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Families Await Recovery of Loved ones; Investigators Try to Find Out What Causes AirAsia Crash; Answering Viewer Questions on Flight 8501; Lake Michigan Salvage Operation Helps in AirAsia Crash; New Republican Congress Starts with Scandals

Aired December 31, 2014 - 13:30   ET

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

ANDREW STEVENS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Like I said, the weather not playing its part. So after the shocking news that the plane had indeed crashed into the sea, now this long and agonizing wait for the bodies to be retrieved. Only two have so far come back to here in Surabaya.

And what will happen now is they're taken to a special hospital where they are I.D.'d. Those first two arrived a few hours ago and still no official confirmation on the ids. So officials are being very, very cautious about making sure they have the right people. They've asked for dental records, for photos, for distinguishing marks and they've asked for something that could match up with DNA samples. That's the sort of steps they're taking at the moment. There's nothing really to be done for the families other than just wait. That's what they're doing at the moment.

In fact, they've just moved. This was the crisis center behind me up until about three or four hours ago. The families were relocated to a hotel close to the hospital where the bodies are now being taken. So that is now going to become the focal point. They are there. They just have to wait.

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN GUEST HOST: That's the new information center where they've been moved? And that is so that the families can move into this phase of identifying their loved ones?

STEVENS: Yeah, that's right. They're going to be closer to where their loved ones are being taken. They will be asked to verify if they can. But, remember, these are bodies which have been in the water for several days now. So it will be difficult, many experts say, to actually distinguish who they are. So that's why the DNA is needed. They're down there. They're still getting the same sort of support they were here, obviously. There are counselors there. There are lines of contact being set up to the search-and-rescue operators.

What we're hearing is the weather conditions -- the search was officially called off about two hours before darkness. And the conditions are likely to be very much the same today. We still have several hours before daylight. But there are very high winds there on the scene. There is heavy rain, which really cuts the visibility. And perhaps most important, there's big waves there. We were told up to 20-foot waves. So you can imagine the difficulties the search parties are going to have. Divers haven't been able to get into the water yet. There are vessels down there with sonar equipment. But at the moment, they still haven't located that fuselage. They think they may have. But they can't confirm it. So they're the sort of frustrations creeping in for the search parties at the moment. And the weather is likely to continue as it is for perhaps the next 48 hours.

KEILAR: Way too long for these families hoping for answers.

Andrew Stevens, thank you so much, from Surabaya for us.

As these families wait for word on their loved ones, investigators are hard at work trying to figure out what caused flight 8501 to crash.

CNN's Tom Foreman is looking at all the factors at play in this investigation.

One of the big focuses here is going to be the flight path, Tom.

TOM FOREMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Absolutely. They want to find out if anything unusual happened in that little bit less than an hour that the plane was flying. And then critically, what led to this plane disappearing from radar there and then showing up here in the red area where they found the debris? 60 to 120 miles is now the estimate of where this debris is from there. That's a big range. Even though a lot of wild currents are going on out here, what made that happen?

That's going to involve three levels of searching in the ocean. The first one, what we're hearing the most about right now is the surface of the water. All the debris they find on the surface of the water is important to the investigation, probably not the most important pieces, but in critical positions right now because they show where other things might be.

How is that? If you move down through the water column and you look at all the currents that are at work out there, the things Chad mentioned a while ago, you can reverse engineer from where you find things on the surface to get a reasonable estimate as to where that big portion of the fuselage is below the water, if in fact the plane came down intact. That could take a pretty cool while to do.

But that third layer of searching, not the surface, not the middle but the third layer is probably where they'll find the most critical evidence out there because if you think about it, that's really where you're going to find the heavy parts of the plane. And those are going to be the parts that really matter in all of this. You're going to be talking big parts of the wing, big parts of the tail, big, heavy things like the engine, each about 9,000 pounds, landing gear, the cockpit and the all-important data and voice recorders. It's to get to that third level of searching that they have to spend so much time right now on the first two layers, the top and middle layers. Because those are pointers that could lead them to the big part of the fuselage that everyone wants to find.

KEILAR: Thinking back to, for instance, TWA flight 800, back in 1996, crashed off of Long Island, it was pretty extraordinary how much of the wreckage investigators were able to recover. Is that the hope with this, that they'll be able to recover almost enough to essentially reconstruct this plane?

