bay in british colombia. i m with phil nuytten. he s a internationally known as a deep water dive expert. you actually develop vehicles like this so people can go deep in the water, places they never have before. and something i have been learning from you as we have been down here is how difficult, even the simplest move seems to be. yes. it tends to be quite a chore. no question about it. the biggest attribute you need for this kind of work is patience. show us. we have a mock up of a black box. of what a black box would look like down here. it is already in the claw n the device on the outside of the vehicle here. it takes more than ten minutes under the best circumstances for that claw to grab the handle. now, watch what happens when we try to put it in to the basket that we d need to take it back up to the surface. go ahead. this isn t something you think would be difficult, but you have to move by inches here.
fourth bluefin-21 mission has come in, but unfortunately it has yielded no evidence of flight 370. the fifth bluefin mission underway now. it s 42 days in to the search for flight 370. the focus has shifted from above the surface to the ocean below. cnn s david mattingly is inside of a submarine off of the coast of horseshoe bay bridge, british colombia. david, talk us through the challenges of an underwater search. don, the challenge is, it s an incredibly long list, not the least of which being the tremendous depths you have to go to and the pressure you have to deal with going all the way to the bottom of the indian ocean. we are talking a couple of miles down. there s only a half dozen manned submersibles that can actually go down and do that kind of work. this vehicle we re in right now is not one of them. we re at the bottom of horseshoe bay in british columbia. i m with phil nuytten.
could we stay submerged. how long will that be, phil? if we have to, we can stay down here for three days. typically down for six to eight hours at a time. reporter: i presume if this goes to the surface, there s another crew that gets ready and come down. that s right. the submarine doesn t get tired, but crew does. it s going to be pitch black. we have illumination provided by halogen lighting. it shows you what seems like a relatively simple task, under water with the issues of clarity as well are not easy at all. i can t imagine the amount of patience it would take to do something like this. reporter: we were talking about carol was saying she can t imagine the amount of patience. you do that because safety is a real danger here. this could become a tomb for
trying tonight is actually showing how you would cut through debris. if you re looking for the black box and it s obscured by cables and wires and things like that, which could be very likely, this is what the end game would look like. take a look. i want you to see right back here, we actually have to manually prime the pump before we can use a cutting device out here. we have a couple of them out here. on your left, that thing that looks like a vinyl record, that s actually a circular saw that can be used to cut the wires and metal that is down here. also, on your right, you can t see it very well because of the murky water, but that s only about two feet in front of us. that claw right there has a cutter that can cut through metal as well. and that s what we re going to demonstrate for you right now. phil nuytten is with me, a deep water dive expert. how difficult is it to do the most simple tasks down here?
it s done by just millimeters here. this is why when you hear people saying that work under water is ex-treechlly slow, think of this. this is just one cable, one. there could be thousands of them blocking your way. you re now focused on cutting and pulling through it. jeff is doing that by working a pneumatic pump in the back here. and then what we hope is that when we reach that point, that phil can then manipulate the robotic arm. it s saying we should be there. here we go. we pull and there it is. see how it s cut and broken away? you remove one ob stockal. i ve got to say that s just one of what could be many. so you clear that one. then you would move forward and you would do it again. it would be hour after hour after hour of doing this. people have said, well, how long