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Debris of AirAsia Flight Found in Java Sea; Recovery of Black Box from AirAsia Flight Delayed Due to Weather

Aired December 31, 2014 - 08:00   ET

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


(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The first two victims have just arrived.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: A stark reminder of the human tragedy here.

TONY FERNANDES, CEO, AIRASIA: I am the leader of this company and I have to take responsibility.

MICHAELA PEREIRA, CNN ANCHOR: Objects thought to have been the plane may have been spotted.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It didn't fall belly first.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I think that the plane stalled.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The industry needs to know urgently what went wrong.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MICHAELA PEREIRA, CNN ANCHOR: Good morning, and welcome to NEW DAY. It is Wednesday the 31st day of December. It is 8:00 in the east. I'm Michaela Pereira alongside my friend and colleague Christine Romans. Poppy Harlow is also with us. We welcome all of our viewers from around the United States and of course across the globe.

We want to turn right now to the breaking news that we have been tracking in the crash of AirAsia flight 8501. Wreckage that could belong to that doomed flight may have been found at the bottom of the Java Sea. This development a day after debris and bodies of the victims were recovered on the surface of the water. Rough winds, though, rain and surf halted today's search. They may very well do the same for the next several days. Poor weather is being forecasted in that region.

CHRISTINE ROMANS, CNN ANCHOR: Meantime, a heart-wrenching night for families anxiously awaiting the fate of their loved ones. Ten victims now recovered from the water. The first two arrived back in Surabaya this morning. As you can imagine, relatives taking the news very, very hard. People have been heard yelling, screaming, wailing. In some cases they are quiet, they are just quietly grieving as the latest developments come in. We're covering the story from all angles only the way CNN can. I want to begin with Gary Tuchman. He is live from the naval airbase in Surabaya, Indonesia. Gary?

GARY TUCHMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Christine, here in Surabaya a very weird thing taking place right now. We're four hours away from the year 2015 and we hear New Year's fireworks all over the city, and that happiness when you juxtapose it with what's going on at the airport and what's going on in the city with so many families, the gloom and the sadness, it's a little hard to take right now. It just does not feel quite so festive for the New Year. Glad some people are festive, though, obviously, or this would be entirely too sad.

That being said, what is making it more difficult is the fact that, while people have recognized the family members that the loved ones most likely have died, the recovery of bodies has gone slowly, and that's because the weather conditions have been so poor. While there are ships and planes on the scene in the Java Sea, divers have not been able to go under. The reason it's important, the divers recovered 10 bodies. There's still 152 souls who have not been accounted for. And it's believed by some of the people leading the search that people may still be strapped to their seats in the bottom of the sea.

It's only 100 feet deep. Scuba divers can go down there. But the conditions have been so rough scuba divers haven't been able to do their work yet. This has been a very eventful and sad day.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

TUCHMAN: This morning the first group of recovered passengers arriving in Surabaya in an emotional ceremony in caskets marked 001 and 002. This as Indonesian authorities focus on pinpointing the exact location of AirAsia flight 8501, officials confirming sonar imagery located wreckage believed to be from the aircraft, submerged at the bottom of the Java Sea.

THOMAS: What is of particular interest is what parts of the airplane are there, the wings, the tile, to sort of try to understand whether the plane broke up in flight or remained intact.

TUCHMAN: Others reports suggest the plane may be lying upside down according to "The Wall Street Journal." On Tuesday, recovery teams bring in pieces of debris ashore, along with the remains of six passengers and a flight attendant. Authorities now faced with a gruesome task, recovering more of the passengers from the wreckage and identifying the bodies for grief-stricken families.

But some still hold onto hope. One woman with six family members on board telling CNN, "There is nothing confirmed as far as what happened to the passengers, and we are still hoping there is a miracle and they survived."

At the crisis center here in Surabaya, relatives gather for a prayer service inside the airport. Next, the hunt for clues, answers as to what brought down AirAsia 8501 likely contained in the plane's flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder, otherwise known as the black boxes located in the tail section of the aircraft. THOMAS: I'm hoping by first thing next week that we're going to have

a very clear picture of what happened to this airplane because the industry absolutely needs to know urgently what went wrong.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

TUCHMAN: So many unbelievably sad stories. I talked to one gentleman today whose mother, sister, brother-in-law, two nieces, and a nephew were all on the plane. He just still can't even believe this is real. We have been told that five more of the victims, their bodies will be brought to that same naval airbase later tonight. Christine?

