the shop. >> tom? >> where's the crime scene debris and plane? >> hopefully we will get answers to all of these questions. thank you for joining us and thank you for joining us at home. that's it for me. i'm don lemon. ac 360 starts right now. >> this is cnn breaking . we would like to welcome our viewers in the united states and around the world. we have break news from australia. bad weather has postponed the search for malaysian airlines night 370. >> storms are whipping up severe turbulence and near zero visibility.

>> we go to perth, australia. another day, another setback the frustration must be growing there in perth and across australia. how soon before this search resumes. >> what we know given the changeability of weather conditions down there, things change so quickly, the search authorities are saying that the bad weather is expected for 24 hours and after that they will make a decision. they are getting updates all the time. there -- it's important to note that there are five ships on station there as well. the australia ship three, the chinese naval ship. we learned that they will staying on station, which is

important. but you have to wonder just how effective they're going to be if these weather conditions are as bad as we are hearing, zero visibility, cloud down to sea level. severe turbulence reported by pilots there. that is strong winds down there. a lot of the crews of the ships are going to be needed to sail a ship through conditions like this. how many will be looking for debris in these conditions is not known at this stage. it's important, also, to note, john that will were planes on station before the weather closed in. there have been some hours down there for about eight planes, we understand to have search for some time, perhaps a few hours. better than nothing. haven't heard back from anyone on those flights. the flights are returning now obviously. haven't heard whether they have spotted anything. but the focus today was this

debris field, some are calling it 122 objects spotted by a satellite by the french. that seems to be the focus. the target. we don't know whether they have been able to follow up at all. >> the question is with the bad weather the photographs were taken over the weekend. the ships are out there but the planes are grounded. how will that impact this debris field and what remains floating and what sinks to the bottom of the ocean? >> depends on the strength of the storm there, john but it sounds like conditions are very bad. these are tough, reliable aircraft. for them to get out of that station givens you an idea. it was taken march 23rd. bad weather after that. two days ago the search was called off and the ships on station, an australian naval

vessel had to get out to escape the worst of the weather which gives you an idea of the strength of the conditions. obviously that is going to impact the debris field. it was seen over a fairly wide area anyway. given the pictures were taken before these conditions hit, gives you an idea of just how -- or just how how much more difficult it's going to be for the eyes on the spotters to actually locate that and see whether it is a debris field. debris field is so important, john. that would indicate better than anything we have learned so far that it could be linked to flight 370. >> all these satellite images say is that they might be looking in the right area and after the cyclone it might not be the right area. andrew stevens live in perth where the search is being coordinated for.

the officials in australia are saying maybe 24 hours. let's get the latest from the national weather service. >> as rough as it gets for the storms right here. and you slice the search area in half. 50% of the area experiencing thunderstorms and low visibility. the concern is where were these debris objects spotted. and it would be in the south central region of this area. you see the rain showers beginning to taper off later on tonight across the northern fringe of it. notice the light showers around it and heavier thunderstorms just north of it. i calculated the currents of this region. based on a five-mile per hour movement of the currents in this region you would see 300, 350 mile movement or 500 kilometer

movement in that debris location. that could be in the northern fringe or exit the picture and go out of that zone where we still have thunderstorms. they are searching around this region. the debris is on the move. that's why the thunderstorms in that area become very dangerous. we are going to see something unusual occur in the next 24 hours. the weather conditions improve and stay nice for much of friday and saturday and clearing conditions on into sunday. for this time of year for this location on earth is very unusual. look at this area with generally clear and calm conditions friday and saturday. hurricane-wi hurricane-force winds to the south. >> across the weekend they will be able to get the planes back out there and continue this search. thanks. appreciate it. >> for our viewers in the united

states we'll have an update on the search for malaysian airlines flight 37067. for now here's anderson cooper. >> it's 2:00 p.m. in western australia. there are new developments. new questions surrounding what appears to be a growing focus by malaysian authorities on the flight crew. we are going to be transparent about the sourcing here. the usa today citing a high ranking unnamed law enforcement officer who says the captain of the flight is believed to be solely responsible for the flight being taken off course. if that is accurate it raises all sorts of questions, also what malaysian investigators think happened. it's a window where they could be taking the investigation. our panel tonight has a lot to say about that. also tonight the race is on to

