Retaliation but was the sony picture hack really 100 the work of north korea or could it have been a former sony employee with a score to settle . Good afternoon, everyone. Im jake tapper. The heartbreaking discovery of bodies and debris all but confirm that the worst happen to airasia flight 8501. Crews are working through the night, though the effort may have turned from search and rescue into search and recovery. Indonesian teams pulled debris and bodies from the water today. This is 60 miles from the flights last known location. Now, per airasia, all the search teams are focusing their efforts around that site. Divers and sonar combing the ocean floor hoping to ind into the main cabin of the plane. Earlier today, the companys ceo, tony fernandes, indicated that the floating debris is from 8501. Its probably an airline ceos Worst Nightmare after 13 years of flying millions of people its the worst feeling that one could happen. Fernandes says their focus will remain on focusing on the remains and the passengers and hopefully closure for loved ones still waiting to find out for sure, for absolute certain, what happened to their Family Members. Now, while the discovery of debris is no doubt a gut punch to anyone who had been holding out any hope that there may have been survivors, analysts can now use that information to start to piece together just what may have brought down this plane. Lets bring in cnn aviation cropped rene marsh. What are people saying about what they found and how does it reshape the next steps in the search . Well jake no doubt today was a turning point. They want to answer the primary question what brought down this plane . Reporter for the first time we hear voices from the cockpit of flight 8501 as it takes off from indonesia bound for singapore sunday morning. Debris and wreckage has been found from the airbus 320. It corresponds with the lost plane. Reporter luggage and an emergency slide and bodies. Some of the remains stripped of clothing. It suggests that the airplane hit the water in tact and the force of the impact tore the clothing off the bodies. Reporter aircraft and ships converging on the area including the u. S. Navy sampson and ft. Worth, both ships have helicopters that can aid in recovering wreckage. The crumpling of the metal will tell you whether the plane broke up in one piece. Reporter the water is 80 to 100feet deep making recovery more manageable but it still could take weeks, even months before debris and bodies are recovered. This is what divers dealt with after twa 800 went down. A tangled debris field. Now, one of the key pieces of wreckage they are looking for, the flight recorders. It will have the last 30 minutes of conversation between the crew and any transmissions to air traffic control. And the other black box will give you almost a moment by moment readout of what systems were operating properly. Reporter after the black boxes are found and recovered, they will be taken to a lab like this facility cnn visited earlier this year where it will be disassembled and analyzed for clues. We have a socalled sound library in which we are able to determine particular signature of a sound so like an explosion. Reporter the digital recordings could reveal what was said in the cockpit and if there was a mechanical failure or pilot error. But answers wont come quickly. Often it takes a year to arrive at a final conclusion as to what caused the fatal crash. While we do not know the cause of the crash at this point, it is worth noting the faa rates the Civil Aviation authority in indonesia poorly. Thats the entity that manages the air space. The faa says indonesia Civil Aviation authority does not provide oversight over its air carrier operators. Thats put forward by the aviation arm of the united nations. They set the global standards. Faa saying that this authority, not up to snuff with that. You know a lot of people asking the question why did this plane take off in the first place with these massive storms . We know the faa says you must stay at least 20 miles away from a major thunderstorm like that. Rene the black boxes that you were talking about, assuming that they are recovered, what is the success rate in terms of getting information from them . Well its pretty good. The ntsb could not think of a time when they were not able to get some information or all of the information off of the black boxes. When you think about it they are located in the back of the plane, strategically. In your typical crash, you have the nose going first so its protected back there. Its also all of the information is embedded on the memory chips but they are insulated several layers that protect it from extreme heat and extreme pressure. So chances are, we will get some good information. I want to go right now to surabaya where we have cnns andrew stevens. Thank you very much for joining us. How did the families react when they first saw and heard that not just debris but bodies were being pulled from the water . Reporter jake i was talking to a man whos in with the families of the passengers and he says it was hysterical outbursts, screaming, crying people fainted as the news came through. But it was compounded the pain and suffering was compounded by the fact that they were watching a live News Conference in jakarta and they said it was 90 chance that the debris that had been spotted in the previous hours was, in fact linked to airasia 8501. As he was saying that local television was broadcasting pictures of bodies in the water and there were the families of those passengers sitting there watching this. So as the man said to me, it was just hystericalness. You cannot imagine they are already suffering the pain the anguish, not knowing what has happened and then to see bodies perhaps of their own loved ones in the water, its just beyond comprehension almost. And theyve still got to identify those bodies. They