Retired Navy captain explains how a rescue of the missing Titanic sub could be carried out

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• Amna Nawaz:

  The international effort to find and rescue a missing submersible is continuing tonight.

  The U.S. Navy is also sending crews and special lifting equipment to help if the missing craft can be found. The challenges are enormous and the situation is becoming more desperate by the hour.

  Rescuers are racing against the clock and a dwindling oxygen supply to find the submersible lost at sea.

• Robert Simpson, U.S. Coast Guard First District:

  This operation is our top priority.

• Amna Nawaz:

  This afternoon, U.S. Coast Guard officials in Boston updated the public on what they called an incredibly complex operation.

• Capt. Jamie Frederick, U.S. Coast Guard:

  Since Sunday, the Coast Guard has coordinated search efforts with the U.S. and Canadian Coast Guard, Air National Guard aircraft and the Polar Prince, which has searched a combined 7,600 square miles, an area larger than the state of Connecticut. To date, those search efforts have not yielded any results.

• Amna Nawaz:

  For the five passengers on board time is of the essence.

• Capt. Jamie Frederick:

  We know there's about — there's about 40 hours of breathable air left, based on that initial report.

• Amna Nawaz:

  Owned by Washington state-based OceanGate Expeditions, the vessel, known as the Titan, takes passengers deep into the sea to view wreckage of the Titanic, all for about $250,000 a person.

  The submersible began its descent Sunday morning near where the Titanic went down about 400 nautical miles south of St. John's, Newfoundland. All contact was lost about an hour and 45 minutes after it began its dive. No one at the surface knows why.

  The day before, one of the passengers, British billionaire Hamish Harding, said this year brought — quote — "the worst winter in Newfoundland in 40 years," but — quote — "a weather window" had just opened up to attempt a dive.

  Rescuers report the water in the area is fairly calm, but their search covers a vast expanse of ocean both on the surface and below. The Titanic's wreckage rests about 12,500 feet or more than two miles underwater. That's equivalent to 10 Empire State Buildings stacked on top of each other, more than twice the depth of the Grand Canyon.

  Those on board the vessel include Harding, chairman of the company Action Aviation. Also aboard the vessel is OceanGate founder and CEO Stockton Rush, Shahzada Dawood, a British Pakistani executive at one of Pakistan's largest conglomerates, and his son Suleman, and French explorer Paul-Henry Nargeolet, director of the company that owns the rights to the Titanic's wreckage.

  Rescuers today say their focus is on locating the vessel, though, if found, it's unclear how or if they could retrieve it.

• Capt. Jamie Frederick:

  We have a group of our nation's best experts in the unified command. And if we get to that point, those experts will be looking at what the next course of action is.

• Amna Nawaz:

  On the search and how a possible rescue could be carried out, I'm joined by retired U.S. Navy submarine Captain David Marquet.

  Captain Marquet, welcome.

  You heard what the rescuers are up against there. If that vessel hasn't surfaced somehow and is still underwater, how are they carrying out a search like this? What are they looking for? And what are they doing?

  Capt. David Marquet (RET.), U.S. Navy: There's two components of the search.

  First, there's the search on the surface of the water. This can happen. You can cover wide areas with airplanes that fly relatively quickly, and they have radars. And it's — now it's getting dark, but, during the daytime, you also use your eyeballs. And so they can cover a wide area.

  I'm pretty confident, if that ship were at the surface it would have been found by now. Underwater, at the depths where the Titanic is, two-and-a-half miles down, it's a totally different story.

  First of all, you hope that, if they were in there and they were capable, they would be making noises, they would be using pingers, or the underwater telephone, or just simply banging on the hull of the submarine. And those sounds would be picked up by the sonar buoys which are being dropped and the other ships that are listening. We're not hearing that either.

  So now I'm fearful that something catastrophic has happened, because, when there's an abrupt termination of communications like that, that would signal multiple systems going down at the same time, or one catastrophic failure which affected the entire vessel.

• Amna Nawaz:

  Captain Marquet, if they even located the vessel, what then? What can they do?

  Is there a way to tow it to the surface, to rescue people underwater?

• Capt. David Marquet:

  Yes, there's no way to rescue people underwater on this type of a ship.

  What you need to do that is, you need two ships with the same type of mating surface that would then come together. And this ship, the hatch is bolted on from the outside. It doesn't have that kind of a mating surface. And the rescue ships that had that those kinds of mating surfaces have been retired and don't go that deep anyway.

  So that's not the way to do it. We need to get that ship up to the surface. You either need to use lifting equipment, which somehow comes under, like a sled that would come under it, and then inflate and go up. But that's got to be placed there by something.

  Or we drop a two-mile cable with a hook on it, and then we have ROV down low, which finds the submarine, gets it hooked, and then we can reel it up to the surface. Again, this takes time, because we need to get that equipment also, first of all, to Newfoundland and then on a ship and out to the wreck of the Titanic, which is 400 miles away.

• Amna Nawaz:

  You may have seen there's some new reporting today that leaders in the submersibles industry back in 2018 sent a letter to the CEO, who was the pilot of this vessel, expressing concerns that he wasn't sticking to their standards and guidelines of the industry and warning of a catastrophic potential ahead.

  Does that surprise you?

• Capt. David Marquet:

  Yes, that's a report in The New York Times. That's a remarkable letter.

  And we see this tug with innovation, where innovation might get ahead of regulation and the ability — the governing laws, in terms of how those particular vessels or that particular area should operate. And then it goes back and forth.

  And I admire the spirit of innovation and pushing the boundaries and not wanting to be fettered by rules that are written into the industrial age. But, at the same time, we have people's lives here. And in the United States Navy, we take great care of our submarines. They're designed brilliantly with multiple redundancies.

  If we have — need one pump, we put in two. If we need two pumps, we put in three. We do operate through operational procedures. For example, if we haven't used a submarine in a while, we go to sea — even before we go to sea, we're going to test everything at the dock. Then we go to sea in shallow water, submerge just a little bit, run around with flashlights, check everything.

  It's a very deliberate, slow, methodical process. And it's hard for me to see how a commercial company is going to have as many resources as we would apply to keeping our submarines safe at sea. It's a very, very harsh environment. The pressure is 380 times atmospheric pressure when you're down at that depth.

• Amna Nawaz:

  That is retired U.S. Navy submarine Captain David Marquet joining us tonight.

  Captain, thank you for your time.

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