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CNN TONIGHT

Search Area For Flight 8501 Expands; Did Bad Weather Play A Role?; Flying The Airbus 320

Aired December 29, 2014 - 23:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.


(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

DON LEMON, CNN ANCHOR: It is 11:00 p.m. on the east coast, 11:00 a.m. in Surabaya, Indonesia, where the hunt for Flight 8501 is growing more urgent and we have reports of smoke on an island in the search area. More than 1,100 search and rescue personnel from Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, South Korea, Japan, and New Zealand are joining Indonesia's search teams.

And the "USS Sampson" is on its way to the Java Sea where the plane went missing Sunday morning local time with 162 people on board. CNN's reporters live in the search zones for you.

And we have got an expert team standing by to answer all of your questions. Make sure you use the #8501qs. But let's begin with our reporters. Get straight to CNN's Andrew Stevens in Surabaya, Indonesia and Will Ripley from Beijing.

Andrew, to you first, 11:00 a.m. there. The search area for the missing AirAsia Flight 8501 has expanded yet again. It's still a search and rescue operation, but if the area they are searching continues to expand, this can't be good news.

ANDREW STEVENS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Absolutely, Don. I mean, it is still a search and rescue operation, but more and more it's in name only given that if the plane is at the bottom of the sea, which is still the working assumption here, well past 40 hours, even the vice president of this country saying anything after that very unlikely we're going to see survivors.

But miracles still do happen, 156,000 square kilometers. That's roughly the size of California. That is the search zone we're looking at. Now, you mentioned smoke. Smoke has been detected coming from an island within that search zone. They are on their way.

Search crews are on their way there. We're staying in pretty close contact with the search crews out of Jakarta, and they're reporting to us now that they still do not know the source of that smoke.

Unlikely to be burning off, which is a pretty common occurrence here, but it is rainy season now. So that certainly is an object of interest. And across the other side of the Java Sea on the eastern side they're expanding the search into countryside there. This is the southern part of Borneo.

So it gives you an idea, Don, that they are still casting the net very, very wide. The sea is shallow. That is a good sign. But there has been no locator pings from the aircraft. All they're going on still is that last communication and the loss of contact with the plane.

That happened early -- three days ago now. And extrapolating from there basically, they've broken the search zone into 13 separate areas. And they are now methodically combing in those areas, 40 ships, 30 planes but still nothing.

LEMON: Andrew, are families there reacting to this change in the search area?

STEVENS: Well, as you can imagine, Don, they just want information. In fact, there is a Skype call going on now between members of -- family members of those on board the plane and the head of the search teams, which are still based in Jakarta.

So they get to ask all the questions they need to ask, but it is, as you can imagine, incredibly sort of -- the moments of anguish here just extraordinary as well as the frustration. We -- there was a briefing about an hour ago.

This is closed obviously to the media, but there are windows. And just looking into the window, one image that stood out was a father, head bowed, tears streaming down his face, his hand resting on the shoulder of what looks like his young son in front of him.

Gives you an idea of what these people are going through. Heartfelt tweets, social media coming from family members of the pilot. "Daddy, please come home. I need you" that sort of -- that sort of heart- rending pleas and still many people here holding out hope, Don.

Hope against hope that maybe a miracle will happen maybe there will be survivors here. But as the hours tick past it just looks more and more unlikely.

LEMON: I want to get to Will Ripley now. Will, you're in Beijing. The Chinese are one of the many nations assisting in this search. What's the latest you're hearing in China?

WILL RIPLEY, CNN CORRESPONDENT: China certainly very keen on deploying their assets to assist in the search zone, joining those nine other countries, Don. Because you remember China, they played a major role. They diverted tremendous resources to try to find MH-370 for the families of the 154 missing Chinese who went through a horrible emotional ordeal that continues to this day.

And that search turned up empty with a lot of Indonesian, Chinese families that are now suffering the same ordeal. China wants to help. And we were speaking with some family members here in Beijing today who said like the ones you interviewed earlier, Don, this disappearance has brought them back to the day when Flight 370 disappeared. Where still ten months later there are many people who cannot accept their family members are not coming home. They still believe that there's some chance that their family members may return. Can you imagine this kind of anguish stretching on for months?

That's what the 370 families are going through. They certainly hope for closure for the families involved in the AirAsia disappearance.

