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LEGAL VIEW WITH ASHLEIGH BANFIELD

AirAsia Victims Begin to be Identified; Flight 8501 Search Continues in Java Sea; Trash and Weather Hampers Search

Aired January 2, 2015 - 12:00   ET

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


PAMELA BROWN, CNN ANCHOR: Hello, everyone. I'm Pamela Brown, in for Ashleigh Banfield. Happy New Year and welcome to LEGAL VIEW.

Weather is still a big problem over the Java Sea at this hour, but this has been the biggest day yet in the search for victims and debris from AirAsia Flight 8501. Teams from several nations, the U.S. included, recovered 21 more bodies today, bringing the total to 30 out of 162 passengers and crew. To date, four have been identified and given back to their families. One was a flight attendant. Another, a 12-year-old boy.

Pieces of the aircraft itself, including what looks like a window panel, also were picked up today. And notably, search officials identified a relatively small area they consider the, quote, "most probable resting place" of the Airbus A-320. It's roughly 2,000 square miles inside a zone of more than 60,000 square miles that was mapped out earlier in the week.

CNN's Andrew Stevens is in Surabaya, the Indonesian city, where Flight 8501 departed last Sunday morning and where victims' remains are returning.

Andrew, thanks for coming on to talk with us. First off, what can you tell us about these reports we're hearing that some of the newly recovered bodies were still strapped in their seats?

ANDREW STEVENS, CNN INTERNATIONAL: Well, at this stage, they are just reports, Pamela. We haven't been able to confirm that at all. There have been several outlets, the local media outlets have been reporting that they were strapped in their seats, but we haven't yet got any independent verification. And certainly the authorities -- the head of the search operation here has not been talking about it.

But, I mean, the most significant move today really, apart from the fact that bodies -- more bodies are being recovered, and this remains the primary focus is to find the bodies, but also narrowing down that search area. It's 2,000 square miles. It is still a sizeable chunk of the sea. But as you point out, it's now being called the most probable area. And ships are on site. There are two ships on site, more coming. And, significantly, this is going to be much more of an underwater search now.

This is a shallow sea. It's monsoon season. The seabed is being churned up, so conditions are very bad under water as well as we know the storms above the water, so they're going to be relying on sonar, sophisticated sonar equipment, listening devices, listening to the pings, those all-important pings from the black boxes. We haven't heard anything on that yet, but that is going to be that focus. We've got a U.S. warship coming in with pretty sophisticated - it's called side scan sonar, which could make a big difference to the search as well.

Pamela.

BROWN: But, of course, those search crews are up against some big challenges with the weather there.

Let's talk about the families. I know you're there in Surabaya talking with the families. We're almost to one week since that plane went missing. Are they losing patience?

STEVENS: No, they're not. It's -- the grieving process continuing. They are -- it's just agonizing more than losing patience because they understand and there has been a pretty good flow of information right from day one here from the authorities, from AirAsia, about the state of the search. It's just an agonizing way. They can't do anything about the weather. No one can. And it is -- the conditions have been described as very, very difficult. Slightly better today, but still very challenging.

But the people you speak to here, you can't imagine the pain they're going through because they just don't know when their loved ones, when the remains of their loved ones are going to return to them because there are still, what, 132 passengers and crew missing. And a lot of the speculation and indeed the search leaders are saying that they expect to find a lot of those passengers still in the main fuselage. They expect a large chunk of the main body of the plane to be intact under the sea and passengers inside there. So all they can do is be there and wait, come down to this crisis center, come down to where the I.D. is being carried out in the hope, and a horrible word to use, but in the hope that the remains of their loved ones will come back to them sooner just to end this agonizing wait of what's happened.

BROWN: What agony it must be. Thank you so much, Andrew Stevens.

And here now to add their insights to the newest information are CNN safety analyst and former FAA investigator David Soucie, former NTSB managing director Peter Goelz, and CNN aviation analyst and former inspector general at the U.S. Transportation Department, Mary Schiavo.

Thank you all for coming on the show to share your insights with us.

Peter, I'm going to start with you. Tell us, what do you make of this relatively productive day for the search teams? Do you think that this is a signal that they really are close to the main wreckage?

PETER GOELZ, FORMER NTSB MANAGING DIRECTOR: I do. And I think, you know, the Indonesians have been relatively closed lipped about the search, but they have conducted it in a timely manner. They've started to recover victims. If they think that they have an area of high probability, I'm confident that they're going to have the resources to identify where the wreckage field is relatively soon. I mean that could be a week, it could be 10 days.

