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More Bodies Of Flight 8501 Victims Arrive; Debris From Flight 8501 Recovered; Storm Halts Search; Security for New Year's Eve; Families Wait for Loved Ones; Storm Halts Search; Security for New Year's Eve; Families Wait for Loved Ones

Aired December 31, 2014 - 13:00   ET

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


BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN GUEST HOST: Hi, there, I'm Brianna Keilar in for Wolf Blitzer. It is 1:00 p.m. here in Washington, 6:00 p.m. in London, 9:00 p.m. in Moscow and 2:00 a.m. Thursday in eastern Indonesia. Wherever you are watching from around the world, thank you for joining us.

And we begin with the search for more victims of AirAsia Flight 8501 and the search for answers about what caused the plane to crash. Right now, weather is slowing the recovery effort. Searchers have recovered seven bodies so far, though. The first two arrived in simple wooden caskets with the numbers 001 and 002 on them. The head of the search operation says one of the seven bodies was that of a flight attendant.

There is conflicting information about whether wreckage from the plane has been spotted under water. A search official told CNN he believes sonar equipment detected the wreckage at the bottom of the sea but the CEO of AirAsia says that hasn't been confirmed.

In addition to recovering the victims, finding the plane's black boxes is a top priority. The flight data and cockpit voice recorders are key to figuring out what went wrong here. They contain information on air speed, on altitude, direction, as well as the conversations and the sounds from the cockpit. Preparations are underway to identify the remains of the crash victims once they've been recovered. Tents have been set up on the grounds of a hospital in Surabaya, Indonesia, and a sign of the grim task ahead, refrigerated containers where the remains will be kept while waiting for identification. Before they're flown to Surabaya, the bodies are arriving in Pangkalan Bun (ph). And our Paula Hancocks has the latest from there.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

PAULA HANCOCKS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: This is the first-stop hospital for the victims of the AirAsia crash on the west coast of Borneo. Overnight on Wednesday, two more bodies were brought to this hospital. Sirens announced their arrival and Red Cross and hospital workers were waiting with gurneys for two ambulances. They were then rushed into a special wing that's in this hospital where hospital workers were waiting to treat the bodies and also to carry out the initial identification.

Now, what they'll be doing is they'll be trying to look for identifying marks, for height, gender, facial recognition, anything that could tell them who these victims are. And their families had been asked to give these kind of details, and to give up-to-date photos just for this eventuality. The bodies, we're being told by the hospital director, is they're prepared and placed in a casket. Then it will be flown to Surabaya and for formal identification by the family.

Now, the process of retrieving these bodies appears to be very slow, at this point, that is, in part, because of the weather. There has been heavy rain at the site of the crash and in the nearby locations. There has been high waves and also high winds. And that makes it very difficult, not only for the divers, with little visibility but also for the ships and the aerial support to be able to do their job. The fear, at this point, is that that bad weather could continue for the next couple of days making what is already an agonizing wait for those families even worse.

Paula Hancocks, CNN, on the west coast of Borneo.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

KEILAR: For more on the efforts to find the rest of the plane and the victims, I'm joined now by "The Wall Street Journal" science correspondent, Andy Pasztor. We have CNN Aviation Analyst David Soucie and CNN Aviation Analyst Peter Goelz.

To you first, Peter. At this point, there are seven bodies that have been found. So, this is not very many bodies found over the last couple of days of searching. Does it tell you anything or are you just expecting that more will be found?

PETER GOELZ, CNN AVIATION ANALYST: Well, you would hope that they would find more bodies, you know, during the next day or two. The only thing this could do is if you could identify where these victims were seated on the plane, where the flight attendant -- what station was she assigned to, it might give you some indication of how the plane separated, how the plane broke up. But it's really very preliminary. We're in for a little bit of a long haul.

KEILAR: Do you think we'll find that information out or we may not hear soon?

GOELZ: It's going to take finding the black boxes for us to get that information finally.

KEILAR: OK. Andy, "The Wall Street Journal" reporting that Indonesia said sonar shows the plane was upside down. Why would this be significant?

ANDY PASZTOR, SCIENCE CORRESPONDENT, "THE WALL STREET JOURNAL": Well, It could be significant depending on the angle of the plane going into the water. But I think it would be good to step back a little bit and talk about the whole system of aviation, their dispatchers, their regulators and there's -- as sad as it is for the families, as difficult as it is to look at what this pilot may have done, I do think that it's important to look at the broader system. Indonesia has a spotty aviation safety record over the years. This is the first fatal crash since 2007 but there have been egregious incidents and accidents since this.

