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New Day Sunday

AirAsia Jet Went Missing Over Java Sea

Aired December 28, 2014 - 08:00   ET

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

ANNOUNCER: This is CNN breaking news.

SUZANNE MALVEAUX, CNN ANCHOR: Good morning, everyone. I'm Suzanne Malveaux, in for Christi Paul.

VICTOR BLACKWELL, CNN ANCHOR: I'm Victor Blackwell. Eight o'clock here on the East Coast.

And we continue our breaking news coverage of this search at sea. Now suspended, more than 12 hours after a passenger jet with 162 people on board went missing in Southeast Asia. Now, officials say large ships with powerful lights will continue to comb the waters off Indonesia for AirAsia 8501. But more intensive efforts have now paused until daybreak at least.

MALVEAUX: The Airbus A32200 left Indonesia at 5:30 Eastern last night, bound for Singapore. Indonesian officials say in about 45 minutes later, the captain asked to climb above 38,000 feet because of torrential weather. Minutes later, the plane disappeared from radar.

Now, airline officials say they lost contact at 7:24 Eastern, though Indonesian authorities say they actually monitored the jet for another half hour before losing contact.

Now, the flight was due to land at 8:30 Eastern last night. Now, families desperate as you can imagine for any sign of what might have happened to this plane and this is all unfolding. As you know, less than 10 months after Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 went missing en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, and despite a massive international search effort, there is still no trace of that aircraft or the 239 people on board.

Joining us on the phone, aviation correspondent Richard Quest.

And, Richard, we've been talking all morning about the potential, the possibility of what went wrong with this plane and this flight and we have heard from multiple sources that we know there were a number of weather conditions, very poor weather conditions that might have had a real impact on this plane.

RICHARD QUEST, CNN AVIATION CORREPONDENT (via telephone): Yes. Good morning, Suzanne.

Obviously, you start the investigation into this sort of incident looking at where the -- what is the last known event. Here we have the last known event being this request to climb to a higher altitude because of the weather. And you work backwards from that to work out what might have happened, the sort of issues that were involved.

There's all sorts of speculation out there at the moment, what speed was the plane was traveling at when they made that climb. There were some suggestions out there that it was slow. We don't know at this moment.

What we can say, of course, is that there is -- this is so far, the search has been suspended because it's nighttime. It's dangerous to search at night, particularly they're doing low over water flight searches trying to find the wreckage.

In the morning hours, that will continue, because if this plane came out of the air, at a high altitude, 36,000, 37,000, 38,000 feet, if this is what happened then there will be wreckage to be found.

BLACKWELL: Richard, a lot of people are waking up and turning on television to see another missing jet, especially in this part of the world. Could you compare and contrast for us the differences you see even so early in the search between the search for 370 and the search for this one?

QUEST: Absolutely. What we have at the moment is a situation that frankly is exactly the same as Malaysia 370 in those first couple of hours, where you have a missing plane, over water, and a search-and- rescue operation is under way.

At that point, the similarities come to an end, because unless there's any reason to believe that this plane, anything else has happened and we have no reason to believe that anything else different from an accidents has happened with this aircraft. In fullness of time, they will be able to locate some form of wreckage over the water.

Now, in Air France 470, that took several days before they were able to find the wreckage. But in that case, remember, you were talking about the South Atlantic Ocean. It was quite a long way offshore. It was going to take a lot longer.

Here we're talking about the Java Sea, still a considerable body of water, but they will be able to get boats on to the area, the last known location where the aircraft was spotted and able to get them there a lot quicker. So, I think that's -- in the first hours, Victor, similarity but that's where it epidemics.

MALVEAUX: And, Richard, can you tell us about the timeline? They're not going to resume until 6:00 in the morning local time. What do we make of what potentially we could learn in the next couple of hours even though it is nighttime?

QUEST: Right. We aren't going to learn that from the actual scene and it's dangerous to search at night. Low flights over water are tricky in the best of times. At night, you're not going to do it.

Certainly, boats remain on site. The ships will remain on site. They will have their search lights on but not a full scale search at night. In the hours ahead that will pick up.

What we're looking at elsewhere -- we're looking for any information on the sort of reporting that the aircraft will have done. We know it didn't have Inmarsat, but what was the reporting mechanism of the aircraft? What information was sent to Indonesia? What radar telemetry do they have either from the Indonesian, from the Singaporeans or any other neighboring countries?

