love him very much.

John, back to you.

BERMAN: Gary, so many people around the world thinking of the captain and his family. Thanks so much for that report.

For more now let's bring in CNN aviation analyst and PBS science correspondent Miles O'Brien. Also joining us, CNN safety analyst and former FAA safety inspector David Soucie.

And, David, we watched Paula Hancocks report just moments ago talking about the recovery effort of these bodies, from taking them out of the water, bring them to Borneo Island. One of the things she noted was that these bodies are being recovered intact. Now this is a detail that is difficult to discuss, gruesome in some ways, but, again, it does give us some information about the investigation itself. If these bodies are intact, what does it tell you?

DAVID SOUCIE, CNN SAFETY ANALYST: John, I've done several of these types of accidents where the aircraft broke up in flight or had a rapid deceleration and dead stall like this. The challenge with me is that this mosaic of riddles that we're going through right now still has so many unanswered questions, so it's difficult to have conclusions. However, the fact that the bodies were completely intact tells me that there was no dramatic event as far as an aircraft crashing into the water, because every single one of these that I've investigated, that's not the case. So, again, we're trying to put the details together. To take one out of this mosaic and make sense of it is difficult to do, but it just - it -- right now it just doesn't - it doesn't make any sense to me.

BERMAN: But it does indicate it didn't break up in the air?

SOUCIE: That - it does to me, yes, yes.

BERMAN: Also in the case that in all likelihood it did not probably hit the water that hard.

SOUCIE: Right, because it doesn't take much at that point if you're in a dead stall and you have no forward air speed -

BERMAN: Right.

SOUCIE: To ditch the aircraft takes a lot of air speed. I mean you can't just - you can't just drop it in.

BERMAN: And the fact they haven't recovered more bodies at this point, there could still be many people wearing seat belts in the fuselage, correct?

SOUCIE: Absolutely. That's typically what would happen in this case, especially if it was landed in ditching arrangement (ph).

BERMAN: All right. Miles, I want to go back to you now to help us try to understand, once again, some of the latest reporting we're getting out of the "Sydney Morning Herald" (ph) suggesting that the flight, 8501, was climbing at a very, very steep rate in those last few moments, climbing very slowly as well. This perhaps due to the weather. We had some images here to show the weather that was in the area at the time I think. Very, very, very stormy conditions. You can just see right there, that was the weather that these pilots and that plane was facing. Explain to us simply, as you do so well, what this means.

MILES O'BRIEN, CNN AVIATION ANALYST: Well, if you think about a thunderstorm as kind of a, you know, a heat engine and it's basically - it's a cycle of, you know, moisture that is condensing, and hot air, which is rising. It kind of goes in that circle. And depending on where you are in relation to the storm, and in this case assume for a moment that this aircraft was outside the actual cell. Most pilots would not fly into a cell knowingly. That would not be prudent. But in the proximity of it, there's all kinds of things that can happen. That energy is going up. And so what, you know, you have to remember, when we talk about speed, the key speed is the speed at which the air molecules are passing over the wing, not the ground speed, and that could be two different things because if you're flying into a head wind, that can provide a lot of that - you know, the speed of the molecules.

So imagine for a moment you've got the air molecules passing over at a couple hundred miles an hour and all of a sudden there's this up swell of warm air, which completely undermines that air speed. And it's not unlike what we call wind shear. It really is a wind shear event. It's something that we are more accustomed to hearing about close to landing when you get these dramatic changes in air speed suddenly can literally knock an airplane out of the air. And in this case, if you're riding one of these up swells associated with this giant storm, the computers on board might very quickly sort of give up the ghost, hand control over to the crew at a time when things are going wrong very quickly and you have a very narrow envelope of flight because you're up so high. The difference between stall speed and too fast is a very narrow band. And so you can imagine a scenario where they were moving around the thunderstorm but maybe got a little too close and one of these up swells came along and basically took the wind out from underneath the wings.

BERMAN: And, Miles, just looking at that map again, and that was a great explanation of how much red and how many storms were in the area, you know, do you think they were perhaps too ready to fly when the conditions were like that? Might it have been more prudent to keep some of those planes on the ground?

O'BRIEN: Well, you know, hindsight is 20/20 in this. I can tell you right now that, you know, there wouldn't be many airliners that would take off if they were worried about thunderstorms, you know, 100 or so miles ahead. Thunderstorms are very dynamic. They live and die. The real power of them can be over the course of only 20 minutes. So you can take off, see a line of thunderstorms. By the time you get to them in the airplane, they're gone or have dissipated and you can find your way through it.

