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tv   The Don Lemon Show  CNN  March 24, 2014 7:00pm-7:31pm PDT

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this remarkable device. that's all for us tonight. we'll be following the story of a deadly landslide in washington state. the mystery of flight 370 with don lemon starts right now. don lemon starts right now. >> this is cnn breaking news. -- captions by vitac -- www.vitac.com >> this is a cnn special report. the mystery of flight 370. we do have breaking news tonight. the search for flight 370 has been suspended at least for now. gale force winds, large waves and heavy rain making it too dangerous for searchers. malaysia airline letted families know they now believe no one survived the flight but there is not one piece of solid evidence that the plane even crashed. there are more questions than answers tonight. we have top aviation experts standing by to answer your questions. like this one, how can the
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malaysian government declare it went down in the indian ocean without solid evidence? could be anything hijacking gone bad, mechanical, pilots, pirating, sabotage, need to find plane first, if it did crash. and straight off the top i want to go to cnn correspondents for the latest. first, the search operations suspended for today. how bad is it out there? >> the weather is simplyoo dangerous for anyone to fly in that area. it is simply the waves too high for any vessels to get out there by sea. that's basically the word from the australian military. we cannot risk lives to try to find this debris. as desperate as they are to
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bring the debris back. the families need proof that this plane did go down. that is really driving the men and women who are getting into these planes and are at sea. but unfortunately today the waves are 6 1/2 feet tall. the swells, 13 feet. but it is generally the cloud cover, visibility at 200, 500 feet. simply too dangerous for the planes. >> why would malaysian airlines tell the families of the passengers that their loved ones are dead when they don't have physical evidence at this point? >> when looking at the satellite data, it appears that this is the only answer and that the satellite data is showing that the plane must have gone down in this region. and then we're certainly seeing all the activity here over the last week or so, it appears all the governments are agreed that this is the area that the plane
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must have gone down. there is nowhere to land. if the satellite tracks this plane into this region, it is incredibly desolate, there is no other option and that's what they are operating on. the governments here looking for debris. >> stand by. we're going to sara sidner now. how did the families respond to receiving news that none on board survived and they got that by text message? >> some of the families got those texts but they were all being told there was going to be a briefing. it was an emergency briefing, sort of the first time they had something happen like that. these briefings have been quite regular. when they got that information and when we heard the information was coming through, everybody knew that something big had happened. when the families heard the news one burst out of the room and crying why, why, why over and
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over again. another family member came out asking where is my son? where is my son? so these families have been through so much. one was so overcome with grief she had to be in a wheel chair and wheeled out of the briefing. there were beds being brought into the briefing because families just could not get up. they could not walk. it was just too much for them to take. it has been a real emotional time for these families especially because for 17 days i think many of them and when we asked them they still had hope. they still believed it was possible that their loved ones were alive on that plane somewhere because there was no evidence to the contrary. but to hear from the government that they believe this plane did end in the indian ocean and that no one survived, that was too much for many of the families to bear and they just broke down. >> i can't imagine. it's too much to watch. i prefer we not show that video but it shows what these families
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are going through. and the malaysian inspector general says that the police are focusing on four possibilities. the question is, why not catastrophic mechanical failure? how can they rule this out, sara? >> well i talked to a source who is close to the investigation and the source says the thing that has really captured their attention is this turn that was made. the source said basically when the turn was made it takes about two minutes for an aircraft of that size, a 777-200 to make the kind of turn the angle of turn that there more mh-370 made. when that happened, there is two minutes time and there is an emergency button that can be pressed if something was wrong in the cockpit. if they didn't have time to communicate with the air traffic
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controllers they had time to quickly push a button since it took two minutes to do this deliberate turn. they can't understand how it is possible they didn't have time to press a button and send an emergency beacon out to the air traffic control in hoe chi ministry or back here in malaysia. that's one of the reasons i think there is a sense in the investigators mind this was a deliberate act. who did it? no one knows. why? no one knows that either. and where, oh, where are these pieces of the plane if they are in the indian ocean. >> and where are the people on board? richard quest, i will have questions for you in a little bit. i want to check in with martin savidge. he is in a 777 flight simulator. martin we have a twitter question from kyle and it's
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about the 370's flying altitude. why did it drop below 2 12 -- 12,000 feet and fly for seven hours? >> one of them the plane descends and the plane turns. in one way it looks like an emergency and another way it looks like something else. >> we still don't know what happened to flight 370. and we have not found any part of that plane. i'm back now with richard quest and cnn aviation analyst miles o'brien. jeff wise, arthur rosenberg, also mary schiavo, an attorney for victims of transportation accidents. captain bobby skoaly, richard,
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despite what malaysian authorities are saying are we any closer to finding this plane? >> we are a lot closer to knowing the whereabouts of the aircraft. what the inmarsat evidence today along with the aaib and what we learned from the malaysian government is we can rule out the northern corridor. this plane went down in the southern corridor and by the words of the inmarsat, in the south indian ocean. >> mary, can you remember a time when a conclusion was made about a plane crash without a known crash site or any debris found at all? >> no, i really can't. and also i can't remember a time when the conclusion was drawn this early. in fact, the ntsb is usually criticized for dragging things out much longer and having a series of hearings. this is rather early and to