LEMON: Will, you know, China not the only nation that's assisting in the search. What other nations are involved?

RIPLEY: Well, you know, you mentioned Indonesia, of course, leading the search effort. We mentioned China. The U.S. has the Navy's Seventh Fleet in the region, one ship on the way, plenty more resources available, Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, South Korea, Japan, and New Zealand.

This is truly shaping up to be an international effort, Don, much like what we saw as the search for 370 expanded. And as we see the search area expanding as well. It seems clear that countries want to work together to try to find this plane as quickly as possible for these families.

LEMON: Will Ripley, Andrew Stevens, thank you very much. I want to bring in now our aviation experts Matthew Wald, Mary Schiavo, former inspector general of the Department of Transportation, now an attorney for victims of transportation accidents.

Also Captain Tim Taylor, a sea operations specialist and underwater vehicle expert. Jeff Wise, the author of "Extreme Fear: The Science of Your Mind in Danger," and CNN aviation analyst and 777 captain, Les Abend.

Les, two pieces of breaking news here to talk about, the smoke and search area expanding, what do you make of these reports?

LES ABEND, CNN AVIATION ANALYST: The smoke, I don't put a lot of credence into that. From the standpoint of I think you and I discussed this with MH370, with reference to the emergency locator transmitters, the ELTs. The fact they never emitted a signal was an indication to me that these things may be underwater.

And the smoke on an island may be some other -- related to something else. So I have a feeling that since we didn't get the ELT signals either by an impact on land, which would have occurred for sure, that they're immersed in water.

LEMON: If you have an emergency like this, I know you'd rather not have it, but does it make a difference, land or water for a pilot?

ABEND: You mean if you had a choice of having land or water? Of course, you're going to look for a landing strip, someplace to put a piece of concrete -- or put the airplane on a piece of concrete. But if the other option is to ditch the airplane, it's not something that we want to do because it's a difficult maneuver to do, to perform safely enough you that don't have injuries. LEMON: Mary, I want to get your take on the breaking news now, the search area expanding again and also the smoke but expanding. And as you heard our Andrew Stevens said it's the size of California. It contains 13 sector zones now.

Three days into this and not a single piece of wreckage so far that we know about. As the hours tick on here, what do you make of this? How hopeful are you that something will happen within the next few days?

MARY SCHIAVO, CNN AVIATION ANALYST: Well, I'm still hopeful that something will happen in the next few days and the search area's expanding because if the wreckage is in the water the currents are just taking it further and further away from the point of impact.

So they have to expand it really and in some ways it's just a practical maneuver. As the days have gone on and they haven't found, it they have to expand it to take in the possibilities of where the wreckage could be.

So I don't take it as necessarily an awful development. It's just something that they have to do because of the way the currents work.

LEMON: The key differences, Tim, between the way this search is conducted and the way they conducted the search for 370, is there a big difference?

CAPT. TIM TAYLOR, SEA OPERATIONS SPECIALIST: I mean, technically they're doing the same thing. But here, as Richard said in the last hour, they know -- they have a good idea where this is. There's no reason to think it's not in this area. There's no data saying it's bugged out or done something different like 370.

LEMON: And we talked about this, Jeff, when we talked about 370. The possibility of -- because they're saying it's at the bottom of the sea right? The possibility that it's intact at the bottom of the sea is that slim and none?

JEFF WISE, CNN AVIATION ANALYST: We don't know why that official said that. There's no real reason to assume that if a plane impacts the water it's going to do so in one piece. That's really rare. It has happened but under very special circumstances.

I think maybe what he meant, and perhaps something was lost in translation, what he meant was it went into the ocean. But we don't even know that that's necessarily true, as we've just been talking about. It might have hit the land. There are islands in the area.

So you know, one thing we saw with MH-370 was early on there were all kinds of reports that would come in and turn out later not to be true. But it's very hard to filter things because you don't -- we know so little about really the basics of the case.

LEMON: And nine months plus later still no sign of MH-370. And Matthew, similar questions, people are wondering in today's technological age how is it still possible for a plane to go missing like this? MATTHEW L. WALD, AVIATION EXPERT: The 370 set off an international debate about standards. The problem is that standards are mostly in the hands of ICAO, the International Civil Aviation Organization. It's an arm of the U.N. and it operates kind of like the Security Council. It operates by consensus.