I mean even when you know where the wreckage is, as we did, say, in TWA Flight 800, it took us three days when we were directly over it to really start to identify the scope of the wreckage field. So it's not an easy process.

BROWN: I think that really does tell you something because, as you point out, you were involved with the search for TWA Flight 800. A lot of similarities there.

Mary, I'm going to turn to you now. Still a mystery as to what exactly caused the plane to go down. I know you've researched the capabilities of the A-320. What might have happened in its final moments, from your view?

MARY SCHIAVO, CNN AVIATION ANALYST: Well, over the weekend, a leaked report came out that said at some point in the flight the plane actually climbed, and this was after the pilot had asked air traffic control for permission to climb to 38,000 feet and the air traffic control did not give them permission, but the plane began to climb anyway.

Well, the information over the weekend puts that rate at climb at something like 6,000 to 9,000 feet per minute. But in actuality, Airbus' own website says the plane's maximum climb rate is a third of that or half of that at 3,500 feet per minute. So what that tells us is whatever weather this plane was in, it was causing the plane to climb at maybe two to three times the maximum climb rate of the plane.

So we know the plane wasn't doing that on its own and the pilot wouldn't have done that because he would have risked losing both engines on a dual engine plane mount. So the information over the weekend indicates that the weather caused this plane to dramatically rise in altitude and then slam back towards the earth. Terrible news, really, frightening for the pilot and passengers.

BROWN: So given what you've learned, do you think it's out of the question then that the pilots may have attempted a water landing?

SCHIAVO: I think it is out of the question, particularly when - if this information is correct. At points during the decent, it went from 11,000 feet per minute to, in one report, 24,000, which would be an incredible drive towards the earth. The plane is supposed to descend at about 2,000 feet per minute, maybe 3,000. But certainly not what was reported. So that plane was in a tremendous freefall, obviously driven by weather. They couldn't land - they couldn't make an ocean landing in that.

BROWN: David Soucie, I want to talk to you about the search. There's a search for debris. We talk about the waves. We talk about the sea floor. But you say we're overlooking an important area. Tell us about that.

DAVID SOUCIE, CNN SAFETY ANALYST: Well, there's a part between the seafloor and the top, and Peter could probably address this as well, but we think about collecting debris only in the top - on the surface and what's down below. The problem with that is the fact that there's a lot of buoyant material, especially on an Airbus. And so if it's attached to metal, this debris could be floating anywhere in between there as it reached its buoyancy balance, so it may not surface and it may not go all the way to the bottom.

So -- but the good thing about that is that that debris is not affected by wind. And the sea is a little bit more predictable as far as which way it's going. So those might be some of the best clues if they get -- are able to find some of that material because today they're starting the underwater search. So hopefully they'll find some of that material and be able to counter that and from there determine where the aircraft may have gone down and its initial scatter point.

BROWN: Yes, that's really interesting you say that debris is not impacted by the wind. And I think there has been that questions, with the weather, is the wreckage, you know, could it be moving to another area.

Peter, I want to go back to your sort of - draw on your experience with TWA Flight 800. How did that sort of middle layer play a role with helping to find the actual wreckage?

GOELZ: Well, you know, in TWA 800, there were rescue and search vehicles over the accident within an hour. And -- but it did take us months and months to recover. We ended up with probably 95 or 96 percent of the plane by weight. We ended up -- the NTSB ended up trolling for wreckage that was in a suspended area or on the bottom. It takes a long, long time to get all the wreckage up.

In this case, trying to find -- you want to try and find the main debris field. And you may not have the pingers working. In TWA, they were not. So it's going to be a methodical search that will be successful.

BROWN: So even though they've narrowed the search, that doesn't mean we're -- we could find the plane any time soon. That puts it into perspective.

GOELZ: Right.

BROWN: Mary, I want to go back to you. There are these reports that several bodies were found in their seats. What does that tell you? Does that tell you anything about the state of the plane or how it hit the water?

SCHIAVO: Well, what it tells me is that it broke up when it hit the water. They would remain in their seats because in any kind of weather condition like this, the pilots would have had them buckle down and everybody, including the flight attendants, should have been buckled down and probably would have told them to give them an extra tug on those seat belts to they would be securely, you know, snugged in. But with this row of three seats together and the people still strapped in, I think it broke apart on impact and several rows of the seats probably did come loose, but not a freefall from altitude, particularly in this kind of weather, because I think that the seats and the clothing on the persons, et cetera, would have been torn up or torn off.

BROWN: Not to be morbid, but, Peter, I'm going to ask you, do you think that the passengers, that they were immediately knocked unconscious or do you think they actually had to go through it and know what was happening?