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narrow it down to those four potential causes with no evidence is irregular, i link. >> a similar question to mile o'brien, miles, it is unusual to say something happened and to say the plane is missing and they -- it's in the ocean. and still, no physical evidence of this. >> everything about this investigation has been unusual by comparison to what we're used to here in the u.s. just the fact that the chief spokesman for the investigation is the prime minister of the country. what is his expertise in conducting investigations into plane crashes. it has been a completely opaque investigation all along. there is information that would reteenly be released in the course of an ntsb style investigation. this is just another part of a pattern, really. >> do you disagree with him? >> i would venture not to
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disagree from miles o'brien except for this, the prime minister of australia, tony abbott made an announcement to the house of representatives, originally. so are you saying that is another example? >> that's a bad idea. it's a bad idea to have politicians running to cameras to explain airplane crashes, period. >> i do agree with that. had he not said we have this credible evidence which we have not found yet raising the hopes of the family and people around the world -- miles you disagree with that? >> absolutely. i think it's a question of expertise. and you know, here's an important question we should all be asking here. if a country like malaysia wants to fly something as complicated as the 777, shouldn't it demonstrate to the world it has the capability of investigating an accident?
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should god forbid it happen? and if not maybe there is a memorandum of understanding with another country in this case with australia or new zealand who has the capability in this regard to take over these investigations and run them in a systematic way. the whole world is interested in this. it's important that we collectively help the malaysians out. >> there are other people on the panel whose voices need to be heard including jim tilmon. i want to ask you this from joy. i don't understand how if a catastrophic mechanical event the flight flew on for hours. how could it fly? the flight flew for seven hours. it doesn't mean it flew in a direct pattern. we just don't know in which direction but it's that's a great question, jim tilmon. >> is it a great question and there are lots of little bits of this information that have been
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left by the wayside. all this business about changing altitudes from whatever altitude up to 45,000 to 23,000 and settling on 12,000, all of these things, you know, we need a definite time line that we can slice up just this much time and that much time, this happens there and this happened there so things begin to make some sense. we are running a highly technical situation with reduced common sense. that's a mistake. >> captain skoaly, you investigated the crash of twa flight 800. what do you believe happened? >> it was a completely different scenario with twa flight 800. i see so many differences. like they were saying before. we had ntsb as the lead agency in that investigation. we had many organizations
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cooperating. the u.s. navy was cooperating with ntsb and we meticulously set out and did the search and started out at a rescue mission and turned into a recovery mission and brought back as many -- as much of the aircraft as we possibly can work with the faa and t with wa and ultimately, put together the full investigation before there were any -- before they came up with any estimates of what happened to the aircraft. >> but that is here in the united states, captain that that happened. and if you are going to fly airplanes like the 77 you should have accountability and now how to investigate if the worst of it happened. we'll get back -- >> you can't. >> the search for flight 370 is suspended today. we are not much closer to answers, exactly where the plane
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sleep number's even got an adjustment for that. find your sleep number setting only at a sleep number store. know better sleep with sleep number. more break news for you now. rescuers are looking for victims of a deadly landslide in washington state this weekend. 14 were killed and 176 are unaccounted for. that number has gotten much higher in the past few minutes. we go to george howell with the very latest. >> that 176, i want to qualify th that first of all. that is 176 reports, anything from social media reports, people with websites looking for
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family members and vague reports like a neighbor who says i know that neil lived in that home and he's not there. those are the reports they are looking into, including names they want to narrow that number down. that number has grown steadily. initially we talked about a dozen. it went up to 108 and now it's at 176. is it not going down. we are watching it go up. but investigators are trying to be deliberate in getting as many of the reports as possible and having people account for themselves or families account for people who are missing so that number can go down. >> how is the rescue effort going? do they expect the number to continue to rise? >> don, we got some insight into the rescue operation. i have to tell you, we understand that one of the firefighters out there, it took him forever. it took him five minutes to go 50 to 60 feet just because of the mud. and we also know earlier tha, t wanted to go in with heavy
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equipment and people on the ground searching the ground to look for people. they had to stop that search around midday because the land was unstable and geologists could sense movement. but we understand now from a recent news conference they did resume the search and the search will continue tonight. they will looking to see if there are any complications like the other night. but if it is stable enough they will continue to search tonight. >> george howell with the break news for us. thank you, george. now back to the search for delight 370. now it has been suspended. it's time searchers can ill-afford to lose. will crucial clues be found before time runs out? >> reporter: with the secrets of malaysia airlines flight 370 believed to be hidden in a remote section of the indian ocean the race to collect clues
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continues. >> there are components that can co road and disappearing. the clock is running against them. >> reporter: matthew robinson spent 20 years investigating accidents for the u.s. marine corps. the top priority is finding the flight data reporter. a torpedo device will be launched into the water. the data recorder holds clues that researchers need to determine to find out what happened. but finding it is the beginning. >> every piece of the aircraft will tell its own little tale. that will give you the big picture and draw a conclusion as to what happened. >> if pieces of the plane are recovered investigators will piece it together.