So we end up with the least common denominator level of safety. If you can't get everybody to agree, it's really hard to put in something stricter. Now, there are cases in which the airlines have felt pressured. The regulators are egging them on.

Most of all the public is egging them on to solve a problem. That's happened mostly on a national basis. I haven't really seen it happen on an international basis.

After the ValuJet crash, for example, the airlines signaled they were all willing to volunteer for better standard for on-board fires because the public just wasn't going to stand for it.

Whether that's going to happen here and the airlines will agree to adapt a quick standard without a whole lot of international discussion and negotiation for real-time monitoring remains to be seen. And probably it depends partly on how long it takes to find this wreckage.

LEMON: All right, stay with me, everybody. We've got a lot more to come on the hunt for Flight 8501. How bad does weather have to be to bring down a jet full of people?

And do high-tech autopilots help or hurt in an emergency? Our experts are standing by to answer all of your questions. Make sure you tweet us using the #8501qz.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

LEMON: One thing we do know about Flight 8501 is that it encountered bad weather off the coast of Indonesia. So joining me now is CNN meteorologist, Pedram Javaheri. Pedram, thanks for joining us. How bad were the storms when Flight 8501 lost contact?

PEDRAM JAVAHERI, AMS METEOROLOGIST: Yes, Don, nice seeing you. This part of the world this is a thunderstorm factory of our planet. Sow ask me a question of, say, between October and April where is the worst weather place consistently on our planet I would direct you, Don, across the equator.

Typically right around Indonesia is where we have the winds from the southern hemisphere meeting with the winds across the northern hemisphere and that really fuels some of the largest storms on our planet across those few months of the year.

You take a look at the perspective. Surabaya, Indonesia the sun comes up roughly 5:15 in the morning. That was the case on Sunday morning. Thunderstorms began blossoming shortly after sunrise across this region.

It's unlike North America where storms really peak intensity into the afternoon hours, in this part of the world around the tropics and also the equator that happens in the early morning hours. So the plane takes off.

Notice major thunderstorm complex to the east of the aircraft there. We know the pilot here asked to deviate to the left. He was given permission to do so, moved the plane to the left presumably to avoid this thunder head.

We know it measured some 53,000 feet high. The plane then shortly after moves over what we call a cold spot. Just like you have major updrafts here in the warm spot of the thunderstorm way rising air, you have major down drafts in the cold spot.

Also we know across these areas especially at altitude, say, 38,000, 39,000 feet you're going to experience super cooled water droplets and essentially droplets of water that is are subfreezing, below freezing temperatures but retain liquid form until they make contact with an object.

If the plane goes into this region if that is the case with supercooled droplets that itself could really lead to disastrous scenario. Shortly after 6:24 a.m. we lose contact with the plane. The plane then runs into a massive complex of thunderstorms and then the rest remains unknown at this point.

So that is the storm system we were dealing with at that point of the morning hours. Really for a plane to retain lift, to retain laminar flow you've got to have velocities or wind speeds across the upper portion of the wing to be higher than down below on the lower area of the flap.

That happens naturally. But you disrupt the flow whether to be by major turbulence, whether with severe thunderstorms in the area or even reduced speed, perhaps too fast of a speed, in this case we know the plane was going too slow, that could lead to a disastrous scenario eventually of course a stall would be a possibility as well.

A typical thunderstorm, Don, would be 20,000 to 30,000 feet in height. This plane climbs up to about 36,300 as far as we know. The thunderstorm complex in the vicinity was well over 53,000 feet in height. Not a storm you want to be messing with.

And this storm again, among the tallest on our planet, occur across portions of the tropics and this is the theme in this part of the world -- Don.

LEMON: Pedram, take us now into the present with the search area now. What's the forecast for the search area today?

JAVAHERI: You know, Don, we're in the wettest part of the year. December and January that is the wettest time of the year. The search boxes combined roughly the size of New York State or the country of Greece if you're watching us internationally.

Look at these thunderstorms beginning to blossom right toward that region, both in the southern portion now and also in the northern portion of the search box. That is the current perspective at this hour. The model indication shows you in the morning hours plenty of weather taking place in the southern periphery.