locate and examine 122 pieces of debris reportedly spotted by a french satellite. this after so many false leads, is it a real lead and hard evidence to what happened to the plane? is it debris from the plane. there's there that but we begin with the flight crew and what american investigators have uncovered after the captain's home flight simulator. for the latest we are joined by pamela brown. there is a usa today report from an unnamed malaysian source saying they are focusing on the pilot. the fbi is expected to turn over hard drive information to the malaysians in the next day or two. what are your sources telling you? >> at this point, sources are telling me they haven't found anything in a muslim anywheprel review.

and a senior government official told cnn a police search of the pilot's home didn't turn up any evidence such as a suicide note that would suggest financial or psychological problems. investigators have not found concrete evidence that suggests it was a premeditated act by the pilots but they are not ruling out that theory either. they don't have the concrete evidence to back up any theory on the table. they haven't found the plane or the smoking gun in the pilots or passengers backgrounds. >> no motive but investigators do continue to focus on the pilots as well as other avenues of investigation? >> the pilots are the top priority. they are digging into their background. of course there is, you know, they are considering their role in the plane and expertise they are a focus but not the sole focus and investigators are interviewing family members. but just for perspective here,

anderson it's still early on in this investigation. we are a few weeks in and wanting answers here but it is still early on. there is no way that investigators have been able to turn over every clue in this investigation. there is a lot to learn about these two men. but one official said they are victims until proven otherwise. >> and a lot to learn about the passengers. i want to bring in our panel. david sousie. richard. let's talk about it's obviously natural to focus on the pilots but essentially "usa today" based on one up named malaysian source is saying it was the pilot who is the only one that could have done this, the most experienced and therefore they're focusing on him. >> the "usa today" report is judge and jury, convicted and

just throw away and lock away the key. in the last hour, one of the guests on our special program with don lemon, one of our guests basically said his source in malaysia, high up in the police force, made it quite clear that there is no undue interest in one of the pilots. they're part of a wider investigation. they're obviously being looked at closely, but he completely and utterly denied that this view -- so what we have really done, and sara said in the last hour, as well. we're now sort of -- the rampant stage of unnamed sources -- >> also a single source who may have their own reason. les, the idea that the captain is the only one that could have the technical expertise to turn the plane, fly the plane like this, true? >> i've got 22-year veteran

co-pilots that could be turning over right now. they could be laughing. this man was a veteran in and of himself. 27 years old. it doesn't mean he was fresh out of initial training on the 777. he would have much more retained than perhaps the captain next to him. and putting in a simple course into the flight management computer or turning the airplane with heading select or manual flight, he's perfectly capable of doing that. that's why he's been hired for that job. >> david, what does it tell you -- pamela brown from one malaysian source, but from u.s. sources has a very different read on the investigation than what this "usa today," according to this malaysian official is telling you, two different things, two different interpretations. does that tell you anything about the investigation or just the initial report? >> it just tells you that people are doing -- at this point when

you don't have a lot of evidence, what you do is try to come up with a conclusion. instead of using that conclusion to use the airplane, you say i've got this conclusion now, all your facts line up and you twist the facts a little bit or overexaggerate or try to find something in there to justify and to justify in your head that yeah, that's the right conclusion. but you have to bring yourself back from that, forget about your past history and forget about what you've known or learned from previous investigations even. at some point you have to imagine or understand the unfathomable of what could have happened and leave it at that. >> david, if idea that this 122 pieces of debris we talked about at the top of the program spotted in a french satellite image, they have not found any of these pieces, how significant do you think this is, this idea of there being a debris field? >> well, i think it's significant, because there is

