Mystery of Flight 370; Still No Closer to an Answer; U.S. Officials Probe Batteries Theory
BILL WEIR, CNN ANCHOR: A full week now since Flight 370 vanished without a trace, now investigators trying to figure out if a stash of batteries on board played a role. I'm Bill Weir. And this is THE LEAD. The world lead, was it sabotage? Was it hijacked? A new report is reviving the worst fears among investigators that something sinister happened aboard Flight 370. Also, what did the pilots see? Could they have actually landed somewhere undetected? We're going to take you virtually inside the cockpit to recreate the path of the vanished Malaysia Airlines plane. And the buried lead. There are no hard answers, only theories, some a lot more plausible than others. Imaginations are running wild around the globe over the need to solve this maddening mystery. We will take a look at some of the most outlandish theories about this plane's fate. Welcome to THE LEAD. I am Bill Weir, filling in for Jake Tapper today. And we begin with the world lead. It's now a solid week since contact was last made with Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, and this has become one of the most baffling mysteries in the history of aviation. Now a new theory is emerging today about what happened to the plane and those 239 souls on board. U.S. officials tell CNN that investigators are now looking at whether lithium batteries in the cargo hold may have played a role. You might recall that this is the kind of battery, lithium, that has been blamed for causing fires aboard planes in the past. But an aviation industry source also tells CNN that the plane must have been intact for at least five hours, because the communication system was still sending out pings during all that time. All of this new information comes after Reuters, citing unnamed sources, reported evidence that the plane may have intentionally and secretly flown off course. Reuters say military radar shows Flight 370 traveled on for hours after going silent, zigzagging way off the flight plan, between waypoints, which are these points on the globe pilots use to orient themselves along well-traveled established air corridors. That either means that the pilots were still at the controls or someone else with flight experience had taken them over. Meanwhile, another report claims that two of the plane's communication systems were shut down at separate times. This is ABC's reporting. They cite two U.S. officials in saying that the data reporting system was shut off at 1:07 a.m. and the transponder, which sends out location and altitude information, that one shut down at 1:21 a.m., which seems to discount the idea that there was some all-at-once cataclysmic event on board that plane. Now, according to Reuters, radar shows that the plane was last headed towards a waypoint that could take it over the Andaman Islands. And so the search is being intensified around that island chain, also in the Indian Ocean as well, crews casting a wide net, and yet, of course, they have still found nothing, not a trace. But here's one more wrinkle. Chinese researchers say they recorded a -- quote -- "sea floor event" about an hour-and-a-half after the plane's last known contact, which could be consistent with a plane crash. But that, of course, would put the plane somewhere close to its original course east of Malaysia and discount all this other information about those pings. So, clear on that? Probably not. It's so hard to keep up with this dribs and drabs of information. We will take a closer look at the search area and try to parse all of this. I'm joined now by Steven Wallace, former director of the Office of Accident Investigation for the FAA. Good to see you, Steve. Thanks for being with us.</s>WEIR: Let me just start with the lithium battery story that we have gotten now. The question that pops into my mind is, why are we getting this kind of information this long after that plane disappeared?</s>STEVEN WALLACE, FORMER DIRECTOR, FAA OFFICE OF ACCIDENT INVESTIGATION: Well, there's a consistent pattern in all of the evidence. There's doubts about its quality and it keeps arriving kind of slowly in dribs and drabs. And to say lithium batteries is kind of like saying stolen passports.</s>WEIR: Right.</s>WALLACE: So red flags start to go up. Of course, there was a terrible UPS cargo plane fire attributed to lithium batteries. But there are very, very strict rules about how they need to be packaged and transported. And, of course, if there were a fire in the cargo hold, this airplane has the latest in detection and suppression. The crew would have been making emergency calls.</s>WEIR: Sure.</s>WALLACE: So, I wouldn't jump...</s>WEIR: But does this indicate that after a dearth of information from the Malaysian government for so long, somebody finally connected with the Americans, looked at the cargo manifest and thought, oh, look, lithium batteries, and that takes on a life of its own?</s>WALLACE: Well, I think that's exactly right, because this investigation has just been kind of poorly organized. First, we had the radar data that said it turned to the west. And then we had the Chinese satellite image, which was so big that it couldn't have been floating debris from the airplane.</s>WEIR: Right.</s>WALLACE: And so evidence -- and now we have these waypoints. Would you like me to speak to those waypoints?</s>WEIR: Well, I want to get to that in a second, but the thing was five hours intact, regardless, if we believe that all of these waypoints -- so that seems to discount some sort of slow-burning fire. It couldn't be a fire that burn slow enough to keep them in the air and yet sent them off course, a lot of conflicting things. Let's take a look at some maps now. This of course is where the search started. This is the original path of the plane. But then came that left turn that we have been fascinated by that gives some indication that somebody was at the stick of that plane and changing things. First of all, explain these pings. Are these coming from satellites pinging off of the plane, or the plane is sending out some sort of a signal?</s>WALLACE: So, it's not entirely clear to me, but my understanding is, is that the ACARS, the data link that went off, I don't know, 14 to 21 minutes before the transponder signal was lost, well, that sends out packets of information on like the health of the engines and things like that, either to the airline or the engine manufacturer. So, my understanding is that these were sort of like blank pings from that equipment. And how the positions were derived from that, I'm not sure. I would point out here that, in this modern age, waypoints are just everywhere. So, this airplane, it's not clear either whether this airplane flew directly over these waypoints or it just kind of got near them.</s>WEIR: Right. Is this consistent -- I can actually draw on here. So if the activity was this way and it goes this way and changes, or regardless of that, does that indicate that somebody at some point is punching those coordinates into the cockpit somehow, or that they are just coming close enough to these waypoints that that's the reference that we know roughly where they were?</s>WALLACE: Well, that's an excellent question. So, if you -- if this airplane were flying on a flight management computer system and those waypoints were put in, the airplane would hit them right on the button. And if someone was flying the plane manually just -- and this is obviously not a direct flight path to anywhere.</s>WEIR: Right.</s>WALLACE: Because it zigzags. Well, then you might sort of just get near them.</s>WEIR: Right. And I guess the way for us as motorists to think about this is, this might be equivalent to where the 101 and the 405 meet in Southern California. That's how pilots can gauge it. But when we first saw that pattern, we thought, ooh, that's somebody who knows what they are doing. Did you infer that?</s>WALLACE: No, I wouldn't jump to that conclusion, only because I don't know with any certainty that we really went precisely to these waypoints. But if the aircraft were shown to have flown exactly to a series of waypoints, that would suggest that someone either knew how to fly it there manually or that it was programmed into the...</s>WALLACE: And, again, this is Reuters reporting unnamed sources.</s>WEIR: Right.</s>WALLACE: We have to take all of this with not a grain, a block of salt. But I'm sure there are people trying to study these -- the wave patterns, the wind patterns. If they do find anything, they have to be able to triangulate where that plane went down, right?</s>WALLACE: Absolutely.</s>WEIR: OK. Steven Wallace, thanks so much for your time.</s>WALLACE: Thank you.</s>WEIR: Good to see you. Coming up next, following every possible lead with new information suggesting the plane was intentionally led astray, as we just said. The pilots in the cockpit that day are being scrutinized. So are the passengers on that flight. But could that answer be in the cargo? Plus, think of the possibility of stealing a plane and hiding it. Is that too far-fetched? Well, my next guest says he was involved in a CIA plot to do exactly that. Stay with us, everybody.