Search Continues for Flight Data from EgyptAir Flight 804; Theories of What Could Have Happened Aboard Flight 804
NATALIE ALLEN, CNN ANCHOR: Remnants of a disaster. The first evidence of flight 804 state emerges from the Mediterranean. But the proof of proof of what caused the EgyptAir crash is still missing. A major objective one in the fight against the Taliban, U.S. officials think they've killed the leader of the Afghan terror group. And a tale of two candidates, after Donald Trump cozy up to the National Rifle Association, Hillary Clinton spends the evening with the mothers bereaved by gun violent. It's all ahead here on CNN NEWSROOM. Thanks for joining us. We're coming to you live from Atlanta. I'm Natalie Allen. An uninflated life vest, a seat, a purse and other personal belongings batted from debris is all searchers have found, so far in the hunt for EgyptAir Flight 804 along with some human at remains. They are still looking for the flight data and cockpit voice recorders which will likely answer many questions. French aviation officials say the plain sent automated messages indicating smoke near the cockpit confirming the data obtained from CNN scene and these screen shots. The jet was over the Mediterranean heading from Paris to Cairo when it dropped off radar early Thursday morning. CNN's Ian Lee is in Cairo with more on the investigation.</s>IAN LEE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: What investigators are looking at right now is the information that came from the airplane minutes before it crashed. As sensors were detecting smoke in the avionics and lavatory. Could it mean a fire? Possibly. Could it mean something else? They don't know at this moment. To really get a full picture of what happened, investigators tell us they still need to find the fuselage and the data recorders. Those are still in the Mediterranean. They have not been able to locate them at this moment. But we are seeing parts of the plane being recovered or has been pieces of carpet, a blanket, a pillow. And remember, this was a red- eye flight. So these items could have possibly been in use when the crash happened. There was also a life jacket as well as a purse. But these are small pieces of a bigger puzzle of what actually happened. The rescue crews are also saying they found body parts. And for families here in Cairo that is crucial. They want to have their loved ones recovered as so that they can give them a proper burial but Egyptian officials are saying that, that still could take weeks. As they need to do DNA testing to make sure the remains get to the right family. So the big theories, right now, two of them, it could it be terrorism or could it be mechanical. Investigators still don't know. The Egyptian officials has that they're leaning more toward terrorism but they haven't ruled out anything yet. This investigation still very much under way and ongoing. Ian Lee, in Cairo.</s>ALLEN: Many aviation experts are saying that the flight may have been tampered with prior to take off. But that hasn't led to any clear idea of who might have done it if that is the case at all. Our Tom Foreman shows how long the list of possible suspects could be.</s>TOM FOREMAN, OUR TOM FOREMAN SHOW'S HOST: At the time this plane went down, there should have been two people in the cockpit, five crew members in the cabin, three security people here marked in red and 56 passengers. They all have to be looked at by investigators. But let's sweep this plane back to gate of Charles de Gaulle before it took of and look at this area right around who had access to this. First of all, there were people on the ground who were doing basic maintenance and care of the ground, maintenance crews that to check the wheels, hook up fuel lines, things like that. There are luggage handlers who had to put bags on and off. There were cleaners who have had come on tidy up a little bit. There can be caterers who have to put food and beverage on board. And there were gate agents ready to check tickets and where people are seated. All in all, easily, 35 people who had access to the plane, direct access on the ground. If you expand it just a little bit, let's say we include the plane next to it or the plane over here, those areas where you have people could walk over in just 100 steps or maybe even less, this number jumps up you can easily triple it to more than 100 people. And if you go to the whole airport, and everybody who has some sort of security badge here that gets them into a secure place then it goes wild. This number jumps to 86,000 people who have some sort of access at that airport. So we started wondering, what about here in the United States? How many people have a badge that lets them go into some sort of secure zone in one of our airports somewhere coast-to- coast? Turns out last year, homeland security gave us a number. 3.7 million people. That's a lot to keep track of.