ROMANS: That's a difficult assignment and what a difficult story to tell. Gary Tuchman, thank you.

The total number of victims from the crash increasing overnight, as Gary said, to 10. Two of the bodies were put in coffins and taken to a naval airbase in Surabaya. That's where officials are working to identify those remains. For more on that part of the story we want to go to Paula Hancocks joining us by phone from Indonesia. Hello, Paula.

PAULA HANCOCKS, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Hello, Christine. Well, I've just arrived outside the military base in the town on the west coast of Borneo. This is the first port of call for these bodies. Once they're pulled out of the water they're brought here to the island, the closest to where the crash location is to be treated and to have the initial identification.

The crash location is about 110 nautical miles from here. And for us to get to this island iIt was incredibly difficult. The weather has been awful. Our flight was delayed by about three hours. We know that the search and rescue operation has been postponed and stopped and started throughout the day because of the bad weather, and according to the chief executive of AirAsia this could carry on for the next couple of days. The next two or three days we could see heavy rain. We could see high waves which is of course very detrimental to trying to recover some of those bodies.

Now, what happens here is that the victims are brought here, and then they are treated, we understand, taken to a nearby hospital. The initial identification can be done, for example, is there any I.D. cards on them, any jewelry, any identifying marks, the clothes they're wearing. Remember, the bereaved families and the grieved families have already been asked for this information and many have been asked for photos of their loved ones, so of course the initial photo identification can be done here as well. And then they are flown on to Surabaya where those families are waiting.

ROMANS: All right, Paula Hancocks, thank you for that. Again, 10 bodies now recovered from flight 8501. Michaela?

PEREIRA: For more we are joined by CNN aviation analyst and former inspector-general of the U.S. Department of Transportation Mary Schiavo. Importantly we should point out she represents victims and families after airline disasters. We're going to speak to her on that in a second. Also here with me is CNN safety analyst and former FAA safety inspector David Soucie. He has a new book coming out. It's called "Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, Why It Disappeared and Why It's Only a Matter of Time This Happens Again."

Mary, I'll begin with you. We just heard about the search and rescue efforts being hampered by the weather. We know their priority is the victims, the retrieval of the deceased there. There's about 155 bodies that are left inside that plane. Talk to us about the importance of what this sonar detection could be, the fuselage that could be there at the bottom of the Java Sea.

MARY SCHIAVO, CNN AVIATION ANALYST: Well, it's very, very important for the families and of course for the searchers, because now that they think they have an indication of where it is, they can put their emphasis, their assets, their resource, their manpower on, first of all, recovering the bodies, and then literally they can send down divers to get the black boxes. They may not even need to worry about listening for the pingers, et cetera, if they get them by simply finding them in the fuselage of the plane. It's going to greatly speed up not only the process of finding out what happened but also the recovery of the bodies.

Now, the storm is particularly different since the fuselage is breached because some bodies have already gotten out. The storm will stir that out and may lodge free more pieces of the wreckage and more human remains. So storm is not good news, but the finding of the wreckage supposedly is very good news.

PEREIRA: We can understand, though, the concern about not sending search and rescue people in there because they don't want further casualties obviously. So, David, investigators are hoping that they might be lucky, as Mary said, that they're able to send divers down once they locate the fuselage. They're hoping for the tail section of the plane to be intact so they can get that all-important flight data recorder, correct?

DAVID SOUCIE, CNN SAFETY ANALSYT: Correct. And if you remember the first pictures with he had of the blue box, the blue case, turns out it wasn't from the passengers. What that is is a suitcase used to put in the back of the aircraft and that has light bulbs and anything that the pilots might need if they have to land the aircraft somewhere else other than their maintenance base, and it was intact. It was completely intact, and it's just forward of where these black boxes are located. So I feel that these black boxes will be in great condition and these are the answers to the clues.