some feeling that it must have come from the same place. whether it's a ship or the aircraft, it's hard to say until they pick up a piece. i find it hard to hope against the hopes and prayers of the families and loved ones of the passengers. so some part of me wants it to not be from the plane. another part of me wants it to go down with the investigation. >> david soucie, the idea of it being together, could it indicate it came from a similar source or just given the nature of the currents in this region, it could be the way garbage collects in the sea around there. >> and it does. but i think that's an advantage. now we know where it's gathering. if there was debris in the area, those currents would bring it into that debris field, as well. so you may have other debris in there. i would suspect you would. but you're also going to have good debris, if it's in that area. but what i'm most impressed

about with these views, the statistics of having a 75-foot object in this picture and previous pictures that are -- if you draw a line between the three of them, it makes a flow as to where it moved from. so i think we're looking at within that picture, that same 78-foot object, which i suspect is a wing. >> yet nothing has been found with. all the resources out there. i know there have been rough swells and weather issues. >> they eastern getting a lot closer to finding something. you know, these pictures aside, the number of planes, 8, 9, 10 planes, the ships in the water, they are methodically combing through the seas. they are getting on with the job. this is the yoman work of trying to find something. it's slow, it's trudgery, but they will find something if it

is there. that's not just a cliche, anderson. they're doing it in this methodical way specific for that purpose. >> there's a lot more to cover, including the challenges of carrying out this search in one of the remotest parts of the planet. we'll talk to an australian captain in charge of a vessel on the scene. and later you'll watch what a construction worker did in houston as this building went up in flames all around him and hear from the firefighter who was on the ladder that you're about to see reaching out to try to help this construction worker and help save his life. it's an incredible rescue story coming up ahead. the great american novel. so you can happily let life get in the way, while planning for tomorrow. so you can finish the great american novel banking for the life you have

investing for the life you want chase. so you can cut! [bell rings] this...is jane. her long day on set starts with shoulder pain... ...and a choice take 6 tylenol in a day which is 2 aleve for... ...all day relief. hmm. [bell ring] "roll sound!" "action!" the search has resumed for flight 370 in the southern

indian ocean with aircraft and ships looking for any signs of the objects spotted. those 122 objects we talked about. but no objects have been found. the search area is more than 600,000 square miles and even getting to that part of the ocean is a challenge. tom forman joins me now with details. >> reporter: they have assembled quite a fleet to look for this missing plane. 11 aircraft, 5 ships from all these different countries. yet even with state of the art technology, this remains a huge task. if you look at the map, you can see why. look at the distance from perth to where the latest debris was spotted. that's almost 1600 miles. the overall southern search area continues to be about 621,000 square miles. that means that on a good day, what they've been able to search out here is only about 5%.

so it would take them 20 days, if everything goes right, to search this entire sector. that's a huge job. let's narrow it down to just that area, which we're told is about 12 1/2 miles by 12 1/2 miles or around the size of denver, colorado. if you were taking off from washington, d.c. with a search crew every morning, flying all the way across the country out to colorado, and then you were flying down to denver, and your job once you got to the city was to pick out a single mailbox or a trash can or even a car, which would be relatively big, think about how difficult that would be if you only had maybe two, maybe three hours of flying over the city, maybe in dicey weather, before you have to fly right back, up into the sky, and back to washington to refuel and rest a little and start another day. that's why this remains a very daunting job.

anderson? >> it gives you a sense of the distances. back now with our panel. david, you talked to someone you know, an auditor who was at the facility where 370, the same facility that flight 370 would have been stored at, who had some disturbing discoveries about how the pingers that would be in the black boxes were actually stored. >> yeah. he contacted me and said i have some information to talk to you about, and i get a lot of that on twitter. so i checked it out and called him back, because he had some credible information. so he said to me, and it was very disturbing. he said to me that while he was at the audit, while he was doing the audit that the pingers were stored in a hot, humid room. >> this is in a warehouse in malaysia? >> exactly. so these pingers, they're sensitive to water and sensitive

to that. so the manufacturer says you need to store them in a dry room temperature, 70 degrees, 85 at the most. so they got rid of these pingers, they put all new pingers in the refrigerator while he was there. now he tells me after that, that that process is not being followed. he's seen countless times those pingers back in those rooms. >> the concern could be that a pinger would be put on board one of these planes without the full life. >> exactly. >> and there's no way to test the battery life of these devices before putting them on the aircraft? >> no, at the c-check, which is every thousand hours, they do check them to see if it pings. which it would. but there's no way to test like put a load on it, like you would

