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Video Shows Plane Spiraling Out Of The Sky Before Deadly Crash In Brazil; Plane In Brazil Hits Homes Before Crash, Killing 62 People; Harris And Trump Take Their Campaigns To Western Voters; Plane Crashes In Brazil Just Minutes From Landing, Kills 62 On Board. Aired 3-3:30p ET

Aired August 09, 2024 - 15:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

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[15:00:18]

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is CNN Breaking News.

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN HOST: We are starting with our breaking news. Brazil's president saying that it does appear now that there are no survivors from this plane that crashed with 62 people on board. And we are getting more video, disturbing video. This is from the aftermath of the crash near Sao Paulo. You see flames billowing up from the site of the crash.

JESSICA DEAN, CNN HOST: Meantime, there is a new angle of the plane seemingly falling out of the sky. And before we show it to you, we do want to warn you, it's very disturbing to watch and could be very disturbing for a child to see.

CNN's Julia Vargas Jones is following this breaking news for us.

Julia, what more are you learning about this?

JULIA VARGAS JONES, CNN REPORTER: Yes. Look, we are hearing from people that live in that area of Vinhedo, Sao Paulo, just how disturbing this all was. I spoke to the person that shot one of those videos that we showed, the video of her walking out of her living room. She says she was having lunch when she heard this noise that sounded like a drone and she decided to go out to her balcony to see what that was about. And she saw the plane starting to spiral down.

She said she just walked right back inside and she crouched. She said, Julia, I did it like I saw in the movies. You know, you're supposed to stay safe. You just crouch down and go under the table. That's what she did. That was her reflex. She also brought her animals inside with her and she just started to pray.

That area that you see in the video, that's her next door neighbor. That's where the smoke is coming from. That's where the fire is coming from. At least a part of the airplane seems to have fallen there, she said. That's what she saw. But right now, all of the streets are closed off. Authorities are on the scene, firefighters, medics, police, to try and make sense of it all. We did hear from President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva that all the 62 people on board, the passengers and crew, are dead or appeared to be dead. We're still waiting on more confirmation. If there were other people injured when the plane hit the ground, I know we have now geolocated all the videos that we're showing you so we know exactly where that happened, but we still don't know the impact that that had in that community.

Now, the woman who shot that video, she told me right now everyone is just praying that everyone is well. We know that this is going to have a massive impact, and in the hours to come, we're going to get a better sense of what it all means.

We do have a statement from Voepass, the airline that the airport - airplane belonged to - they said that they confirmed the accident, the occurrence of the accident involving that flight. It was leaving from Cascavel, Parana. That's just one state over from Sao Paulo, Guarulhos, where it was headed. That's Brazil's largest airport, busiest airport that it was going to, and it crashed just about eight minutes before it was supposed to land.

So it gives you an idea of how close this city, this town of Vinhedo, is to one of, you know, the major city of Brazil. And just south of that, that's where President Lula was when he made that announcement.

Voepass said that they are using all means to support the people involved. At the time, they said that they don't have confirmation of how many people were killed or survived in that crash. But as you heard from the president, we're expecting everyone on board to have lost their lives.

KEILAR: Yes. And we're looking for news on those folks on the ground. Obviously, this is a well-populated area. Julia, stand by for us, if you could. I do want to let our viewers know that we are getting some new video in of the wreckage of this plane crash just outside of Sao Paulo. You can see this is just adjacent, I mean, really just yards from where this plane crashed. And you can see just how populated this area is, homes very close to each other.

So there is certainly a risk, even as we know that 62 people on board this plane have died, there is a risk, of course, that people on the ground as well have been injured or may have perished in this and we are awaiting some information on that. Of course, the hope is that as people did see this plane falling, maybe they were able to get some sort of warning from their neighbors. We don't know. We're certainly waiting for news on that.

I do want to go now to CNN Transportation Analyst Mary Schiavo.

Mary, the most disturbing video that we are seeing, and quite frankly, I think a lot of us when we first saw it, we were hoping it wasn't real --

MARY SCHIAVO, CNN TRANSPORTATION ANALYST: Mm-hmm.

KEILAR: -- is of the plane falling out of the sky. [15:05:01]

I do want to have you look at it and also listen to it so that you can tell us what you see in it and also what you're hearing. This is, again, a disturbing video. Let's watch.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: (Foreign language).