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analyzing the fuselage, flight controls and wings would help investigators pinpoint a cause. many parts of an aircraft like everything components are made of magnesium and in salt water, it can dissolve like an alkaseltzer tab let. there is the grim task of recovering bodies of passengers. the bodies could show signs of smoke inhalation, for example. all of this work could take north months, if not years. family members of the passengers continue to push for answer. >> i just want to see some debris off the aircraft and the black box to know what happened. >> reporter: for now the waiting continues for the families desperate for clues to emerge from the depths of the ocean
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waters. >> the depths of the ocean waters. my next guest is a deep water search expert. and he knows how challenging it is to find any sign of flight 370 in the most remote part of the indian ocean. joining me is david mearns. you know how big a task this. is and assuming the malaysian prime minister is correct on the plane and it went down in the indian ocean 18 days ago, how challenging is this underwater search going to be, david? >> it's going to be a monumental challenge. unprecedented, really, in its scale and compared to air france 447 which everybody has been talking about. previously that was the biggest, most complex and most
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challenging aircraft investigation in deep water in the middle of an ocean. the scale of this is many times greater. just to put it into perspective, on the af 447, the period of uncertainty when that last contact with the plane was taken, if you take that -- the time that elapsed before that plane crashed into the ocean, the period of uncertainty was only 280 seconds. and in that time, the plane could only travel 40 nautical miles. and that basically defined a radius around which the entire search plan was based. compare that with the malaysian plane here. this plane was aloft for six, seven hours and we didn't know where it was. the starting search was in the southeast china sea and ended in the southern indian ocean. a completely different part of the world.
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>> if they find a piece of the debris with the currents in the area and after so many days, how hard will it be to find the point of impact? >> it's going to be incredibly hard. and i think it will be -- you know, we haven't really pushed it out that far. the first piece is that satellite image on day eight after when the crash would have occurred in that time, the wreckage could have been moving anywhere between 25 to 40 nautical miles a day. you are talking several hundred nautical miles of drift in a direction we won't be able to estimate accurately. the ocean down there is not well understood. is it a complex area, which is characterized by eddies and meandering currents and it is just a very, very long period of time to be able to pinpoint a search box. i have used that technique in about four or five examples
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looking for ships and aircraft and the longest that we ever really had -- with air france, it was five days but that is a completely different scenario to this one. the longest is over a three-day period. richard quest has a question for you, david. >> david, in this extraordinarily difficult and different environment where do you begin in if they have not found debris, what do you do next? >> well, you've got nothing left, frankly. they will find debris, i'm sure of it. they'll have enough ships down there. unfortunately, the weather is the main complicating factor. it almost seems like one day is a decent day to work. yesterday was good. that's why they had sightings. today has been called off. that is the biggest complication but i believe they will find some wreckage. >> considering the monumental task that we all know it is why
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are you so certain they are going to find something? >> i'm talking about drifting wreckage. they'll have a lot of ships down there. there will be wreckage that floated away, that drifted away. now with time, some of that wreckage will get water logged or water will penetrate into spaces and some of it will sink to the bottom. but some of it will continue to float. we saw this largest piece on the satellite on day 8. i believe it was the same piece on day 10. if they piece was going to sink, i believe it probably would have before then. so with the number of ships that are on their way to that location with the international effort that's going on in the right area, i believe they will get some wreckage. how many pieces? i don't know. nobody can predict that. on air france it was well over 100, starting on day five all the way up through day 18 wreckage was being recovered.
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but that was a completely different scenario to this one. >> how long can they continue to put out the resources. >> they will have to. they did with 447 each season having refined what they needed to find before they located the wreckage. >> stick around both of you. coming up, are there more resources they could be using in this search? and we try to get an answer to a key question. why would the crew of flight 370 make a sharp turn and descend to 12,000 feet? keep tweeting us your questions at #370qs. multi-layered security solutions keep your information safe, and secure.
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