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Germanwings Flight 9525 Crashed in French Alps; Airbus A320 Has Good Safety Record. Aired 11-11:30a ET

Aired March 24, 2015 - 11:00   ET

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ANNOUNCER: This is CNN breaking news.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: Good morning, everyone. I'm John Berman.

KATE BOLDUAN, CNN ANCHOR: Hello, everyone. I'm Kate Bolduan. Thanks for joining us.

Breaking news AT THIS HOUR. Searchers are looking for debris in the French Alps and they're preparing to make the very difficult trek to the scene where a German passenger plane crashed earlier this morning with at least 150 people onboard.

[11:00:03] Some of the searchers, we're learning, they may have to actually ski to the crash site to access the remote area and snowy terrain. The Germanwings airlines jet was headed from Barcelona, Spain, to Dusseldorf, Germany; that's when something clearly went wrong we're told about 45 minutes into the flight. The airline CEO said just a short time ago that the Airbus went into a steep descent for about eight minutes before crashing. They do not believe anyone survived the crash.

This is a tragedy now that is hitting several nations. Most of the passengers onboard are believed to have been from Germany, Spain and Turkey.

Let's begin our coverage this hour with Jim Bittermann, who has the very latest for us from Paris. What the do we know, Jim?

JIM BITTERMANN, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well there are a lot of crash investigators headed toward the crash scene, which as you mentioned is high up in the Alps and the crash site is believed to be around 6,000 feet where the plane actually hit the ground. And as a consequence, it's difficult for searchers to get in there.

Right now, down there, it's about 20 degrees Fahrenheit and temperatures are going to drop this evening. It's already started raining and as a consequence they believe there will be some snow up there. That's going to be adding to the difficulty because of the fact that the searchers, both the people that will be searching to retrieve bodies, but also people who are involved in crash investigations, will have to be operating in snowy, windy, and rainy conditions in very low temperatures. They're almost certainly going to have to hike in because of the fact

the helicopter access is not even that good. They can get helicopters to fly over the scene and there have been a couple of the Jean Donnery (ph) helicopters that have done that. However, they are having difficulty landing close to the crash site. So it's a very difficult situation for the people who are trying to investigate the crash further and also to bring back the bodies. They have established a temporary morgue in a very small town about 10 kilometers away, about 6 miles away from the crash site, and that's where bodies will be taken when they begin to recover them.

BOLDUAN: And, Jim, put this in a little bit of perspective for us. Because I was reading that if all of this is confirmed, and the numbers stand or climb, this will be the deadliest crash in France in some 30 years.

BITTERMANN: Well, yes, that's correct, in terms of the deadliest crash. It's the last major crash here, we had if anything comparable, is the Concord crash in 2000. That killed 113 people and most of the people on board that plane were Germans; they were German tourists taking a leisure flight when the Concord broke into fire on takeoff and crashed just a mile or two from the airport.

As a consequence, I think that there's a great deal of emotion here. We just had another air crash last week, it wasn't here in France but it was in Argentina, had two helicopters that went down carrying three very famous French sports figures and a reality TV crew went down with it. It's been a kind of a series of tragedies here that are I think really hitting this country.

And in addition to everything else, Kate, we had the King of Spain here on a previously scheduled coincidental visit. It was supposed to be a visit full of pomp and circumstance. The Champs-Elysees, where I'm standing, is all decked out with the Spanish flag and that sort of thing. In fact, it's been cut short. The visit has been cut short and the Spanish king went over to the crisis center and tried to get the latest information there. So it's been a real turn of events here, a real emotional ride I would say. Kate, John.

BOLDUAN: Absolutely, a really tragic coincidence that the King of Spain was there at the time. Jim, covering the details for us. Jim, thank you so much. John?

BERMAN: Want to dig a little deeper right now into the flight path of Germanwings Flight 9525. Let's bring in Chad Myers, our meteorologist here.

Chad, lay out the direction that this flight was going and what particular challenges it might have been facing.