GOELZ: Boy, that's a very difficult and painful question and it's, frankly, one that every victims' families ask and we just don't know yet. I mean you pray that this was over in a matter of seconds for the passengers, but you just don't know.

BROWN: You do. You just certainly hope they didn't know what was happening. Thank you so much, Peter Goelz, David Soucie and Mary Schiavo. We appreciate it.

SCHIAVO: Thank you.

BROWN: And narrowing the search area is so important because it could mean finding those critical black boxes and the information on those could solve the mystery of why this plane went down. What's being done to find them, up next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: We still don't know why Flight 8501 crashed and it will likely remain a mystery until we can recover the flight data and cockpit voice recorders. It's also a race against time. The batteries powering the pingers that send acoustic signals that help locate those so- called black boxes only have about 25 days of power left. For more on the search and recovery, let's bring in Mary Schiavo, CNN aviation analyst and former inspector general for the U.S. Department of Transportation, David Soucie, CNN analyst, safety analyst, and former FAA safety inspector, along with Peter Goelz, former managing director of the Transportation Safety Board.

Good to see all three of you again.

Mary, I'm going to start with you this time. Tell us about the challenges inherent in finding a black box. Why haven't they found a black box yet?

SCHIAVO: Well, first and foremost, it's just the condition of the seas and the inability to get out there with all the equipment to really find them and try to find the pingers, et cetera, and get their hands on it. But even once you do, as Peter already mentioned, the - you know, the pingers don't always work, in many cases, and sometimes about a third of the crashes into water they don't. Sometimes the batteries don't functions. Sometimes it's simple, they haven't even changed the batteries and sometimes they're damaged or the pinger part is broken off from the black boxes. And also, if the tail area is cracked off of the plane, off the fuselage, sometimes the black boxes can be broken free and move across the ocean floor in the crash sequence. So the pingers would be the most help, but in many cases it's been divers that have put their eyes upon the boxes and brought them up.

BROWN: Wow, it just seems like something -- like a needle in a haystack finding that.

David, Mary mentioned divers. What else do you think they're doing to try to find the equipment?

SOUCIE: Well, the primary goal right now is to recover any of the deceased victims, although concurrently they're probably listening for it. The underwater locator beacon is really not designed to be the first level of search for the aircraft, like we tried to make it in 370. It's really designed, once the aircraft is under the water, once it's in a mangled mess, at that point, that's when it's really important to have that underwater locator beacon working because you can hone in on it much closer and know where to concentrate the search to retrieve it.

But it's going to be difficult to find it. It's going to be difficult to get in there and get it. But as far as locating it, it's tough. But the most important thing right now is the deceased is documenting where they are with just the general recovery.

BROWN: Of course, and we know that 30 bodies have now been recovered, four identified.

Peter, I'm going to go to you now and ask about the black boxes because whenever a plane goes missing, there's always this focus because of how much it can tell us about what actually caused a plane to go down. In this case, what do you think it will tell us?

GOELZ: Well, in this aircraft, which is relatively new, the digital data recorder literally will give you thousands of actions or parameters that the aircraft was issuing. I mean the data is extensive. It tells you what the pilots were doing, what inputs were going in to the aircraft, whether the aircraft was responding. It will tell you just an enormous amount of data. But you can't do it alone. You need the voice recorder as well. As Mary has mentioned, in the Air Alger crash, the voice recorder had not been maintained, it did not have good recording on it and that air crash is still pretty much a mystery. They think they know what happened, but the voice recorder is critical.

BROWN: David, earlier when we talked on the show you talked about this middle layer. Is it possible the black box, you know, isn't just at the bottom of the ocean?

SOUCIE: It's unlikely because of the fact that it's in the tail of the aircraft which is a heavy -- and - well, and also it appears as though it's the fuselage has been broken, and so then, therefore, it would sink down to the bottom. The only thing that's buoyant -- most of the things that are buoyant in the back of that aircraft would be the flight control services, which in that impact I would suggest that it's possible they were torn off. So while it's possible, I think it's most likely that it is on the bottom of the aircraft at this point - or the bottom of the ocean, excuse me.

BROWN: OK. Peter Goelz, David Soucie, Mary Schiavo, thank you very much. Appreciate it. Well, it's hard enough to spot pieces of debris floating in miles and

miles of water, as we've been talking about. What makes it even trickier, garbage. Tons of it floating everywhere. Next we're going to show you how bad it's getting in our seas and oceans.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: One factor complicating the search for bodies and debris from doomed Flight 8501 is the amount of trash floating in the Java Sea. Trash is a massive environmental problem facing the world's oceans. CNN's Stephanie Elam looks at the threat this waste poses to the ecosystem.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ANNA CUMMINS, 5 GYRES INSTITUTE: Our oceans are littered in trash. And it's unfortunate that it's taken this human tragedy to highlight it.