Look at the time stamp. Take you through local time into Wednesday morning. Shortly after sunrise thunderstorm complexes begin to pop up here, what I like to call popcorn showers just because they're literally scattered about all over the place reducing the visibility and plenty of cloud cover.

Look at Thursday morning. Similar scenario, again, this is something you see every single day across this region, but I can tell you with the storm that was in the vicinity of the aircraft it was a lot more symmetrical, a lot more organized.

And of course getting up to 53,000 feet and we saw it literally collapse shortly after this plane disappeared. We know it lost a lot of intensity, perhaps way significant downdraft associated with that too.

LEMON: Pedram Javaheri, meteorologist at the CNN Weather Center. Thank you very much. I want to bring back Matthew Wald, Mary Schiavo, Tim Taylor, Jeff Wise and Les Abend. Les, pilots are trained to navigate severe thunderstorms, correct?

ABEND: Correct. At this particular time they would have been utilizing a very sophisticated form of radar, on board radar, looking at it would have been color radar, we would have been looking at green, yellow, red being the most intense.

We do -- probably had cells that did go up to 50,000 feet. The thunderstorm consists of a lot of cells especially something as big and as immense an area that that was in. But not every area, not every cell would have gone up to 50,000 feet.

So it would have been possible to navigate at least around it if not at least possibly above some of them. We don't know what the pilots were seeing at that particular time.

LEMON: Mary, you know, we sit of runways, we sit in the airport and we complain we say it's just a little thunderstorm, little shower. But in the United States with a system like that, thunderstorms, a weather system, would that flight had been canceled?

SCHIAVO: I think it would have and because the United States has additional considerations, sometimes just schedule irregularities and repositioning the flight makes it a nightmare.

For example, just last month there was a huge storm system moved through and most of the airlines prophylactically canceled flights and waited out the storm although I was in a hurricane in Florida a few years back and all the U.S. carriers except for one canceled the flight. One carrier took off. So you never know.

LEMON: Do you agree with that?

ABEND: I think what we would have done -- I'd like to modify that, what Mary's saying. I think there may somebody truth to it. If it's affecting a group of airports, for instance, the northeast corridor down to Florida. If it was affecting that we might be closing down New York airports or the Florida airports.

But what generally happens is if you've got a weather system moving across a route corridor, that I'm just talking about the north-south corridor. It starts to constrict the route. So only a certain amount of airplanes per hour is what air traffic control can handle.

So they literally meter airplanes from the ground prior to departure and say, Kennedy, we can only handle ten departures, LaGuardia we can only handle ten of your departures, and keep restricting it from that standpoint. So we do have that flow control that's regulated out of Washington, D.C.

LEMON: This is according to the "Wall Street Journal," it's reporting nearly a dozen other planes managed to go through the same region at the same time. Could they have encountered a part of the system that no one else -- a more severe part of the system that no one else encountered?

WISE: Yes. Listen, I think there's a misconception that perhaps is being generated here. Thunderstorms are very dangerous systems. They contain a lot of energy and severe down drafts and so forth. But historically if you look at the way thunderstorms cause problems, you look at something like Air France 447, a very well-known case in which a plane flew through the top of a thunderstorm.

It wasn't that it got somehow crushed by a giant monster of a storm and was turned into a crumpled aluminum can. What happened was the pilot got disoriented. If you look at another case that's similar to the AirAsia case that we're talking about, an atom air case back in January 1st, 2007.

Left Surabaya, flew to the northeast and again it entered an area of intense thunderstorms. Again, the pilots became disoriented. It wasn't that the plane itself was somehow damaged. It was disorientation. There's a very good chance what we're going to find is it has to do with weather but not directly.

LEMON: OK, that it was a factor is what you're saying. Matthew, this is the important question. I have to get this in. Have pilots become overly confident that they can fly through severe weather? And, and do they rely on the autopilot perhaps too much? And then when a situation like this happens they're not sure how to deal with it?

WALD: We're missing part point here. The question isn't, was the weather bad. The question is was the weather unusual? I have not heard people say the weather was unusual for this area. And here as Richard pointed out we have a high time pilot.

These guys are locals. They understand this stuff. If you're in bad weather and you're flying on the autopilot, the autopilot has limited authority. If you get some upset that the autopilot can't handle it reaches the point where it says here, boss, your airplane. And does that with no warning, and then you can be startled. That has been a factor in U.S. crashes. On the other hand, these guys are looking at their radar. They're looking at the weather ahead. They're paying attention. It seems unlikely that that's what happened here.

