Former FBI dive leader warns oxygen estimate for missing tour sub is 'best case' scenario
Former FBI dive team leader Bobby Chacon joined ‘America Reports’ with analysis on OceanGate’s missing Titanic tourist submersible.
Former FBI dive team leader Bobby Chacon issued a warning Tuesday regarding OceanGate's missing Titanic tourist submarine, urging experts to refrain from putting "a lot of faith" in the widely echoed 40 hours of remaining air time estimation.
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"The first thing I would do is caution people to not put a lot of faith in this '40 hours left.' Those calculations are estimates based on normal working conditions," Chacon explained during an appearance on "America Reports."
"If a person is injured, or they're stressed, or they're panicking, their air consumption increases. So those numbers of available hours go down. So if people are injured on that vessel, if they're panicked on that vessel, they're going to use more oxygen or more air more quickly."
The former FBI dive team leader continued, explaining that the widespread estimation that OceanGate's submarine has 40 hours of oxygen left is the "best case estimate" in "normal" operating conditions, "which we don't have here," Chacon noted.
"In the phase of the dive that lost contact, which is where we think the malfunction occurred, was on the descent, which is the increasing pressure. So, you have to start assuming that whatever went wrong was due to the increasing pressure," he detailed.
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"You can make certain assumptions about what caused the malfunction. In this case, I would assume that the increasing pressure, there was some kind of compromising of the integrity of that hull at some point that allowed the pressure to cause a malfunction. And that's the worst case scenario."
The company’s website says that the Titan has life support capabilities sufficient to sustain its five-person crew for 96 hours. According to the Coast Guard, the submersible departed the Canadian research vessel Polar Prince on Sunday morning for its trip to the Titanic, and the ship lost contact with the sub after about 1 hour and 45 minutes.
OceanGate’s expeditions to the Titanic departed from St. John’s, Newfoundland, to the wreck of the Titanic about 370 miles away. The trips take eight days, and each dive to the wreck and ascent to the surface reportedly takes roughly eight hours.
The last known position of the submarine is alleged to be somewhere over the Indian Ocean, making rescue efforts extremely difficult given the "vastness" of the water, Chacon noted.
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"The ocean is a vast place. 70% of the earth is covered by water. And so, you know, people think, ‘oh, we should be able to find this,’ but they don't understand the vastness and how things move… The currents are different on the top than the bottom and then the mid-water column." the former FBI dive team leader explained.
"There is still hope for a miracle. But as each hour passes and there's no new news, the chance that we need a miracle increases," he grimly concluded.
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Fox News' Greg Norman contributed to this report.