Flight Search Turns Up Nothing; EU Signs Pact with Ukraine PM; Obama to Meet With Tech Leaders; Mapping Out the Location of Possible Debris
JOHN BERMAN, CNN CO-ANCHOR: Hello, everyone. I'm John Berman.</s>MICHAELA PEREIRA, CNN CO-ANCHOR: And I'm Michaela Pereira. It is 11:00 a.m. in the East, 8:00 a.m. out West.</s>BERMAN: And @ THIS HOUR, stymied, the search for missing Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 has turned up nothing, despite that possible debris spotted by satellite some 1,500 miles off the coast of Australia. But a huge mobilization is happening with more countries now sending crews to help.</s>PEREIRA: Here is where the search stands right now. Two weeks after the Boeing 777 disappeared, search planes from Australia and the U.S. have returned from their mission combing that area. Now, despite much better weather conditions today, none sighted plane debris. Meanwhile, there is a growing international force of ships steaming toward the southern Indian Ocean to help aid in that search. Australia's prime minister spoke today warning that the two objects may not be from the plane.</s>TONY ABBOTT, AUSTRALIAN PRIME MINISTER: It could just be a container that's fallen off a ship. We just don't know. But we owe it to the families and the friends and the loved ones of the almost 240 people on Flight MH-370 to do everything we can to try to resolve what is as yet an extraordinary riddle.</s>PEREIRA: Owe it to those families. Investigators are now looking into the activities of the pilot before the flight took off. Malaysia Airlines said today that it is aware of the media reports that the pilot made a cell-phone call eight minutes before the flight took off.</s>BERMAN: And Malaysia Airlines CEO said today that Flight 370 was carrying a small cargo of lithium-ion batteries. Now, CNN first broke the story last week. The batteries are the type used in laptops and cell phones. They have been known to catch fire, although it is very, very rare.</s>PEREIRA: This is an exhaustive search with pilots going grid by grid through the area searching for the images. It is truly looking like a needle in a haystack, because we are talking about a piece of debris, about 78-feet across, in a search area of several hundred thousand miles.</s>BERMAN: Even if that debris is, was something significant, it could have sunk by now, it could have floated away. I want to bring you two guests to talk about all this. Art Wright is an expert in deep-water search investigations. He's operations manager for the company, Williamson & Associates. Also, with us right here, our friend, Richard Quest, anchor of CNN INTERNATIONAL'S "QUEST MEANS BUSINESS." And what I want to do, what we want to do here is really alternate between two separate tracks. We want to talk about the search off the coast of Australia, and we want to talk about, really, the investigation into what happened on that plane, two separate fields. Art, I want to start with you, because you have searched the area in the southern Indian ocean before. You headed a search for a lost Australian navy vessel which you ended up finding. So I want to ask you, what are the challenges for looking for things in this place. What are these planes, what are these ships facing right now?</s>ART WRIGHT, OPERATIONS MANAGER, WILLIAMSON & ASSOCIATES: These ships are facing weather problems in sea states looking for a small object that's going up and down waves. And with a sea state of 15-to-30 foot waves, probably, the lookouts on the ship have trouble seeing objects, and the radars won't pick them up because it's so jumbled. And for the searchers, they have to rule out the area, grid by grid, to ensure that they haven't missed anything. It's a very painstaking process.</s>PEREIRA: I think that's the best word to use, painstaking. And we also know there are also limitations. These search planes may have, some of them may have a capacity of 10-hour flying time. Takes four hours to get out there, only a couple of hours time they can search and then they have to head back to land. Richard, let's talk to you. We know for the first time now, Malaysian Airlines CEO has said that, on board, there was a small cargo of lithium-ion batteries. How concerning is this about the possibility that they have -- could have exploded, caught fire, caused this plane to come down?</s>RICHARD QUEST, CNN AVIATION CORRESPONDENT: The FAA in the United States did a report into lithium batteries some years ago, and it came up with more than a hundred incidents where lithium batteries had either overheated, smoked, molten coming out of it, and they looked at this in great detail. So, it is a well-known and well-documented issue with lithium-ion batteries. But the Malaysia CEO in his news conference specifically said that they knew about those batteries. Those batteries had been packed in accordance with IKO. That's the organization -- the international aviation organization, according with their regulations, and this had been checked and rechecked. And there is one small point conveniently overlooked by those that want to put the lithium-ion battery argument forward. If they had been an incident, there would have been a warning. If there had been a warning, the pilots might have got a mayday out. If there had been a full-scale fire, it probably would have been reported on the ACARS system and we might well have known about it. So, it's -- you know, the lithium-ion battery theory is there. It will remain there.