Malaysia Denies Report Flight 370 May Have Flown for Four More Hours; Search Under Way for Nine Missing in Blast
COSTELLO: Happening now in the NEWSROOM, Malaysia disputing the mystery plane was in the air four hours after its final communication.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Let me be clear, there's no real precedent for a situation like this. The plane vanished. We have extended the search area because it is our duty to follow every lead and we owe it to the families. And trust me when I say, we will not give up.</s>COSTELLO: If Flight 370 did fly on for four more hours, that plane could be anywhere in a radius of 2,500 miles from its last known spot. That stretches from northwest India, all the way to mainland Australia. NEWSROOM continues now. Good morning. I'm Carol Costello. Thanks so much for joining me. It is day six in the search for Flight 370 and still no sign of debris from the Malaysian airliner. But a new report from "The Wall Street Journal" suggests the plane could have flown for four hours after its last contact. If that's true, that could widen the search area by thousands of miles. We want to talk about that possibility with Mary Schiavo and Tom Foreman. Tom, I want to start with you. Where are we talking about? Give us -- lay out the landscape for us, if you will.</s>TOM FOREMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, I'll tell you this about the landscape, Carol, you know this, it's changing every single day. Let's bring in the map and talk about what we know about this tragic story and the huge mystery that continues to swirl about it. Here's what we know. We know the plane took off, right? We know that it flew for some 45 minutes to an hour roughly. And then we know it completely vanished somewhere around here. Now we know from last night the Chinese took some pictures from somewhere over here, which they say they should have never released. Those were some 140 miles away. That automatically raised questions about, could it really be that far away at the time they took these pictures or said they took these pictures? Maybe ocean currents could affect where the wreckage would be and that would be true no matter where the wreckage might go down. In fact, if this plane crashed, you'd have to look at currents, especially after six days like this, things moving around, that sort of thing. But the real question was, could that piece of debris that we saw, that tiny thing there, come from a plane this size? Well, that's not so tiny. Really, if you take all three pieces and average them out, they're about as big as half of a basketball court. So the question was, could you get something like that from something the size of a 777. Well, the 777's a very big aircraft. There's no question about it. About 200 feet wingtip to wingtip on this plane. But to get something that big or three pieces that big out of this, not really that easy. So you are correct. We'll move the airplane now and just look at the space again. Once again we're back to all these competing questions about what happened. We have the image from the Chinese, which has now been discounted. We still have the mystery of where the plane went. We have the errant radar ping that we talked about so much, which drew the whole search over into the Strait of Malacca. It's all very confusing. And I want to point out something, Carol. You talk about how far this area goes. When we talk about the big map here and the idea that perhaps this has expanded from India, I have to turn way over here, from India all the way down toward Australia, that sort of thing, a map like this - a</s>COSTELLO: All right, Tom Foreman, thanks so much. I want to bring in Mary Schiavo now, former inspector general of the U.S. Department of Transportation, now an attorney for victims of transportation accidents. Welcome.</s>MARY SCHIAVO, FMR. INSPECTOR GENERAL, U.S. DOT: Thank you. Good to be with you.</s>COSTELLO: Oh, nice to have you here. So let's talk about this "Wall Street Journal" report. Here's the scenario. Supposedly a U.S. source told "The Wall Street Journal" that the maker of the plane's engine, Rolls Royce, received pulses of data from the plane's engines after it disappeared from the radar. Which means, I suppose, it could have been flying for up to four hours after it disappeared from the radar. I mean, what do you think about that? Is that a plausible scenario?</s>SCHIAVO: Well, it's factually possible. Look, the plane, the 777 is very much like the 340. The Airbus 340 was the plane on Air France 447. That plane did the same thing and in the aftermath of that we had a printout. It's actually a data printout that shows these systems status reports is what they are. They're supposed to go back to the airline. They go back to the engine manufacturers. 777's the same way. So it is factually possible. But it is not factually possible if what happened when the transponder stopped is there was a catastrophic loss of the aircraft. There would be no further data. So what has to happen now is what happens - this is the second thing that happens in U.S. crash investigations. The first thing is to send the go team. The second thing is to gather every piece of data, every maintenance report, every engine speck, every engine log, every plane log, every piece of data about the maintenance operation performance of that plane and study it. That needs to be done next. And if this data exists and it hasn't been provided to the investigators, frankly I think that's almost criminal.</s>COSTELLO: You're echoing what Bob Francis (ph) told us earlier this morning. He's a former NTSB investigator. Now, U.S. investigators are on the scene in Malaysia and I've been asking everybody, how much input do you think they really have?</s>SCHIAVO: Well, they're not in charge. You know, there's a - there's a treaty, international civil aviation - IKO (ph) organization, sets forth how this should be done. And, you know, the U.S. follows them. Most nations follow it. But it's supposed to be the civil investigative body that's supposed to lead it. But here we have so many cooks in the stew that perhaps they're not speaking with one voice of authority. And they may not have the domestic rules in place. For example, in the United States, if you tamper with an accident scene, if you withhold information, anything like that, not only can you have a civil penalty, it can be criminal. We take it very, very seriously. We need one voice and we've got to get this data. These wild leads are plausible because we don't have the data. If they would have gathered the data, then we would know, no that's a wild hare. This isn't possible. This is possible. Follow the hard lead. And I think they need to go right back to where they think that the catastrophic event happened.</s>COSTELLO: OK. So I'm just thinking about all of the different pieces of information that have come out, right?</s>SCHIAVO: Correct.</s>COSTELLO: And then Malaysia shoots them down. For example, yesterday we were told that authorities searched one of the pilot's homes for anything that might lead them to maybe a psychological problem he had or whatever. Today, during the press conference, the Malaysians said, no, we didn't do that. It's just confusing.</s>SCHIAVO: But they should have. What's amazing is they seem to be embarrassed about investigating a horrific accident. Of course you should search the pilots' home. You should look for data. When the NTSB and when we do an investigation in the United States -- by the way, when the NTSB is done, people like me pick up. We depose everyone. We go back over - we re-create the accident. You should have the -- the log books, you know, searches, whereabouts, what did he do in the previous week. I mean there's no -- there's nothing to be saying they didn't do it about. They should have done it. And if they haven't, I want to know why.</s>COSTELLO: Mary Schiavo, thanks, as always.</s>SCHIAVO: Thank you.</s>COSTELLO: Still to come in the NEWSROOM, Malaysian officials respond to the latest report that Flight 370 flew on for hours and hours after it disappeared from the radar. We'll talk more about that when we come back.