</s>ALLEN: Tom Foreman reporting for us there from Washington. Alan Diehl joins me now from Albuquerque, New Mexico. He's a former accident investigator with the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board. He's also the author of "Air Safety Investigators: Using Science to Save Lives-One Crash at a Time". Alan thanks for being with us. I want to as you first as you know as teams continue to search for the fuselage and the recorders. We only have this ACAR's data not for each authorities said backed up showing a cockpit window was open for some reason that's -- then smoke alerts from a front lavatory in the avionics bay, and then within the two to three minutes timeframe, two alerts having to do with flight control computer systems. Are these computer systems in the avionics area and how important is that area to control this type of airplane?</s>ALAN DIEHL, FORMER U.S. NATIONAL TRANSPORTATION SAFETY BOARD: It is absolutely important. It is the brains of the aircraft dock. The airbus was the first fully automated aircraft to fly year A3 fly I should say in the '88. And that is where every -- that's the central nervous system, if you will, of the aircraft. So, if things start going wrong in there, if there's heat, fire, et cetera, you got real problems and you could've literally lose control of the airplane because the aircraft is also a fly-by-wire aircraft. The electronic signals from the side stick controllers run through that section, that bay, that avionics bay. And I also know that the wall between the cockpit and the lavatory, the forward lavatory, is -- it's not armored like the door. It's fairly flimsy. And so smoke could also drift from the avionics bay into the cockpit and then into that lavatory. So, everything is still on the table. We don't know why that smoke was detected in that avionics bay or lavatory. Could have been sabotaged, could be a mechanical failure or so. Everything is very much on the table, at this point.</s>ALLEN: Well what is protocol or the methods for a pilot and co-pilot when they detect smoke? What would they begin to do?</s>DIEHL: First thing is you get your smoke mask on. There's one stow at beside your cockpit. Now these are not the kind of masks at the passengers in the back, the yellow things that come down from the ceiling. These are more like the firefighter mask. They cover your face. And when you hit the button it literally inflates the back tubes inflate and hold the goggles, which are integrated into the mask tight to your face. So that's the first thing. The next thing is you start doing what they -- what we call troubleshooting. They have to figure out what's this -- what's causing this problem. And there are very complex and lengthy checklists. Now these come up on computerized screens. But you're supposed to work as a team to troublesho -- to works through the checklist. So, a lot of things need to happen in a sequence. The problem is, if you have smoke in the cockpit, we've seen this before, even with the goggles, Natalie, it can cover up the instruments. You literally can't see the instruments that you're using to fly by. So, things can go very bad very quickly if you have a failure like this.</s>ALLEN: Is there a microphone in these masks for the pilots to still communicate with each other?</s>DIEHL: Yes Natalie, they use an earphone each mask. Once you put it on, the masks are -- if the mask microphones are hot. So they can talk to each other, of course. And they can select whether they want 100 percent oxygen or just normal oxygen, depending on how much smoke there is -- in the cockpit. But we've seen before, there was a Swissair McDonnell Douglas jumbo jet that had a cockpit fire and they were complaining when they found the voice recorders, you could hear the pilots -- the co-pilot who is flying saying, "I can't see the instruments." He also lost his transponder and a lot of the automation. Remember, this aircraft or highly automated. And you're -- it's important that you be able to see these instruments, especially at altitudes like 37,000 feet. You don't want to make too many dramatic moves too suddenly that you could've -- you can literally stall the aircraft and have a -- what they called depart-controlled flight, and then you are in deep trouble. So, this is going to be a lengthy process and not until they find those black boxes, the data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder. We probably really understand this and, as others have said, we need also need to find the wreckage of the E.E. bay or they call it the Electronics Equipment Bag. But that's going to be critical. So then -- the nose of the aircraft is critical, but the tail where the black boxes are located are also critical. Now the tail with the black boxes has the underwater locator pingers. So, those are good for 30 days. I just hope the Egyptians are getting the support they need. This didn't in Malaysia 370 and we -- the batteries died and so the batteries expired before we found the airplane. But we still haven't found that airplane.</s>ALLEN: All right. So, that of course, they want those and list here the pinging hopefully of the Mediterranean Sea is pretty deep, but what will be key to learn? What will you'll be hearing for when they do and if they do recover the recorders of -- what would you be wanting to know about the data?