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THE LEAD WITH JAKE TAPPER

Bodies, Debris From AirAsia Plane Found; Sony Hack; Ships with Sonar Equipment Sent to Site

Aired December 30, 2014 - 16:00   ET

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


JAKE TAPPER, CNN ANCHOR: The hearts and hopes of friends and family now sinking as wreckage and bodies are pulled from the sea.

I'm Jake Tapper. This is THE LEAD.

The world lead, the worst all but confirmed as search teams spot remains from the missing AirAsia flight. What is the wreckage telling us about how this passenger jet may have gone down?

Families suffering unthinkable grief for the 162 victims now hoping for answers that eluded so many when Flight 370 vanished. We will hear their stories, parents, children, a husband to be and more all likely lost in this tragedy.

And in national news, President Obama threatened to cyber-attack North Korea over it as retaliation, but was the Sony picture hack really 100 percent the work of North Korea or could it have been a former Sony employee with a score to settle?

Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to THE LEAD. I'm Jake Tapper.

We're going to begin today with our world lead, the heartbreaking discovery of bodies and debris that all but confirmed that the absolute worst happen to AirAsia Flight 8501. The search for the plane of course continues, crews working through the night, though the effort may have turned from search and rescue into search and recovery.

Indonesian teams pulled three bodies, two women and one man, from the Java Sea. That's according to the head of that country's search-and- rescue agency, with whom I spoke earlier today. Spotters in a military plane also spied and collected pieces of debris floating in the water below just 60 miles from the flight's last known location.

Now, per AirAsia, all the search teams are focusing their efforts around that site in the Karimata Strait. Divers and ships with sonar combing the ocean floor hoping to find the main cabin of the plane.

Earlier today, the company's CEO, Tony Fernandes, confirmed that a mangled piece of floating steel discovered today was from AirAsia 8501.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TONY FERNANDES, CEO, AIRASIA GROUP: It's probably an airline CEO's worst nightmare. After 13 years of flying millions of people, it's the worst feeling that one could have.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

TAPPER: Fernandes said that his focus and his airline's resources will remain on recovering the plane and its passengers and with it hopefully some closure for anguished loved ones still waiting to find out for sure, for absolute certain, what happened to their family members.

Now, while the discovery of debris is no doubt a gut punch to anyone who had been holding out any hope that there may have been survivors, analysts can now use that information to start to piece together just what may have brought down this plane.

Let's bring in CNN aviation correspondent Rene Marsh.

Rene, what are people in Indonesia saying about what they found and how does it reshape the next steps in the search?

RENE MARSH, CNN AVIATION CORRESPONDENT: Well, Jake, no doubt today was a turning point. The investigation can now begin. A wealth of information will be pulled from the wreckage to answer the primary question, what brought down this plane?

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MARSH (voice-over): For the first time, we hear voices from the cockpit of AirAsia Flight 8501 as it takes off from Indonesia bound for Singapore Sunday morning. The airline confirms debris floating in the Java Sea is wreckage from the Airbus 320.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through translator): The part that we found corresponds with AirAsia's part number and the serial number of the lost plane.

MARSH: Pulled from the water, luggage and what appeared to be an emergency slide and bodies, some of the remains stripped of clothing.

CAPT. WILLIAM SAVAGE, PILOT: It suggests that the airplane hit the water intact and the force of the impact tore the clothing off the bodies.

MARSH: Aircraft and ships converging on the area, including the U.S. Navy's Sampson and Fort Worth. Both ships have helicopters that can aid in recovering wreckage.

SAVAGE: The crumpling of the metal vs. shearing for tearing of the metal will tell you whether the plane broke up in flight or was in one piece as it hit the water.

MARSH: The water is 80-to-100-feet deep, making recovery more manageable, but it still could take weeks, even months before debris and bodies are recovered.

This is what divers dealt with after TWA 800 went down, a tangled debris field. Now one of the key pieces of wreckage they are looking for, the flight recorders.

SAVAGE: It will have the last 30 minutes of conversation between the crew and any transmissions to air traffic control. And the other black box will give you almost a moment-by-moment readout of what systems were operating properly.

MARSH: After the black boxes are found and recovered, they will be taken to a lab like this facility CNN visited earlier this year, where it will be disassembled and analyzed for clues.

DR. JOE KOLLY, NATIONAL TRANSPORTATION SAFETY BOARD: We have a so- called sound library in which we are able to determine the particular signature of a sound, say, like an explosion.