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KEILAR: How are you analyzing that, Mary?

SCHIAVO: Well, there are so many clues in that video. And just like you, when I first saw it, I was questioning whether this was accurate or not. But, you know, sadly, I've worked other crashes where this has happened. This is clearly a stall, what's called an aerodynamic stall. There's not enough air speed and air flowing over the wings to keep the plane in the sky.

At this point where we see it in the video where the plane is falling, the pilots would have had no ability to control that plane, so they could not have directed it away from houses or populated areas. When you're at that point in the fall, you have lost all control and controllability and surfaces of the aircraft. And we also heard, very, you know, good to note - to listen because we also note that the engines are still running, so the plane did not stall, did not lose its air speed because it lost its engines.

We've now also learned that throughout most of the flight, the plane was flying in a hundred percent humidity and below freezing temperatures, which is very significant for this kind of aircraft, which is something called an ATR 72, which is not, you know, a popular thing in the United States anymore because it had a problem in icing.

Now, they still fly in the Caribbean and other places. There's a smaller model called an ATR 42, but there were a number of crashes and accidents in the U.S. because of the de-icing systems. There was criticism that they weren't robust enough, that it didn't cover enough of the plane, that it couldn't handle a tough icing condition. So it's possible that there are two systems, anti-icing and de-icing, so because of the weather information we now have, people will want to consider that as well, and pilots are trained to respond to the stall.

But given that they were coming in, they were already at about 17,000 feet, so they must have been descending, getting ready to land, they might not have had enough altitude and enough time, literally, to try to recover or one of those systems may not have been robust enough or might not have been working enough to get rid of that icing.

And I've been in icing conditions in a small plane, it's terrifying, and you don't have a lot of choices if your anti-ice and de-ice can't handle it, you can descend and try to get out of the ice or climb and try to get out of the ice. But if you're coming in to land, you're just about out of time. I think they were eight minutes out of the airport. It's very close to the ground.

DEAN: And so Mary, you mentioned because we were hearing the engine that you would deduce from that that they didn't lose their capabilities because an engine went away. What else could it have been? Is it, like you're saying, that it was just where it was and they didn't have any air, they could - just couldn't control the plane because of how it was in the sky at that point?

SCHIAVO: Well, we have one more clue, and this is hugely important. Some of the radar tracings indicate that the aircraft had been flying throughout most of its flight at over 200 knots - 202 knots. And at this particular point, and remember, just a minute after this happened - it took a minute for all this to happen, to fall and to crash, it was going only 40 knots. I mean, not even a very small, tiny two- seater plane can stay flying, in most cases at 40 knots.

So for some reason, we know it had dramatically lost its speed, and that just won't keep this plane in the air. So we already know that as a clue as well. The question is why? We know it was not the engines, they - at least from what we hear on the tape, because they were still running.

So again, it points back to icing, which is the most prevalent issue that has plagued this aircraft in the past. Of course, we don't know if that's the case. And they were communicating with air traffic control because they were under positive air traffic control. This is a very big, very busy airport. You can't fly without air traffic control there. It's not allowed. It's not legal.

So if they had time to talk to the air traffic controllers, I would anticipate those tapes would be released fairly soon. But sometimes in icing, you just don't have time, whereas I always like to tell people, we don't have any rear-view mirrors in the cockpit. So we have to rely on the instruments. You get icing warnings, by the way, in the cockpit on - in most modern cockpits. You do get those warnings.

But given this flight was in moist conditions, a hundred percent humidity and below freezing for most of the flight, I would have thought that the pilots would been - would have been aware that they needed both the anti-ice systems and the de-ice systems, depending on the - what they were experiencing.

[15:10:15]

But I had a flight - I was in a flight where the icing came so quickly, it was below freezing the whole flight, but on coming into land, ice - this ice that accumulated on the wings was thick, quick. It came on very quick. And, you know, when we finally got on the ground, thank God, and we're very close to the airport, so we didn't run out of time.

But when you pulled the ice off the wing, it was literally like pulling off a frozen piece of heavy lace. And, you know, that really busts up your airflow. You need smooth airflow over those wings to keep that plane hanging in the sky and you just don't have it with that kind of icing. But we don't know if that's the case yet. The black boxes probably will give the indication if they got the ice warnings out in the black boxes.