PEREIRA: So let's talk about that, Mary, then I've got another question for you. The retrieval of these data recorders is vital.

SOUCIE: Absolutely.

PEREIRA: And you want to make sure they're not compromised so that the data is not compromised. It's a very careful and safe and meticulous operation to recover them.

SOUCIE: It is, and we have the capability now of actually getting the information off of it without sending it back to the home locations. The reason they don't do that is because if the cell itself is breached and saltwater gets into it, then we're talking about taking your laptop and sticking it in the saltwater. So because of that, you put it in a container, you put it in a pressurized container if it's deep water. In this case they may not have to do this, but you keep it in its environment until you can fully rinse every bit of salt that might be in there off, because that will damage those electronic components.

PEREIRA: We've seen how it has done that to our electronics. Mary, I want to talk to you because, again, you have represented victims' families, members of victims of plane crashes. This is important thing for to us talk about. Indonesia is not part of the Montreal Convention, correct, a treaty that offers payments from airlines, compensation around $17,000, did I get that right? Indonesia instead follows the Warsaw convention of 1929 which only offers compensation of about $8,300. Now we've heard the CEO, Tony Fernandez, who has been vocal about his support, the airline's support of what they're going to do to compensate and to support the families of these victims. I'm curious, what kind of compensation do you think or not even that so much, do you feel that the airline is going to step up and support these families?

SCHIAVO: Well, I certainly hope so. And, yes, the international aviation laws are just a mismatch, a patchwork quilt of everything from very current laws to antiquated laws. And some countries follow the Montreal treaty, some the Warsaw, and each have different levels of compensation. The modern version of Montreal is the compensation is equivalent to what the family has lost, wages plus everything else, and Warsaw is a set amount.

The problem for the airline is the airline at some point is going to lose control, and they're going to lose control of this case to the lawyers for their insurance company. And they will be setting the standard, once this initial phase is passed, they will, and it's right in their insurance contracts, they will rest a lot of the control from the airline. And I've dealt with this particular insurer many, many times, and, you know, they can be tough and they can be rather cheap. They can really put the clamp down on what they will pay out. So it will be up to the airline to remind the insurance company they really work for them and they want to treat their families like family.

PEREIRA: Yes, like family, and we think about that, Mary. That's the thing that's so sobering, 162 lives lost but so many of those people from the very same families Gary Tuchman was telling us about. Our thanks to you, Mary Schiavo, and to David Soucie. Busy days ahead of you, but thank you again and a happy New Year to you both.

SCHIAVO: Thank you. You too.

ROMANS: Great conversation. We have another developing story to bring to you in southern California. More than 100 drivers rescued after being trapped on a snow-covered highway in the San Bernardino mountains. This happened after a car accident left them nowhere to go, and then a foot of snow piled on while they were waiting. Want to get to Sara Sidner along highway 138 in the San Bernardino mountains with more. They were very quick and very precise and they moved 130 people off those roads, Sara.

SARA SIDNER, CNN CORRESPONDENT: That's right. And a lot of people go, well, a foot of snow, what is the big deal? But things got really slippery and there have been really strong, strong gusts of wind that come -- here comes another one -- every few minutes that managed to push some of the cars. So we're also feeling it. We're in the foothills. We're not up into the mountain because, frankly, we could also get stranded as we tried to go exactly where the rescue is happening or was happening.

But certainly we're seeing people come down from the higher elevations and their cars have, you know, the snow-cover on it. But these 139 people were in their cars, they could not move around. They were slipping and sliding all over the place. They were scared and they were calling for rescue. That rescue did happen. Many of them we're told are going to be staying in a church, staying in a shelter until it becomes light, until they're able to clear the roads. For a while the road was closed.

And this has been quite a bit of a mess. Where it isn't snowing, it's been really gusty winds and it is very cold. And as you know, in this part of the country, a lot of folks not used to it getting this cold, even though it is New Year's Eve. Michaela?

ROMANS: New Year's Eve, All right, thank you, Sara Sidner for that. Let's move to Poppy Harlow now for some of the days other top stories. There's so much going on.

