Update on Missing Flight 370
WOLF BLITZER, CNN HOST: What will searches of their homes reveal? Holding out hope. The partner of one of the three Americans on the plane says she's convinced he's still alive. She talks to CNN about the excruciating wait for information. We want to welcome our viewers in the United States and around the world. I'm Wolf Blitzer. You're in THE SITUATION ROOM. The search for the Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 is now in its 11th day, and as new information trickles out the mystery of what happened to the 777 and the 239 people on board only getting deeper. More than two dozen countries are now taking part in efforts to try to locate the plane which disappeared on an overnight flight to Beijing, but the task is monumental, with the last possible known location believed to be somewhere between the Southern Indian Ocean and Central Asia. CNN is putting our unmatched resources on this story with our correspondents covering all angles around the world. Let's get straight to Jerusalem though and our senior international correspondent, Nic Robertson. Nic, the Flight 370, the mystery prompting Israel, I understand, to take action. What is Israel doing right now?</s>NIC ROBERTSON, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Wolf, Israel has put its air traffic controllers at Ben-Gurion International Airport, its main air traffic control facility. It's put them on a higher state of alert. It has told them to implement the checks that they do more rigorously, and they should follow the detail and follow the letter, if you will, of an implementation of all the procedures that they would normally follow. They're saying that the procedures remain the same, but they're going to check them and that they're going to follow them much more closely. And the reason for this is they want to be able to identify aircraft while they are further away from Israel, so that the air traffic controllers know that there can be no incoming threat from a plane that is misidentified, semi-identified or perhaps doesn't have its identification beacon on, as is the case with MH370. Israel taking concrete steps. And let's be very clear about this. The air traffic controllers in so many countries around the world are in many ways a first line of defense against what could potentially be a civil airliner full of passengers coming towards that country with a potentially bad intent. They're in the front line of security for their countries, Wolf.</s>BLITZER: The statement coming from the Israeli Transportation Ministry very significant. I'm going to bring Jim Sciutto into this as well. This is the statement from Avner Shavi (ph), a spokesman for the Israel Transportation Ministry. "In the security room where we identify every plane that enters the state of Israel, a notification went out to increase the alertness to a level which is higher than the usual. There are rules that are in place before a plane enters Israeli airspace. The procedures have not changed, but they are being applied more closely. There is more implementation of checks than are required to be done." Jim Sciutto, this sounds like a precautionary measure by the Israeli. If in fact this missing Malaysian airliner did land someplace, would be refueled, the Israelis would fear this plane could head towards Israel.</s>JIM SCIUTTO, CNN CHIEF NATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT: No question. You and I have flown to Israel a number of times. We know there is no country in the world that has more strict security than the Israelis do on the ground and in the air. But it's interesting. I have been speaking to people on Capitol Hill here as well in the U.S. They're considering steps, proposals for steps to increase security here, not necessarily immediately because the concern about this plane coming this direction today, but to prevent commandeering a plane in the future. You have a lot countries looking at this now and looking at how they will respond.</s>BLITZER: Back to Jerusalem and Nic Robertson. Nic, as we see this, what the Israelis are doing, is it just out of an abundance of precaution or based on what you're hearing over there, Nic, do they really fear this plane potentially could be someplace and could be sort of a guided missile, if you will, down the road?</s>ROBERTSON: Wolf, it seems to be potentially part of what you're saying, that there is a potential that they cannot rule out because there isn't adequate information about MH370, but it is also therefore an abundance of caution in this case. But it's a realization of the fact that there is potentially a threat that hadn't been considered before, a civilian airliner full of passengers unidentified in the air, and that's of a concern that this could be a new threat in the future. Aviation experts here have sat down over a number of days, we're told, considered the implications of what we're learning about this flight in Malaysia, MH370, and have come to these conclusions. What we understand as well is that there is a longer list of security steps and measures, but for security reasons those are not being made public. So, it's being given a huge amount of consideration, a lot of weight here, again, recognizing that whatever happens with MH370, whatever's discovered, there is now a potential for a threat that perhaps hadn't been adequately considered before, Wolf.</s>BLITZER: Nic Robertson reporting on the latest news coming out of Israel, stepping up its own security, fearful potentially that this airliner or others could be headed towards Israel. We will stay on top of this. Nic, thanks very much. Let's go back to Jim Sciutto, our chief national security correspondent. Let's take a look at the investigation, where it stands right now.