The odds of survival for those aboard a missing submersible on its way to see the Titanic shipwreck are low, says a former Navy Rear Admiral and journalist who went on an expedition with the craft.
Titan, a carbon fibre cylinder operated by underwater exploration company OceanGate Expeditions, was reported overdue by its mothership on Sunday.
It's vanishing has sparked an international search covering around 25,000 sq kilometres of the Atlantic Ocean.
Now, the crew aboard the vessel have less than 40 hours of oxygen left — if they are still alive.
Former British Rear Admiral Chris Parry, who has been involved with a number of rescue operations, told Breakfast that while he is an optimist, it's not likely the crew will be rescued in time.
He said the depth of the water and gigantic search area would be making the search operation very hard.
"The chances of finding them, if they're still alive, is extremely remote," Parry said.
He said there was a "less than 5% chance" of the craft being found safe, going on to say that locating it will present a whole new set of challenges.
"How on earth are you going to get it to the surface," he said.
"I don't know any way this has been done in the past.
"Conceptually, you can wrap a wire around it, but that's a 4km long wire… Or you could send down another submersible with a grabber arm that can hug it and bring it to the surface, never been done before."
He compared the search to following a field.
"It's gonna take them all day just to do one field, and we're running out of air, I'm afraid."
CBS journalist David Pogue, who went aboard the submersible last year, shared Parry's worry — saying malfunctions on the craft are frequent.
He had to sign a disclaimer before boarding the sub, thanks to some of its more "makeshift" elements.
“I was very surprised to notice there were a number of off-the-shelf, ‘improvised’ elements,” he told Breakfast.
Pogue said the OceanGate chief executive told him the lights were bought from a camping store, and the craft was piloted using an Xbox controller.
However, what worried him most was that the Titan couldn't be opened from the inside — meaning that if it had surfaced, the crew could still suffocate in the airtight craft.
"That's the real nightmare scenario," he said.
"The odds are very low," he said, calling the lost crew's plight "heartbreaking".
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