Search for the Perfect Clock; Mystery Surrounding Passenger List; Standoff in Crimea gets more Tense; Questions About Identity Of Two Passengers; Search For Missing Malaysian Airliner
FREDRICKA WHITFIELD, CNN ANCHOR: All right hello, everyone. It's the 11:00 Eastern hour of the NEWSROOM which starts right now. An urgent search and rescue mission is under way right now after a large passenger jet disappears on its way to Beijing. No one knows exactly what happened or where the plane is. And now there are new questions about the identity of two of the passengers. The breaking story straight ahead. In the Ukraine, tensions ratchet up. Russia now accuse of carrying out more aggressive bullying tactic against the Ukrainian military and Poland takes action to protect its consulate in Crimea. And back in the U.S., a mother seen driving her children into the Atlantic Ocean faces an attempted murder charges. Hear what she allegedly told her children during those terrifying moments and the disturbing revelations about her mental state. We start this morning with that frantic search for a missing Malaysian Airlines plane. The Boeing 777 vanished not long after taking off from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia yesterday. It was headed to Beijing with 239 people on board most of them Chinese nationals at least three Americans are among the passengers. State media in Vietnam and China say the jet has crashed but Malaysian authorities are not confirming that yet. Rescue crews from across the region are now searching an area of the South China Sea where the plane may have gone down. Search helicopters and airplanes are also being deployed. An official tells CNN a Vietnamese aircraft has spotted possible debris and an oil slick in waters off Vietnam and Malaysia. We have correspondents covering this story from all angles. Richard Quest is in New York and David McKenzie in Beijing. Let's begin with you Richard, there's been a lot of confusion about the nationalities of at least two of the passengers. Malaysian Airlines says there is one Austrian passenger and one Italian passenger on the plane that is now missing but officials in Italy and Austria say that's not the case. Why so much confusion? What do you know?</s>RICHARD QUEST, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well it's not unusual for there to be some discrepancies on a manifest certainly when you've got large numbers of passengers involved. What's unusual here is that in the case of the Austrian and the Italian, the people on the plane seem to be traveling on passports that are being reported lost or stolen, which seems somewhat extraordinary in this day and age that two passengers on the same flight could be traveling on forged or stolen or lost documents. And then you've got the issue of these passengers were flying to Beijing. Now you would have assumed that if passports have been reported lost and stolen and we don't know that they had been, but if they were, then of course the system of monitoring and the immigration and cooperation that takes place would have -- you would have thought, prevented this from taking place. So that's that side of it. And there are discrepancies. There are questions about the manifests. And there are issues about these two passengers who did travel on passports that had been lost or stolen -- Fred.</s>WHITFIELD: All right in the meantime, I understand you actually met some of the members of this missing crew fairly recently while doing a story with CNN International. Tell me about the crew. Tell me about what you learned during that story.</s>QUEST: We were filming for "Business Traveler" flying from Hong Kong to Kuala Lumpur and the crew onboard appeared to be the same ones as on this flight, certainly the first officer. Malaysia Airlines has confirmed it was the same first officer, Farik Hamid (ph). He was a young 27, experienced first officer. More than 2,700 hours flying. And he was transitioning to the -- to the 777 fleet. The captain when we landed and it was Farik who did the landing at Kuala Lumpur, when we landed the captain pointed out it had been a flawless perfect landing and also said that at Malaysia Airlines they went out of their way to ensure training up to captain standards. And I think what he also meant is that before Hamid even got into the right-hand seat of a 777, he had certainly spent many weeks and months in the simulator as he transitioned from a smaller jet to a large wide bodied.</s>WHITFIELD: So Richard, let's talk about the fact that this plane is now missing with this crew onboard. If it's believed the plane went off radar somewhere between an hour and two hours after takeoff, how will that help investigators, whether it be the arsenal in the air or in the sea, try to locate where this plane possibly may be, if indeed it went down an hour or two after takeoff?