LEMON: We're going to talk about the reliance on technology a little bit more coming up. So stick with me, everyone. Our experts are going to weigh in on the theory that the plane stalled coming up.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

LEMON: Weather was bad off Indonesia's coast. But was it bad enough to play a role in Flight 8501's disappearance? CNN's Tom Foreman has that.

TOM FOREMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Don, investigators have to consider the possibility that weather brought this plane down because it went through such a huge band of terrible storms out there. And here are the three key questions viewers keep asking us.

First, could lightning have done this? The answer is not likely. Modern aircraft are designed so they can be hit by lightning, the lightning travels along the metal skin and then is ejected off the wing tips or off the tail.

Very unlikely that it would hit some sort of internal piece and do so much damage that it would bring the plane down. Second question, what if the storm is just huge and massive and so powerful that it creates huge turbulence and essentially tears the plane apart in flight? Again, very unlikely.

If there's a maintenance problem, if there's something already wrong with the plane, then maybe that could happen, but not to a healthy plane in most circumstances. And lastly, what if this plane simply stalled in flight?

What if there are so many low and high pressure areas happening so quickly that the plane lost a tremendous amount of speed at some point, was only flying maybe 100 miles an hour, as some have postulated here, and it just started falling out of the sky? That can happen.

If a plane gets that far off of where it ought to be flying, essentially the air flow over the wings can separate from the wings. The pilot has very little control. And even at 32,000 feet this plane could plummet to the water in 45 seconds or less. And it would take a very calm, very skilled crew to stop that before it was complete -- Don.

LEMON: All right. Thank you very much, Tom Foreman. Back with me now Matthew Wald, Mary Schiavo, Tim Taylor, Jeff Wise, and Les Abend. Plausible scenario from Tom Foreman there explaining how the plane could have stalled?

ABEND: Well, it's the basic theory behind aerodynamics and the fact the air flow separates from the wing. Yes.

LEMON: Obvious question, Mary. If a plane does stall, how should a pilot react? Tom said it would take a very calm crew or pilot to get a plane back on track, or to deal with that situation.

SCHIAVO: Well, it depends on the nature of the stall. I mean, you're trained to recover from the stalls in flight school. I mean, literally the first week. But the problem is the nature of the stall and if it's a stall in this kind of weather.

And you've lost the stall as one of the other guests mentioned and off the wings and the tail and you can't recover because you have no control surfaces left that are responsive, very difficult if not impossible.

LEMON: Matthew, these pilots both have thousands of hours of flying experience, but this incident, as the "Daily Beast" points out is leaving a lot of people wondering whether autopilot -- the autopilot is leaving real pilots with insufficient seat of the pants proficiency. What do you make of that?

WALD: That was one of the theories in the Air France crash. There was a crash of an American Eagle ATR in Roseland, Indiana on Halloween, I think it was 1994. They were in a holding pattern on the way in to O'Hare. Ice slowly builds up.

And the autopilot just clicks off with no warning when the ice ridges get too big, and the pilots are startled by the loss of the autopilot and they don't recover.

There are other cases in which it's postulated that heavy use of the autopilot makes some of your basic flying skills disappear. They wither away. On the other hand, the only way you can have a multi- hour, multi-continent flight is with the autopilot.

You can't stand there with the yoke, or sit there with the yoke and the rudder and everything else and manually fly it all those hours. A good book recently came out on the b-24 liberator bomber of World War II.

Charles Lindbergh tried it out and he said the control forces were so enormous his arms got tired too fast. The reason they had two pilots is they traded off as they got tired. That's before the days of autopilot. You just couldn't fly the way we do today without heavy reliance on autopilot.

LEMON: I see Mary nodding her head in agreement there. You think pilots are too reliant on technology now?

SCHIAVO: I do. And that's part of the training. And I also put some of that blame on their carriers. I mean, for example, I worked on the Colgan crash. On that one it was very surprising they got very short amounts of training and some of it was just classroom training including some of their upset training occurred in a classroom.

So they just relied upon the computer too much and the carrier was in agreement with that. They said a simulator was OK for some of these things, and I think not because in a thunderstorm like this, for example, if the computers and the autopilot's switched off.