CHAD MYERS, AMS METEOROLOGIST: What you will notice on my map, John, is that if you leave from Barcelona and you fly right to Dusseldorf, people think you fly in a straight line but you don't. There are highways in the sky that planes have to follow. The plane was all the way over here over the Alps. You think why on earth would you fly over the mountains if you didn't have to here? But this is the way it went yesterday, a perfectly smooth flight all the way up to 38,000 feet right over the mountains. And you can fly over mountains if you're that high and not get any turbulence whatsoever.

The problem is right here. Right when it was crossing over from the Mediterranean back on to land near Marseille. And that's what I'm a little bit confused about it. If the pilots knew there was an emergency going on, as they were starting to descend, there's right there is right about land. So why would they not make a left-hand turn and go to Marseille, which is only about 30 miles away? The plane continued to fly 100 miles before it impacted the ground.

And let me show you what the ground looks like here, because here's the problem. Here's the plane's path, something like this.

[11:05:00] And there's Marseille, that close. If the problem was there, it could've been right here -- so they probably didn't know there was a problem yet until they were continuing on up here even on farther on up into this location. And eventually the plane's lack of altitude and the mountains coming up got together right at about 6,000 feet.

Now, eventually there were much higher Alps here 10,000 feet to the north of that, but the plane didn't even get there because the plane was already lower than that. Down through here, this is 1,000 to 3,000 feet, the rolling hills of French plains. Some -- you get vineyards up through the valleys and things through here. But all of a sudden, when you get right up through here, almost like Colorado front range. I grew up in Nebraska and you're driving for 60 miles and you can see the mountains and you think you are almost to Denver, but all of sudden those mountain ranges right through there, everything comes straight up out of valleys, and this is where the plane ended up somewhere in here. We don't have the exact location yet but we know that it's right along this ridge line.

BERMAN: Hey, Chad, any weather in the area that might have played a factor?

MYERS: That's a good question. Because earlier we thought, no, probably not. But something kind of curious popped up a little bit ago. I noticed this little elevation right there. This is 30,000 feet. This is where the plane could have leveled off and continued to fly. But it didn't. It slowed down a little bit. And when you get bumps, all of a sudden the pilot will slow it down a little bit because of the bumps.

Were there bumps through here? Maybe a little bit of turbulence that the pilot asked to go to 38,000 feet instead? And so the bumps here, but other than I don't see, at 38,000 feet, any thunderstorms that could have been that high. There were a few in the area, but I don't believe it. There could still be something. We'll find the black boxes. I know they are painted orange, but we will know everything when they find the boxes. Unlike 370, MH-370, where we still don't know what happened, this one we'll put together pretty quickly.

BERMAN: Chad Myers, thanks so much. Kate. BOLDUAN: All right, so let's continue this discussion, John. The trouble as we're now learning seems to have occurred mid-flight on an aircraft with a solid safety record, one that had a routine safety check just yesterday. That's according to the airline. And the captain on the flight had more than ten years experience with Lufthansa and Germanwings.

BERMAN: Yes, 6,000 flight hours on the Airbus. So the question is what could have gone wrong with this flight and cause that steep descent for 6-8 minutes? Let's bring in aviation analyst Mary Schiavo.

Mary, what do you think the most important data point we have right now is? Is it this rapid descent of 14,000 feet in six to eight minutes?

MARY SCHIAVO, CNN AVIATION ANALYST: I think that is the most important data point and probably the most important correction is that there was no mayday call, because we were wondering why would the pilot continue to descend into the Alps, did not change course, straight ahead, a descent into the area of the Alps where they start to rise, just as Chad said, with a mayday call. If you knew you had a problem, turn back to Nice or other -- Grenoble or other airports in the area.

But without a mayday call, I thought that was a very important development that French air traffic control said it was they who tried to contact this aircraft, as they should, because the aircraft was descending for six minutes. It was leaving its flight-assigned flight level, which it had to be, under air traffic control. And it was leaving that level. So air traffic control should have been trying to talk to them. Why are you descending without permission? And they got no response and then issued the warning.

