Tasking Surface Assets News Today

expedition yesterday and failed to return safely last night. >> sandra: operated by oceangate expeditions, a company in the past year has begun taking tourists for $250,000 apiece to explore the wreckage, which is located on the ocean floor of the atlantic around 350 miles south of newfoundland. alexis mcadams has the latest breaking details. >> just having the developments roll in here, its a small vessel, so an active search and rescue mission hoping to find the five mission speciali...

System. rain not much of a concern and as those winds throttle back with the system progressing off to the north and east, so, too, do the wave heights. theyll be in the 1 to 2 foot range. time is of the greatest concern. we will see improving weather conditions moving forward. >> sandra: something important to watch there as the hours go on, john. >> john: we hope that that will happen. thank you for the update, appreciate it. gosh, you know, the thing is the size of the back end of a minivan, ...

>> john, thoughts are with the crew members and their families, bringing all assets to bear to try and find the submersible and so we were notified yesterday afternoon and we began immediately to mobilize assets to search the surface of the water, search from the air and launch equipment that would enable us to detect any vessels under the water as well. and so we have had a comprehensive approach to trying to find this submersible and the people on board. >> sandra: you mentioned the air search...

Back up, any idea how long the ascent will take? >> so john, if we were to find this vessel submerged, we would need additional technical expertise from u.s. navy, from the canadian armed forces or from the private industry to be able to effect an underwater rescue. i dont have those details at this time, but we are reaching out to all parties to make sure that we have capabilities if we come to that phase of search-and-rescue operations. right now we are really just focused on trying to locate ...

Using both radar and visual when able to search the surface of the water. we have the polar prince itself, out there on-site that is conducting a surface search, and we are looking to bring in additional vessels operating in the area. there was a research vessel that was conducting research, you know, not exactly nearby but within several hours of transit so we will bring that vessel into the search on the surface as well. and then use all those underwater methods we have from the p8 orion and t...

Sonar survey of the bottom but we are working closely with our partners, both in the federal government and in the canadian armed forces and with private resources that are there to provide that capability. as you noted, this is on the site of a wreckage, the wreckage of the titanic, and so there is a lot of debris on the bottom and locating the object on the bottom will be difficult but we will bring all assets to bear that we can to try and find the submersible and rescue the crew members. >> ...

Operate as planned if it had problems to be again with. so, what are you leaning towards where this vessel might be? >> sandra, this is a very complicated problem, its out there in not quite the middle of the ocean, but near the middle of the ocean, a remote part of the ocean, 900 miles away from our coast here in massachusetts. and we have to assume that, you know, anything is possible at this point and we are bringing to bear a number of different assets. launched coast guard c-130 aircraft, w...