</s>QUEST: Right, because it narrows the field of search. You look at where the plane last reported that it was. And every ten minutes or so the aircraft is supposed to tell the -- pilots tell air traffic control, in this case they were under the control of the Ho Chi Minh Vietnamese air space. And they tell you where you are. Now it's just a -- imagine you've just called someone on your cellphone and say I'm at "x" heading in this direction at this speed. And then you're not heard from again within the next check call. So you start to work backwards. And that's how you do it. Well you know they were there, therefore, they were traveling in this direction at this speed and we didn't hear from them again, therefore, the search area -- now, it sounds relatively straightforward when I talk about it to you on the television. We are talking about a very large space of land and water in this case and that's why you now have navies and air forces from several countries that will be cooperating to find the wreckage if such it is. And one other thing they will be helped possibly by the underwater locator beacon. This is attached to the flight data recorder. And it will be emitting a signal. Now, we've got several days of this signal so it's not going to switch off overnight, after seven days of it. And that will be a good indication. It won't be easy. I'm not for a moment sitting here sort of saying it is. But they will find the plane. And I promise you this. Everything we've known so far they will also find what happened because planes do not fall out of the sky at 36,000 feet without somebody wanting to get to the bottom of why.</s>WHITFIELD: All right. Richard Quest. Thanks so much. And if of course in the South China Sea we understand that it is shallow so that ping actually could indeed make a difference in the search. Thanks so much. We're also going to be having a report coming from Beijing, China momentarily because again 159 of the 259 people on board are Chinese national. So we'll bring you up to date on that end. Now moving on to the crisis in Ukraine. A growing standoff between pro-Russian forces and Ukrainians shows no signs of letting up in Crimea. Tensions flared in Simferopol as armed men stormed the military office today, that's a day after another tense situation in nearby Sevastopol. Ukrainian troops there say pro-Russian force had tried to take over a base but the Ukrainians refused to surrender. Also today, military observers from the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe were not allowed into Crimea again. That's three days in a row they've been kept out. Russia is denying any role in the standoff. The country's foreign minister said today the Russian military is not involved. He also said Russia is ready to talk. But that might not get very far since Russia has sharply criticized Ukraine's interim government. All right all that seems to indicate things are ramping up instead of calming down. Correspondent Anna Coren is live for us now in Simferopol and has been seeing some of the tensions firsthand. Anna, what are things like right now?</s>ANNA COREN, CNN CORRESPOONDENT: Well, Fredricka you're absolutely right. Things are ramping up. I would say that the military build-up of Russian forces are entering a new phase. According to the Ukrainian Defense Ministry they are reporting convoys of trucks carrying Russian soldiers across the border heading towards Crimea. So that, of course is a grave concern to them. There was obviously that incident here at a military office close by where pro-Russian forces have taken over this particular facility with weapons, pushed people on to the floor, occupied several -- all the levels of this particular building. And then there was the incident last night, Fredricka where an hour and a half away from here Simferopol the Russian troops, unidentified Russian troops rammed a truck into a gate. Gotten entrance on to this air force base and met some resistance, however, from Ukrainian troops. Apparently they formed a human shield. They retreated but then the local militia turned up and that's when things turned ugly. They clashed with journalists on the scene and some had to be hospitalized. So certainly things are definitely becoming a lot more aggressive. There seems to be a great deal more animosity here on the Crimean peninsula -- Fredricka.</s>WHITFIELD: And what about now the protections that Poland is now taking with concerns of its consulate?</s>COREN: Yes -- no, there are reports certainly from the Polish Foreign Minister that they had to evacuate their consulate here in Crimea due to safety concerns. So I think, you know, anyone associated with the West who is against the referendum to poll Crimea to become part of Russia is really feeling the crackdown, certainly the media is also getting -- getting a taste of what it's like to be among that group. You know, there have been attacks on journalists, individual journalists. We spoke to a Greek journalist this morning who said that he had a confrontation with pro-Russian forces at a military base. They stole his equipment, he drove off they chase him down and when he got away from, I guess, away from the public, drove away from other people, that's when they -- when they attacked him. He's in a bit of a bad way. The Bulgarian journalist, we had that footage from him yesterday being attacked on CCTV. And these paramilitaries, they don't want another viewpoint coming out of Crimea -- Fredricka.</s>WHITFIELD: All right. Anna Coren, thank you so much. Keep us posted. With the escalating crisis happening in Ukraine a lot of people are asking the question, are we headed toward another Cold War? And in this country, new video of the mother who drove her minivan into the ocean with her children inside. She made her first court appearance today. We'll have all the details next.