MARSH: The digital recordings could reveal what was said in the cockpit and if there was a mechanical failure or pilot error.

But answers won't come quickly. Often, it takes a year to arrive at a final conclusion as to what caused the fatal crash.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

MARSH: While we do not know the cause of the crash at this point, it is worth noting, the FAA rates the civil aviation authority in Indonesia poorly.

That's the entity that manages the airspace. The FAA says Indonesia's civil aviation authority does not provide oversight of its air carrier operators. That oversight is put forth by the aviation arm of the United Nations. They essentially set the global standards, FAA saying that this authority not up to snuff with that.

You know, a lot of people asking the question, why did this plane take off in the first place with these massive storms? We know the FAA says, you must stay at least 20 miles away from a major thunderstorm like that.

TAPPER: Rene, the black boxes that you were just talking about in your spot, assuming that they are recovered, what is the success rate in terms of getting information from them?

MARSH: Well, it's pretty good.

The NTSB, for example, they could not think of a time in which they were not able to get some information or all of the information off of the black boxes. When you think about it, they are located in the back of the plane, in the tale, strategically. Usually, in your typical crash, you have the nose going first so it's protected back there.

It's also -- all of the information is embedded on the memory chips, but those memory chips are insulated, several layers that protect it from extreme heat and extreme pressure. So chances are, we will get some good information, Jake.

TAPPER: Hopefully, they will find them soon. Rene Marsh, thank you so much.

I want to go right now to Surabaya, where we have CNN's Andrew Stevens.

Andrew, thank you very much for joining us. How did the families react when they first saw and heard that not just debris, but bodies were being pulled from the water?

ANDREW STEVENS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Jake, I was talking to a man who was in with the families of the passengers and he says it was hysterical outbursts, screaming, crying, people fainted as the news came through.

But it was compounded. Their pain and their suffering was compounded by the fact that they were watching a live news conference in Jakarta and as the head of the search-and-rescue operation in Indonesia said he thought there was a 95 percent chance that the debris that had been spotted in the previous hours was, in fact, linked to AirAsia 8501, as he was saying that, local television were actually broadcasting, would you believe, pictures of bodies in the water.

And there were the families of those passengers sitting there watching this. So as the man said to me, it was just hysterical scenes in there. You cannot imagine. They are already suffering, the pain, the anguish, not knowing what has happened and then to see bodies, perhaps of their own loved ones in the water, it's just beyond comprehension almost.

It has been an extremely harrowing time. And, Jake, they have still got now to identify those bodies. They are going to be brought back here to Surabaya. They have set up a special police hospital. The families are being asked to bring in I.D. photos, samples which they may need to use for DNA matches, that sort of thing.

This is not over yet by a long, long way for the families.

TAPPER: Heartbreaking. Yesterday, some of the families were expressing frustration at the lack of information that they were getting from the airlines. Are they still having those frustrations?

STEVENS: Those frustrations were centering around the fact that there was no new information.

It was very difficult to pass on any news at all. And obviously the families were getting more frustrated by that. They were watching -- they were saying they were watching -- getting more information from television than they were from the local authorities.

But now the mood does seem to have changed somewhat. Listen to what one of the family members told us just a few hours ago.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

IMAM SAMPURNO, FAMILY MEMBER (through translator): I'm feeling confused. I have been waiting here since December 28. I was so nervous, but now I'm a bit relieved because now we know the aircraft has been found. We hope that our children will be saved by a miracle.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

STEVENS: So a little bit relieved. Just purely, they actually have an outcome, even though it is the worst possible outcome.

That man that was speaking there, that couple, they had a son who had his family on, a wife and two children. So what compounds this, Jake, is it is a holiday period here. It's quite a strong connection with Singapore. A lot of these people were going to Singapore to celebrate New Year's Eve. They were family groups. There was one group of seven we saw on the manifest. It's that sort of thing. There's a lot of big families who were on that plane when it went down.

TAPPER: That's right. Of the 162 on board, 18 were children. Andrew Stevens, live in Surabaya, Indonesia, thank you so much.

Well have much more on who these passengers were and whom they leave behind later in the show. But let's continue on.

While the aerial search mission continues, divers as well as ships equipped with sonar technology are headed to what appears to be the crash zone to help find larger pieces of the plane which could be somewhere near the bottom of the ocean.

CNN's Tom Foreman is live in the virtual room to show us how this ocean search will probably play out -- Tom.

TOM FOREMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Yes, Jake, really what we're talking about is three levels of searching going on here.