So whatever happened, the pilots either didn't have time to communicate or they were not able or did not realize they were descending. Remember, in Air France 447, they had a problem with the Airbus, wasn't the same kind of Airbus, but they didn't realize how much they were descending, how fast they were descending. And we've already heard from German authorities from this airline saying they did make those fixes to the angle of attack indicators, by the way. That's been a suspect in crashes in the past, so the pilot wouldn't know that their nose was going down, perhaps. They said this plane got those repairs.

BOLDUAN: So, Mary, put it into perspective on this issue of the steep descent. It's happened for six to eight minutes. How fast is that? Put that in perspective. Is that an emergency descent, from your perspective?

SCHIAVO: Yes, it's a very fast descent and from that altitude. Now, your rates of descent or your rates of climb depend on where you are. If you're at a very high altitude, you have to do that more slowly than you might do at other altitudes. So at 33,800 feet, a 3,500 feet per second decline is outside of the recommended descent, but it's not steep enough to give that aircraft structural damage. So you wouldn't have a descent where pieces of the plane were coming off, for example.

But it's a very rapid descent. It would be one that the passengers would notice. So because -- that's why they wouldn't be doing it. So whatever was causing that to do it, it was very rapid. If the pilots instructed the plane to do that -- which I have a difficult time believing. At this point, I just don't believe that would be pilot- ordered because they were headed into the Alps.

[11:10:03] And we got a report over here in London that they found it at 8,800 feet. So it's difficult for me to believe the pilot would do that intentionally.

BERMAN: We just got a little information from the area right there. A mountain guide has been speaking to CNN, said he heard a flight, a plane at a very low altitude, over him, which is very rare in that remote region. He says the area completely inaccessible by ground. You would need to have helicopters to access it by air. And this man tells us he has seen several, several helicopters flying overhead -- not where you're looking at right now. That's Barcelona where the flight took off. I'm talking about the Alps where the plane went down.

Mary, I also want to ask you about some maintenance issues with the A320. The FAA had sent around what they call an Air Worthiness Directive about some issues of corrosion having to do with the wings. Could that be an area of concern here?

SCHIAVO: Well, it's certainly an area of concern. I mean, the NTSB -- not the NTSB, the French BEA will poring over all of these kinds of warnings. But we do have an accident where, a modern accident, it's extremely rare to lose a piece of structural part of the plane.

But people might remember the Chalk's air disaster down in Miami about, oh, eight or ten years ago. And in that case there was structural corrosion on the wing. That plane was 53 years old. And in that -- the wing tore off right after takeoff. And what happened there -- it's very dramatic and it's very rapid. The wing came off, the fuel caught fire, there was an explosion. It went straight down.

This is not the kind of path that losing a structural member would make. I mean, descending for six minutes in a straight line, that's not loss of a structural member. However corrosion of the wing could have possibly caused other problems; maybe a leak of fuel, fire, whatever. But in that situation, the pilot would have time to get a mayday call off. You would tell air traffic control what's going on. And there's just no -- there's -- n now it's been corrected that that didn't happen.

And there was a pilot flying in the area. This is the reports we're getting out of London, is that there was a private pilot flying in the area. And he said the visibility was pretty good. So presumably pilots would have been able to see, at least, that they were in mountainous terrain even if they didn't have the ability to get visual reference from the instruments. For example, if the pitot tubes were blocked and they couldn't tell their angle, attitude -- their altitude was falling, they should have been able to see it according to this private pilot that was flying.

BERMAN: All right, Mary.

BOLDUAN: Put all the --

BERMAN: Go ahead, Kate.

BOLDUAN: Sorry, John. Go right ahead.

No, I was just going to say when you put it all together, that's kind of why you are left with scratching your head, especially early on. A pilot with a lot of experience. A good safety track record for this flight. It leaves you to really wonder something had to have gone drastically wrong on that flight because obviously it ended tragically.

SCHIAVO: Exactly. Leaving the pilots unable to change the course of the flight, I suspect, whether it's from a mechanical reason or from a pilot incapacitation reason.

BERMAN: Mary Schiavo, thanks so much.

SCHIAVO: Thank you.

