Germanwings Unaware of Co-pilot Illness; Pilotless Planes Proposed to Keep You Safe.
BALDWIN: As you're hearing, all these reports investigators are saying the intentional downing of the German airliner, you might be wondering could more be done from the ground to keep pilot or terrorists from crashing a plane? In this case, prosecutors say the co-pilot, whose doctor deemed him unfit to work, activated the descent A website that tracts activation data says someone in cockpit reprogrammed the auto pilot to drop from what it was, attitude at 38,000 feet to that lowest number you can program it to, 100 feet. AS it turns out, technology does exist that would allow a plane to be control remotely from the ground, but that also poses its own set of challenges that we'll get into. I've got Tom Foreman with me, along with CNN safety analyst and former FAA safety inspector, David Soucie. But, Tom Foreman, you're up first with explaining to me one potential idea.</s>TOM FOREMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: One potential idea is to say there's technology that can do this. It exists, and big names like Boeing, Google, BAE are all experimenting with this, and a lot of others are as well. The idea to control a plane and control it from the ground with the pilot there would have applications now, maybe in cargo planes, planes in hazardous circumstances, like hurricane hunter or flying into wildfires. The technology exists there. Extending this into passenger planes is really tricky, Brooke, because there are unanswered questions about how safe that would be.</s>BALDWIN: So here is where I turn to you, David Soucie. I have to wonder, if you have the possibility to override, say for example in this case a, if you have the co-pilot turning the knob down to 100 feet. The person on the ground has the chance to override that and turn it back.</s>DAVID SOUCIE, CNN SAFETY ANALYST: That's a complex thing to do. You have the weight of is automation doing the right thing or pilot doing the right thing. I buy on the side of the pilot. I see the need might exist. The pilot has to have the need to go down to 100 feet. If he can't, he may not be able to land at sea level, ever. So he has to be able to go to zero. If he's at a higher land and he says I want to go down, override it. What's the chance he does perhaps want to land and it overrides and he goes up into another aircraft's area? So that's one of a thousand different considerations.</s>BALDWIN: I keep thinking of the Miracle on the Hudson. Captain Sully Sullenberger, really reaching into his pilot instincts and pulling that off.</s>SOUCIE: That was manual. I mean --</s>BALDWIN: That was manual.</s>SOUCIE: Yes.</s>BALDWIN: Imagine someone on the ground saying, uh oh, and trying to override. Who knows what might have happened.</s>SOUCIE: Exactly right. It's like automatic brakes on cars, they bother me. If it brakes for me, and a car is coming this way, I want to get out of the way. I try to disarm those on my cars.</s>BALDWIN: Foreman, jump in.</s>FOREMAN: You may be talking about two different things here, David. One is a fully robotic system that automatically does things. The other possibility is a human-based system that's not on the plane. Basically, you have ground controllers that say, if you have a plane doing something really unusual and won't communicate and tell us what's going on, then we take over. So Captain Sully Sullenberger can say, I've got an emergency and going to land on the Hudson. They say, go ahead. If a plane starts circling around towards Manhattan or Boston and it won't answer, they take over and say that plane is under our control and we're flying it somewhere else.</s>SOUCIE: And, Tom, Boeing developed one of these, not long ago, the Boeing uninterruptable auto pilot, the BLAP (ph). But it told exactly what you just described. The FAA didn't approve it. They didn't want it because it created more vulnerabilities than it did better things. It's like the old adage that just because you can doesn't mean --</s>BALDWIN: You should.</s>SOUCIE: Right.</s>SOUCIE: And the reliability of this technology is still up in the air. We don't have the exact numbers out of the military with their drones but drones are having problems. The numbers look to me too high to be acceptable in commercial aviation at this point.</s>BALDWIN: OK. Tom Foreman and David Soucie, thank you very much. Let me turn now to the focus of victims' of this tragedy because for some family members the southern French Alps may be their loved ones' final resting place. Lufthansa, which owns Germanwings, has commissioned flights and buses to the crash site for grieving relatives. The father of Robert Oliver Kalvo (ph), one of three Americans on board, said, although he is grieving, he doesn't feel anger towards the flight's co-pilot.</s>ROBERT TANSILL OLIVER, FATHER OF VICTIM: I don't feel anger. I'm really sad for the father, the parents of that young pilot. I mean, I can't imagine what they're going through right now, as well as our companions here. They're all feeling, hurting. No, we don't feel anger.</s>BALDWIN: As each day passes, we're learning more about the lives lost on this flight. Carol Friday (ph) was a maternal health nurse from Australia. Paul Brandley (ph) had finished first year of college in the U.K. Maria Radner (ph) and Oliver Rajec (ph) were two very accomplished German opera singers.