[Costello:] Recovery efforts have begun in the Java Sea. Two bodies have been found along with some wreckage from the plane. The black boxes have not been found but crews are very hopeful they'll be found soon. Let's talk more about this search-and-recovery effort. I'm joined by CNN aviation correspondent Richard Quest and Lieutenant Colonel Kent Christensen he's an aviation consultant and commercial pilot. Thanks so much. Thanks to both of you for being here. Richard, I'll start with you. The bodies and debris were found off the coast of Borneo just about six miles from the last known position of the plane. What does that tell investigators?
[Richard Quest, Cnn Aviation Correspondent:] It tells us it suggests and the lieutenant colonel will have more experience of actually doing it on the ground. It suggests, of course, that the plane came out of the sky pretty much intact because it's a fairly tightly-controlled, tightly-limited debris field. And that's both that makes it a lot easier in many ways to find firstly those who perished but also the wreckage.
[Costello:] Also the wreckage. What does the wreckage field tell you, Colonel? Because they only found an emergency door exit floating on top of the water and some life jackets and, of course, a few bodies but nothing else as far as we know so far.
[Lt. Col. Kent Christensen, Aviation Consultant:] I think it's important to look at the debris field. The debris field initially you want to see how concentrated it is. If it's very concentrated, that's going to point towards the total aircraft going into the water. If the debris field is spread out then that is pointing towards a possible in-flight breakup. One of the things you want to see I understand they recovered two bodies. My question would be are the bodies clothed or are they not clothed? Again, not clothed pointing towards an in-flight breakup; the air could shred the clothes off the victims and if they're clothed in the water then it points again towards the airplane going down in the water. So as a whole vehicle
[Costello:] As far as we know and we've examined the video footage that we have one of the bodies we know was found not clothed. It's just so difficult to talk about but I hear you. The bodies that were recovered, they were also not wearing life jackets so that probably tells you, Richard, whatever happened, happened very quickly.
[Quest:] Oh, no question. We can pretty much say and maybe the lieutenant colonel agrees with me we can pretty much say that whatever happened was fast and it was dramatic and certainly no chance either for maydays, for major rescues to try and recover the aircraft and certainly no opportunities for people to be putting on life jackets. We'll be looking to see, for instance, at what point there was a decompression of the aircraft as it came down, did it break up at all in the air, whether it had any oxygen masks becoming deployed all those sort of things. But I think this is really skating around the point which is that this was a dramatic, catastrophic incident which took the plane out of the air with tremendous force and rapidity.
[Costello:] Would that mean then you know, there was that two-minute lapse right. The pilot asking air traffic controllers, you know, I want to ascend so I can escape this storm and this turbulence. Two minutes go by, air traffic control tries to contact the pilot again, no response. So does it seem feasible that whatever happened, happened shortly after that initial response with air traffic controllers?
[Quest:] Absolutely. That seems entirely possible. Two minutes is not a huge gap. It's a long time but the pilots will have known that air traffic control either has forgotten his request and he has to go back and ask for it again or that he's trying to move other air traffic about. The fact that the controller approved the diversion but didn't approve the ascent tells us that he knew he wasn't able to go. And the pilot will have known, well, there must be somebody up there above me that I can't go there.
[Costello:] Do you think it will be fairly easy, Colonel, to find the black boxes?
[Christensen:] I'm very confident they're going to find black boxes. The water is relatively shallow. They have a very concentrated search area now. And it's just going to be a matter of time before they do recover those. And they should be in fairly good condition. I would like to make one point, what Richard is talking about. Two minutes in flight when the pilot is talking to a controller to deviate, that's it seems like a short period of time but the plane is going approximately eight miles a minute, six to eight miles a minute, so that's almost 20 miles, 18 miles to deviate. So what we typically do here in the U.S. is if the plane is in danger, the pilot has the authority to change direction first and then tell the controller what they're doing and so the controller's responsibility under radar control is to separate the other aircraft from it. So that could be a cultural difference, just from the region; it could be communication issues or whatever but the captain was fairly experienced with 20,000 hours and 6,000 hours in type.
[Costello:] So Colonel, from the air traffic control perspective, that two minutes, they had at least six planes around the area from what I can remember. Would it take the two full two to tell those planes either to, I don't know, slightly adjust their course so that this flight could ascend?
[Christensen:] It is and the aircraft are separated by a thousand feet. If planes are on the same line flying, they're separated vertically by a thousand feet and so when these planes are doing this, the plane underneath can go left or right and the plane up top can go left or right. They might have other traffic routes near them, but they do have room to move around and you have room to make a u-turn. If you have a wall of weather that you know is going to destroy your airplane you can make a u-turn in the air and get away from that. That's another possibility, another out for the pilot.
[Quest:] And also, to advance on what the colonel is saying, there's no indication from that request that there's an urgency about it. He's not said in the request "I have a really nasty thunderstorm that could well break up the aircraft in front of me. I'm declaring an emergency. I need to climb to 38,000 feet now." He said he's requested to go to flight level 3-8-0. Well the air traffic controller says, right, got a question from 8501 to go up there, he can't go up there. Let's see if we can move him there, hold him there, move this one over there." So this is normal air traffic control. Until somebody says "I need it and I need it now" everything else is just, well, let's see what we can do and if we can't you have to stay where you are.
[Costello:] The black boxes will tell us a lot about that. I wanted to ask you about this CEO of AirAsia.
[Quest:] He's been speaking in the last hour or two, Tony Fernandes taking questions, refusing to speculate but once again making it absolutely clear that he's the CEO of the company, the buck stops with him. And he's spending his time with the families, with them explaining, helping and providing that which is necessary and most crucially saying to everybody this morning "I'm not going anywhere. I'm not going anywhere. We will provide whatever is necessary." Tony is one of those CEOs who this is his first major accident and you can tell.
[Costello:] Richard Quest, Lieutenant Colonel, thank you so much for your insight. I appreciate it. Still to come, the passengers aboard AirAsia Flight 8501 have their stories and so do the passengers who never showed up for that flight.