BOLDUAN: Now there are ways that you can help, of course, when tragedy strikes. We're putting all of those resources, pulling all of those resources together. Continue to check back to cnn.com/impact to look for ways that you can help.

BERMAN: Ahead for us, more questions about this plane crash. We'll look at exactly where it went down and how this treacherous terrain will make it very difficult for searchers, rescuers to reach it any time soon.

[11:13:34]

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[11:17:07] BERMAN: Our breaking news this morning. It's been six hours now since a commercial jet with 150 passengers and crew crashed in the French Alps. Searchers still trying to locate the wreckage of Germanwings Flight 9525. Authorities say expect no survivors.

Let's bring in Tom Foreman here. We want to get a sense of the terrain, what the search might be like and also the circumstances that led up to this crash. Tom?

TOM FOREMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: You can look at that photograph you just had on there and have an idea of what we're talking about here. Look at the mountains in this region. This is a serious area of mountainous hiking to reach anything back in the mountains here. This is a little bit shorter than the Colorado Rockies but a very similar environment and the area where we're talking about, the plane going down would be more than a mile in the air so if you think about what it's like if you were to go to Denver and hike around the foothills of the Rockies there, that's what you're getting. It's going to be a strain on all the people trying to reach the location and strain on getting out with everything. It will be a tremendous amount of work. But overriding all of it right now, John, is the urgency to get in there and get the flight data and voice recorder because that's what will explain what actually happened to this plane because we know now that it was in good repair based on an Lufthansa engineering check just yesterday by some of the best in the industry. We know that it had a skilled and experienced pilot onboard. We know it wasn't particularly old for an aircraft of this time. They have got to get to that wreckage despite those challenges to figure out what really went wrong in those final moments.

BERMAN: A mountain guide in the area telling us there is a cloud formation coming in will make it much harder. The only way to access it really by air right now. Tom, there are a lot of questions about air speed. These pitot tubes. These devices that measure air speed and whether or not they may have been functioning properly because there have been questions about that in the past.

FOREMAN: Yeah, there have been. Pitot tubes are located -- you'll see them on many planes as you get onboard. Here is a cockpit. You can see them down here. That's what a pitot tube looks like. They are heated so they won't freeze over, and yet there have been problems with them freezing over in the past. When that happens, this is the thing that measures how fast you are moving through the air. When that happens, then the pilots are not so sure how fast they are moving and that can change many things. Mary has been talking today about angle of attack. The truth is pilots have to rely on instrumentation to tell them if they are angled up or if they're angled down, what speed they're traveling. Yes, as Mary noted, you get close to the mountains and you would think someone would be able to look and see it then. If they believe that they are well up above that until that critical moment, maybe they just don't know. All of that, I must say, the angle of attack, what it affects is the airflow over the wing and the airflow over the wing is the thing that makes a plane like this fly.

[11:20:00] If the airflow gets separated from the wing because the angle of attack becomes too severe or you get too slow or something like that, then there's a serious problem and there's no recovering from that as a general rule. It can be done but only by a very experienced pilot in the right circumstances. That's why those pitot tubes matter because if there was something wrong with them, and there have been problems in the past, it could give a false reading to the cockpit. We don't know that's what happened now, but again that's why they have to get to wreckage to find the evidence, John.

BERMAN: That will be one of the first questions that we'll be asking here. Tom Foreman, thanks so much. Kate?

BOLDUAN: Ahead for all of us AT THIS HOUR, more details are coming in about the plane's final minutes. What could it tell us about why it went down? We'll talk to a commercial airline pilot coming up next.

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BERMAN: Breaking news. Helicopters are now scouring the French Alps for Germanwings Flight 9525 which crashed with at least 150 people onboard this morning. The Airbus A320 went down during a flight from Barcelona in Spain to Dusseldorf in Germany. The weather is getting worse in the region which could complicate the search efforts. Officials believe there's little chance at this point that there are any survivors.

BOLDUAN: Keith Wolzinger is a commercial airline pilot as well as a flight instructor. Keith, you can bring a very unique perspective to this and we want to get your take on what we know and what we don't know and what questions you have. As we understand it, mid-flight is known as the safer portion of any flight.