FOREMAN: That's exactly what they want to do. Take a look at what they found with TWA 800. They found about 95 percent of that plane. This was also in about 100 feet in the water. Say you have breaks in the storms and eventually they stop altogether. This search went on for months. Ten months, they found the final victim in the water. But they did find all of them and 95 percent of the plane. This matters because this is what will tell you whether there was a fire on the plane, whether there was scorching somewhere or an explosion of some sort, whether a wing or a tail tore off early, whether there was an electrical problem.

This is how you do it. They get all the pieces, they put them all together. But I will caution, this can be a long process. Even if they find all of this in a reasonable amount of time and have great success, remember, the TWA report, the final report on what happened on TWA 800 took four years to come out. So people may have initial answers early on. But final answers really could take quite a while -- Brianna?

KEILAR: Yeah. And very important to get to the very end of that. Such a painstaking process.

Tom Foreman. Thanks so much, Tom.

Coming up, we're going to get the latest on the controversy over House Majority Whip Steve Scalise's appearance before a white supremacist group back in 2002.

But first, our panel of experts is going to answer your questions about the crash of AirAsia flight 8501.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

KEILAR: The investigation into the crash of AirAsia flight 8501 will be a long, difficult process. The first priority is to recover the bodies of the victims. Then crews will focus on finding the flight voice recorder. Many of you are tweeting questions about the investigation using #8501qs.

We'll answer those questions now with our panel. We have CNN aviation analyst (sic), David Soucie, and we have Peter Goelz with us.

This one is for you, Peter.

Elson Willingston writes, "Why is it easier to find an iPhone than to find a plane? Do they not have more than one tracking device?" I think that's something a lot of -- you lose your iPhone and you find your device.

PETER GOELZ, CNN AVIATION ANALYST: That is a question that Andy Passtor earlier in the show was talking about. The aviation industry is dragging its feet on implementing real-time tracking of its aircraft. It's a complicated issue but not so complicated that it can't be addressed. I think we should focus on open ocean, transoceanic flights, and put in the devices and mandate that there's communication every minute, every 30 seconds. But that's the first step.

KEILAR: Five to 10 years, is that what we're hearing for implementation on something like that?

GOELZ: It's far too long. We should do it in a much more accelerated basis.

KEILAR: Yeah.

David, for you, Jay Mac tweets, "When a plane goes into a stall, like experts are theorizing in this case, does it lose all power, is that why we didn't hear any communication?"

DAVID SOUCIE, CNN SAFETY ANALYST: No, a stall has nothing to do with the electrical supply or anything of that manner. The stall is just simply a stall of the air that goes over the top of the wing which creates lift. So all the other systems should be functioning normally.

KEILAR: And the engines are working, right?

SOUCIE: That's correct.

KEILAR: So it's about really getting the air speed up, getting the plane pointed in a direction to get the air speed up so that you can get that lift back?

SOUCIE: Right. Because you're trying to get the air flow back over the wing, the top of the wing to be smooth rather than having a burble. That defeats the lift. The challenge here is if you're on power-on, a deep stall and you're in that situation and the air burble is over, you fall flat than allowing the air to get over the top.

KEILAR: Jessica Perry tweeting, Peter, "If a large plane were to crash on land or in shallow water, could the impact possibly register on a seismograph if one were near enough?"

GOELZ: It could. In fact, I think the Shanksville tragedy in 9/11, that that registered on certain seismographs. It could also -- if the explosion in midair, TWA was picked up by a satellite. So there were other instrumentation across the globe that if they're positioned right can pick up these tragedies.

KEILAR: That will register the force?

GOELZ: Yes.

KEILAR: And certainly, with the Shanksville one, horrible tragedy, but we're talking about a plane going 600 miles per hour into the ground.

GOELZ: That's right. In this case, unlikely it would have registered.

KEILAR: And then I have a question for you, which is, we talked yesterday about how, even in the case of finding some of the bodies, they tell us things, whether clothes are on. The first bodies that were found, it appeared did not have clothes, only undergarments. Now one of the other bodies recovered is that of a flight attendant in uniform. So what does that tell us?

GOELZ: Well, it all depends on how the plane broke up as it hit the water. The pieces are going to come apart. And it's not uncommon -- and I think David would agree -- that in the final moments of a crash that pieces of the aircraft can come undone. And it might be that the tail broke off right at the very end and some people in the back of the plane were ejected or it might simply have been the force of the impact on the water. We just don't know yet. It will be important to find out where that flight attendant was serving. What was her position, where was she sitting on the plane?

KEILAR: David, Cindy Lou has tweeted a question. She wants to know, "How rare is it to even find bodies in a crash like this?"