And you've got to fly through hell you'd better know how to do it. And you remember what Churchill said. When you're going through hell, you'd better keep going.

LEMON: Before you get to that, I have to get to the 777 pilot in here. Because he is -- you're champing at the bit. You're taking it, but you're not happy about it. Do you believe pilots have gotten too lazy and they're depending on technology?

ABEND: Well, I wouldn't find it as lazy. I mean, the objective of these systems is to work in conjunction with the pilot, work in harmony with the pilot. Does it degrade some of our old-fashioned stick and rudder skills over time because we become dependent on it functioning in a particular way?

Yes, I think there's an aspect of that. But the training has to be done so that we are operating the machinery in an appropriate form and at an appropriate level for the phase of flight that we're flying.

LEMON: So go ahead, Matthew. I just wanted to get him in.

WALD: There's a catch here. You go up in a single-engine four-seat Cessna and you can practice stalls. You can practice engine outs. You go up in a swept-wing jet you're not going to do any of that.

The only way you're going to practice these things and recovering from the autopilot is one of these things, is in a simulator. Don't knock the simulator. It allows pilots to have proficiency experience in problems most of them will never see in their lifetimes.

LEMON: Yes. Go ahead.

ABEND: And we do get training in that -- just for that particular reason so we can recognize a stall in a swept wing airplane, how it will react at high altitude. I just went through recurrent training doing exactly that thing.

LEMON: Tim is sitting here going I'm a search and rescue guy --

TAYLOR: Same thing. Autopilot all the time. I almost got run down by tons of freighters that are just on cruise control. So it can make you complacent.

LEMON: Now that there is another plane that has gone missing, do you think there's going to be a bigger push to live-stream data, Jeff?

WISE: Well, I don't think it necessarily would have helped in this case. Again, we don't really know what happened with AirAsia. But if it was a case of running into bad weather and the electronics going out because you had an impact with a surface, then I don't see much of a benefit of having --

Look, there's going to be a huge amount of costs -- in aviation you want to avoid over engineering, which is putting in too much material, too much energy, too much time into a system that's not going to be used.

You don't want to build an aircraft that's too strong, for instance. You also don't want to load up an aircraft with electronics that are going to be used only one in a million times.

LEMON: This Airbus A-320, that's a workhorse, right?

ABEND: It is. It's been proved to be a very reliable airplane.

LEMON: We're going to talk about that coming up because how safe is the Airbus A-320?

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

LEMON: The missing plane, AirAsia Flight 8501 is an airbus model A- 320, and chances are you have flown in this very model jet probably more than once. CNN's Miguel Marquez has more.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MIGUEL MARQUEZ, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Worldwide, more than 3,600 Airbus A-320s are flown by more than 400 airlines, charter companies, and private entities. Eight American carriers combined have more than 450 A-320s in their fleet.

Among the biggest, JetBlue, with 130, United has 97, Delta and US Airways 69 each. In the short to medium range world the A-320 is second only to Boeing's 737, which has delivered nearly 8,000 of its ultra-popular medium-sized planes.

The A320 family of planes includes the A318, 319, and 321, all similar in range and control. Airbus says every 2.5 seconds a plane from one of its 320 family is taking off or landing somewhere in the world.

The missing plane, designated QZ8501, was delivered to AirAsia in October 2008. Since then the airline says it has taken off some 13,600 times, logging approximately 23,000 hours in the air.

AirAsia 8501 was carrying more than 18,000 pounds of fuel when it departed, enough for about 3-1/2 hours of flight. Shortly before disappearing, the pilot asked air traffic control if he could ascend to 38,000 feet. That request was denied.

The A320 is certified to fly up to 39,000 feet. Its absolute limit is 42,000 feet. Weight, temperature, weather, and fuel all play a role in how high the plane can fly safely. In its history, 16 A320 planes have crashed. Nine of those crashes were deadly, resulting in 656 deaths on the planes or on the ground.

The first crash, shortly after the plane started service in 1988. Air France flight 296 skimmed the top of trees during an air show demonstration flight. The cause, the fly by wire system and pilot error. In 2007, Tam Airlines Flight 3054 crashed on landing in Sao Paolo Brazil. A reverse thruster had been deactivated. The plane unable to stop crashed into a cargo terminal, 187 passengers and crew died plus 12 on the ground, the deadliest crash for an A320. Cause, likely pilot error or mechanical failure.

