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New Developments in Flight 8501 Search; Church Loses 46 Members on Flight 8501; Sully Sullenberger Talks Emergency Training; Answering Viewer Questions on Flight 8501; U.S. Ground Troops Acting as Advisors in Iraq

Aired January 02, 2015 - 13:30   ET

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

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN ANCHOR: Let's get more now on the new developments in the search for flight 8501. I'm joined by CNN aviation analyst, David Soucie. We have aviation analyst, Les Abend; and we have contributing editor to "Flying" magazine and CNN aviation analyst and former NTSB managing director, Peter Goelz.

I want to ask all of you, at this point, as we are days into this now.

Peter, starting with you.

What do you think, at this point, brought the plane down? Is there anything that you can say conclusively or rule out?

PETER GOELZ, CNN AVIATION ANALYST: You have some tantalizing hints. Clearly, the weather is where we are focused on. And the pilots' interaction with their aircraft in difficult weather. But beyond that, you really can't tell. The idea that the plane did a dramatic climb, radar notoriously is unreliable for recording that kind of behavior in a plane. So we just don't know. But we're going to find out.

KEILAR: Even that Mode-S radar that we're talking about, that "The Sydney Morning Herald" repeated?

GOELZ: If it was Mode-S, still, it's an extraordinary climb.

KEILAR: Speak to that a little bit, also, because the information -- this was information that was leaked that was given to "The Sydney Morning Herald"." It talks about ground speed, but we don't have the indicated air speed. The ground speed is the net of the wind, the weather and obviously the speed of the plane. So we don't have the indicated air speed, right?

LES ABEND, CNN AVIATION ANALYST: Yeah. And I agree with everything that Peter indicated. It's tantalizing clues that we have now but that's exactly correct. The Mode-S transponder gives more information but there's a time delay so we really don't know what that was -- what that ground speed was -- or that air speed on the radar was all about. There's a difference, like you indicated, between what the airplane senses and the ground speed. So it's all subject to possible discrepancies. The climb seems extraordinary. They could have gone through a thunderstorm that causes a lot of updrafts in addition to downdrafts. So weather does seem to be related but, once again, we can't rule out anything. And I think it's important to determine flight breakup, which is a possibility, or a breakup once there was an impact with the water.

KEILAR: What do you think, David?

DAVID SOUCIE, CNN AVIATION ANALYST: I think I agree with Les and Peter. I believe there is one thing that we can probably rule out, most likely, is the fact that the aircraft broke up so we don't know whether it was in the air or on impact, but I think we can rule out the fact that a successful ditching attempt had been made or even an unsuccessful ditching attempt because -- and that subsequently the aircraft sunk after the fact. We wouldn't be seeing this type of debris. We wouldn't be seeing bodies, especially those that are in seats. So I think that's the one thing that we may be able to rule out or that investigators are ruling out right now.

KEILAR: OK. And then let's take a look at how -- the unfortunate thing is that we have something to compare this to in the region as well, the flight of MH-370 in March. But let's look at how we think the Indonesian government is handling this.

What do you think, David?

SOUCIE: Well, I believe that they are doing an excellent job. As far as I can tell, they are way ahead of what I would have expected in this type of environment, particularly dealing with the weather that they have. But it's interesting to me, too, that the control of information has been very well-handled. We've had very little misinformation. There's been some here and there as far as the location from the initial -- or the loss of the aircraft but I think in general they are doing a very good job of not putting out any information that's -- that's erroneous or that could be used in ways that could lead for main and difficulty for the families.

KEILAR: Are you seeing that, Les?

ABEND: Yeah. It seems to me that they are following the protocol of the accident investigation. I'm certain the way things are -- the information is being disseminated, that there's got to be a go-to involved with this and the various parties of the investigation, I think that this is being handled appropriately.

KEILAR: For the black box, Peter, do you think it should go to Indonesia? Well, I guess I mean the data from the black box. Who should be in charge of analyzing that?

GOELZ: Well, the Indonesians will be in charge of where it goes and they'll oversee the analysis. The French will obviously participate, as will the United States. The easiest way to do it would probably be to fly it to Australia. It's within a day's flight. Canberra has a great flight laboratory. If need be, it could go to France. I would think it would go to Australia because they want to get the data downloaded as soon as possible under Indonesian supervision.