SOUCIE: It's not rare at all. It's part of the investigation. As Peter said, there's a lot of information you can get from those bodies. But, yeah, they're usually found. This scenario is not odd to me either, in that there's only been 10 bodies found. But it's been three or four days and it's been drifting. But the other thing, too, is, many times, like in Air France 447, many of the passengers are still strapped to their seats and went down with the aircraft.

KEILAR: But dozens were found floating. Right now, we're at seven, I believe, for this. So the search will continue and there are issues with weather right now.

Peter Goelz, thank you.

David Soucie, thank you so much for your expertise.

What challenges do recovery crews face as they're searching for the wreckage of AirAsia's Airbus 320? We'll get a taste from dive teams. We're exploring the wreckage of a World War II bomber in Lake Michigan.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

KEILAR: Back to our top story now, the recovery of flight 8501. A small amount of debris has been found. So far, though, none of the expected larger pieces of debris have been located. Crews now dealing with a depth of only around 100 feet. It's similar to what's found in Lake Michigan.

Our George Howell takes a look at a similar salvage operation there.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

GEORGE HOWELL, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): From up here, the waters look vast and the horizon seems endless. But for this team of salvagers and divers --

TARAS LYSSENKO, A&T RECOVERY: Airplanes look like airplanes. We're looking for an image of an airplane. HOWELL: In no way is this the search for a proverbial needle in a

haystack. The crew here knows roughly where to look. And after years of searching charts and records, they find themselves on the verge of a big find.

LYSSENKO: The worst the crash is, they put it back together.

HOWELL: The depth of Lake Michigan, not more than several hundred feet in this area. The team uses sonar to find the exact location. And within a matter of minutes --

LYSSENKO: Right there. Boom, right there. See it? Oh, yeah. Look at that.

HOWELL: -- they find what they're looking for.

LYSSENKO: Drop the buoy.

HOWELL: Drivers drop in and take us down below. They capture these stunning images of a World War II bomber that crashed into Lake Michigan nearly half a century ago.

LYSSENKO: The engine sank first, right away, the other part floated a little bit. The pieces are there but about 100 feet apart.

HOWELL: Back then, the Great Lakes served as a training ground for aircraft carriers and pilots learning to land on the short runways. This dive bomber crashed, though the pilot survived.

This salvage expert, Taras Lyssenko, hopes to raise money to raise the plane and put it on display in Chicago.

LYSSENKO: You show one of these things to a 6-year-old, the first time they see them, their eyes light up.

HOWELL: A successful mission, finding the submerged plane, but Lyssenko still hopes to recover the wreckage before locating and raising more planes from the World War II era, still sitting at the bottom of the Great Lakes. The one thing this team knows for certain, persistence and patient do eventually pay off.

George Howell, CNN, Chicago.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

KEILAR: Checking other news, a move today by Palestinian President Muhammad Abbas could deal another blow to Middle East peace efforts. The Palestinian leader signed a bid to join the international criminal court. The deal comes a day after the United Nations Security Council rejected a resolution calling for Palestinian statehood. This could set the stage for the Palestinian Authority to possibly pursue war crimes complaints against Israel.

An American air strike in Somalia killed one of the region's top terror leaders. The target was the head of intelligence and security for al Shabaab, a terror group with links to al Qaeda. His vehicle was hit by missiles fired from an unmanned drone. The strike comes a few days after another al Shabaab leader was captured by Somali troops.

It's been a strong year on Wall Street to say the least. Dow Jones Industrial Average up about 9 percent for the year. Let's look at how things are looking today. The last trading day of 2014. Checking the big board, up 12 points.

And next -- I struggle with my eyes lately. I think too much staring at my iPhone. Down 12 points.

Next, let's talk about this story. One of the House GOP leaders is trying to overcome a lot of questions today. What impact will Representative Steve Scalise's appearance before a white supremacist group have on Republicans as they take over the majority role in both houses of Congress? We'll talk about that.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

KEILAR: Republicans in Congress are lining up in support of Louisiana Congressman Steve Scalise. The House majority whip, the number-three in the House, is under fire for giving a speech to a white supremacist group 12 years ago. Scalise says he didn't know who the group was at the time and has since apologized. John Boehner backed Scalise making this statement, quote, "He made an error in judgment and it was wrong and inappropriate."

Here to talk about this, Jackie Kucinich, senior politics editor for "The Daily Beast"; and CNN digital correspondent, Chris Moody.

So with the Scalise controversy is one thing, but you have Michael Grimm, the re-elected Congressman from Staten Island, stepping down because he's admitted to a felony here. This isn't really a great start, right?