And who could forget the 2009 ditching of US Airways Flight 1549? On takeoff from New York's LaGuardia Airport the plane collided with a flock of geese. Both engines failed. Captain Sully Sullenberger successfully landed the plane on the Hudson River. All 155 aboard survived.

Miguel Marquez, CNN, New York.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

LEMON: Back with me now, Matthew Wald, Mary Schiavo, Tim Taylor, Jeff Wise, and Les Abend. You said you don't like the word safe.

TAYLOR: No. Safer.

LEMON: Why is that?

TAYLOR: Safe is a -- it's either safe or it isn't safe. It's -- it leads people to assume things.

LEMON: That something is 100 percent --

TAYLOR: And nothing's ever 100 percent.

LEMON: fail-safe or fail-proof. Let's dig deeper and talk about this Airbus A320. How safe is it? I have to use that word.

WISE: These planes are workhorses. I mean, they go up, they come down. They're in the air more often than not. The thing that ages an aircraft isn't how much time it spends in the air. It's really what they call a cycle, how many times it lands and takes off.

That's what puts the stress on the frame. This thing was six years old. It was considered young. They can take an enormous amount -- they're built very robustly. They're very solid and if you look at the number of flights that take place every single day around the world compared to the number of accidents that happen, safer, very much safer I would say.

LEMON: Did you say you don't want to build a plane that's too -- did you say too strong? Meaning too heavy?

WISE: You don't want to over engineer a plane. For example, if you want a structure to be 150 percent, to be able to carry a load 150 percent more than it's ever expected to actually have to carry, you don't want it any stronger than that. You want to engineer it to a certain level and build it just to exactly that because anything more is just dead weight.

LEMON: OK. Matthew, A320, it's lighter than other commercial jets. Could that have played a role, especially if the weather pushed the plane around?

WALD: It has to meet specifications for G forces. For how many forces of gravity when it gets shoved up and down, left and right. So it may be lighter. That's not the issue. The issue is its strength. There is an advantage to having 3,600 of these, which is you get a glitch in one or two and everybody who flies that airplane knows it.

There's safety in numbers. It's not like the space shuttle, where we only flew a few of them, we only flew them a few flights, and each problem they expressed was a really serious one. One of the reasons these are safer is because there are so many of them.

LEMON: This is what you do in your business. You search for planes. Does it make a difference? This plane was red. Do you think about the ocean blue, a darker color? Is it easier to find? Does it make it any easier --

TAYLOR: The vehicles we build, we paint them the same color, white and white caps, when wind blows in the water over 12 knots, it creates white caps. White caps are foamy white water and everything looks white on the ocean.

LEMON: So you paint them the same color you mean red?

TAYLOR: I paint them red. Our robots are red. The same color that plane is because they're easier to see on the surface. They stand out on the ocean versus -- it's not natural to have a red object. Life jackets are painted red.

LEMON: We saw during MH370 was a number of the submersibles were either red, you see the so-called black boxes. They're orange in color. They were yellow, though. Is that --

TAYLOR: Yellow's another good color. Actually, some people are starting to use a lime green. But again, red is such a non-ocean color military boats are painted gray to blend in with the horizon and the ocean. White and gray are not good colors.

LEMON: Mary, let's talk about the search. Airbus is sending two experts to assist in this investigation. What will their involvement look like?

SCHIAVO: Is that for me?

LEMON: Mary, yes, Mary Schiavo.

SCHIAVO: Well, the involvement of airbus, they're going to be a party to the investigation. So they will have a significant role in the investigation. But then they do in the United States too. That's the way the investigators are set up.

Once they do start getting the parts and pieces of the plane, what they will do is they will play the role of investigating what's wrong with the part. They will take the parts back to airbus. They will see if they can get them working again. They will if necessary reconstruct whole pieces of the plane to try to see what went wrong, if something went wrong, and also rule out if something went wrong. So their role is going to be a very big role.

Just as Boeing's is, for example, in the United States, for an investigation concerning a Boeing, they are just a very huge part and investigations. Frankly, they have to be. The NTSB in the U.S. doesn't even have that kind of personnel that could do that work.

LEMON: Matthew, given everything that we know, what's the likelihood that human error played a role here?