POPPY HARLOW, CNN ANCHOR: Good morning to you, good morning to everyone at home. Thanks for joining us. One of our top stories, police shot and killed a man in suburban Philadelphia who they say tried to run them over with his car. They say they were trying to arrest the 52-year-old after he posted an online video threatening to kill police officers as well as FBI agents. His death comes a little more than a week after a man who made similar threats shot and then killed two NYPD police officers in their patrol car, then he shot and killed himself in a subway station.

A high-ranking leader of the Somali militant group al Shabab was killed by a U.S. air strike overnight in Somalia. Abdishakur was the head of the group's intelligence unit believed to be responsible for suicide attacks in Mogadishu. U.S. officials say there were no civilian casualties in that mission.

The U.N. Security Council rejecting for a resolution calling for Israel to abandon Palestinian territories. The U.S. was among the nations to vote it down saying negotiations, dialogue are the only way to solve the ages-old conflict

And it is New Year's Eve here in the U.S. But in some parts of the world they're already ringing in 2015. Let me show you great pictures -- Australia kind of always does it best. Look at those images that country rang in 2015 at the top of the hour, just about 15 minutes ago. Some regions are still enjoying their final hour of 2014 there in Australia. Parts of the Far East, including Japan and South Korea will usher in

the New Year at 10:00 eastern this morning our time. Here in New York we're less than 16 hours away from the big party.

PEREIRA: Can't say that because I need to get a six-hour nap in before all this happens.

HARLOW: Michaela Pereira will be -- are you going to be the moderator between Kathy Griffin and Anderson Cooper?

PEREIRA: I thought so, but I think I'm going to clear the way and stand down with millions of our friends in Times Square instead, and watch from afar.

ROMANS: True confession, until this year I've taped that and replayed it when I want to. But now the 8-year-old is onto me. He knows and wants to watch the ball drop at midnight. We'll see. It starts at 9:00.

HARLOW: Nine o'clock, New Year's Eve live with Anderson Cooper and Kathy Griffin. It is TV you don't want to miss.

PEREIRA: Absolutely.

All right. We are going to continue to follow the latest developments in the search for AirAsia Flight 85. One of our experts will weigh in on what we know and what we don't. And, of course, they'll answer some of your questions.

ROMANS: Plus, John Boehner lending his support to the House Majority Whip Scalise who spoke to a white racist group in 2002. Will Boehner's support cost him his new post to the Congress?

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ROMANS: Welcome back to NEW DAY.

Objects that could be from AirAsia 8501 may have been located on the bottom of the Java Sea. Divers were hampered by rough weather and more of the same is on the way for tomorrow. There are still many questions about what happened to the AirAsia flight. We want to get to the about the tom of what we do and don't know, sort through all of this and answer some questions you have been sending us over Twitter.

I want to bring CNN aviation analyst Les Abend. He's also a commercial airline pilot and contributing editor of "Flying" magazine. Jeff Wise is a science writer and author of "Extreme Fear."

Let's sort through sort of the interesting contradiction of the morning, and that is that investigators there on the ground saying they have located with sonar what they believe to be the plane, but the CEO of the company that owns the aircraft AirAsia saying there is no confirmation yet.

In situations like this, in disasters, there's often conflicting information. A lot of people hold little pieces of that whole puzzle. Do you think, Les, that's what we're seeing here? There's a lot of different pieces of information being held by different officials?

LES ABEND, CNN AVIATION ANALYST: Absolutely. And this is all part of the investigation process. You get little fragments, little pieces of evidence and people go with it one way or another. I think the CEO is being very strategic and very smart about saying that yes indeed that might be it. He's got some credible sources for his information.

ROMANS: And you just want to make sure the information people are get something correct because the families are listening to every word and want new information.

One of the things we know now, ten bodies, Jeff. You would like to know sort of where these bodies were found. That would help you understand sort of what the site looks like.

JEFF WISE, SCIENCE WRITER: It's tantalizing because we seem to be getting information coming in slowly, bit by bit, it's fragmentary. We don't know where the new bodies have been found. We know very little about the actual position information.