KEILAR: Yes.

SCHIAVO: And the cockpit voice reports.

KEILAR: Yes, you're raising very important questions there, though, Mary. Stay with us if you would. We're going to stay on top of this. This plane has crashed in Brazil just outside of Sao Paulo. It has killed 62 people on board and certainly questions about what is happening on the ground because it did crash into a populated neighborhood.

Ahead, hitting the road but in two very different places. How the Harris and Trump campaigns are revving up support on the trail, plus a special counsel in Donald Trump's election interference case, getting his wish as the judge delays the first scheduled hearing in the case.

And remember, ugly Monday on Wall Street, how the markets are feeling as we wrap up the trading week. Those stories and much more coming up on CNN NEWS CENTRAL.

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[15:16:09]

KEILAR: The race for the White House taking place out west today. Vice President Harris and former President Trump are both on the campaign trail in western states. Harris and her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz, are in the battleground state of Arizona, and they're holding a rally later today in the Phoenix area. It's coming, as CNN is learning that next week, President Biden will make his first formal appearance with Harris since he passed the baton to her.

DEAN: Meantime, former President Donald Trump also back on the campaign trail for his first rally in nearly a week. Tonight, he'll hold that rally in Montana. It will also be Trump's first rally since he recommitted to a presidential debate with Harris next month. So, let's talk a little bit more about this with CNN Senior Political Analyst and senior editor for The Atlantic, Ron Brownstein, and former advisor to George W. Bush and John McCain, Mark McKinnon. He's also the creator of the political docuseries, "The Circus."

Great to have both of you here with us. Thanks so much for being here.

Mark, I just want to start first with you because it is noticeable the tone and tenor of these campaigns now that Harris is at the top of the Democratic ticket are very, very different. And we do see Trump getting back on the campaign trail. He's going to Montana where a safe state for him in that presidential race, but that Senate race could be a big one.

What do you make of Harris and Walz crisscrossing the country, multiple events a day, versus the way that Trump is campaigning right now?

MARK MCKINNON, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Well, I just wrote a column for Vanity Fair today called "The Power of Joy." And I just think that this exuberance of this ticket is something that we've really never seen before. People are so hungry for - to turn the page on the - just the depressing, angry, nasty sort of tenor of politics of the last decade, really, that something new and different is happening.

And it feels like, you know, a moment is now becoming a movement. And it's interesting that they're in Arizona today. Ron, I remember when I did my very first Trump rally, and it was in Arizona in late 2015. And I went down there and there were - it was the middle of the day, 110 degrees and lines around the block.

But now that's happening with Harris and Walz. And so, the - you know, with - there's a very different thing happening, but it's happening with the Harris-Walz ticket now.

KEILAR: Yes. Ron, what do you think about the enthusiasm that you're seeing, what it means for Trump and the fact that he hasn't been out on the trail so much?

RONALD BROWNSTEIN, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: Yes. Look, I mean, you know, heading into the decision by the President Biden to step aside, there was an enthusiasm. It wasn't even a gap. It was a chasm. You know, in some polling, the share of Republicans who said they were very enthusiastic about voting was 25 points higher than among Democrats and now that has narrowed and virtually disappeared.

Trump has a passionate base. I mean, there's no question about that. And that base - he has shown both in 2016 and 2020 that he can get that base to show up on Election Day. But there is, I think, what Mark was referring to underway, which is, you know, when Harris says we're not going back, that argument exists on two levels.

I mean, in the most immediate level, she's talking about the rollback of rights on abortion and other issues that's been engineered in red states and at the Supreme Court. But I think there's something deeper there, too, that he's alluding to, which is that we're not going back to necessarily the highly conflicted, you know, intensely polarized politics of the last decade.

And that may help explain why she is polling so well among independents who have been pretty skeptical of the Biden administration. Just a desire to turn the page, we'll see if that can carry her all the way to November, but it's real.

DEAN: Yes. And they're obviously trying to really capitalize on this, Ron, and keep it going.

[15:20:04]

They're looking to the DNC, which is in, what, about a week from now, August 19th, I think is - around then is when it's going to start. And so you get that bounce, as well.

