Transcripts for CNN The Situation Room 20150102 23:33:15 archive.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from archive.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
with more. what s the latest? the u.s. navy has been lending assistance along with several other countries. but indonesia is still looking for the break that will help solve the mystery of what happened to flight 8501. today what appears to be part of the plane was found, an indonesian official said it appeared to be an interior panel. it was 5:36 local time when the plane took off from surabaya bound for singapore. at 6:12 the plane made its last contact with controllers asking to turn left and climb to 38,000 feet to avoid bad weather. according to one indonesian official the request to turn was given the okay but the request to ascend was denied because there was another plane in the area. shortly after that the plane disappeared off radar. there was no distress call. at 7:55 flight 8501 was declared missing over the java sea. on december 30th searchers saw
might be versus ground speed. this is important. the wings don t know anything about the ground. all they know about is air molecules passing over the rig, and that s what gives it lift. that canning very divergent depending on where the wind is coming from was there an updraft, was there a downdraft? there is a number of scenarios that could be at play here which would cause that ground speed to be a little misleading. and why those black boxes are so important. peter, really quickly before i let you guys go the bodies that have been found. you expected investigators are looking at the flight manifest to see exactly where people were sitting on the plane? sure. with 30 victims recovered, you want to know were they sitting in a certain area of the plane? the flight attendant, was she assigned to the rear of the plane, was she in the front of the plane? that might give investigators an initial feel about where the breakup occurred what part of
would have broke up. that s what it indicates to me. before, if you remember we had the emergency exit and below that we had the slide. the door that peter was just looking at there that looks strange, the floor piece, to me that looks like the cover for the emergency exit on the side of the aircraft which is that slide that comes out and opens. it looks very much like that to me because it is a slightly triangular shape and exterior and then an interior would be that other color. i think that s what i m looking at there. so many may be more of an indication that there was no attempt certainly to exit the plane by people who were in it? yeah that that slide would have deployed there through that door. okay. david gallo, we were talking about this probable area, the new probable area. it s 2,000 square miles. that s still a considerable amount of area to be searching. how long do you think that will take? well it would take if it was deepwater, it would take a
easy and there s still no guarantee of success. so much work to be done and as you said no guarantee of success. tom foreman, thank you. i want to bring in aviation consultant and retired lieutenant colonel ken christensen. we also have sea operations special ilsist timothy taylor and gary gather. david, i want to ask you the first question here. you helped successfully narrow the search zone to locate air france 447. we just saw tom explaining that and just how deep the water was there. but this new probable search area for flight 8501 we re talking 2,000 square miles at this point. how long does it take to search this area and how do they narrow it down to that area? well i think they ve used probably a combination of all the clues of what they found at the surface in terms of bodies and things like that and maybe incorporating a bit about the current and the wind drifts to get some idea.