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1 Dead, 100-Plus Injured After Severe Turbulence Hits Commercial Jet; Louisiana House Passes Bill To Classify Abortion Drugs As Controlled Dangerous Substances; Judge Halts Sale Of Elvis Presley's Graceland Property; 100-Year-Old WWII Veterans Honored For Service With Hero Award. Aired 1:30-2p ET
Aired May 22, 2024 - 13:30 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
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[13:33:28]
BORIS SANCHEZ, CNN HOST: Now we've now learned that more than 100 people on board a Singapore Airlines flight yesterday were hurt from severe turbulence.
According to a witness, about 10 hours into the trip from London to Singapore, "All hell broke loose." The plane began to violently shake at about 37,000 feet.
Hospital officials in Thailand, where the plane made an emergency landing, said that 20 of those hurt are now actually an intensive care.
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JOSHUA SILVERSTONE, PASSENGER: I'm lucky. A lot of people have got some spinal issues and from hitting their head and then come back down. But a lot of people can barely move their back. I'm very fortunate to be (INAUDIBLE) my neck.
But everything is fine. And until I arrived back in Apple and then I started feeling really safe. You know, I couldn't stop vomiting. But I can walk. And, yes, it was -- it was pretty bad.
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SANCHEZ: Joining us now is a retired U.S. Airways Captain C.B. "Sully" Sullenberger. He's on the phone for us. He served as U.S. ambassador to the International Civil Aviation Organization. He also drew international acclaim for landing the so-called "Miracle on the Hudson" flight back in 2009.
Captain, thank you so much for being with us.
You were a commercial airline pilot for 30 years. I'm wondering what's it like in the cockpit when you experience extreme turbulence like that?
C.B. "SULLY" SULLENBERGER, RETIRED U.S. AIRWAYS CAPTAIN & PILOT OF "MIRACLE ON THE HUDSON" LANDING (via telephone): Boris, it's good to be with you.
[13:35:57]
Well, fortunately, in my 57 years as a pilot and 30 years as an airline pilot, as a captain, as you mentioned, I'd never encountered turbulence that severe.
Fortunately, these encounters are rare. But when they happen, they can be very damaging and cause many serious injuries, like in this case. And it can be very sudden.
As hard as we all work in the aviation industry to understand the science of the atmosphere, it's still difficult to predict with precision exactly where or when or at what altitudes this turbulence may occur.
And it's difficult to detect unless it's associated with cloudiness. It can happen in clear. And that's -- that's one of the most dangerous encounters as the clear-air turbulence, or CAT.
There's nothing to see. It's just a change in the -- the movement of the air, either horizontally or vertically. And it can really be a big surprise.
And so that's one of the biggest reasons that, no matter where in the world you're flying, that is a past year, that the single most important thing that you could do is to keep your seatbelt fastened.
SANCHEZ: So, Captain, as a pilot, you first sense that sort of clear- air turbulence based on what you get from the controls, the feedback from the controls, is that right?
SULLENBERGER: From the movement of the airplane. For -- you can feel it, you know, the sudden upward or downward movement of these vertical currents of air or with this sudden changes in wind speed or direction at a given altitude.
SANCHEZ: And is there much a pilot can do when you're in that situation where it surprises you to get out of it or to avoid it, to lessen the damage caused by it?
SULLENBERGER: Well, look, of course, the airline meteorologists and the flight planners and the pilots do their very best to try to anticipate where this kind of turbulence might occur. But once it is encountered, you have to maintain totally the airplane to maintain your assigned altitude possible.
And to deviate from your designed -- from your assigned altitude from air traffic control, if necessary, to avoid over stressing the airplane.
But these airplanes are designed, engineered, and built to very high standards to accommodate severe turbulence, plus a 50 percent margin of safety.
So it's very unlikely that it's going to severely damage the airplane, but it certainly can injure people and make a mess of the cabin when things fly about.
SANCHEZ: Yes. No question about that. And rattle the crew as well.
I want to play some sound for you from a passenger talking about what he saw the crew endure during all of this. Let's listen.
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ANDREW DAVIES, PASSENGER: I didn't see any member of the cabin crew that wasn't injured. They all, every single cabin crew person I saw had had an injury of some sort.