The key is to be constantly making this decision as you're flying, using your onboard weather radar, talking to air traffic controllers, listening to the ride reports on flights that have gone ahead of you. But, in the end, using the most important instrument on board, this was daylight, the most important instrument that they had were their own eyes to look out the window and see what they saw. And it's still possible that they saw what seemed to be a clear shot and an updraft could have gotten them.

BERMAN: Just one more reason we need these flight data records, the cockpit voice recorder to find out what was going on and what they really did see.

Miles O'Brien, David Soucie, thanks so much for being with us.

About 38 minutes after the hour. As investigators try to piece together what brought down this plane, a lot of comparisons are being made to Air France Flight 447. Why did the AirAsia flight apparently climb in altitude after being told to wait? CNN's coverage of the crash of AirAsia Flight 8501 continues right after this.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BERMAN: Welcome back to NEW DAY.

The search for AirAsia Flight 8501 again called off because of weather and darkness. That was after improved conditions did give crews a brief window to resume their search on Thursday. This comes as new questions emerge about the final moments of the flight, specifically how the pilots handled rough weather after requesting an altitude change.

This crash is prompting a lot of comparisons to Air France Flight 447, which crashed into the Atlantic after a midair stall in 2009. Here to help us sort through these new developments, Dr. Alan Diehl, former accident investigator for the NTSB and author of "Air Safety Investigators."

Dr. Diehl, thanks so much for being with us.

Again, the Air France comparison is one we have heard from the very beginning, the midair stall. Does this make sense to you?

DR. ALAN DIEHL, FMR. ACCIDENT INVESTIGATOR FOR NTSB: Absolutely, but, of course, we're -- everything is very preliminary right now. And, of course you know, there's even a better accident, John, and that's the one that occurred last July over North Africa, the Air Algier accident. It wasn't an Airbus, but the aircraft entered a weather system, a thunderstorm if you will, told the controllers they're going to have to turn around and then, in that case, it broke up midair, unlike the Air France accident which literally fell in a deep stall, an aerodynamic stall from 38,000 feet and hit intact.

BERMAN: These were different planes. How did the aircrafts themselves differ in this between Air France 447 and 8501?

DIEHL: Well, the AirAsia 8501 is of course a smaller version of the Airbus, and we know the problem on the Air France 330 Airbus was also involved with a failure of the air speed sensing devices. They iced up at the high altitudes and caused erroneous indications in the cockpit.

As an aviation psychologist, we always look at what information the pilots had, and we don't know anything about that just yet. Clearly, the recorders are key. And the fact that two of the bodies at least two of the bodies were naked in this AirAsia crash suggests that there almost certainly had to be some kind of inflight breakup; at least those are the indications. The fact that some of the bodies are clothed suggests some passengers and the flight attendant was still within the fuselage within they died.

BERMAN: 8501, does the Airbus 320 even have the pilot tubes that froze in Air France flight 447?

DIEHL: Well, certainly they have pilot tubes. I understand it's a different manufacturer and these model pilot tubes, John, have not had a failure history like the ones that were on aboard Air France.

BERMAN: Again, this is just another reason why we need to get a hold of the flight data recorders to find out exactly what was going on at the controls when this flight went down.

There is this new report this morning, Dr. Diehl, about the possibility that the plane was flying at an impossibly steep incline and then flying at a speed that was, as they say, almost impossibly slow. What would cause that to take place? DIEHL: Well, Miles talked about what happens in a thunderstorm just a

minute ago. Clearly an updraft could make the aircraft climb -- uncontrolled climb. In other words, uncommanded by the pilots.

The fact that the air speed information that we have now says it was too slow also may be erroneous, because we don't know that that's air speed. It may well be a ground speed report, and Miles explained the difference earlier. So until we get those recorders and know what was really going on inside that cockpit, and inside the mind of the two pilots, we really -- this information is very preliminary, and it may not mean that the pilots did anything wrong. We've also heard people criticize the pilots for climbing without having permission from air traffic control. In a very strong updraft, they could have been literally sucked up into the higher altitudes without doing anything.

BERMAN: Dr. Diehl, last question. We now know that this debris that they have found, most of it was about 160 miles or well over 100 miles from the point of last known radar contact. Does that distance tell you anything? Initially we thought it was much, much closer.