are going to be brought back here to surabaya. They set up a special police hospital. The families are being asked to bring in i. D. Photos samples that they may need to use for dna matches. This is not over by a long long way for the families. Heartbreaking. Yesterday some of the families were expressing frustration at the lack of information that they were getting from the airlines. Are they still having those frustrations . Reporter those frustrations were centering around the fact that there was no new information. It was very difficult to pass on any news at all and obviously the families were getting more frustrated by that. They were getting more information from the television than local authorities. But now the mood does seem to have changed somewhat. Listen to what one of the Family Members told us just a few hours ago. Translator im feeling confused. Ive been waiting here since december 28th. I was so nervous but now im a bit relieved because now we know the aircraft has been found. We hope that our children will be saved by a miracle. Reporter so a little bit relieve. They have an outcome even though it is the worst possible outcome. That man that was speaking there, that couple they had a son who had his family on there, a wife and two children. So what compounds this jake is it is a holiday period here. Its quite a strong connection with singapore. A lot of people were going to singapore to celebrate new years eve. There were a lot of families and big families who were on that plane when it went down. Of the 162 on board, 18 were children. Andrew stevens, live in surabaya, indonesia, thank you. Well have much more on who these passengers were and who they leave behind later in the show. But lets continue on. While the Aerial Search mission continues, divers as well as ships equipped with Sonar Technology are headed to what appears to be the crash zone to help find larger pieces of the plane which could be somewhere near the bottom of the ocean. Cnns tom foreman is live in the virtual room to show us how this ocean search will probably play out. Tom . Jake really what were talking about is three levels of searching going on. We know where the plane took off and where it was headed and where it disappeared and now we know where they found debris. We also know that particularly in these stormy conditions there are very strong currents out in here that have to be considered in terms of what they have done to the first layer of search. The surface layer. Let me explain why that makes it a difference here. If youre talking about the surface of the water, where you have wind blowing and currents at work everything can move around hour by hour by hour. The lightest things can move the most. It serves a purpose because it helps point you below the water but as soon as you move down in this column of water, you start encountering all of these different currents of water which can move anything that is suspended between that top, say, 80 to 100 feet above the floor, it can move things around in here. They have to reverse engineer what the currents were and what they really want to find which is down on the bottom here because down on the bottom is where the flight data recorders will be where youll find the cockpit and wiring and significant parts of the fuselage down here. The wings, the tail the engines. Each about 9,000 pounds. Those are the critical parts, jake and its important to recover the bodies here for the families and for whatever evidence that also brings but all of this parts of the plane is at the bottom. You have to have side scan sonar and robotics and all of that coming together to dig up what they can down there. Jake . Tom, with all of these conditions like the currents that you mentioned, how much can the search and rescue teams reasonably expect to find . I think reasonably they can expect to be very successful at this. I want to remind you of something. This is about the same sort of conditions that we had with twa 800 which crashed off long island in the 1990s. In that case it was about 100 feet of water and after ten months they have recovered every victim and they recovered 95 of the plane, jake. That was critical because when you have all of that you can put it all together and you can see where fractures occurred and what possibly went wrong and what went right and how the plane actually came down. Thats the evidence they need. They found it in twa 800 with very similar circumstances. In this case if they are lucky and the clues point the right direction, they could have the same thing happen. Jake . Tom foreman thank you so much. Searching under water is no easy task but key pieces of wreckage could answer the question as to what really happened and now divers are facing what could be their Biggest Challenges in the days ahead. Thats coming up. [ female announcer ] knows her way around a miniskirt. Can run in high heels. Must be a supermodel, right . You dont know aarp. Because aarp is making finding the career you love no matter what your age, a real possibility. Go to aarp. Org possibilities to check out life reimagined for tools, support, and connections. 