My heart goes out to them, actually, because they were doing their job and they're quite vulnerable as well because they're on the airplane. They weren't seated. They obviously didn't have their seat belts on because they were doing -- going about their duties.
So they were extremely vulnerable. And as I say, not one of them was uninjured that I could see.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
SANCHEZ: I'm curious, Captain, about the training that an airplane crew goes through to try to mitigate this risk that's part of the job. And if there's much that can be done to protect them further in situations like this.
SULLENBERGER: Well, that passenger is right that the flight attendants are often the most vulnerable. They're on the front lines. They are the ones moving about the cabin, doing their duties serving passengers.
And so they're the ones who are not buckled in and as safe as the passengers when an event like this suddenly occurs.
And as I said, pilots and the airline and meteorologists and flight planners do everything they can to anticipate this and avoid it, and including, you know, using airborne radar when there is precipitation that's ahead.
But you have to understand that radar can only see something that's got water in it, precipitation, like a thunderstorm. If it's clear-air turbulence, there's no cloud with a lot of moisture in it, radar's not going to detect that.
There are some efforts that have been made to use Lidar, to use light beams to try to detect clear-air turbulence to see the actual movement of the air ahead of the airplane. But as right now, it's still in its infancy and it's not really a reliable, effective tool.
So aside from looking out the window and seeing cloudiness or knowing from experience where, at certain altitudes, there are forecasts to be big changes in wind speed or direction or sudden updrafts and downdrafts over mountainous terrain, for example, it's very difficult to predict.
Retired U.S. Airways --
[13:39:55]
SULLENBERGER: We have -- we have to be prepared for it by warning the cabin crew and the passengers to keep their seat belts fastened throughout the flight, especially on very long flights that cover huge parts of the globe, of many changing climates and atmospheric conditions over a 10-hour flight, for example.
So even though we've made so even though we've made common place and very routine air travel around the globe, we have to remember that what we're doing really is pushing a tube filled with people through the upper atmosphere seven or eight miles above the earth. And we must really be prepared for whatever conditions we might encounter.
SANCHEZ: So important to heed that warning about keeping your seat belt on.
Captain Sully Sullenberger, a pleasure to have you this afternoon. Thanks for joining us.
SULLENBERGER: Good to be with you.
SANCHEZ: Still ahead, the White House is sounding off after the Louisiana House votes to criminalize the way that certain abortion pills are used. What's next for the controversial legislation.
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[13:45:26]
JESSICA DEAN, CNN HOST: Today, the Biden campaign blaming Trump for the latest move by states to cut back on women's reproductive rights. The Louisiana State House passing a bill to classify abortion-inducing drugs as controlled, dangerous substances.
The Biden campaign warning this law is, quote, "example of this dystopian agenda that Trump and his allies are pushing."
Dr. Megan Ranney is joining us now to discuss. She's an emergency physician and Dean of Yale's School of Public Health.
Great to have you with us, Doctor.
I just want to start with the fact that the risk of death with Mifepristone is lower than that of penicillin. So medically, why would it need to be classified as a controlled, dangerous substance?
DR. MEGAN RANNEY, DEAN, SCHOOL OF PUBLIC HEALTH, YALE UNIVERSITY: It doesn't. Not only is the risk of death less than penicillin, it's less than the risk of pregnancy.
And let's be clear on what the Controlled Substances Act and this whole idea of scheduled drugs is about. It's about trying to unify federal drug laws to control medications that have high risk of addiction. Mifepristone and Misoprostol in no way, shape, or form have any chance
of causing addiction, substance-use disorder, overdose, or any of the other things that all of the other medications under the Controlled Substance Act lead to.
So this is pure legislative overreach that has nothing to do with the actual risk profile of the medications at hand. It's yet another example of legislators and politicians trying to get between women and physicians when it comes to allowing women to make the best choices for their own and their family's health.
DEAN: Yes. When you're -- what we're talking about, when you say controlled substance, it's like what you're talking about, you're thinking about narcotics, things like, that that are highly addictive. And this is just not proven to be that.
A group of nearly 270 physicians, health care providers, medical students all signed a letter to the bill's sponsor, Republican State Senator Thomas Presley.
And they wrote, in part, "Neither Mifepristone or Misoprostol have been shown to have any potential for abuse, dependence, public health risk, nor high rates of adverse side effects."
To your point, Doctor.