JACKIE KUCINICH, SENIOR POLITICS EDITOR, THE DAILY BEAST: This is not what they wanted to be talking about going into the new Congress. They wanted to talk about tax reform and Keystone and things they're going to do to make regular Americans' lives better. Instead, they are stuck with these scandals. It harkens back to the last Republican Congress before they lost the majority where there were these scandals and leadership had trouble dealing with them. Now Michael Grimm stepped down. Steve Scalise is holding steady. Nobody in Congress is calling for him to step down. It doesn't look good for him. He hasn't explained this away.

KEILAR: If he hasn't explained this away, what more does he have to explain, and is he safe? And I know these are a lot of questions.

(LAUGHTER)

If something else comes out, is he toast?

CHRIS MOODY, CNN SENIOR DIGITAL CORRESPONDENT: From what I understand from Team Boehner, or Boehner world, they are waiting to see if there's another shoe to drop. If not, he's probably safe. If there are other speeches that he's given or there's just another couple of weeks of media coverage of this with new information, that's a real trouble for Scalise. Without it, time will pass and he'll survive given enough time.

KUCINICH: It doesn't seem like it's the Trent level yet, when Trent Lott had to step down.

(CROSSTALK)

KUCINICH: It doesn't seem to raise to that level quite yet.

KEILAR: Something Steve Scalise said on Monday, he was talking about, hey, I would talk to anyone trying to make the point that this wasn't an endorsement of this point of view. He said, "I spoke to the League of Women Voters, a liberal group. I still went and spoke to them. I spoke to any group that called. And there were a lot of groups calling."

OK, so League of Women Voters, yes, not in line with Steve Scalise's politics. But I think, like, why is he saying this? Why is he even bringing up I went and spoke to the League of Women Voters. Isn't he kind of alienating other people too?

MOODY: It's a terrible comparison to make.

(LAUGHTER)

We've seen an evolution of statements. From day one, it was his staff saying it was a staffing error and then it evolved and I knew about it and shouldn't have done it. Which one is it? There will be more questions when he knew who the group was and if he himself chose to speak with them or sought them out.

There's also the story about his connection to David Duke's aide as well. This is bigger than just one talk.

KEILAR: And if he knew who the aide was and who the aide worked for, then --

(CROSSTALK)

MOODY: And his relationship to that aide.

KUCINICH: And he was backing him, saying, we were really good friends. Somewhere Steve Scalise is saying stop talking about me.

KEILAR: Exactly.

But this speaks to a bigger issue than Steve Scalise for Republicans. This speaks to the fact that Republicans now control Congress but they are looking toward 2016. They are trying to appeal to women, to minority voters. What does this do? How does this affect that?

KUCINICH: I think Michael Steele, former RNC chairman, said it best, "It's two steps forward, three steps back." And this takes them three steps back if not more steps back. They may be moon walking at this point. It undermines this narrative they have been trying to push that we're getting better and more diverse. Look at our upcoming stars. They are from a variety of different ethnic backgrounds. It really undermines the fact that this guy is in leadership. He's not just some random backbencher. That's problematic for them.

KEILAR: What about the -- explain this to maybe a lot of people who don't know who Steve Scalise is. Why is he someone Speaker Boehner would want to keep in his position and maybe also can we just be honest, maybe have done a favor for, right?

MOODY: Scalise has been a liaison between some in the caucus that Boehner has had severe trouble with in the past couple of years and leadership. Scalise is a guy that a lot of people can get behind. As whip, it's his job to have a strong relationship with members of the Republican conference and so he's a very important crucial part of that leadership team. If the people in that Congress lose faith in that person, it is real trouble for leadership.

KEILAR: And Republicans as well are trying to start off this new Congress unified. That's also playing into this, right, Jackie?

KUCINICH: Absolutely. They don't want to be talking about this. They are trying to make this more like a bump in the road rather than, you know, a pothole that makes one of the tires go flat. They are trying to put this behind them and move forward. And as Chris said, if there are other instances, it's going to be an even bigger problem.

KEILAR: Big problem for someone that's the number-three Republican in the House.

Jackie Kucinich, Chris Moody, thank you so much.

And that is it for me. I'll be back at 5:00 eastern on "The Situation Room." We'll be talking much more about our breaking news coverage of AirAsia flight 8501. The search currently suspended in terms of aerial searches but we'll be looking to see if weather conditions calm down. We'll have the latest for you.

For our international viewers, "Amanpour" is next.

For our viewers in North America, "NEWSROOM" with Ana Cabrera starts right now.