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, it s a small vessel, so an active search and rescue mission hoping to find the five mission specialists on board. oceangate launched it, the size of a minivan, so inside a small vessel from newfoundland, six-hour tour of the wreckage of the titanic. they reported it missing to the coast guard, the coast guard has also stepped in trying to reach out to the navy and armed force, all hands on deck. we are told it is designed in such a way if it has a problem it automatically floats to the surface. if it happened here, we are waiting to find out. video of the wreckage was taken by oceangate last ye
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. they ll 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, bigger than a phone booth and five people in there, and gosh knows what s happened to the submersible, but hopefully with all the resources, the coast guard, private enterprise and the navy and canadians adding assets as well, if it s out there bobbing on the ocean they ll find it. if it s below the surface it
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 that is ongoing as well, and that is because this particular vessel is designed to surface automatically should there ever be any technical issues. so, for anyone to assume that it was below the ocean surface, that would be that it had such technical issues it did not
submarine prior to going down and the direction where it was headed gives you kind of a focus point of the area you need to search. because the location where the submarine did go down makes it very difficult for any program other than military or extreme science research facility to go and search it. and one of the most difficult areas is not so much identifying the location because we have assets, military has assets to be able to identify location pretty well. it s identify exactly where on the bottom it is. it s a huge area and the ocean has different thermal, so as you go deeper the temperature changes dramatically, down to about 100, 200 meters, and there is the zone goes from 200 meters to 1,000 meters, and that s an area typically where the
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 don t 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 the vessel. again by saturating the air with aerial assets, by tasking surface assets in the area and then using the underwater sonar and sound detection means that we have available to us right