Search is in full swing – “Titanic” submersible disappeared: the most important answers – News


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The search is a race against time. According to the provider, the oxygen on board is sufficient for 96 hours.

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 about an hour and 45 minutes after it began its dive off Cape Cod, the peninsula off Massachusetts.

The “Titan” belongs to the US company Oceangate, which occasionally brings private individuals to the wreck of the “Titanic” for a lot of money. The passenger ship sank in 1912 and has been lying at the bottom of the ocean at a depth of 3800 meters ever since. In the narrower sense, the “Titan” is a submersible and not a submarine. This is because she does not enter and leave ports under her own power.

Oceangate Expeditions


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The US company’s expeditions to the “Titanic” last a total of eight days and cost up to $250,000 per person. The submersibles used are initially transported by icebreakers. These depart from St. John’s, on the Canadian island of Newfoundland, and then sail around 640 kilometers through the Atlantic until the transported submersible plunges over the sunken “Titanic”.

According to the company, Oceangate’s expeditions are not purely for tourism purposes, but have a scientific task: to document the decay of the Titanic and the underwater ecosystem that shipwrecks often produce. Accordingly, the “Titan” is equipped with high-resolution cameras and multi-beam sonar devices.

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. The names of the other crew members were not initially confirmed publicly. According to British media, one of them is a French “Titanic” expert.

Heavy passengers


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Legend:

Hamish Harding, here on a flight in 2019.

Jannicke Mikkelsen via REUTERS

Hamish Harding is known as an adventurer. He holds several Guinness World Records, including the longest dive in the Mariana Trench, the deepest place on earth, in March 2021. In June 2022, the Brit flew into space. His company Action Aviation announced on social media on Sunday that Harding was taking part in the “Titanic” expedition.

Shahzada Dawood lives and works as a management consultant in the UK. According to the Daily Mail, the 48-year-old is one of the richest men in Pakistan. His company invests in agriculture, industry and the healthcare sector. Shahzada Dawood is also a member of the Board of Trustees of the California-based SETI Institute, which searches for extraterrestrial intelligence.

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, also announced Tuesday morning that “survival equipment was on board for this eventuality.”

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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 forces also deployed sonar buoys that could locate objects and vehicles down to a depth of around 4,000 meters. Merchant ships and private boats were also asked for help. An Oceangate adviser said authorities were working to get a remote-controlled vehicle, which can reach depths of four miles, to the scene as soon as possible.

Submarine Expert: Poor prognosis in case of a leak


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The Submarine expert Alistair Greig from University College London mentioned several possible scenarios of the incident in an interview with the BBC. In the event of a power or communications failure, the submersible could be drifted to the surface. The situation would be significantly worse if the hull were damaged and a leak had occurred. “Then the prognosis is not good,” said Greig.

It would also be difficult if the submersible could no longer rise from the seabed under its own power. “Even if the submersible may still be intact, if it’s deeper than 200 meters, there are very few ships that can go that deep, and certainly no divers,” the expert explains. “The vehicles designed for the Navy’s submarine rescue certainly cannot penetrate anywhere near the depths of the “Titanic”.

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 verifies hull integrity on every dive.

At the time the application was submitted, Titan had completed more than 50 test dives, including at the same depth as Titanic, in deep water off the Bahamas and in a hyperbaric 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, according to a November court filing.

Titanic shipwreck

Legend:

The wreck of the “Titanic” in the depths of the sea. In 1912, the ship, considered unsinkable, hit an iceberg.

Reuters

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