</s>SCIUTTO: No question. Speaking to intelligence officials and other U.S. officials involved in this investigation, this would normally be the time you would be narrowing down your targets, but in fact the opposite is happening. They're expanding their targets of investigation and inquiry, first of all, on the possible people involved in this, first, you know, focusing on the two people in the cockpit, but now 10 people in the flight crew, 227 passengers and even more than that, folks who have access to that plane on the ground, cleaning crews, baggage handlers, you name it. But let's look at the search area which is expanding as well. I think people have become familiar with this arc, where that last satellite contact was somewhere along here. They don't know where, but somewhere in that arc. Let's look at the Indian Ocean. Imagine a map of the continental United States fitting here. That's the kind of area you're talking about, very deep ocean, very remote, a difficult place to search. And you have U.S. assets going there now, including airplanes precisely because they have greater range than the ships which have now turned away have previously. But let's go north for a moment, because this is where you have a whole 'nother dynamic that comes to play, and that's politics, the geopolitics of this region. You have more than 12 countries, 14 countries on this path here from Southeast Asia all the way up to Central Asia, Kazakstan, Tajikistan, this is Western China here, Tibet, and a dozen countries and a dozen rivalries among those countries as well. Why is that important? They don't want to expose their capabilities to each other, their radar capability, their satellite capability. So, as you have seen countries reveal, they don't want to reveal too much or too little. They don't want to show that they have too much capability or in fact reveal they have less coverage than their adversaries might have imagined. That's a worry here. Are they sharing enough information? Just today, you had the Chinese government say to the Malaysian government please release more detailed info. The Malaysian government is sensitive to China's influence here, they're also a bit little embarrassed perhaps that this plane flew through three radar coverage zones here without any jets being scrambled. That politics plays a part. It's a tension because there's concern that there is not going to be as much sharing in the investigation as there should be. Keep in mind, as we talk about this, Wolf, the U.S. is involved in this power struggle in the region as well with China and a lot of the assets that we're sending out there, that the U.S. is sending out there have to some degree China in mind, including that P- 8, that we talked about, that Poseidon aircraft that will now be searching down in the southern part of the ocean here. That capability, there's a reason why that capability is in Asia now and that's in effect to look at China. Everybody is watching everybody else, what they have and what they don't have.</s>BLITZER: Yes. And that U.S. aircraft will be based in Perth, Australia, flying out of there and covering a wide area looking for anything that could be debris or anything else. Thanks very much. Jim Sciutto will be back with us. If someone wanted to make a plane disappear, they would do it when no one else is watching. That's exactly when Flight 370 vanished during a brief void in contact with air traffic control. CNN's Rene Marsh is digging deeper into this part of the story for us. Rene, what are you finding out? Well, I will go to Rene in a moment, but, Barbara Starr, let's go to you first, because you're getting new information right now on this search that the U.S. is now apparently scaling back at least as far as ships are concerned.</s>BARBARA STARR, CNN PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT: Well, they are taking the USS Kidd out of there, as we have chatted about, Wolf, because they simply feel that the P-8 aircraft out of Australia will provide much more coverage and will be able to get to any debris field much more quickly. And that was proven earlier today when they responded to a possible debris field. That turned out to be a false alarm, but it can get there more quickly. There was no way a U.S. Navy ship was going to stay there forever. The search in the southern Indian Ocean very wide open, hundreds of thousands of miles of open ocean , and the aircraft will do much better efficiently getting to that part of the search. As for the northern track, Wolf, I have to tell you that the U.S. military, the U.S. intelligence community has once again scoured all of their satellite data, all of their radar data, because they have pretty good coverage up there. The U.S. watches constantly for any kind of missile launch out of China, Pakistan, Kazakstan, any of these places. They know what's going on up there. And the U.S. military, the U.S. intelligence community has not seen any indication of any kind of crash landing of a 777. They simply don't see it. And they feel that they would. Could the plane have landed? That's the next question. You asked about it being potentially taking off again as a guided missile in some sort of terrorist attack. We have asked about that. And officials say you would have to assume then there's a large runway and a refueling capability and an ability to repair the plane. That calls into question whether there'd be some kind of international conspiracy here, not something the U.S. thinks is very realistic.