Trump tried to make the case yesterday that he's not out there on the campaign trail because he's going to wait till after that. He's ahead by so much, which polling does not show that. Should the Trump - should Trump and his campaign be concerned that this bounce, that this momentum can sustain itself in what is kind of, weirdly, a snap election for America?

BROWNSTEIN: Yes. Well, that - I mean, that's really important, right? So, you know, this convention, I think, is more consequential for her than for any nominee in either party, at least, since Bill Clinton in 1992. And the reason is she is the first major party nominee who was not an incumbent president, who didn't spend a year and a half running around the country getting bruises and triumphs in primaries.

You know, I think both sides agree that impressions of her, positive or negative, at this point are pretty shallow. So there is more opportunity than usual at the moment of the convention to kind of draw on a blank piece of paper. I mean, what has to concern Republicans is that her favorable ratings are now significantly better than Trump's or Biden's with the convention coming up and the opportunity to tell her story to voters who know less about her than they typically know about a nominee at this point.

Now, the risk, of course, is that Republicans have been kind of casting around for how they want to describe her, but I do think they're heading toward a message of - that she is dangerously liberal and weak and won't keep you safe.

And so there is a lot more at stake, I think, in the kind of back and forth that happens around the convention than is often the case simply because impressions of her are so more loosely formed than they usually are for a candidate this late into the year.

KEILAR: Yes. Mark, this is a strange place for the Trump campaign to be. I mean, what oddity for them to be facing a candidate who just emerged. And Trump has said he's not going to change his campaign strategy. Does he need to, though?

MCKINNON: Well, if he doesn't change it, then the outcome's not going to be very good. I mean, this clearly caught them on their heels. They prepared everything, the resources they're planning, their strategy for Joe Biden, and now it's a completely different script.

And the compressed time schedule is really interesting, as Ron was pointing out. He's one of the smartest guys in politics, and he's right. But I think when we look back, if Harris wins, well, it'll turn out that this compressed schedule was a huge advantage for Harris because, again, as Ron pointed out, they didn't have a whole year of battering and bruising Harris, which normally would have been the case.

And also, they don't have their Republican convention. They wasted that completely, that whole time, attacking the wrong candidate. And now Harris has had this rollout and dominated nearly every single news cycle since she announced, and that's going to go right on through the convention where they will dominate coverage for, you know, almost a period of month going into September. So they're winning, you know, nine out of 10 news cycles and dominating the coverage. And so that - I think this compressed time schedule will turn out to be a huge advantage for the Harris campaign.

DEAN: It is a fascinating thing to watch unfold. Ron Brownstein, Mark McKinnon, always great to see both of you. Thank you.

Still ahead, 62 people are feared dead after a plane crash outside Sao Paulo, Brazil. We have brand new information about the flight's final moments.

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[15:28:20]

KEILAR: All right, we are following some breaking news out of Brazil where emergency responders are now at the scene of a passenger plane crash in a residential area near Sao Paulo. And while we found out that 62 people who were on board - all on board, according to Brazil's president, were killed. We did just hear from the city's communications director that it seems almost miraculously that in this densely populated area, no one on the ground died.

That is according to a city official, that no one on the ground in this neighborhood was killed as this plane crashed into homes there. Flight tracking data appears to show the plane losing altitude a minute and a half before the crash. We have CNN's Tom Foreman here to analyze what's coming in. Tom?

TOM FOREMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Yes. Well, you look at the ground scene here, these are the closest picture we have so far. Remarkable to think numerous houses hit, nobody on the ground killed, if that information is correct. That doesn't do anything for the 62 people who are on board, four of them crew members.

This is called an ATR 72 because that is the typical - the complete load of the aircraft, so they were almost full. They had flown from Cascavel down here, which is about a 12-hour drive from Sao Paulo. Vinhedo is just a little bit north here, probably from the regional airport downtown, and this is a regional carrier, if that's where they were going. This is at least an hour and a half drive.

This is the big question, though, what happened? It would have been in the position of approaching to land to some degree at this point, and you see it falling out of the air. In - everything I'm reading about this and what we're hearing from our aviation experts, one of the things you have to ask here is what was going on before this happened.

[15:30:00]

I want you to notice, this is a painful thing to look at, at a time like this, but it's a real thing.