test your car battery. so i'm concerned that if these others were at half life, if one of those bad ones were put into this aircraft at the last check, it's possible it could be done by now. >> so the idea is it wouldn't even last the 30 days. david, the pingers weren't going off in air france flight 447, so how complex a task is without pingers to locate these things? is it just searching a grid? >> as long as you have a place to start, running back and forth plowing the field and hoping you don't go over a spot, think the aircraft is not there and go on to the next spot. you don't want to miss it if it's sitting right below you. >> les, i know we talked to david about this, after the air france crash, there were new safety guidelines about the

length of time that a pinger would be able to go for, for 90 days. but that's only in new aircraft from 2015 on. the old aircraft it wasn't retro fitted that way. >> correct. that's my understanding. >> so only aircraft being released after 2015. >> any other civil aviation organization, are you going to mandate these be retro fitted? i can't find anything on it. right now all they did is say whoever manufactures these has to make sure they do 90 days from 2015 on. >> richard, you're sort of more optimistic that this debris will be found? >> oh, yes, i'm optimistic, because they will just keep going. they may have to suspend it for the winter, although they won't be doing that for some time. but they'll keep going.

lessons have to be learned from what's happened. i'll give you an example. 447, air france was seminole in terms of what took place. they learned so much about how pilots reacted. all these things were raised in that. i guaranty you, this one is going to be the test case. this is going into the books, even before hand. not because of what may have happened on the plane, we don't even know that. we may not know that for months if not years. but simply for the fact that they could not and cannot find debris, find the plane, and have such little information three weeks on. that's why this is already in the books. >> david, there hasn't been one like this? >> no, never. we can't forget that we're learning things now, too. i don't want to discount that,

because if we all we say is if we don't find what we're looking for, we can't learn from this. but we can. we have to speculate, we have to come up with these ideas so that we can determine where the aircraft is. but we can't stop the speculation after that, as painful as it is for the families. >> it's one thing for people in the media to be going over theories. this is what investigators are doing. they're running through every scenario. >> it's a crude terminology, but david will agree with me, it's called tombstone technology. we learn this from these tragedies, but we do learn something so these people have not gone on or died in vain. >> david gallo, again, from that debris, i know you were working under the water on 447, but it is fascinating even with some pieces of debris you can start to understand what maybe happened to the aircraft based on stresses put on the debris and marks on the debris.

>> yeah. we learned a lot from the debris in air france 447. we could tell off the pieces aft of the wing section were compressed and everything forward was relatively great shape, so it gave us the idea that the plane belly smacked tail first. everything is a piece of evidence, so you've got to get wherever you can out of every piece collected. >> for more on the story, go to cnn.com. up next, one woman's story of survival in washington state in the midst of that deadly landslide. she was in her home when the landslide hit, ripped her home off the foundation, carried the home a quarter of a mile. she was buried in mud, encased in mud. you'll hear how she got out. also, new details on the desperate rescue of a 4-year-old child stuck in the mud. you see him there on the left hand side of your screen.

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breaking news tonight regarding the landslide in washington state. we know 16 people now confirmed dead. officials say 8 others have been located. they report that the number of people missing or unaccounted for has dropped to 90. today the governor of washington said the area suffered what he called 100% of devastation. last night we told you about the

rescue of a 4-year-old boy. tonight they released video from a camera mounted on a helicopter. you see the first responder there in a black shirt on the left, securing the child, carrying him to the helicopter. here's the same video. the boy is named jacob siller. officials tell us that jacob was upstairs when the landslide struck his home. his father and three siblings are still missing. his mother is okay, she was not home at the time. many of the firefighters and rescuers digging through the mud, the stress on this is mounting. >> we were digging. we come across a gentleman, and his son is out there, and it's his father. >> despite all the stress, all the danger for the rescuers, they're not ging