KEILAR: Peter Goelz, thank you so much.

David Soucie, appreciate you being with us.

Les Abend, thank you.

I think, Les, you're going to be leaving us for a moment, but we have our other experts staying with us. We'll be answering viewer questions in just a few minutes.

And, among the passengers on that AirAsia flight, 46 members a single church. We'll hear from the church's pastor, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

KEILAR: For some, the loss of AirAsia flight 8501 is a tragedy within a tragedy. Among those grieving the apparent deaths of 162 passengers and crew is one church congregation in particular. 46 members of that church were on the plane. So as searchers continue to find bodies, their loved ones wait and pray for a miracle.

Here's CNN's Gary Tuchman.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

GARY TUCHMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): They are people who have something in common, they belong to the same Protestant denomination. As they come into a church sanctuary used by the police in Surabaya, Indonesia, they arrive with something else in common, they are all people who lost loved ones aboard AirAsia flight 8501.

(SINGING)

TUCHMAN: The heartbroken people here are members of the Charismatic Mawar Sharon Church with about 4500 members across Indonesia. Sadly, many of them packed the AirAsia flight to celebrate the New Year in Singapore.

Lianggono Tejo Bunarto is the church pastor.

(on camera): 46 people from this church were on the plane. That's almost one-third of the total people on the plane.

LIANGGONO TEJO BUNARTO, PASTOR, CHARISMATIC MAWAR SHARON CHURCH: We put our trust in God's hand.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: (SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE)

TUCHMAN (voice-over): The 46 members of the church were not all traveling together. It was a coincidence that so many of them ended up on this flight.

BUNARTO: Some things that happen in our lives, sometimes we just don't understand what cause it. And in that way, we just put our trust, everything, completely in him. Because it's going to bring everything is the best for our life.

TUCHMAN: None of the bodies of the 46 members of the church have been recovered yet. The pastor telling me that, until they are accounted for, they are in a place between life and death.

Church members preferred not to talk on camera. But sometimes you don't need to hear words because, when you look at their faces, you understand how they feel.

Gary Tuchman, CNN, Surabaya, Indonesia.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

KEILAR: Coming up, our panel of experts will answer your questions about the crash of AirAsia flight 8501.

Plus, Captain Sully Sullenberger, who landed a plane on the Hudson River, talks about the training that pilots get or don't get to handle in-air emergencies.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

KEILAR: Among the theories being proposed in the crash of AirAsia flight 8501 is that the jet stalled in flight. Experts say the plane could have been flying too slow or climbing too steeply in the bad weather. In that last critical period, the pilot would have had just seconds to react.

I spoke with Captain Sully Sullenberger, who landed his crippled jet on the Hudson five years ago, in what has become known as the Miracle on the Hudson. I asked him what a pilot should do if a plane loses power or stalls.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

CHESLEY "SULLY" SULLENBERGER, FORMER PILOT: First, you maintain control of the airplane and you learn to find out what you can trust and what you can't. If you have visual references, if it's daylight, if it's clear of clouds, you use the natural horizon. In fact, you might not know that most airline pilots have never stalled an airliner, certainly not intentionally. And our flight simulators currently are not programmed to be able to practice a full stall of an airliner in the flight simulator. I've had a chance to go to the Airbus factory and under controlled conditions actually stalled the airplane, something that few airline pilots have had a chance to do. But an inadvertent stall at a high altitude, you would have to respond very quickly. You'd have to correctly solve the problem you've never faced in reality before and get one chance to do it right.

(CROSSTALK)

SULLENBERGER: So that's why recent improvements in the safety rules have required that going forward we begin to practice doing that.

KEILAR: That makes total sense. I'm imagining, when you went through that in France, it was probably clear skies, very unusual circumstances that you had the chance to do that.

SULLENBERGER: Yes.

KEILAR: But you're in clear skies. What did it feel like? And what did you have to do to regain control?