This flight was over water, yes. It went over Indonesia out to the Java Sea and northwest, but highly traveled airspace. This is not the South Indian Ocean. There are planes crisscrossing these pieces of water every hour of every day. So, that there will be good or should be good radar telemetry of what was going on and the last known reporting and that's what they will be analyzing overnight.

BLACKWELL: You know, Richard, when we think back to 370, the last point of contact was quite some distant from the most credible search areas. Do you believe that it's credible thing to think that this plane if it indeed went down is not in the Java Sea, it's somewhere else in that neighborhood?

QUEST: At this point to suggest to speculate or to even contemplate, Victor, another 370 situation would be counter-intuitive to every plane incident I ever covered. The plane is normally, you know, I'm aware that on the night they find it in the Gulf of Thailand and they didn't.

But there's no reason to suspect at this point -- they have a really good idea where the last known part of the aircraft was. Now, the transponder was on and it's still transmitting ACARS information. They will be able to work out pretty quickly where the aircraft is likely to have come down and then start to find it from that.

Just to go to the next stage could it have veered off in a different direction, you'll have some form of electronic fingerprint of where the plane was.

MALVEAUX: Richard, is it possible that -- do we know whether or not the plane at this point would have run out of fuel. Is it possible it's still flying or very unlikely that that is a scenario, that it has dropped?

QUEST: First of all, it wouldn't have had that much fuel or enough fuel to get from Indonesia up to Singapore and an alternative and enough fuel to get back again. But certainly it would have been fuel exhausted many hours by now. And the issue, I mean could it of a run out of fuel during the flight, highly unlikely.

What we're looking for here is the pilot giving some sort of warning, some sort of mayday, some sort of pan-pan, and what we have is a pilot asking for higher altitude because of bad weather. And that's where the starting point has to be in putting the jigsaw puzzle together on what might have happened to that plane.

BLACKWELL: All right. Richard Quest, CNN aviation correspondent. Richard, thank you so much. We'll be speaking with you throughout morning.

One hundred sixty-two people, again. We have to remember at the center of this, there are 162 families who are waiting for some word on their loved ones, 155 who were passengers, seven crew members here. They are from six different nations, 155 from Indonesia, three from South Korea, one each from Malaysia, Singapore, United Kingdom and one also from France.

Now we know that the one French national on board is the first officer of the plane. That means he was the co-pilot, French foreign ministry confirmed that and they have spoken to his family and made aware of the situation. French authorities are working in close collaboration with the Indonesian government to locate this plane.

I want to go now to Beijing and CNN's Will Ripley.

Because, Will, I'm reading your updates as well and you bring up an important point that Richard touched on for just a moment.

But this portion of the Java Sea is a popular shipping channel and I imagine that has pros and cons. The pros you have some civilian ships out there that could spot this or could join the search. The cons in search for wreckage, there might be so much debris there that there might be a lot of false positive, a lot of false items identified.

So, help us understand what this search area looks like.

WILL RIPLEY, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, certainly the way that this is going to work given it is a heavily traveled shipping area and these are shallow waters, the visual search will certainly by air will happen at first light as well as ships. They will be looking when the sun comes up visually on the surface for debris. They'll be using side scan sonar if they had that capability.

But what ships are doing right now, what the larger ships can do and will do is they will stop for the evening and they'll turn on their own big search lights. And those search lights will scan the water. Perhaps some and we don't know what's happening on those ships but presumably if they have large search lights, there will be people at all hours that are at least monitoring the surroundings as they would normally and if they spot anything, any debris, any survivors they would alert.

So, in that sense, do you have a lot more eye balls that are out there even in these evening hours and certainly than there were in the search for MH370 in the Southern Indian Ocean which took a long time for ships to get out to the search zone doing through from treacherous waters. And this is monsoon season and three storms converging on that area it's still sailable and flyable. There are flights going through that area every day at all hours of the day.

But the really big search, Victor, will happen in the morning and this is just going to have to be such an agonizing night for these families. Because until they have answers, one way or the other, they are clinging on to hope that perhaps -- perhaps their loved ones might be still alive. And they are waiting for that word, and they don't know and won't know until they get the answer about what happened to this plane -- an answer that we likely won't have for a while, at least, during the overnight hours into tomorrow morning here.

MALVEAUX: Will, I imagine this will be a different scenario than the MH370 situation just because we're dealing with a smaller area of sea, as opposed to the last time where you had a lot of those false reports about which is junk that they were finding from the sea and debris that didn't have anything to do with the plane.

