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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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.