SULLENBERGER: Well, again, it was in clear skies with flight instrumentation more than most airplanes have with flight engineers monitoring your progress as well as a test pilot in the other pilot seat. But it really was not a violent event at all. There was some shaking, some vibration as to turbulence of the air flow over the wings began to occur as the air flow is being disrupted as the angle of the -- against the wings was too great and then you could feel it settling as you begin to lose lift and then you would quickly and responsibly begin lowering the nose and increasing thrust to recover. But like I said, a sudden unexpected stall in cloud in an unusual altitude would be a very different occurrence and much more challenging and if it was not correctly handled very quickly, it could lead to loss of control of the airplane.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

KEILAR: Captain Sully Sullenberger there on the need for quick and decisive action in the event of a stall. You have to fix a problem you've never experienced and you have one chance to do it. You can see how difficult that would be.

I want to get to some of the questions that we're getting from viewers now. A lot of you are asking really good questions about this crash and this investigation.

I want our panel members to answer those questions for you. We have CNN aviation analyst, David Soucie; Meteorologist Karen MaGinnis; and we have CNN aviation analyst and former NTSB managing director, Peter Goelz.

David, I want to start with you.

Warren Friedman is asking, if communication is the last thing a pilot would do, because it is -- aviate, navigate, communicate, why not just have a mayday button they could push to communicate danger?

SOUCIE: Well, there actually is one of those buttons. Most aircraft have an ADSB-type thing or it's not one button but you can squawk a specific code on the Mode-S trans responder. If you're in the mountains and driving your car and on the way to meet the family and you're sliding because you have come over the hill and it's all ice and you lose control of the car, you look like you're going to go off the edge, you're sliding down the hill, it wouldn't be something that anyone could help you with but you so would the instinctive thing to do to pick up the cell phone and call somebody and say, hey, I'm about to go off the road here, maybe you should call a tow truck for me? I know that's a way oversimplification of what went on here but that gives you a glimpse into the mind of what might be going through a pilot at that time. And if they can't help me, what am I supposed to do, I need to recover from this stall ordeal with the aircraft itself. That gives you a little insight into what is going on with the cockpit.

KEILAR: You deal with the problem at hand. That makes sense. Karen, we have a weather question for you. This comes from Steven.

He wants to know, are thunderstorm updrafts strong enough to lift a heavy plane like AirAsia upwards several thousand feet? And we've learned from the Mode-S data that was provided by "The Sydney Morning Herald" that that's what it appears to have done. Is this weather lifting the plane or would this be the pilot lifting the plane?

KAREN MAGINNIS, AMS METEOROLOGIST: Well, if you remember, the pilot did request a deviation from 32,000 feet to 38,000 feet. But let's discuss the dynamics of what they may have encountered here. This is monsoon season. We have these thunderstorm clusters, perhaps a pilot was looking to get into some calmer air, although the tops of the thunderstorms were running 50 to 53,000 feet. Could he go around? The best option. I have flown small, light aircraft. You get near a thunderstorm, you are going to be bounced around. Large aircraft, as we've heard time and again, are built to withstand all of this jostling. Passengers don't like it. So they try to minimize that. But we recently -- you may remember back near the beginning of the year, a United flight was going from Denver to Billings, Montana, and they hit such severe turbulence, it was as if the bottom of the plane was punched. There were flights -- there was a passenger who was not belted in, who was thrown around in the aircraft. So even though an aircraft can take it and there are maneuvers that pilots can take there's very violent and stressful events that take place on airplanes that can be very jolting. Is it always up? It could be up. Is it down? Well we know from delta aircraft in 1985 that was a microburst, a different sort of force on that aircraft.

KEILAR: I hit a down draft once, only once, and it was the scariest flying experience I ever had. It was like we fell out of the sky and then were caught and let me tell you, I was -- I just wasn't sure. I'm not going to lie.

Peter, this is a question for you. Williams Jones is asking about hail. Because we're talking about, in some of these, if the weather conditions were right, golf ball-size hail and, in the extreme case, maybe even baseball-size hail. Could hail break the windshield and cause explosive decompression?

GOELZ: It would not be able to break the windshield, highly unlikely. These are laminated, very strong, heated. It can shatter it and cause visibility problems. Hail has been known to knock the nose cone off planes to seriously damage the engines, but to puncture the windshield highly unlikely.

KEILAR: So the bigger concern would be the engine then, right? What are you looking at there with hail in the engine?

GOELZ: You could dump enough stuff into the engine to smother it and lose power in one or both engines. And that's happened in severe thunderstorms. And that's something that pilots, again, train for and are aware of.