WALD: It's likely it played a role. It's likely that weather played a role. It may be that a mechanical defect played a role. These things happen because you get a concatenation of problems. It's not because you have a problem.

I should add what airbus will do probably presuming they recover the black boxes is provide its interpretation of the crew conversations, of the mechanical inputs, of the readings from the airplane. There will be a lot of others who do that also.

These are multipart investigations with a lot of different parties who either arrive at a consensus or there's some authority that arrives at the consensus. That's how -- you don't let the airline or the manufacturer or the pilot's union figure out what happens. You get a lot of people to put in their two cents.

LEMON: Jeff Wise, same question.

WISE: Well --

LEMON: The likelihood this is human error.

WISE: I mean, I agree. You know, in aircraft accident investigations you talk about lining up the Swiss cheese. Because aircraft are built so robustly and the systems are so robust, in order for something to come to this stage, to lose an aircraft, multiple things have to go wrong.

And in case of, for instance, Air France 447 you had some bad decisions which led to a mechanical problem, which led to more bad decisions. And so all these things strung together what really is in these days a one in a million event.

Planes are lost so frequently that you have to have a string of bad things happen. And if you can prevent any one of those from taking place the accident won't happen.

LEMON: Les Abend, 2014 has had the fewest aviation crashes in more than 80 years, but the most deaths in nearly a decade. What does that say about air travel? Is it still safer to fly?

ABEND: I think it is. I think it's much -- I feel more comfortable getting in my 777 going to work than I do getting on the Westside Highway. We've added all sorts of elements to the airplanes. We've added elements to training that make things safer.

And air traffic control will be changed dramatically in 20 by the next gen systems. So I think overall that we have a safer system. It's unfortunate that we have this coincidence of accidents that have occurred in Indonesia. It's baffling, very baffling.

LEMON: Stand by, everyone. Coming up, two jets full of people vanish in less than a year. What's going wrong? My aviation experts will answer your questions next. Make sure you use the #8501qs. Also, we have some news just in to CNN. We'll have it for you on the other side of this break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

LEMON: All right, welcome back, everyone. The breaking news here on CNN, I'm going to get to my questions from our aviation experts, but we do have some breaking news now, a recording of the voices of the crew of Flight 8501 requesting permission to depart the airport. It comes from Broadcast IFY. Take a listen.

(AUDIO RECORDING)

LEMON: All right, Les, what are we listening to?

ABEND: It sounds like clearance delivery, Don. It's a standard typical clearance that was given. They give a departure routing. They gave a squawk, what we call, for the transponder so they have a discrete code so they can be found on radar.

And the nuance between the tower -- the clearance delivery people and air traffic control and the pilots seems very standard and very nonchalant like it normally does.

LEMON: One of the things they said wag in 8501 cleared and then it's 8501 it's unintelligible. Flight level 2401 initial do you want alpha departure squawk. Is that what --

ABEND: Yes. They were giving them the departure and that's very standard. And the readback was clear, concise, and to the point like it should be.

LEMON: Mary, there's 30 minutes of this. Will we learn anything from this, possibly?

SCHIAVO: Well, from the part we just heard it sounds very typical. I agree with Les completely. Nothing jumped out at me. Perhaps -- when they give the weather, for example, if they ask anything related to weather if there were any mistakes in there it would be significant. But nothing jumped out at me.

LEMON: Matthew Wald, you don't think we're going to get anything from this?

WALD: No. In most crashes you don't. In a few you did. In the 9/11 tapes you sure did. There's a principle here, aviate, navigate, communicate, in that order. Nobody outside the plane is going to help you. You've got to solve your problems on your own. At the bottom of the chain is tell air traffic control, tell somebody on the ground what's going on.

LEMON: All right. Stand by. The first voices we're hearing from the pilots just in to CNN. We'll have more on that. We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

LEMON: We are hearing the voices of pilots for the first time in a recording just released and also just in to CNN, the relatives of the passengers of the missing Flight 8501 will be flown over the search area on Wednesday in an especially chartered Airbus A-320 Wednesday there, Tuesday for us. That's according to AirAsia Indonesia CEO and as many as 180 family members will be flown.

I'm Don Lemon. Thanks for watching. Our coverage continues now with Errol Barnett and Rosemary Church at the CNN Center in Atlanta.