We know where the plane took off and we know where it was headed and we know where it disappeared. And now we know in these search areas where they found debris. We also know that particularly in these stormy conditions, that there are very strong currents out in here that have to be considered in terms of what they have done to the first layer of search, the surface layer.

Let me explain why that makes a big difference here, because if you're talking about the surface of the water in an area where you have a lot of wind blowing and a lot of currents at work, everything up here obviously can move around hour by hour by hour.

And the lightest material, the things they found so far can move the most. It serves a purpose because it helps point you below the water, but as soon as you move down in this column of water, that's when you start encountering all these different currents down here which can move anything that is suspended between that top, say, 80 to 100 feet above the floor, it can move things around in here.

They have to reverse-engineer where the currents were and what they did between that material they find on the top and what they really want to find, which is down on the bottom here, because down on the bottom is where the flight data recorders will likely be. It's where you would find the cockpit, where you would wiring. You're probably going to find significant parts of the fuselage down here, the wings, the tail, the engines, each about 9,000 pounds.

Those are the critical parts, Jake, and it's important to of course recover the bodies here for the families and for whatever evidence that also brings, but all these physical parts of the plane, they're at the bottom. That's the third layer of searching here, where you have to have side-scan sonar and robotics and divers and everything all coming together to dig up everything they can down there, Jake.

TAPPER: But, Tom, with all of these conditions, like the currents that you mentioned, how much can the search-and-rescue teams reasonably expect to find?

FOREMAN: I think reasonably they can expect to be very successful at this.

I want to remind you of something. This is about the same sort of conditions that we had with TWA 800, which crashed off Long Island in the 1990s. In that case, it was about 100 feet of water. The search went on for months, but after 10 months they had recovered every victim and they recovered 95 percent of the plane, Jake.

That was critical because, when you have all of that, you can put it all together and you can see where fractures occurred and what possibly went wrong and what went right, and how the plane actually came down. That's the evidence they need. They found it in TWA 800 with very similar circumstances.

In this case, if they are lucky and the clues point the right direction, they could have the same thing happen -- Jake.

TAPPER: All right, Tom Foreman, thank you so much.

Searching underwater to find victims and debris from Flight 8501, that is no easy task, but key pieces of wreckage could answer the question as to what really happened. And now divers are facing what could be their biggest challenges in the days ahead. That's coming up.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

TAPPER: Welcome back to THE LEAD. I'm Jake Tapper.

We're going to continue covering now our world lead now, that search crews have recovered some wreckage from AirAsia Flight 8501. They now face the daunting task of trying to find the bodies of those who were on board along with, of course, the all-important black box. And even though the waters in this part of the sea, the Java Sea, are relatively shallow, just up to 120 feet deep, the mission will not be easy.

Let's bring in our guests, Tim Taylor, a submersible specialist, the president of Tiburon Subsea Research. Along with CNN aviation analyst David Gallo.

Gentlemen, thanks for being with me.

David, let me start with you. The sun will rise in just under two hours in that part of the world. Now that they found three bodies and some debris, how will the search play out?

DAVID GALLO, CNN AVIATION ANALYST: Well, I'm guessing that they are going to go right back to that spot and shift the search, collapse the big search area, and focus on this area with shifts and planes to really identify this debris field. I'm sort of mystified by the fact that they seem to be only a few bodies. They didn't talk about many -- in Air France 447, there was the sea was strewn with debris from the plane. This doesn't sound the same to me. So, I'm anxious to find out what they see early this morning.

TAPPER: And, David, what could be the reason for that, if they only find three bodies and some debris?

GALLO: Jake, I don't know. You know, in the earlier segment, we heard absolutely correct that objects in the ocean will either drift depending on whether they are sticking up and acted on by air, or in the water, and pushed around by currents. You know, we'll learn a lot from those bodies and debris. I hate to talk about it that way.

But we'll just have to wait and see. I just don't understand why there would be so little in one spot and then seemingly easily isolated. It's not like suddenly we see the horizon and then there's a steady trail of debris from the aircraft heading over the horizon. It's very odd.

TAPPER: Tim, what do you think will be the biggest obstacles these search teams will face when the sun rises in a couple of hours?

TIM TAYLOR, SUBMERSIBLE SPECIALIST: The weather is always going to be the obstacle this time of year over there. There such moisture in the air all the time. It seems like working at night even be a better option for some of the operations because the weather seems to calm at night. So, definitely, that's going to slow them down. It's not possible. It's closer to shore. It's not like it's hundreds of miles offshore. So, they have some ability to dodge that weather.