And one of the -- one of the questions that people keep asking me and also one of the things that pilots keep telling me is, how is it possible that this -- the route of this flight was going directly into such an intense thunderstorm? In the U.S., it would never be done and dispatchers would have alerted the crew probably to steer away from that thunderstorm long before they ever got close to it. And so, I think it's important to look at the specifics of the crash. But I think it also behooves everybody to take a broader look at what the country has done over the years or not done. And also the system that this airline had in place for safety.

KEILAR: David, can you talk a little bit about what Andy just said, that in the U.S., this plane would have been steered around this? We've been talking a lot about this the last couple of days about whether there would have been something different. And I haven't heard a lot of people say that. They've said that the pilots really should have been trained to flight in conditions like this. What do you think?

DAVID SOUCIE, CNN AVIATION ANALYST: Well, I believe that he's right on a lot of levels, as far as stepping back and taking a look at the regulatory system. It's important to understand, though, that the aviation system and the regulatory system worldwide is based on continuous improvement. What that means is that there is propensity or there's a possibility of failures within that system. What's important about our regulatory system is that we learn from those and that we improve. The FAA is one of the first regulatory systems. The Asian system is one of the last.

When I was with the FAA in early 2000, the Chinese were coming to the United States to learn our regulatory system. We worked with them to come up with what their aviation regulatory system is. Asia is also one of these that's trying to get in there. Indonesia is a little bit more behind. Malaysia, there's a few things going on there that we could talk about for a long time.

But Akao (ph), Dr. Alu (ph), who I interviewed up in Montreal, said that prior to his regime, there -- the president had gone down to Indonesia to try to make sure that they were complying with these standards and practices and the annexes within Akao. So, there has been issues but it's important to remember, too, again, like I said before, it is a continuous improvement program and they're very good at learning more. But there is room for improvement certainly.

KEILAR: Yes, certainly something to -- and you're nodding this yes as well, Peter. So, clearly something to be learned from this, as you said, Andy. You know, I wonder, Peter, there are a lot of, I guess, criticisms of the Malaysian Airline search from the March crash this year.

GOELZ: Right.

KEILAR: Do you think because of that, you have officials being more cautious about whether the plane has been found? Because we're hearing these conflicting reports about it. The CEO saying, no, we haven't necessarily found it.

GOELZ: I think there's always misinformation, as both Andy and David will confirm. There's always misinformation during the early stages of an accident. And we're still in the early stages. So, -- and you need to be very careful. People want to give good news out. They want to see things as -- that tend to be positive. You have to take it with a grain of salt. You have to be careful. You have to be verified -- verify the information.

And I do think Andy's right. I mean, the whole issue of dispatch is a -- is a critical one. You know, because there were planes taking off before and after this plane that were flying a very similar route. And we need to know whether the dispatch system in that part of the world really takes into account --

KEILAR: Yes.

GOELZ: -- the challenges of the air -- of the weather.

KEILAR: Especially with the growth that we're seeing of air travel in that area. Andy, you -- there is new and improved GPS technology. This is -- this is already out there. It hasn't been implemented. And some say that it's because, technically, it's not going to save lives. It's just going to help locate aircraft if they crash. And, you know, in the scheme of things, that does happen infrequently. But, you know, it would help locate lost planes. Do you think this is a valid argument for why you shouldn't implement it?

PASZTOR: I don't think so. For example, if there had been survivors in this crash, three days is an unacceptable time for rescue crews to get to them. That's one point. Secondly, I think the industry treated Malaysia 370 as a one-off accident. It would never happen again so let's not really spend a lot of time or money. They're doing some things but not very much. And I think that's really a backward way of looking at it because in today's world, in today's digital world, first of all, three days is an eternity and neither passengers nor airline officials nor regulators should be sitting back and saying, it's OK not to find the plane for that long or much longer.

And secondly, the point is that there is technology available at some -- at some cost and I think that the average flyer would say it's unacceptable to have even one example of Malaysia 370, let alone another one.

And I would like to make one other very quick point getting back to the history of Indonesia. We don't want to beat up on the regulators. I certainly don't. But if you look at their history. There are egregious accidents and incidents not in the long-ago past but this year and last year of Lion Air -- Lion Air air craft which the captain violated all the safety rules trying to land at Bali and crashed into the water. Luckily no one was killed.