What we're trying to, what we'd like to see is a more comprehensive picture of where the debris is being located, that will give us a sense of what kind of accident it might have been.

Obviously, this is early in the process. The investigators are under no obligation to release everything that they know and not supposed to release everything they know, but we as the public are watching this with baited breath. You know, it's so tantalizing that they found evidence that we know so much more what happened to the plane than we did just a few days ago, and yet we're halted. We can't move forward because of the bad weather. It's tough.

ROMANS: And we need those black boxes. We need to see the flight data recorder and the flight recorder. That's going to give us so much information.

So, this is what we do know. We know parts of the plane were located on sonar at the bottom of the Java Sea. We don't know how large the parts are, where they are or their orientation on the sea floor. There's still a lot of conflicting information along those lines. That will take clearer weather to clear up, won't it?

WISE: It seems like the weather is getting better every night, and if they know where this debris is underneath the surface, using GPS it should be fairly straightforward matter to go out there in the middle of the night, put the underwater equipment down, and get those images. We just don't know. I mean, this is pure speculation on my part just now.

ABEND: I think some of the -- depending upon the protocol as gruesome the task as it may be, the autopsy also start revealing some of that evidence, too, depending upon if there's salt as we probably discussed before, the saltwater in the lungs, that will give a little bit of evidence, what might have happened to the airplane.

ROMANS: Yes, it is gruesome, but it will help to determine what this mystery was. We know the debris from the plane was found in the ocean 100 to 200 kilometers from the last location but we don't know if the final resting place of the plane is close to the debris field.

When we get more of that information we will be able to see what the pilots might have been thinking, where they might have been trying to turn around. How long after that last request for a climb in altitude before something terrible went wrong?

ABEND: If indeed they were turning around or if they were being subject to some sort of mechanical issue with the airplane that they were trying to rectify maybe by turning around, it's hard to say if that's exactly what was happening. They may have been experiencing some severe turbulence perhaps or like I mentioned something going wrong with their displays on the instrument panel.

ROMANS: Let me ask you a Twitter question we got in, specifically as a pilot, what this pilot might have been thinking. We talked about how he asked to change altitude to climb over the storm. This Twitter user wants to know would it have made a difference if the pilot was allowed to increase altitude?

ABEND: We don't know. We don't know what they were facing. I mean, the onboard radar gave a picture that may have some data we could see if it has some memory. It may have. It's hard to say. He may have just been experiencing a rough ride at higher altitude which is a typical request.

ROMANS: Another Twitter question, Jeff, some of the debris we've pulled out of the ocean and ten bodies of those on board. In light of that, one of our Twitter followers asked, how crucial is it to secure this evidence with investigators prior to any potential mishandling by rescuers?

Are the rescuers trained to treat this stuff as forensic evidence?

WISE: The answer is we don't -- fishermen, this is a very populous country, percentage of the population gets their living from the sea. Fishermen are going to be crisscrossing this area and so ideally, yes, you're going to have trained rescuers pulling this material out. And it's been subjected to the elements for all this time. It's not really a secure crime accident investigation area.

ROMANS: By the nature of the accident it can't be. You've got, just you want to get as much evidence as you possibly can as quickly as you can.

WISE: For instance, there was some footage, unfortunate footage of a body floating without clothes, just underwear. We don't know did the clothes get removed as it fell through the air, was it something that happened in the ocean. There's so much that happened in the last three or four days.

ABEND: One of the things that concerns me is the fact that there was no communication at all after that last radar contact, and that would mean to me that there was something serious going on. In other words if they were having a controlled flight situation, at some point, they would have been able to simply key the mike switch on their yoke switches, on this airplane it's a stick but they would have been able to get something out, we've got a problem, we're going to attempt ditching, whatever it is, so that concerns me.

ROMANS: We need those black boxes to hear what happened. Gentlemen, thank you so much.

Michaela?

PEREIRA: We do need the black boxes, so true. More of our coverage of the search for AirAsia Flight 8501, we're live on the ground with what is going on right now. Also here stateside, a top ranking Republican in damage control after admitting that he gave a speech to a white supremacist group. House Speaker John Boehner backing the Louisiana congressman. How could this support backfire, will it?

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