DIEHL: Well, we all know about winds and currents, but when aircraft break up in thunderstorms, the it debris can be very widely scattered, even initially. And you know, John, that might be the problem with the voice recorders and -- the data recorder I should say -- they're in the tail section. If we had an inflight breakup, and the tails do come off sometimes in thunderstorms, that could be many miles away from the rest of the floating debris and the submerged debris. And, remember, on a submerged debris, this a former World War II war zone. This could be another relic from an earlier war.

BERMAN: All right, Dr. Alan Diehl, thanks for being with us. Really appreciate your insight this morning. Happy new year to you.

DIEHL: Thank you, John.

BERMAN: All right, investigators are carefully examining the debris that they have from the crash of AirAsia Flight 8501, but so many questions remain unanswered. We're going to discuss some of them when our continuing coverage continues right after this break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BERMAN: Welcome back to NEW DAY's continuing coverage of the crash of AirAsia Flight 8501. Some big questions remain about what sent that plane into the Java Sea. We're going to ask some of the questions right now.

Jeff Wise is a science writer and author of "Extreme Fear"; Les Abend is here with us, CNN aviation analyst and commercial pilot. Also contributing editor for "Flying Magazine".

Jeff, I want to start with you. You're sort of our resident skeptic on flight investigations here. What are the big questions or at least the one big burning question that you still have?

JEFF WISE, SCIENCE WRITER: Well, I mean, really, it's a fog of questions at this point. We have very little information and the information that we do have, we don't really know the provenance of it, so we don't know where some of these assertions are coming from.

Really, what I want to know right now is are they listening for the black box pingers? Are they pulling these towed pinger locators through the water near where the plane was last located? Because that's -- even though we don't have enough data from the debris field yet to probably do a comprehensive drift model to work backwards to the point of impact, most loss of control accidents wind up with the plane hitting the ground or the water within about 20 nautical miles of the lost point of last known location.

So they have enough, I think, to start towing for the pinger. The pingers, as we know well from the MH370 case, they only last for 30 days. So they should start listening now, even if the information is incomplete. Start listening for those pingers and try to really hone in on the black boxes. In a way, focusing too exclusively on the floating debris is a distraction. The real -- the brass ring they're trying to get are those black boxes like here, like here, this orange box is what it really is. That's what they need and I hope that they're looking for it. Now, we don't really have any information about that yet.

BERMAN: And, Les, what are the questions you have, particularly about those last moments of flight?

LES ABEND, CNN AVIATION ANALYST: Well, the questions that I have is once again a lot of conflicting data which is very typical of accident investigation. But what bothers me is that, if indeed this was a controlled situation, that at some point from 32,000 feet or 34 -- we don't know for sure -- that there was no call that went out. Even if there was a possibility of both engines flaming out, in other words, being inoperative because of encountering heavy turbulence, that airplane was still very controllable. That's the way the Airbus is designed. And no call got out at all to say, hey, as Captain Sullenberger had indicated, we're going in the Hudson. We're doing something. So that concerns me from the standpoint of did we have a breakup in flight maybe instead? Or do we have an uncontrollable airplane?

BERMAN: Jeff, this most recent report that the flight was climbing at a very, very steep incline, impossibly steep by some accounts, and also flying very, very slowly, does that make sense to you? And what questions does that raise for you?

WISE: Well, if the data is true, then it must be possible, because it must have happened, and one can imagine these intense updrafts, up to 100 miles per hour in these really large, intense thunderstorms, so you can imagine a case in which a plane is flying with a moderate air speed and yet gets sucked up into the air essentially.

ABEND: But, remember, it's important to distinguish between ground speed and actual air speed, and the air data from the air traffic control would have been ground speed.

WISE: Excellent point. So basically what you're seeing is not the speed through the air of the plane; what you're seeing is a projection onto the horizontal plane of that motion through the air. So we do have to realize that, for instance, if it's only going -- it might only read 50 knots but if it's going upwards, then you're only seeing that downward projection, so it's actually moving much faster. So it's not as impossible as --

BERMAN: And of course all of these answers will come when they find that flight data recorder. We've got a model of it right here, the flight data recorder, the cockpit voice recorder. They say they could have them in their hands within a week. Let's hope they get the answers that they're looking for.

Les Abend, Jeff Wise, great to have you here with us. Really appreciate it.

CNN's coverage of the crash of AirAsia Flight 8501 continues with "NEWSROOM" with Carol Costello right after a short break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)