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Welcome back to the lead. Now that search crews have recovered some wreckage from airasia flight 8501 they face the daunting task of trying to find the bodies of those who were on board along with of course the allimportant black box. And even though the waters in this part of the sea, the java sea, are relatively shallow, just up to 120 feet deep the mission will not be easy. Lets bring in our guests tim taylor a submersible specialist. Along with david gallo, thanks for being with me. David, let me start with you. The sun will rise in just under two hours in that part of the world. Now that they found three bodies and some debris how will the search play out . Well im guessing that they are going to go right back to that spot and shift the search collapse the big sechlg area and focus on this area with shifts and planes to really identify this debris field. Im sort of mystified that they said there have only been a few bodies. Jake in the earlier segment we heard that objects will drift whether they are pushed around by air or pushed around by currents. Well learn a lot from those bodies and debris. I hate to talk about it that way but well just have to wait and see. I dont understand why there would be so little in one spot and then easily isolated. Its not like theres a horizon and then a debris. Its very odd. Tim, what do you think will be the biggest obstacles these search teams will face when the sun rises in a couple of hours. It seems like some of the operations from the weather seems so calm at night. Definitely that is going to slow them down. Its not possible. Its closer to shore. Its not like its hundreds of miles off shore. They have some ability to joj that weather but weather is going to be the major issue in any type of to expedite this in any way possible its going to be a battle against weather. Tim this part of the sea is relatively shallow. Does that limit the kind of equipment that can be used to find debris and victims . Not really. Some of the big tote systems, its overkill for this area. They can size down that piece of equipment. It brings in rov work and they can stay on the bottom and continually work and stench and move stuff and then when they put divers down its not recreational divers. Its going to be a surface supplied hard hat commercialtype diver that they can communicate with or divers and go down there and do the work. I know youre reluctant to talk about it, because obviously this is a human tragedy and there are people mourning people in real horrific grieve. But i do want to ask about what the debris and what the bodies can tell us. Are there clues, without getting too graphic, that the conditions under which we find metal or even people can tell us about what happened . Yes. They can talk about how these individuals, various souls met their end and as horrible and painful it is to talk about that. And that will be interesting to see because it will did they die at impact in the air, survive for a bit on the surface of the water . There are two things going on. One is the horrific humanitarian effort to obtain the bodies and the fuselage at the bottom of the ocean, which is a initial altogether. Theres that effort and the forensic effort and investigative effort about what happened to the aircraft and for that we need the black boxes. Yeah its a difficult task to have to combine the two but its something that has got to be done for the sake of all involved. Miles obrien, a cnn aviation analyst, is joining us. I want to ask you one quick question, if possible. I assume now with the recovery of the debris that the search grid shrunk. It was Something Like 60 square miles. That will get much smaller, right . Yeah. Its interesting because, as david gallo will tell you, there was noting debris from air france 447 after it disappeared. And that amountllowed them to hone in on the wreckage at the bottom of the sea floor. But it took some time to identify the location. They used bad drift models which put them in the wrong area for quite some time and they ended up at ground zero as it were and found it, obviously getting the black boxes is important. As you say, knowing what pieces fell off as well and when they fell off would tell a lot about how it broke up and exactly what happened to them. Thank you all so much. Appreciate it. Hope is of course dwindling that anyone from flight 8501 will be found alive. The painful reality for families. Into plus plus the support that they are going to need to get from others from around the world. Plus the third ranking House Republican said he did not know that a white supremacist leader was part of the group a few years ago. Can he survive the heat . Narrator these are the tennis shoes skater kid whoa narrator that got torture tested by teenagers and cried out for help. From the surprised designers. Who came to the rescue with a brilliant fix male designer i love it narrator which created thousands of new customers for the tennis shoes that got torture tested by teenagers. The internet of everything is changing manufacturing. Is your Network Ready . Welcome back to the lead. Im jake tapper. Were going to continue our world lead about the mysterious circumstances surrounding airasia flight 8501 and the fact that its discovery is giving loved ones of the 162 people on board some reason to hope that somehow, some way they could be found alive. But now that the debris and the bodies have been found, that hope well its given way to unbearable grief. Some Family Members even fainted, were told when an asian newschannel broadcast pictures of bodies floating in the water. As the harsh reality of this tragedy begins to set in were learning more about the mothers and fathers, husbands and wives and, of course, those 18 children who were on the doomed plane. Reporter for the families praying and waiting for good news each piece of debris discovered represents the destruction of their last hopes. The only slight benefit is that for the people in there, there is some closure. Reporter confirmed wreckage from airasia night 8501 was discovered last tuesday along with three bodies of those on board. This is a scar with me for the rest of my life. Reporter now as victims belongings are collected from the sea, the world is gaining a Bigger Picture of who we lost. 162 souls, including 18 children. One of the first pilots to spot debris told the indonesia newspaper compass that he saw victims floating in the water Still Holding hands. Its symbolic of the tragedy. In this south Korean Church the congregation is weeping for one of their missionaries. As well as for