Pilot Made Phone Call Eight Minutes Before Takeoff
BANFIELD: With each passing day, the mystery of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 seems to just get more mysterious. In addition to all the questions about the pilot seen here, Captain Zaharie Ahmed Shah, there is this new report from "The Sun" newspaper saying that he made a mystery phone call on his cell phone just eight minutes before the flight took off. Investigators say they're now trying to find out who he might have been calling, who was on the receiving end. And when it comes to the cause of the disappearance of the plane, investigators are also looking into the possibilities - like a theory that lithium batteries were being carried in the cargo hold and might have caused a fire. We learned today from Malaysia Airlines, the CEO, that the flight was, in fact, carrying lithium ion batteries, a load of them, in the cargo hold. But they were quick to defend the airline's handling of those batteries.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: They are not declared (ph) dangerous good (ph)</s>BANFIELD: Want to bring in CNN safety analyst, David Soucie, accident investigator and also the author of "Why Planes Crash," also with us again, Colonel Michael Kay, former adviser to the British ministry of defense and retired military pilot with over 3,000 hours in the cockpit. And still with us, pilot and CNN aviation analyst Miles O'Brien, live in Washington, D.C. David Soucie, first to you. Richard Quest walked off the set, walked right back on a few moments ago and handed me this. It is a report from the FAA. And just rough gauge here. It notes that there have been 141 air incidents since 1991 involving batteries. Batteries being carried as cargo. They range in all sorts of significance, not to suggest they've all been lethal, but here we are with the suggestion that, yes, indeed, there were lithium batteries in the cargo hold. Explain why this is not, perhaps, unusual, and why perhaps it could have been unusual.</s>DAVID SOUCIE, CNN SAFETY ANALYST: Well, the important word in there is incident, not accident. Incident can go ahead and be occurred -- there's plenty of suppression, fire suppression, a lot of safety mechanisms that go into those 191 issues that did mitigate the issue. So to think that tying this into this aircraft now -- the ones that have the accidents that have been caused by battery fires or any kind of cargo fire have resulted in significant damage to the aircraft, structural damage to the aircraft and subsequent crash. So -- and I don't suspect that here, obviously, because we have pings from that aircraft from hours and hours later. Had there been a fire in the cargo hold, we also would have gotten notification through the ACARS system. It would have really triggered a new indication. The pilot and co-pilot from the cargo compartment would have had indications of it and been able to notify someone at that point.</s>BANFIELD: So every day we get a new nugget of information that either, you know, helps us to figure something out or creates more questions, which is typically what happens. Colonel Kay, the cell phone call made eight minutes before takeoff by the pilot. Significant? Insignificant? You've got thousands of hours of flying.</s>KAY: Yes. I have also served on two boards - crash investigation boards of inquiry. And for us, the most important thing to do is eradicate any logical explanations for anything that might have occurred. And there is always generally a logical explanation. We talk about the data being deleted off the simulator that the guy had in his apartment. Well, he may be using a home PC and he maybe ran out of room on his hard drive. That's a logical explanation. Regarding the phone calls, I mean we're all guilty of</s>BANFIELD: All right. Well, this is what I want to know -</s>KAY: We're a little -</s>BANFIELD: Because those doors are closed -</s>KAY: Yes.</s>BANFIELD: And I'm a passenger and I never assumed for a moment my pilot has been talking to his wife or children or friends eight minutes before takeoff.</s>KAY: Well, I mean, I'm not necessarily advocating that the pilot should be on his cell phone as he's lining up for the runway to take off. But, you know, we're all - we're all guilty of having our phones on when we've been told to turn them off on the airplane right until the last minute. In fact, sometimes I keep mine as we're climbing through 5,000 feet and it loses the cell tower. So, again, we don't know the content of this phone call, we don't know who it was to, and we don't know what it was about.</s>BANFIELD: It's not that unusual.</s>KAY: So, I don't -- well, again, it shouldn't be happening -</s>BANFIELD: OK.</s>KAY: But until we know the content of the phone call, we shouldn't be jumping to conclusions.</s>BANFIELD: So perhaps - and you're right. And, you know, the reason why we're left not knowing is because we don't have any of the recordings released, the flight cockpit data recordings. We don't know any of the transmissions. Miles O'Brien, they know that the last thing that was said was "all right, good night," but that's all they have released to us. There's a lot more they have in terms of communications to the ground, right?</s>O'BRIEN: Yes. I mean, all -- every communication between traffic control and these aircraft are recorded. And those tapes have not been released by the authorities in Malaysia. And that would be very helpful for all of us, just to get an idea of who was on the radio. Was there a change in who was talking on the radio? Was there any background noise? Was there anything unusual about those communications? There's also -- independently, there are reports out there that there was an effort to get another aircraft to relay information to the aircraft that was not responding, which is very common situation when air traffic control can't raise an airplane, and supposedly the response was some sort of mumble. Again, that would be captured probably on a recording somewhere. So it would be nice to hear those recordings, and we could probably shed a little more light on what was going on.</s>BANFIELD: All right. Miles, thank you for that. Appreciate all your insight. And it's good to see you again, Miles, old colleague of ours at</s>CNN. O'BRIEN: Likewise.</s>BANFIELD: Really great to see you. David Soucie and Michael Kay, stay with me, a couple of other questions for you in just a moment. The key, though, to recovering this flight could be a 13-foot-long underwater robot. If you've ever thought of what an underwater crime scene looks like, that robot scans them and could really be the key to the CSI. We're going to show how this works, coming up.