Search for Flight 370: Officials Discount Rise & Fall in Altitude
PEREIRA: Welcome back to NEW DAY. A new development in the search for missing Flight 370. Investigators are set to reveal a shift in the plane's search area after they say unreliable information led them to believe that the plane had dipped in altitude. In fact, it may have stayed in a controlled flight hours after losing contact. Now, after three months without any leads, officials are focusing the search hundreds of miles southwest of where they had been looking. For more, let's bring in David Soucie, CNN safety analyst, and former FAA safety inspector and author of "Why Planes Crash." We haven't seen you in months. You look so different, my goodness. It must be the beard. Good to see you, David.</s>DAVID SOUCIE, CNN SAFETY ANALYST: Thank you.</s>PEREIRA: There's a few things we should wade through here. First off, the search coordinator Angus Houston discounting radar equipment that indicated these altitude dips, something we talked about right here on CNN. The plane went up. It went down. You have said from the beginning, if I go back through my mental hard drive, you had said from the beginning that the altitude data was an assumption. Is that primary radar even reliable for determining altitude?</s>SOUCIE: Not for altitude. No, not for altitude, Michaela. It's really designed to tell you where the aircraft is, what direction it's going and what speed it's going. It has to be very carefully calibrated and looking for altitude. And in addition to that, it needs a secondary primary radar to give them verifying information as well to be very accurate about altitude. So, I'm really surprised and a little disappoint that had they actually used that in their calculations to determine the fuel consumption. It's really surprising to me.</s>PEREIRA: Help me understand that. Why would they have used that in their calculations initially? That set us back a fair amount of time here.</s>SOUCIE: Yes, it really did. Now you have to understand that when you're in an investigation, especially when there's just a few pieces of information, you over-rely on what information the people are giving you, and so you end up being led down wrong paths. And I think that's what happened here is they wanted to grasp at paths. They wanted to find out what's going on. There's a lot of pressure going on. And so, you've kind of ultra focused on things that seemed to offer good answers but in fact, they don't. It takes a while before they finally sink in and say, well, that's not it. We're looking in the wrong place.</s>PEREIRA: OK. With this steadier altitude then, the plane would have behaved differently. Fuel consumption would have changed, et cetera. So tell us how that then changes this new search area that we're told they will be embarking on.</s>SOUCIE: Well, what it changes is the amount of time and the distance that the aircraft could have flown. If it did go up in altitude beyond its normal range and it dipped way down and come back up again, it would have used a lot of fuel and that's the case where it would have ended up on the arc would have been much different. And so, with those assumptions, they were more in the northern part of that arc which would have been less distance flown and that's when it would have run out of fuel. But now, they're saying that because of this, it's just on a constant altitude, it would have flown farther. So, they are confident it's on the arc. That's a good piece of information but it's going to be now further down south than where they looked originally.</s>PEREIRA: And we should point, that's an area that has not mapped yet. That ocean floor has not been mapped. The southwest portion of this arc is unknown right now.</s>SOUCIE: That's correct. It's a place they didn't even look for debris.</s>PEREIRA: OK. I want to bring up "The New York Times" reporting suggesting that the settled search area will be based on a crucial assumption that this plane, as you mentioned, was on autopilot when it ran out of fuel, but you suggest, and you brought it up, that it was in a fuel efficiency mode on this particular model of plane. Explain how that works and how it would change the workings of the plane.</s>SOUCIE: Sure. As the aircraft burns fuel, the center of gravity changes on the airplane, which changes the flight attitude of the airplane. So as the fuel burns and it starts to change the attitude, the auto pilot in efficiency mode is capable of understanding that and changing the air speed to make it more efficient and a better fuel consumption rate. So, if that's the case, then if it was on, which I assume it was at this point, it would have gone much further. And, again, contribute together idea that it went further south and southwest on the arc.</s>PEREIRA: It's interesting because we've been talking and we've been talking before we went on camera and you brought up the fact that the area where they are now going to be searching, isn't this the area that NTSB had suggested that the plane potentially could be from the jump?</s>SOUCIE: Yes, you know. It was just a few weeks after the start of the investigation that the NTSB came out with this recommended search area. But remember at that time it really wasn't -- NTSB wasn't the primary drive of the investigation. It really hadn't been brought in as the primary people to talk about it. So they did say this, and I think that attributes or that came from the fact that the NTSB would have been very familiar with this efficiency mode and would have known also that the primary radar is not something reliable.</s>PEREIRA: I read also that an executive from Malaysia Airlines made a comment to a London paper that he thinks that this could take a very long time, in fact, that it could take decades to find this plane. Do you feel the same way he does, or are you feeling hopeful still?</s>SOUCIE: Well, I'm not letting myself go there. I -- I really believe we need to find out much more quickly than ten years from now whether we're safe flying on international flights. And there's been some great movements forward on tracking airplanes, but even if we track the airplane, that doesn't stop from happening what happened. So it's very crucial, very important that we continue the search and that we find the airplane and figure out what exactly happened and hopefully find out why.</s>PEREIRA: Good point to end on. David Soucie, always a pleasure to have you with us on NEW DAY. John?</s>SOUCIE: Thank you.</s>BERMAN: All right, up next, for us on NEW DAY, John Kerry says Iraqi unity is necessary to stop ISIS militants. CNN's interview with the secretary of state in Iraq. That's ahead.</s>BOLDUAN: Plus, if the U.S. beats or ties with Germany on, I guess they call it a draw, if you will, on Thursday, the team will advance to the knockout round of 16 at the World Cup. What are their chances? We're breaking it down with a former soccer pro.