And even this year, a plane -- a Lion airplane landed in Bali and bounced four times and injured some -- seriously injured some passengers. So, yes, AirAsia has a good safety record, has never had a fatal accident. But I think you can't look at it in isolation. The country has had tremendous problems over the years. They say they're improving but their accident rate is still twice what the worldwide accident rate is for western-built jets. And I think that has to be part of this investigation if we're going to be serious about finding out what happened and why it happened.

KEILAR: It is very key, as you say. Andy Pasztor, thank you. Peter Goelz, David Soucie, thank you all for your expertise.

Recovery teams continue to work at the crash site for AirAsia Flight 8501. Those working at the scene, they're not only trying to recover victims, they are trying to gather clues that will explain what caused this tragedy. And we'll also get the latest on weather conditions there at the site that they're dealing with.

We also want to hear from you so please tweet us. Use the hash tag 8501QS on Twitter. We'll have our experts here to answer your questions, some that we haven't thought of so we certainly appreciate your input there.

And later, what's being done to make sure that the 1 million people expected to gather in Times Square for New Year's Eve will be able to celebrate safely?

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

KEILAR: Big waves, strong winds, heavy rain, this is what crews are battling as they try to recover more victims from the crash of AirAsia Flight 8501. Chad Myers joining us now from the CNN Weather Center. This is very important, this search. You have both on ships searching, you have plane searching. The aerial search was suspended today because of the bad weather. What are the conditions going to be like in the hours and days ahead, Chad?

CHAD MYERS, AMS METEOROLOGIST: Rain, clouds and wind of 30. Now, I know that sounds bad, but the model run that just expired, and we got a new one, said rain, clouds, wind to 50. So somehow we're going in the right direction but still a wave at 15, 20 feet high with a white cap over the top of it doesn't help you find white pieces of an airplane in the water because it just gets too mixed up.

Here's where we are right now. We're actually in pretty good shape. The problem is, it's dark. So not many crews out there. You don't have aerial searches in the dark. And even though this is the best weather we've had all day.

By morning, we have more weather moving back in. That's the kind of diurnal pattern we have here. In the morning, it gets cloudy and stormy. By late afternoon, it goes away. And by night it's great. Well, that's the problem with this search. And we talked to a couple of researchers earlier that said, OK, if

this is the case for the next few days, we need to start doing the underwater search during the night when it's calm, because it doesn't matter whether it's day or night down there if you're doing side scan sonar. It's all the same. It's all dark down there anyway. But the water is turbulent, visibility isn't that good. And when you get waves and winds like this, you still get it.

Now, it's better than it was. The rainfall rate is still going to be about four inches in the next two days, which means there's going to be cloud cover, there's going to be a lot of rain. When the clouds come down, the planes can't fly high enough.

This is the only real positive story to my map today at least is that we are over here in the 25, maybe 30-mile-per-hour range. Earlier today, the models were saying 55 miles per hour. And that's just an unusable sea state. You can't get boats, ships, anything in there. Even if you found something, you couldn't retrieve it because the waves would be so big. So we're getting better. We're going the right direction. And it looks like by Saturday, Brianna, there may be a real big break in this action.

But this is the ITCZ. This is where we expect storms to be this time of year, and they are. They are right where they should be, where air comes together at the surface, it goes up and you get thunderstorms. If we didn't have thunderstorms, we probably wouldn't be talking now would we because the thunderstorms would likely had something to do with this plane.

KEILAR: And, yes, definitely. And this weather, this tricky weather, does it do anything to the debris? There is obviously still a lot of objects, we would imagine, out there waiting to be discovered. Are they getting scattered farther afield?

MYERS: Absolutely. And there are some objects that are sticking up four or six inches out of the water. Some may be higher. The higher they're sticking up out of the water, the farther they get blown by these winds. The farther down wind they go. If they're slightly below the surface, they don't move very much at all. And if it's a black box and it sinks right down to the ground into the silt down there, it's not going to move. So you're going to see a scaling of how far the top layer moves, the middle layer debris moves and the bottom layer doesn't move very much at all.

This is the box area we've been watching. It wouldn't surprise me, just like MH-370 when they moved those search areas all around, that we begin to look a little bit farther to the northwest for something under the surface because that was the last known position. Right now, we're looking above the surface because that's where the wind pushed all that debris.

KEILAR: Yes, and you could see some of it even coming onshore in the weeks ahead here.