KEILAR: Then you would be dealing with sort of a Miracle on the Hudson situation, but in terrible weather, terrible turbulence and without any sort of visual stimuli to navigate. Peter Goelz, thank you so much.

David Soucie, with us as well.

Karen MaGinnis, thank you for lending your expertise.

Still ahead hundreds of American troops now stationed at a base right in the middle of Iraq's heaviest fighting. We're going to take a closer look at the U.S.'s battle against ISIS next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

KEILAR: In other news now, Senate Democratic leader, Harry Reid, is resting in the hospital following an exercise accident in his Nevada home. His office said that a piece of exercise equipment broke causing him to fall and that the 75-year-old suffered broken ribs and facial fractures. His doctors do, though, expect a full recovery and the Senate will continue vaccine on Tuesday. Best of luck to him in his recovery.

2014 was a strong market year with the Dow Jones gaining 8 percent. Not carrying over into the first trading day of 2015. Right now, the Dow down about 54 points.

And the U.S. and the anti-ISIS coalition are continuing their air strikes against militant positions in Syria and Iraq. Hundreds of American ground troops, acting as advisors close to the fighting in Iraq's Anbar Province.

Joining me is CNN global affairs analyst, Bobby Ghosh, and also the managing editor of "Quartz."

Bobby, thanks for being with us.

Just, you know, this is sort of the -- this is the thing that Americans don't want, the thing that politicians won't commit to know, boots on the ground. They say no combat boots on the ground for U.S. forces. But, you know, is that really the case? And what would it really take to get U.S. ground forces involved?

BOBBY GHOSH, MANAGING EDITOR, QUARTZ & CNN GLOBAL AFFAIRS ANALYST: Well, it's always been very misleading. There are combat troops in Iraq. They are in the air. The American air force is running multiple bombing missions against is. And the American, there are 2,000 American soldiers on the ground. That number will increase to 3,000. Presumably, they are all wearing boots. They are supposedly there only in an advisory or training capacity but many of them are very close to the fighting especially in Anbar, west of Baghdad. There are 300 trainers in a small military base and that base is surrounded pretty much by is. It's taking a lot of fire and it gives you a sense of how dangerous it is there that when American advisors fly in and out of the base, they do it in the cover of darkness in helicopters. So they are constantly in harm's way. And one imagines that should -- heaven forbid -- but should ISIS come close to the base or actually be able to attack it directly with ISIS boots on the ground and presumably the American forces were there will have to respond directly not simply be guiding or assisting the Iraqi forces.

KEILAR: There are two fronts in this -- really it's one stretching Iraq to Syria, but what do you consider really the most important front, Iraq or Syria?

GHOSH: Well, the Iraqi front is the one Americans will pay much more attention to because of the history. We have with that country but also because there are American boots on the ground. In Syria, there are not directly any American forces on the ground, nor is there any discussion of having that. But ISIS is much bigger in Syria. It controls much greater territory. Strategically, it's a much more important place. ISIS' headquarters, their capital, is in Syria. But it's going to be sort of a long-term operation, step by step. And the first step the place where the U.S.-led coalition against ISIS, the place where they have the greatest hope or likelihood of success is Iraq because that's where you have a local government that is in support of the coalition, whereas, of course, in Syria, the local government of Bashar al Assad is independently fighting a separate civil war within its country. Much more complicated. Iraq, as dangerous as it is, is a simpler case.

KEILAR: I want to take the long view, the White House admitting that the fight against ISIS is going to take years. So we're here at the beginning of 2015. What does this year hold for us in this fight against ISIS?

GHOSH: Well, the crucial thing is can these anti-ISIS forces, the Iraqi forces and Western allies, can they begin to take territory back. The first half of 2014 was a story of how ISIS took a lot of territory in Iraq, up to about a third of the country, including some very important large cities. And towards the end of 2014, ISIS' advance stopped, essentially, and that's good news. But in 2015, the big question is can they be pushed back, can some of that territory be regained.

KEILAR: Yeah, that is a very big question, and I guess we'll be talking this time next year to see the answer to that.

Bobby Ghosh, CNN global affairs analyst, thank you so much.

That is it for me. I'll be back at 5:00 eastern on "The Situation Room".

For our international viewers, "Amanpour" is next.

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

ANNOUNCER: This is CNN breaking news.