This drug has other uses outside of abortion. We do know that. I believe it can also be used sometimes in childbirth and in other situations. So how can it affect those who need this in other situations?
RANNEY: I and other public health professionals and physicians are worried that this is going to have a chilling effect on access to these medications.
We use them to manage miscarriage, as you said. We use it to manage high-risk pregnancies, to manage postpartum hemorrhage, which is a leading cause of maternal death.
Let's note that Louisiana already has one of the highest maternal deaths and maternal injury or morbidity rates in the country. It gets an "F" from the March of Dimes in terms of its infant and maternal health outcomes.
This is going to put more regulations in place that will make these medications harder to access, particularly in rural areas for safety net hospitals, thereby putting many more women and children at risk of bad health outcomes.
DEAN: And so much of Louisiana is serviced by -- in rural areas and they don't necessarily have great access to health care to begin with.
Dr. Megan Ranney, thanks so much. We appreciate your expertise in this.
RANNEY: Thank you. [13:48:46]
DEAN: Stay with CNN. We'll be right back.
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[13:53:23]
DEAN: New today, Elvis Presley's family is hanging onto his Graceland mansion for now. A Tennessee court halting a planned foreclosure auction of the Memphis property, siding with the late singer's granddaughter.
SANCHEZ: She sued to block the move after a mysterious company claimed that it had the right to sell the home.
CNN's Isabel Rosales has been following this for us.
So, Isabel, what's the latest?
ISABEL ROSALES, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Boris, Jessica, good afternoon to you.
Yes, it's the 11th hour. This ruling handed down by this judge because the foreclosure sale was actually scheduled for tomorrow. This judge now saying that he has blocked the sale. Graceland is staying in the hands of the Presley family for now.
Let me backtrack a little bit here as to how we got to this point. The lender behind the sale, Naussany Investments, presented documents claiming that Lisa Marie Presley entered into a loan agreement with them for $3.8 million, and that put -- then put Graceland, the property, as collateral.
And when she defaulted on that loan, well, the property then became theirs to sell as they see fit.
But the King Elvis' heir, Riley Keough, filed a lawsuit claiming that those documents are fake, that her mother, her late mother's signature was forged on there, that her mother never borrowed money and never put up Graceland as collateral, and that Naussany, she claims, is not even a real company.
Now, the judge today, at a morning hearing in Shelby County, Tennessee, specifically pointing to a problem with the notary. The person who signed off on these documents, actually put in a sworn affidavit saying she had never met Lisa Marie Presley and never notarized her signature.
[13:55:06]
Here's what the judge had to say.
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CHANCELLOR JOEDAE JENKINS, SHELBY COUNTY CHANCERY COURT: Which brings into question as to the authenticity of the signature and, indeed, the deed of trust as being a fraud.
It appears that you, Mr. Germany, your client will be successful on the merits providing that you prove at the ultimate haring the fraud that has been alleged.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ROSALES: And that chancellor saying that Keough is likely to prevail in her lawsuit ultimately, saying that adequate discovery is needed here to argue the merits of this case as to who is the rightful owner of Graceland.
Also letting you know that, back in 2020, a Presley executive, speaking to the "Rolling Stone," stated that the property is worth an estimated $400 million to $500 million.
But beyond that, right behind the property, something more valuable than that. It's Elvis Presley's final resting place. He's there along with several other family members.
SANCHEZ: Isabel Rosales, thank you so much for the update.
Turning now to this week's "HOME FRONT," May is Military Appreciation Month and one community is shining a spotlight on 100-year-old Army Veteran Jimmy Eastburn.
DEAN: He was the recipient of a Hero Award in Elkhart, Indiana.
The Department of Veterans Affairs estimates, of the 16 million-plus Americans who served in World War II, fewer than 120,000 were alive as of 2023. An estimated 131 of those veterans die every day.
Here's Eastburn and his daughter talking about the award and his service to this country.
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JIMMY EASTBURN, WORLD WAR II VETERAN: I'm glad to be alive and to be an American.
PAULA YOUNG, DAUGHTER OF VETERAN JIMMY EASTBURN: He feels privileged to have served his country, and then to see the recognition from others. It's humbling. It's extremely humbling.
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DEAN: Well, we're certainly grateful to him, too. It's an award for a very deserving veteran from our Greatest Generation.
We'll be right back.
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