MYERS: Absolutely.

KEILAR: Chad Myers, thank you.

Later, we are going to get an update on how victims' families are coping in Surabaya, Indonesia, where Flight 8501 took off on Saturday. A painstaking wait for them.

And next we'll be taking you live to Times Square for a look at how police and security officials are getting ready for one of the biggest public gatherings of the year.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

KEILAR: New York City is getting ready to ring in 2015. But it will happen under intense security. Heavily armed counterterrorism teams, bomb-sniffing dogs, rooftop patrols, helicopters, all of this part of the security plan to keep the expected 1 million big apple revelers safe.

But this year brings some mounted headaches. The potential for demonstrations against the NYPD and the recent targeting of police officers. Rosa Flores is live from Times Square for us.

And are you seeing this security, Rosa? Is it more noticeable this year?

ROSA FLORES, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Brianna, the biggest takeaway is that although revelers are going to be here, like you mentioned, about a million of them, they will not be able to notice the changes in security.

Take a look behind me. You can see that a lot of the revelers already here. You can see some police officers as well, the NYPD. But the NYPD does tell us that they do plan to beef up security.

So why? Well, it's because of the increased number of threats that have come in through social media. All this after two police officers were ambushed and killed here in New York City. So they're going to be monitoring social media heavily. There's going to be more eyes and ears here in Times Square. Like you mentioned, they're going to have eyes in the sky as well, helicopters hovering overhead to make sure that everything is secure.

Now, the other thing that they're also keeping an eye on is protests. Why? Because protests have been erupting in this city since those two police officers were killed. So there's a specific detail that will be on standby and that can be activated at a moment's notice. But, again, Brianna, the biggest takeaway here is that people from around the world are going to be here in Times Square, they're going to be watching on television and they're not going to be able to notice anything different. The scene is going to be the same. The experience of the ringing in of the New Year will be the same.

Brianna.

KEILAR: Rosa Flores in Times Square for us, thank you.

And as you get ready to celebrate the New Year, others have already started. This is Sydney, Australia. Let's take a picture there. Beautiful, spectacular fireworks display over the harbor. Happy New Year to my relatives there in Sydney.

And, you know, you might be able to make out that opera house there. There it is to the left. Gorgeous, in the lower left corner. A million and a half people crowding the harbor to watch this gorgeous show.

And not to be outdone, Auckland, New Zealand, began its fireworks extravaganza on its famed Sky Tower. At 1,075 feet, it is the tallest manmade structure in New Zealand.

And, believe it or not, we have some pictures from Pyongyang, North Korea. The usually reclusive country threw this big celebration at midnight. By tradition, North Korea welcomes the New Year by ringing the Pyongyang bell.

And in Beijing, more fireworks, also a laser light show, of course, pretty amazing, welcoming 2015 in. That is -- you may recognize the iconic Olympic venue known as the bird's nest. We are going to end on these happy faces of some children there in China. Happy 2015 wherever you are.

And certainly do not miss Anderson Cooper and Kathy Griffin anchoring CNN's New Year's Eve Special live from Times Square. That starts at 9:00 Eastern tonight. I'll be watching because, let's be honest, you never know what's going to happen and it's always a whole lot of fun.

Now still ahead, if you have some questions for us about the Asia Air crash, please share them on twitter at #8501qs. We will get answers from our panel of experts.

And next we'll get a live update on family members who are waiting to hear more from those in charge of this crash investigation.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

KEILAR: Welcome back to our viewers in the United States and around the world. I'm Briana Keilar, reporting from Washington.

It's almost impossible to imagine the agony for relatives of those who were on board Asia Air Flight 8501. First, the devastating news that the plane was lost, and now this agonizing wait for crews to recover the bodies of their loved ones. CNN's Andrew Stevens is at the airport in Surabaya, Indonesia.

Andrew, you've been covering this from the beginning. You've seen the grief that family members are going through. Are they getting all of the answers that they need? Are they being kept updated in a timely manner?

ANDREW STEVENS, CNN INTERNATIONAL: They've being kept updated as much as they can be, Brianna, but you're right, it is an anguished wait for them because their can -- at the moment, the weather conditions are so bad that they can't actually continue to bring bodies out. So, at the moment, only seven bodies have officially been brought from the debris field. And they are still searching for the main, the primary fuselage, where the plane went down. Most of it they think now intact. And that grim scene about 40 meters under the water of a fuselage of a plane with people still strapped to their seats inside.

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.