Dow Plunges as Oil Price Drops Again; Dozen of Divers Join AirAsia Search; Report of Icing Possible Factor in AirAsia Crash
WOLF BLITZER, CNN HOST: Hello, I'm Wolf Blitzer in Washington. Wherever you're watching from around the world, thanks very much for joining us. We've got some breaking news from Wall Street we're watching right now. Plunging oil prices are triggering a selloff of the Dow Jones. There, you see the Dow Jones down more than 300 points. Right now, Alison Kosik is joining us from New York. She's got the very latest. Alison, what is going on? Why is the market in bad shape, at least right now?</s>ALISON KOSIK, CNN BUSINESS CORRESPONDENT: Part of the reason, Wolf, has to do with oil prices. As we watch stocks fall, we are watching oil prices in free fall as well. If you look at how oil has been since July, oil prices have lost half their value since July falling from $100 to even below $50 a barrel today making up a little bit of ground still falling over four percent, however. And the way Wall Street sees it, this is unsettling when one particular area of the economy is in free fall, that leaves a lot of uncertainty. And uncertainty about where the bottom is. There's really no sense of where and when oil prices will stop falling this much. Now, at the same time, Wall Street is uncertain about it and it's unsettling for Wall Street. For us who use gas to drive in our cars and to use it for our home heating oil, we're really enjoying it. Right now, the average price for a gallon of regular is at $2.20. That's down from a high of $3.68 over the summer. And if you look at gas stations across the country, Wolf, at almost 40 percent of the gas stations in the U.S., gas is below $2 a gallon -- Wolf.</s>BLITZER: Alison, as you know, Goldman Sachs put out a little warning today saying professional investors may be unduly bullish. A lot of people have been expecting some sort of correction because the market has been going up and up and up. Is that what they're bracing for now, some serious correction?</s>KOSIK: I think that the market really thinks that -- at least investors think that the market is overdue for a correction. There is some question whether oil prices would be the lynchpin for that. I think you see other things globally that could be the catalyst for a -- for a correction. For one, you're seeing a slowdown in China. You're seeing a slowdown in Europe. That would affect the market more on a longer term basis than, let's say, oil prices. Also, Greece is one of the wild cards as well. Greece had -- is expected to hold a national election at the end of January. And in this upcoming election, the worry is that it could be won by a party that's looking to renegotiate the terms of its country's international bailout. So, that's really a wild card in the mix as well -- Wolf.</s>BLITZER: All right. Alison Kosik, we'll stay in close touch with you. The Dow Jones industrials right now, here in the United States, down 312 points. We'll see what happens. But let's move on. Let's get the latest now in the search for AirAsia Flight 8501. The search has been suspended for now due to bad weather and then darkness. Dozens of divers were dropped in the water to look for the wreckage. So far, murky conditions, strong currents have hampered those efforts. But there are also reports of a possible break through. A captain of one of the search ships told Reuters he thinks they found the tail section. That's where the black boxes, as they're called, are located. But that news has not yet been confirmed by CNN. The batteries and the flight data recorders have around 21 days left to power the pingers. Also, relatives of victims tell CNN they're being offered $24,000 as compensation from AirAsia. As we said, 37 bodies have been recovered, 13 of those have been identified. Our Anna Coren has more now on the search for the wreckage and the victims of Flight 8501.</s>ANNA COREN, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Authorities wrapping up the search for AirAsia 8501 with crews scouring the Java Sea, both in the air and by water. By the afternoon, at least three bodies, two male and one female, pulled from the water and taken to land. Severe weather breaking long enough for officials to deploy a total of 57 divers to investigate several large objects detected by sonar imagery. The U.S. Fort Worth is also assisting using sonar equipment to scan the ocean floor. Meanwhile, Indonesian authorities extend the massive operation east beyond the so-called most probable area where crews have already retrieved dozens of bodies and located large pieces of debris believed to be from the aircraft.</s>DAVID SOUCIE, CNN AVIATION ANALYST: The position of where they find the debris is extremely important because of the fact that you can determine whether there was an in-flight breakup or if there was a breakup -- the extent of the breakup once it hit the water.</s>COREN: Now nine days since the airbus 320 went missing and so far no signals have been detected to help hone in on the critical black boxes.</s>JEFF WISE, CNN AVIATION ANALYST: The voice recorder in the cockpit tells you what the people were saying. It also records sounds. You might hear a bang, for instance. And you've also got this data recorder that's telling you what kind of thrust settings the engines were on. So, you can really recreate, in a great level of detail, what was happening with the plane and why it came down.</s>COREN: Also, Indonesian officials revealing that AirAsia did not have a permit to fly the Serbia (ph) Singapore route on December 28th, clarifying that the airline was approved to fly the route only four days a week which did not include Sunday.</s>BLITZER: That was CNN's Anna Coren reporting from the scene for us. Let's continue the discussion with our panel of experts. Joining us, our Aviation Analyst and pilot, Miles O'Brien; former NTSB managing director, Peter Goelz; and CNN Law Enforcement Analyst, the former FBI assistant director, Tom Fuentes. Peter, this report from Reuters that the tail section -- we have not confirmed this. The tail section may have been found. That would be very, very significant.</s>PETER GOELZ, CNN AVIATION ANALYST: Well, that would be. And it would mean that the black boxes are not far away. It doesn't disturb me that they haven't heard the pingers yet. Sometimes they break loose, sometimes they're buried under debris. If you're not directly over them, sometimes you can't hear. But if they found the tail section, then it is likely that --</s>BLITZER: How close do you have to be to those black boxes and the pingers in order to detect them?