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So far there is no trace, reports the Coast Guard. The crew still has oxygen until Thursday – a race against time.
What happened? A submersible went missing near the Titanic wreck in the North Atlantic on Sunday morning. Contact with the nearly seven-meter-long “Titan” was lost after about an hour and 45 minutes after it began its dive off Cape Cod, the peninsula off Massachusetts.
So far there is no trace, the US Coast Guard reported on Tuesday evening: “Today these search efforts have not brought any results,” said the coordinator for the search operation, Jamie Frederick, in Boston. The emergency services had about 40 hours left. This is an estimate based on information provided by the operator.
Who is missing? According to the US Coast Guard, there were a pilot and four “operations specialists” on board who paid for the expedition. The “operations specialists” take turns operating the sonar devices and other tasks in the five-person submersible.
Among the passengers is billionaire British businessman Hamish Harding. Also on board are Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son Suleman, their family confirmed.
One of the passengers is also the French “Titanic” expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet, as his family confirmed to the BBC. Finally, Stockton Rush is on board, founder and CEO of the operating company Oceangate, as the media reported.
How big is the danger for the crew? The search for the submersible is a race against time. According to the provider Oceangate, the oxygen on board is sufficient for 96 hours in an emergency. This capacity was also confirmed by the US Coast Guard. Harding’s company, Action Aviation, said it had “survival equipment on board for this eventuality.”
How is the search going? US and Canadian ships and planes are jointly searching an area about 1,500 kilometers east of Cape Cod and Boston. They keep an eye out for the “Titan” on the water surface as well as in the sea depths. According to the US Coast Guard, the emergency services are also deploying sonar buoys that can locate objects and vehicles down to a depth of around 4,000 meters. An area of around 26,000 square kilometers has already been searched.
According to an Oceangate spokesman, authorities are working to get a remote-controlled vehicle, which can reach a depth of four miles, to the scene as soon as possible.
What is the condition of the «Titan»? The submersible is capable of diving four kilometers “with a comfortable margin of safety,” according to documents the company filed in April with a US district court in Virginia that has jurisdiction over the Titanic. In a May 2021 court filing, Oceangate said Titan has an “unparalleled safety feature” that checks hull integrity on every dive.
At the time of the application, the “Titan” had completed more than 50 test dives, including at the same depth as the “Titanic”, in deep waters off the Bahamas and in a pressure chamber. During a 2022 expedition, Oceangate reported that the submersible had a battery problem on its first dive and had to be manually attached to the lifting platform. This emerges from a court document.