</s>BLITZER: But they got to err on the side of caution on every conceivable contingency. Barbara, stand by. I want our viewers to hear what Commander William Marks, spokesman for the U.S. Navy's Seventh Fleet, told me just a little while ago.</s>CMDR. WILLIAM MARKS, U.S. NAVY: The Kidd and its helicopters have covered as much of the Andaman Sea as we can. We feel that we have searched that area just to the west and south of Burma. We're not going to find anything out there, we think. When you have a destroyer out there doing 10, 15 knots at a time, that's really not the most effective platform for the entirety of the Indian Ocean. So we said -- we got together, we said let's move a P-8 down to Australia, we will leave our P-3 in Kuala Lumpur. That way, we get 1,200 nautical miles of searching at a time, so this is actually much more effective.</s>BLITZER: Commander William Marks of the U.S. Navy's Seventh Fleet speaking with me just a little while ago. Once again, if someone wanted to make a plane disappear while no one was watching, there would be some ways of trying to do that. Let's bring in Rene Marsh. She's looking into this part of the story of us -- Rene.</s>RENE MARSH, CNN AVIATION CORRESPONDENT: Wolf, we have our 777 here. When jets like this, they are flying very long distances, they're passed from one air traffic control center to the next and sometimes it takes minutes before a plane makes radio contact with the next set of controllers. So could someone on board Flight 370 have taken advantage of this gap in responsibility and disappear when no one was looking?</s>MARSH (voice-over): 1:19 a.m., Malaysian say the co-pilot signs off with Malaysian air traffic control. "All right, good night," he says. It's a common sign-off, as one plane is being handed off to the next controller, this time in Vietnam.</s>LES ABEND, CONTRIBUTING EDITOR, "FLYING": All I could tell is, it was a routine operation from the time that they said goodbye to the last controller.</s>MARSH: Here's how a similar handoff sounds in the United States.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: American 370, contact Washington Center, 127.7. Good day.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And 127.7, American 370, so long.</s>MARSH: But what is different with Malaysia Flight 370 is the pilot never contacted the next controller in Vietnam, which should have happened moments later. Instead, the plane's transponder used to track it goes off at 1:21 and a data transmission at 1:37 doesn't happen.</s>JOHN HANSMAN, MIT: If you're trying to disappear, this would a time where again the Vietnamese controller is expecting you, but doesn't know exactly when you're going to show up. And that controller doesn't yet have responsibility for you. You're in this kind of no- man's land where nobody has clear responsibility for you.</s>MARSH: Could whoever was in control of the plane use this gap in responsibility to try to disappear? Perhaps, but some experts see the potential of a mechanical failure.</s>ABEND: They may have started to shut things down because of an electrical fire. An electrical fire is a nightmare. It requires a process that none of us ever want to go through. You're pulling -- shutting certain things down to isolate the problem.</s>MARSH: Malaysian authorities don't know when the plane's ACARS system, which beams down information about the health of the plane, stopped working.</s>AHMAD JAUHARI YAHYA, CEO, MALAYSIA AIRLINES: The last ACARS transmission was 1:07. OK? We don't know when the ACARS was switched off after that.</s>MARSH: In a normal flight, ACARS should have transmitted information about how the plane was flying, engine data, fuel burn and any maintenance discrepancies. Pilots say it's abnormal to voluntarily shut ACARS off.</s>MARSH: And we also learned today from Malaysian authorities they have not found any evidence from any telephone company that anyone on board was trying to call or text out, but they say they're still checking into those phone records. There are millions of them.</s>BLITZER: A lot of people are looking for those, too. Rene, stand by. I want to bring in our CNN national security analyst Peter Bergen, our CNN aviation analyst Peter Goelz, the former NTSB managing director, and CNN's Jim Sciutto is with us and CNN's Richard Quest is joining us from New York. Peter, first to you. That report at the top of the hour we heard from Nic Robertson that out of a measure of prudence the Israelis are beefing up their air defense system right now, worried potentially that maybe this airliner is on the ground someplace, could be refueled and flown towards Israel as sort of a missile. How serious should the Israelis and other countries be about that contingency?</s>PETER BERGEN, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY ANALYST: They're paid to worry about these kinds of things. And El-Al has very effective security, the best of any airline out there. But it's puzzling to me if this was some kind of terrorist event. There's been no claim of responsibility. There's been no overt political acts like we saw on 9/11. The groups that either have capability or intentions of doing this really don't have really the capabilities to get something as sophisticated as this done. The local al Qaeda affiliate wouldn't, I don't think, target a Malaysia Airlines. They're likely to target a Western airline. And Chinese Uighurs separatists who have been mentioned their previous hijacking attempts have been very incompetent. Terrorism seems unlikely right now.