</s>GOELZ: Well, in open ocean on a sandy bottom, four or five miles. But if it's buried -- for instance, in TWA, we were right over it at 100 feet and we could not hear the pingers.</s>BLITZER: What do you make, Tom, of this notion that the plane was not really authorized to fly on that day?</s>TOM FUENTES, CNN LAW ENFORCEMENT ANALYST: I think the only way that's an issue, in terms of the crash, Wolf, is if they weren't authorized because that was a day with crowded skies and they didn't want the extra aircraft in the air at that time. And that may have affected where they were allowed when they asked for permission to climb, that the traffic control said, no, you can't because other planes are up there. But other than that, if it didn't interfere with the flight path or the crowded skies weren't the issue, it's really an administrative function that may determine whether Indonesia fines the airlines, takes other administration action or whether it affects the insurance liability coverage which is another huge issue.</s>BLITZER: I don't get it, Miles. A plane is not authorized to fly and it fly and it fly -- a commercial plan. This is not a private little -- you know, a piper. This is a major commercial plane. It's not authorized to fly on that day but AirAsia lets it fly?</s>MILES O'BRIEN, CNN AVIATION ANALYST: Yes, I think you have to remember, Wolf, the context of where we are. This is an incredibly fast growing region for aviation. This airline is a low-cost carrier, trying to meet up with a lot of demand. It's having a hard time filling cockpits. They're running fast and they're running hard trying to -- well, it's the biggest aviation sector in the world now. So, have the regulations, has their systems gotten to the point where it's like it is here in the U.S. or Europe, I think they're still working on it.</s>BLITZER: Does that make sense to you? I mean, do they just have a lot of standards? They're a lot more lax than standards here in the United States?</s>GOELZ: I think -- I think Miles is onto it, that it shows that there may be the safety infrastructure. The behind the cockpit may not being keeping up with the growth of the industry. I mean, the plane takes off on Sunday, I mean, and it's not authorized, somebody's got to realize that. And it means that somewhere the paperwork is not being done and nobody cares.</s>BLITZER: Do you believe this notion that -- "The Wall Street Journal" has this report that icing may have played a role in bringing this plane down. You've looked into that?</s>GOELZ: We've all been talking about that and it is certainly something that could have occurred. You did have five planes in the general area. We need to hear from those pilots what they were experiencing. But it would not surprise us if icing or a heavy hail storm came in and caused disruption to the flight. But that's only the beginning of it.</s>BLITZER: Because, you know, one thing that worries me is that the cockpit voice record -- that whatever conversations were going on between the cockpit and ground control, it stopped, what, like at 36,000 or 38,000 feet and there were no more conversations, right?</s>O'BRIEN: Yes, and this is why I think we have to be careful when we talk about icing. What the early reports were and the indication that came out of the region there was that somehow icing caused the engines to flame out, that they -- and this is possible if you don't turn on what's called continuous ignition, which a pilot would do in that scenario. But let's assume that didn't happen or it failed. That aircraft is completely viable aerodynamically.</s>BLITZER: He can still communicate with ground control.</s>O'BRIEN: He can -- he can glide for a hundred miles, point toward land and communicate with the ground. Something, what Peter was talking about, where there was maybe hail involved, or ice that covered over some crucial instrumentation that allowed you to know air speed or altitude. I think ice might have been involved but I think it's much more catastrophic than a simple flame out of the engines.</s>BLITZER: When you say catastrophic, what does that mean?</s>O'BRIEN: Well, like hail breaking the windshield, like hail ingesting into the aircraft damaging aerodynamic surfaces, like pitot (ph) tubes, which measure air speed, being iced over. All of these things compounding and then add a lot of turbulence and a huge updraft, and you've got a much -- it's a much more complicated picture than it sounded in those initial reports.</s>BLITZER: The U.S. is involved in this investigation, I assume at several different levels, right, Tom?</s>FUENTES: Right. Right, the U.S. has warships in the area that are now looking for the -- for the debris and for the -- you know, have the sonar also searching. But, you know, in terms of what Miles just said about -- you know, that it could glide for a hundred miles, it's not impossible that that plane crashed. There's thousands of islands that belong to Indonesia, 18,000 as a matter of fact. And the coast line of Borneo is about a hundred miles from area where they're looking. So, it's not impossible, I don't think, that that plane could have glided and crashed in the jungle and the terrific torrential monsoon rains suppressed any smoke and fire and that it could be in the jungle and that's why it hasn't been found.</s>BLITZER: But they've recovered, Peter, as you know, 30 or 40 bodies already in the water.</s>GOELZ: Right. And we haven't seen the full report on whether some of the bodies were clothed, some were not, apparently, which would indicate some degree -- if they were not clothed, some degree of in- flight breakup. I mean, my guess is that the plane's in the water and then it might have broken up, at some late stage of the incident.</s>BLITZER: Yes, we know this investigation, obviously, only just starting right now. Guys, thanks very, very much. We'll stay on top of this story. More of it coming up later. CNN teams, by the way, out on the stormy Java Sea joining search crews tracking down the missing Flight 8501. We'll take a closer look at the rough conditions they face. That's coming up. And the accused Boston marathon bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, he's in court today as jury selection gets underway. We'll go live to the courthouse. And North Korea's fiery response to U.S. sanctions slapped on the hermit (ph) nation following the hack at Sony Pictures. We have more. All of that coming up.