</s>PEREIRA: But does it hold a lot of water?</s>QUEST: It should frankly be somewhere on the back burner, because it doesn't hold a lot of water.</s>BERMAN: Let's get back to the front burner. Fifteen hundred miles off the coast of Australia, Art, one of the things officials are asking for is more my hydrophones. This is to help in the underwater search. They want to listen for possible pings from the flight-data recorder. How hard is it to search underwater? What kind of equipment do you need to scan that ocean floor?</s>WRIGHT: The hydrophone is a passive device. It listens for the ping from the beacon on an aircraft. Once that ping is heard, then they have an idea where the location is. If that beacon dies and the pings are no longer there, then you have to search with it for a deep-ocean sonars. And we use deep ocean sonars to find objects on the bottom. They have a range -- our sonars have a range of 1,250 meters, so we do a swath of 2,500 meters which results in 85 square nautical miles a day searching. It' a very slow, painstaking process. And you want to establish on the seabed exactly where that plane is not. If you know where it is not, then you know where you have to search next.</s>PEREIRA: That's a good point, the process of elimination. Richard, let's ping back to you now and talk about the news that came out today. Again, Malaysia Airlines looking at these media reports that the pilot, eight minutes before the flight departed, made a cell phone call. On a regular day, this might not seem unusual.</s>QUEST: It still doesn't seem unusual to me.</s>PEREIRA: OK.</s>QUEST: Absolutely not. When you say departed, I assume you mean before the doors were closed and the plane pushed back as opposed to at the end of the runway before it took off. Every flight attendant, every pilot I've ever known is making phone calls virtually to the time they close the doors.</s>PEREIRA: Almost like the passengers.</s>QUEST: You've got one thing to remember. You and I -- you can't make a phone call, Michaela and John, you can't make a phone call for the next 53 minutes, because you're on-air. Any flight attendant and pilot may not be able to make a phone call for the next six to eight hours, because they are flying. And then there may be a turn around and they may not be able to call on the way back. There could be a thousand and one reasons. So for this particular profession, flight attendants and pilots, they do take the opportunity to make those calls, duties permitting, until the last possible moment. I am not -- and I'll nail my colors on this one. I could be proved wrong by tea time, as I've said many times, but I am not in the slightest concerned by this call at the moment.</s>BERMAN: Nailing colors and throwing out tea time in one reference there. Richard Quest, Art Wright, great to have you here with us to walk us through this latest information. Appreciate it.</s>PEREIRA: @ THIS HOUR, let's take a look at some of the other stories that are making news. We are watching the situation, Crimea, Crimea now officially a part of Russia. President Vladimir Putin signed the treaty into law today after it was approved almost unanimously by Moscow's parliament. Meanwhile, European Union leaders and Ukraine's prime minister have signed a political pact -- political part of a trade pact, this a day after the U.S. and E.U. imposed tough sanctions on members of Mr. Putin's inner circle.</s>BERMAN: President Obama is meeting with tech CEOs today to continue talks on privacy, technology and intelligence. The meeting comes at a really critical juncture of the NSA reform debate. The president is expected to announce the future of the phone metadata-collection program.</s>PEREIRA: It is now 20 years after Kurt Cobain's suicide, and police are releasing new pictures of the crime scene. These pictures come after much speculation on the Internet that investigators would reopen the case into his death. Seattle police are insisting, though, that the case is still considered a suicide and remains closed. The rock star shot himself at his home when he was just 27-years-old. Rumors have swirled for years that foul play was involved. Police say these new pictures are not new evidence</s>BERMAN: A New Jersey teenager is accused of sneaking to the top of the World Trade Center. Justin Casquejo reportedly slipped past security and headed straight to the top of the 104th floor early Sunday. The 16-year-old's Twitter account showed pictures of him standing on the roof and hanging from a crane. He is now charged with criminal trespassing in what seems to me like a fairly epically awful idea.</s>PEREIRA: Puts the things you did as a teen into very pale comparison.</s>BERMAN: I made some bad decisions in my day.</s>PEREIRA: That is a terrible one, as Charles Barkley would say. All right, we're going to take a short break here on @ THIS HOUR, 10 minutes after the hour, in fact. Ahead, it's one of the most remote parts of our planet. Why there is an added obstacle to the search for Flight 370 and how special technology could help in that search.</s>BERMAN: Plus, the pilot's home flight simulator, how the FBI is working to dig up the clues that could now be hidden in its data.