STEPHANIE ELAM, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): For aviation, 2014 was scarred by the disappearance of two planes over open water. The hunt for AirAsia Fight 8501 in the Java Sea and Malaysia Air Flight 370 in the Indian Ocean has given the world a good look at the trash conditions of our oceans. During the search for any sign of the aircraft, objects floating in the water turned out to be junk, discarded nets and old buoys among a myriad of items.

CUMMINS: These are all examples of the kind of plastic pollution that we find out in our oceans.

ELAM: Anna Cummins is the executive director of 5 Gyres Institute.

CUMMINS: The biggest offender is plastic pollution. Roughly 80 to 90 percent of the debris in our oceans is plastic. And the worst of it is that people don't realize that this is not just unsightly. This plastic pollution is actually getting into the food chain and may ultimately be affecting our health.

ELAM (on camera): And it's affecting the animals.

CUMMINS: Absolutely. Roughly 660 species today, and that is a conservative estimate, are affected by plastic. They either get tangled in it or they ingest it. It's a lot of single-use disposables and packaging. And what's really insidious about it is that plastic in the oceans doesn't disappear. It acts like a sponge for contaminants.

ELAM (voice-over): In the Pacific Ocean alone, NOAA (ph) says massive patches of garbage swirl about between California and Hawaii.

ELAM (on camera): There are international laws that prohibit dumping plastics in the ocean. The problem is enforcement. Countries need to do a better job of cracking down on pollution and then there's another issue, the vast ocean waters are just very difficult to police.

CUMMINS: All over the world people are realizing that we just cannot afford the convenience of single-use plastics and companies need to start taking responsibility for what happens to their products after they leaves the consumer's hands.

ELAM (voice-over): As for the AirAsia jet and MH-370, what impact will they have on these bodies of water? Cummins says, as ocean pollution goes, the debris from the planes are just drops in the bucket.

CUMMINS: The bigger problem is what starts here on land. Roughly 80 percent of the plastic pollution we find out in our ocean starts on the land. It's as simple as the debris that we see right here on the send, the cigarette butts, the straws, the forks, the bottles, the bags.

ELAM: Some common items that may help daily life, but pose a threat to our oceans.

Stephanie Elam, CNN.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Wow, that is eye-opening.

Well, there is another big obstacle to finding the wreckage of AirAsia Flight 8501, terrible weather. Why it's making it so hard to search and when it's going to get better. That's next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: Well, no big breaks in the weather over the Java Sea, but this still has been a pretty productive day in the search for victims and debris from AirAsia Flight 8501. Twenty-one more bodies were recovered today, bringing the total to 30 out of 162 passengers and crew. Four have been identified and given back to their families. One was a young flight attendant. Another, a 12-year-old boy.

Pieces of the aircraft itself, including what looks like a window panel, also were picked up today and search officials sharply reduced the area they're focusing on. The new zone is roughly 2,000 square miles, down from more than 60,000 square miles earlier in the week. CNN's Paula Hancocks is on the northern shore of the Java Sea, a busy place right now where a big part of the rescue work is being staged.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

PAULA HANCOCKS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: We're down in Cumi (ph) Port, just on the west coast of Borneo. And as you can see, preparations are underway for one of the search vessels to head out to the search location and try and locate some of those bodies and also some of the debris. Now, this is a police boat. It's also going to have search and rescue on board. Some of the divers are going to be on board as well. They've already been out a couple of times, but many of them say they couldn't get into the water, it was simply too dangerous.

Today, they know they have waves of four meters or 30 feet high, and it's simply too dangerous for them to get in. One diver said he would basically be giving up his life if he tried to do that. So they're very frustrated. Sometimes they just have to sit and wait and hope for a break in the weather so that they can try and bring back more bodies and bring some closures to those distraught families.

Paula Hancocks, CNN.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: It must be an agonizing waiting game. Well, the weather didn't look too bad where Paula Hancocks was standing, as we saw there in her shot, but out to sea, where the plane wreckage is believed to be, that is another story. Karen McGinnis is in the CNN Weather Center, and also here joining us is David Soucie, once again.

Karen, I'm going to start with you. It is after midnight out there on the Java Sea. What will it look like when the sun comes up?