The family members who are gathered there are isolated from others in the airport, certainly a lesson learned from the last go around. What kind of information are they getting? What are they telling them? What kind of resources do they have now to deal with this moment, with this very trying, very emotional time?

RIPLEY: Well, Suzanne, you make an excellent point it's important to keep them separate, unlike what was happening at the airport in Kuala Lumpur, where I remember certain family members wailing because they felt they weren't getting information,. They felt the airline wasn't communicating directly with them.

And so, they came out pleading for help from the media, in tears. They were swarmed. It became an emotional situation. The energy from the press and victims' families kept feeding off of each other. It was a very, very difficult and damaging situation. It was an awful thing to see when that happened.

What we're hearing in Indonesia nothing like that. There's a room set up in Surabaya for these families to gather. They have the airport is, of course, giving them with all the provisions they need to stay there as long as they need, food, water, that sort of thing. There are experts on hand, crisis counselors and more, I can guarantee being deployed.

We know Asia -- AirAsia CEO on his way as well, if he hasn't arrived all already. He'll be communicating directly with families. You can bet he'll be meeting with them personally.

So, it seems as if the approach is transparency. They don't know the answers yet, they don't know what's happened to this plane. But they will deliver that information to the families first as they learn it, so the families don't have to learn about it on the news.

MALVEAUX: Yes, that is such an important point because we had seen just how the emotional roller coaster that so many of those passengers went through the last time and clearly a lot of tension with the airline and a lot of misinformation in the weeks and months that played out there. Thank you so much. We appreciate your time.

We want to tell our audience to bring you up to speed there, that we've been following the breaking news from the early, early morning. It's 8:14 local time in the evening in Indonesia and that's where Surabaya in Indonesia, the airport there where people are waiting to find out what has happened to this missing flight AirAsia Flight 8501. It was just supposed to be a couple of hours leaving Surabaya going to Singapore. Forty-five minutes into that flight is when they lost contact. A

pilot did communicate asking to divert the route because of severe weather and then communication was lost. We have been following the story ever since to find out as much as we can about the fate of that plane and the passenger and crew on board. We're going to have much more information after a quick break.

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BLACKWELL: The breaking news coverage this morning, nighttime search at sea now suspended almost 13 hours after a passenger jet with 162 people on board went missing in Southeast Asia.

MALVEAUX: Officials say large ships now with powerful lights are going to continue to comb the waters off of Indonesia for AirAsia 8501. But more intensive efforts -- well, they have been paused until daybreak.

BLACKWELL: We just got an update about the U.S. resources potentially that will be involved and a Pentagon spokesman says that right now Pacific Command does not have any assets supporting the search for this AirAsia flight. That could change. But that just came in just a couple of minutes ago that no U.S. assets are involved in the Pacific Command at least in the search for this flight.

Now, let's talk about the flight. It's an Airbus A32200. That's the jet that left Indonesia at 5:30 Eastern last night on what was slated as a three-hour flight to Singapore, pretty routine. But airline officials say they lost contact with the jet at 7:24 last night.

MALVEAUX: Heavy storms have been reported in the area, multiple storms. About 45 minutes into the flight, Indonesian officials say the pilot requested permission to change altitude to go higher because of the weather to try to avoid it.

We're joined by Peter Goelz. He's the CNN aviation analyst and former managing director of National Transportation Safety Board.

And, Peter, we know now that the search has been halted except for, as we have mentioned, some of these ships that were already in the area, they have stopped, they have those large bright lights, might be able to see something while they are there. But is it your concern, are you worried that we might be losing some

valuable time in locating this plane and potentially those passengers on board?

PETER GOELZ, CNN AVIATION ANALYST: Well, Suzanne, every hour does count. But it's foolishness to have any kind of air assets up after dark.

I think this will give the searchers also some time as Richard Quest pointed out to really look at the radar tracks and to download any ACARS, this is the automatic information that the plane might have been transmitting to get a better fix on where the plane was last reported to be so that the search can be concentrated. Unlike Malaysia Flight 370, this is a heavily trafficked route both on

sea and on the air. I'm pretty confident we'll start to see something once the light of day comes tomorrow.

BLACKWELL: Yes, I would like to pull that grid, actually, because you talked about spending some time with the radar and the technology determined where this plane was but also a visual search. Which do you think in this case, compared to MH370 which came down to Inmarsat and data, do you think that this will be a visual search that will be probably what will lead to the wreckage if this plane indeed went down in the Java Sea or to the specific search area because of the data that's collected overnight?