[11:25:05] We were looking into it and the FAA says just under 16 percent of crashes occur during the cruise portion, if you will, and though we're told that the flight dropped maybe 14,000 feet then, in six to eight minutes. Take us inside, if you could, what would be going on in the cockpit at that time with that steep descent?

KEITH WOLZINGER, COMMERCIAL PILOT: Well, that steep descent would indicate that if the pilots were in control of the airplane they're responding to some sort of emergency and following a checklist, possibly even executing an emergency descent, which would ordinarily follow a depressurization of the airplane. So the idea there is to get the airplane to a lower altitude where passengers can breathe the air, which at high altitude, you can't really breathe air. So the oxygen masks would have dropped and the flight would have descended to a breathable altitude somewhere below 14,000 feet. Now, if that's the case, the pilots were executing an emergency descent, then they would stay on the track that they had been programming the flight to follow. The flight plan. If the airplane was not under the pilot's control or if the airplane was out of control, it probably would have veered off of the intended flight path. So it remains to be seen where the impact site is in relation to the program flight track of the plane. If it's along that track, I would have an idea that it might have tried to execute some sort of an emergency descent to lower altitude and continue flying to find an alternate airport to land at.

BERMAN: It's interesting, I have a graphic which might illustrate the very point you're making. It shows the altitude and also the air speed. The blue line is the altitude. The red line is the air speed. What you see on that blue line is that rapid descent but it's steady. It doesn't go back and forth and back and forth. A steady descent of some 14,000 feet in those six to eight minutes and the air speed maintaining a relative consistency there as well. You suggested that it indicates the pilot may have been attempting to do something and may have been attempting some kind of emergency landing, pressurization could be one issue. What else could cause or lead a pilot to try something like that?

WOLZINGER: Well, a smoke event would also cause the pilots to probably try to make an emergency descent as well. Because then the air in the cabin becomes uninhabitable so you try to reduce the pressurization differential between the outside of the airplane and the inside of the airplane so that you can get the smoke evacuated from the cabin and make it safer to breathe. BOLDUAN: Now, Keith, flying through the French Alps and finding a

place to land anywhere in there, if the pilots have control, that's an important point, seems very dangerous even to the laymen, we would assume. What is the captain, the flight crew, considering if they are in this emergency situation and you are over the French Alps. What do you do? What are you looking for?

WOLZINGER: Well, their first job is to get the airplane to a habitable altitude, which looks like they might have been trying to. Now the trick in the Alps is that the terrain is very high, so while you're trying descend to a lower altitude so you can breathe better, you've got terrain considerations as well. So you can descend but you can't descend too low or you'll have a terrain issue. So that could be the problem. Once you have the airplane under control and you have an idea of how you're going to handle the pressurization issue or the oxygen issue, your second task is then to find a suitable airport to land at. They may have been so preoccupied with handling their emergency that choice of a suitable landing site might have been beyond their grasp at that point.

BERMAN: We always hear that if you're a pilot in a tough situation, the order of business is aviate, navigate, communicate. But if we're talking about a six to eight-minute descent, is that a long time to not talk to ground control and say, hey, guys, there's something going on here?

WOLZINGER: It is kind of a long time to not announce your intentions. Normally, even if you are on an oxygen mask in a depressurized plane or a plane filled with smoke, you're still going to transmit on the radio and you can still set your transponder to the emergency code that air traffic control would pick up. And you would still be able to communicate with the outside world. If they are overcome in some fashion, either the pressurization increased too high or they weren't able to get their oxygen masks on or if they're overcome by smoke, then they may not have been able to respond. If the airplane was in a controlled descent at a constant air speed, it seems like they were in control for at least a portion of that.

If the airplane was not under their control, like I mentioned earlier, they would have veered off course and the speed would have increased above the structural limits of the airplane if it was in a very steep descent, which it doesn't seem like it was in a completely out of control very steep descent. Seems like it was somewhat controlled to me.