</s>DIEHL: Well, there are different types of recorders. Obviously one is -- they call it a voice recorder, but it's really a noise recorder. And I can remember, a South African 747 that went down in the western Indian Ocean, they never find the data recorder. But on the so-called voice recorder, they could hear circuit breakers popping in the cockpit. So, both recorders are very critical. In my book, I talked about the flight data recorder with its hundreds of channels tells you what happened, but you have to kind of listen to the voice recorder to deal with the response of the pilot. So, both are critical. But Natalie, there's one other thing that I haven't heard anybody talk about on television, and that is the oxygen-- the solid state oxygen generator that's located in that forward lavatory. In 2011, the FAA ordered all U.S. aircraft to remove those oxygen generators for fear that a terrorist could those as weapon. These burn very hot and could be dangerous in the hands of the wrong person. They are literally located I believe in the ceiling of the lavatory of that airbus. And I don't know if the European authorities, some of them did this. But I don't know if the Egyptians removed those portable or not portable but they fixed oxygen generators from the lavatories. If they haven't done that, I'd sure like the Egyptian officials to acknowledge that.</s>ALLEN: All right. Well, we'll look into that. And thank you for sharing that information with us and thanks for helping us understand what's next with this search and we hope they find these data recorders. Alan Diehl. Thank you, Alan.</s>DIEHL: Thank you.</s>ALLEN: U.S. officials think an air strike has killed the leader of the Afghan Taliban. Mullah Akhtar Mansour was traveling in a vehicle near the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. A U.S. official says the strike probably also killed the second man in the vehicle but it may be days before the deaths are confirmed. The strike was authorized by President Obama. So, what impact with Mansour's death have on the larger fight against the Taliban? Chief U.S. security correspondent Jim Sciutto got some insight from former CIA counter terrorism analyst, Buck Sexton.</s>BUCK SEXTON, CNN SECURITY CORRESPONDENT: This may keep them off balance for a short while. And it's also -- it should be noted that we're entering the fighting season, we are in the fighting season in Afghanistan and so anything that disrupts their operational tempo is going to be very helpful for the purpose of stability and will help the afghan national security forces perhaps get a stronger footing in some areas. All that said, there's certainly succession plan in placed. We've seen leadership before killed or just die of natural causes that are at up the heads of insurgencies or terrorist groups like the Taliban without really much of a long term change. In fact, sometimes things get worse afterwards. So, right now I think there will be a bit of a pause or they're will a pause in some operations perhaps because of the strike. You can also expect senior leadership to probably keep their heads down a little bit more in the Af-Pak border area, but we still have a very long protracted insurgency, a counterinsurgency campaign to wage.</s>JIM SCIUTTO, CNN ANCHOR: So place this in the political debate for us, does this fight the narrative that the U.S. war on terror is failing? We know that there is a recent CNN poll that shows that most Americans feel the fight against ISIS, for instance, is not working. Does a strike like this on the heels of other successful strikes against terror leaders in Iraq and Syria, Yemen, you name it, does it change that narrative?</s>SEXTON: I don't think it will really affect perception, Jim, because not that many people, quite honestly know Mullah Mansour is or was, depending on whether he was actually killed in this strike. Isn't somebody who is thought of, for example, having direct ties to 911. Mullah Omar, for example, is someone who is generally better known, obviously, Osama Bin Laden. I mean some of the names that have become more prominent in terrorist lexicon that have taken out in the past, quite affect perception but Mullah Mansour will be replaced with Mullah such and such in a very short period of time. And so I don't think it will really make much of a difference to how the public views this. I think what does matter is that we still have close to 10,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan. We've been that war for 15 years and there's no change in strategy. There's no reason to believe we're doing anything differently that would put the Taliban back on their heels. We're still hoping for political reconciliation. We've been hoping for that for a long time. The Taliban is resurgent this year. The Taliban has actually been taking back territory, so it's really, piece by piece in a very large war, and this is a good day for U.S. special operations, a good day in the counterinsurgency campaign against the Taliban but not a sea change.</s>ALLEN: Buck Sexton, former CIA analyst. We turn now to the presidential race. Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are blasting each other on guns. Like Clinton calls Trump's ideas dangerous. Hear that with given a moment plush a tropical cyclone slams the coast of Bangladesh. The death and destruction left in its wake. We'll hear about that from Derek Van Dam.