GOELZ: I think we're going to have better data. You know, we simply didn't have any data on Malaysia Flight 370. Once they turned of the ACARS, once the ACARS was turned off, once the transponder was turned off, the plane went dark and it was very difficult to track and a lot of it was superposition.

In this case, there's no indication so far that there was any issues such as those. So, I think -- I think we'll be driven by the data. It will point us in a direction.

But still, the ocean is awfully big. I've searched for things there. It will take a little time. But I think we should have the data to narrow this search down and get some results within the next day or so.

MALVEAUX: Peter, we know the pilot actually asked to change course to travel due west and then throws increase the altitude because of the bad weather but there wasn't a distress signal from the plane. What does that tell you?

GOELZ: Well, I mean, you know, pilots are trained to navigate and to aviate. They want to avoid any kind of stress to their passengers. If they see bad weather in front of them they want to bypass it. It is a little mysterious that there was no may day or no as Richard pointed out no pan-pan, which is a call of something less than mayday.

But pilots are loathed to report maydays or emergencies. They just don't like to do it. And they might have had their hands filled with some sort of aviation issue that they just didn't have time to communicate.

BLACKWELL: All right. Our aviation analyst, Peter Goelz -- Peter, we want to stick around. We obviously have more questions as we try to figure out what happened here.

But let's go now to CNN's Rosa Flores. She's monitoring the response to this missing flight on social media.

And in many cases, this is how we're hearing from the officials. We're hearing from officials in Malaysia. We're hearing from the CEO of AirAsia.

Online, what are we hearing? ROSA FLORES, CNN CORRESPONDENT: You know, Victor, this has turned

into a global conversation with people from every corner of the world sending their thoughts and prayers to the family members of those 162.

Now with certain hashtags also trending, there's QZ8501 and #AirAsia also trending. But you're absolutely right. This also an avenue for those officials to communicate with the families and with the friends of those passengers and crew.

Let me share one with you. This is from AirAsia CEO Tony Fernandes. He says, and I'm going to quote here, "I as your group CEO will be there through these hard times. We will go through this terrible ordeal together, and I will try to see as many of you."

Now, it's also chilling because if you look closely at your screen, you'll also see AirAsia logo is gray. So, it's gone from red to gray. A chilling move, of course, because all of these people are missing right now. This airliner is missing. And so, that's just another touch of what this airline is doing.

Now, we all remember MH370 covering it extensively. Malaysia Airlines having their own tragedy and mystery, they are also going to Twitter to send a message. Take a look at this. Malaysia Airlines tweeting, quote, "Our thoughts and prayers are with all family and friends on those on board QZ8501."

Malaysia's transport minister tweeting, saying, "We will support Indo counterparts as they take lead in this crisis under ICAO," which is the International Civil Aviation Organization, "protocol."

The ICAO sending thoughts and prayers through social media.

So, Suzanne and Victor, it's really become this global conversation with a lot of people remembering MH370 and a lot of people questioning why again.

MALVEAUX: And, Rosa, one of the things they are doing different than the Malaysian flight they do seem to be communicating quite a bit. I mean, this is a big difference than what we saw before. We saw it at the airport, that they have isolated these family members, that they were at least trying to give them whatever information they have.

Does this look like a lesson learned, if you will, from the experience with the Malaysian flight that we see so much discussion on social media? We're seeing these pictures now of people, they have been on their cell phones, they have been taking notes, they have been looking at the manifest. It's a very, very difficult time for them and I imagine too that they have turned to social media as well.

FLORES: Yes. You're absolutely right. It has turned into this conversation with officials sending their message, their thoughts to the passengers.

Like you mentioned, during MH370, that was one of the big frustrations, the communication gap, and right now, we are seeing a lot of traffic from different officials, from Indonesia, from Malaysia that are taking to Twitter. They are taking to Facebook as well and updating people as to what they are actually doing within the power that they can and a lot of the times this early on, Suzanne and Victor, it simply thoughts and prayers.

BLACKWELL: All right. Rosa Flores watching the social media angle for us.

We have learned that there was one person from the U.K. who was on board and we're now getting confirmation from the United Kingdom Foreign and Commonwealth Office. They release this statement. They are aware of the incident with AirAsia Flight QZ8501. "Our thoughts are with the family and passengers as they await for news." They have been informed and informed the family of that one person who was on board.

Breaking news coverage will continue in just a moment.

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