But weather is going to be the major issue in any type of expedition or -- to expedite this in any way possible, it's going to be a battle against weather.

TAPPER: And, Tim, obviously, passes for good news with this tragedy is the fact that the water in this part of the sea is relatively shallow. But does that limit the kind of equipment that can be used to find debris and victims?

TAYLOR: Not really. It doesn't in effect, 370, Flight 370, some of the gear that's being used, the big AUVs, the big tote systems are just -- it's just overkill for this area. So, they can size down that size of equipment. It brings in still some ROV work and they can stay on the bottom and continually work and search and move stuff.

And then when they put divers down, it's not recreational divers. It's, you know, people jumping over the boat. Usually, it's going to be a surface supplied hard hat commercial-type diver that they can communicate with or divers and go down there and do the work. And you saw that with -- TAPPER: David, I know you're reluctant to talk about it, because

obviously this is a human tragedy and there are people mourning, people in real horrific grieve. But I do want to ask about what the debris and what the bodies can tell us, because you were talking about that just a second ago. Are there clues, without getting too graphic obviously, are there clues that the conditions under which we find metal or even people can tell us about what happened?

GALLO: Sure. I mean, a good forensic scientist or coroner will be able to talk a little bit about how these individuals, various souls, met their end. And as horrible and painful it is to talk about that. And, you know, that will be interesting to see because it will -- did they die at impact, in the air, survive for a bit on the surface of the water?

There are two things going on here. One is the horrific humanitarian effort to recover the bodies, both in the surface and probably in bits of the fuselage on the bottom of the ocean, which is another challenge altogether. So, there's that effort and the forensic effort and investigative effort about what happened to the aircraft and for that we need the black boxes.

But yes, it's a difficult task to have to combine the two and -- but it's something that has got to be done for the sake of all involved.

TAPPER: Miles O'Brien, CNN aviation analyst, is joining us.

Miles, I just want to ask you one quick question, if possible. I assume now with the recovery of the debris that the search grid shrinks. It was something like 60,000 square miles. That will get much smaller, right?

MILES O'BRIEN, CNN AVIATION ANALYST: Yes. Of course, you can hone in once this happens. You know, it's interesting because, as David Gallo will tell you, there were -- there was floating found from Air France 447 just a few days after it disappeared, some 3,000 pieces, as a matter of fact, was found floating on the surface, and that allowed them to hone in on the wreckage at the bottom of the sea floor.

But it took some time for them to actually identify that location. They used bad drift models which put them in the wrong area for quite some time and they ended up at ground zero as it were, at square one, and found it. Obviously, getting these black boxes is important. Pingers would be crucial in this case. And as you say, knowing what pieces fell off as well and when they fell off would tell a lot about how it broke up and exactly what happened to them.

TAPPER: All right. Miles O'Brien, David Gallo, Tim Taylor, thank you all so much. Appreciate it.

Hope is, of course, dwindling that anyone from Flight 8501 will be found alive. The painful reality for families.

Plus, the support that they are going to need to get from others from around the world. Then, coming up in our politics lead, the third ranking House

Republican claims he did not know that a white supremacist group was his audience for that speech in 2002. Is that possible? Can Congressman Steve Scalise survive the political heat?

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

TAPPER: Welcome back to THE LEAD. I'm Jake Tapper.

We're going to continue our world lead about the mysterious circumstances surrounding AirAsia Flight 8501 and the fact that its discovery is giving loved ones of the 162 people on board some reason to hope that somehow, some way they could be found alive. But now that the debris and the bodies have been found, that hope, well, it's given way to unbearable grief. Some family members even fainted, we're told, when an Asian news channel broadcast live images of what appeared to be bodies floating in the water.

And as the harsh reality of this tragedy begins to set in, we're learning more about the mothers and fathers, husbands and wives and, of course, those 18 children who were on the doomed plane.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

TAPPER (voice-over): For the families praying and waiting for good news, each piece of debris discovered represents the destruction of their last hopes.

TONY FERNANDES, AIRASIA CEO: The only slight benefit is that for the people in there, there is some closure.

TAPPER: Confirmed wreckage from AirAsia Flight 8501 was discovered last Tuesday along with three bodies of those on board.

FERNANDES: This is a scar with me for the rest of my life.

TAPPER: Now as victims' belongings are collected from the sea, the world is gaining a clearer picture of who we've lost.