</s>BLITZER: Jim Sciutto, from your sources are you hearing that the U.S. has taken sort of new steps to beef up its air defense security?</s>SCIUTTO: Not in response to this, but after 9/11 U.S. surveillance and identification measures are very severe, some of the best in the world. They may already have a higher standard than some. And, as we know, Israel is always the first, I think to take the most severe standards because of the nature of the threat to them. But to this point, the U.S., no, has not taken any new measures in response to this.</s>BLITZER: Could this airliner have flown on that northern route over these countries in Central Asia, sort of just trying to blend in with other commercial airliners and not be detected by any of these countries?</s>PETER GOELZ, CNN ANALYST: I think that would be very difficult because you would have to either drop down to such a low altitude that people would see you.</s>BLITZER: Because even if it went down to 5,000 feet, as one of the Malaysian newspapers suggested, radar could still detect that aircraft.</s>GOELZ: And people would hear and see you and the fuel burn would be much higher. It would limit their distance.</s>BLITZER: What if you were shadowing a commercial airliner, trying to blend in that way?</s>GOELZ: You would have to be a very good pilot. It might set off TCAS alerts on the lead plane. It would be a very challenging event.</s>BLITZER: Let me bring Richard Quest into this conversation as well. Richard, for a pilot to do that, to blend in, sort of shadow another commercial airliner and pretend that the radar, whatever signals that are being emitted are coming from one plane as opposed to two, that would be, as Peter Goelz points out, an extremely sophisticated maneuver.</s>RICHARD QUEST, CNN CORRESPONDENT: It would be so sophisticated, it would be so challenging, what method are you going to use to actually follow this aircraft? Anything you do, any of the normal mechanisms of radar or coms or anything at all that you would use to follow them would naturally be picked up by somebody else. The TCAS, that you can't switch on your responder to try and find him because his TCAS, that's the emergency collision avoidance system, would light up like a Christmas tree if you were that close to him. You can't switch on your ACARS. Your radar will be relatively limited. At any moment, you might fly into a fog bank or cloud. Whilst it's a deliciously enticing theory, it doesn't bear scrutiny in the cold light of facts. Now, possible? Maybe. Probable? Unlikely.</s>BLITZER: Peter, what bothers me is that this Boeing 77 apparently flew over very populated areas of Malaysia and the Malaysian air force didn't scramble jet fighters, didn't do anything as far as we know, right?</s>GOELZ: That's the question. They were tracking it on primary radar, which can occasionally, particularly at the outer limits, be unreliable, but that's the question. How did it get -- come back over the island without anyone being alerted?</s>SCIUTTO: Think in the U.S. when you have had those incidents where a private pilot takes a left turn anywhere near Washington, D.C., and everything lights up like a red alert. You know that's a measure of where the U.S. is in terms of unidentified flying aircraft. Here you have this aircraft crossing not one, two, but three separate military radar zones in Malaysia. It's a real failure, yes.</s>BLITZER: Rene, in your piece, you reported this notion of a pilot deliberately shutting down that so-called ACARS system, there's no real reason to ever do that, right?</s>MARSH: Absolutely no real reason. And just to talk a little bit about that switch-off point going from one airspace to the next and whether that's the best time to disappear if you wanted to, you know, I spoke some time with some experts today. And they say in the United States within five minutes they would know that a plane is missing and it's not where it's supposed to be. However, it gets a little ambiguous when it gets to certain areas, certain regions where you're talking about being over water and you're in between countries. You may be out of radar contact, you may be out of radio communications, so that possibility of maybe not picking up within five minutes that this plane is missing, that's possible. But in this case, a trained expert says within 15 to 20 minutes someone should have realized that something was wrong.</s>BLITZER: This case, all the suspicious stuff happened when they were in this sort of no-man's land between Malaysian airspace and Vietnamese airspace, and the co-pilot or whoever was in the cockpit says, "All right, good night." I guess the Malaysian air traffic controllers, Peter, they just went to sleep. Right?</s>GOELZ: They weren't there. They should have sparked and said, where is Malaysian air flight? Why hasn't it checked in? And the company should have sparked.</s>MARSH: The piece to that, though, is also the transponder went off after "All right, good night." So it would make it really difficult for the Vietnamese airspace to even be able to begin to identify on their radar who is this person because they cut off their identifier.</s>BLITZER: Clearly some failure there. All right, guys, stand by because there's a lot more to dissect. Still ahead, Malaysian officials reveal new information about Flight 370 and their investigation. We're about to go live to Kuala Lumpur. And we're also live in Beijing, where the partner of one of the three missing Americans is speaking out in an emotional interview with CNN, why she's convinced he's still alive. Much more of our special report right after this.