In a race against the clock on the high seas, an expanding international armada of ships and airplanes searched Tuesday for a submersible that vanished in the North Atlantic while taking five people down to the wreck of the Titanic.
U.S. Coast Guard officials said the search covered 10,000 square miles but turned up no sign of the lost sub known as the Titan. Although they planned to continue looking, time was running out because the vessel had less than two days of oxygen left.
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“This is a very complex search, and the unified team is working around the clock,” Cpt. Jamie Frederick of the First Coast Guard District in Boston told a news conference.
Frederick said the crew had about 41 hours of oxygen remaining as of midday Tuesday. He added that an underwater robot had started searching in the vicinity of the Titanic and that there was a push to get salvage equipment to the scene in case the sub is found.
The Ocean Gate exhibition sub left St. John’s, Newfoundland, Sunday and lost communication with its mother ship less than two hours into the trip.
Authorities reported the carbon-fiber vessel overdue Sunday night, setting off the search in waters about 435 miles south of St. John’s.
Aboard were renowned British adventurer Hamish Harding; father-and-son Shahzada and Suleman Dawood, two members of one of Pakistan’s most prominent families; Titanic expert Paul-Henry Nargeolet, a former French navy officer; and OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, who, according to the company, was serving as a member of the crew.
The submersible had a 96-hour oxygen supply when it put to sea around 6 a.m. Sunday, according to David Concannon, an adviser to OceanGate Expeditions, which oversaw the mission. That means the oxygen supply could run out Thursday morning.
Experts said the rescuers face steep challenges.
“Logistically speaking, it’s hard to bring assets to this location. You’re dealing with a surface search and a subsurface search, which makes it very complicated,” said Capt. Jamie Frederick, a local maritime expert.
Maritime expert Capt. Robert Russo said visibility is the biggest challenge underwater, saying it’s pretty much total darkness in the 2.5 miles down to where the Titanic rests. In an interview last month, OceanGate’s CEO said what worries him most while exploring is the possibility of entanglement hazards, which would prevent the vessel from returning to the ocean’s surface.
“There’s a bunch of different things. One thing is cables, wire cables from the Titanic, lines from the Titanic, fishing nets, and debris from the Titanic. For example, if a piece of steel got caught between the propeller and the hull, they may not be able to reverse it and free themselves of that entanglement,” Russo said.
Russo said another possibility could be what’s called catastrophic hull failure, which would have destroyed the vessel that’s made of a mixture of carbon fiber and titanium.
Coast Guard officials said they’ve deployed military aircraft to search the ocean’s surface and underwater, but Russo said not even the military is equipped to find small submersible vehicles underwater that aren’t made of steel like a submarine.
“The military underwater detection systems are set actually set up for a different kind of target. Don’t forget this submersible was not completely steel or even a large steel object. It was other material also,” Russo said.
If the vessel does float to the ocean’s surface but isn’t located immediately, there is no way for the occupants inside to open the submersible. It’s bolted shut with heavy screws from the outside so it must be spotted on the ocean’s surface before the oxygen is depleted.
Russo said if this ends tragically, he anticipates, both the U.S. and Canadian governments will close off access to Titanic tourism permanently.
CBS News journalist David Pogue, who traveled to Titanic aboard the Titan last year, said the vehicle uses two communication systems: text messages that go back and forth to a surface ship and safety pings that are emitted every 15 minutes to indicate that the sub is still working.
Both of those systems stopped about an hour and 45 minutes after the Titan submerged on Sunday.
"There are only two things that could mean. Either they lost all power or the ship developed a hull breach and it imploded instantly. Both of those are devastatingly hopeless,” Pogue told CBC on Tuesday.
The submersible had seven backup systems to return to the surface, including sandbags and lead pipes that drop off and an inflatable balloon. One system is designed to work even if everyone aboard is unconscious, Pogue said.
Eric Fusil, director of the University of Adelaide’s Shipbuilding Hub, said there are other scenarios that could have cut communications, including an electrical fire that could create toxic fumes and render the crew unconscious.
The Canadian research icebreaker Polar Prince, which was supporting the Titan, was to continue conducting surface searches with help from a Canadian Boeing P-8 Poseidon reconnaissance aircraft, the Coast Guard said on Twitter. Two U.S. Lockheed C-130 Hercules aircraft also conducted overflights.
The Canadian military dropped sonar buoys to listen for any possible sounds from the Titan.
OceanGate’s expeditions to the Titanic wreck site include archaeologists and marine biologists. The company also brings people who pay to come along. They take turns operating sonar equipment and performing other tasks in the submersible.
Rush told The Associated Press in June 2021 that the Titan’s technology was “very cutting edge” and was developed with the help of NASA and aerospace manufacturers.
“This is the only submersible – crewed submersible – that’s made of carbon fiber and titanium,” Rush said, calling it the “largest carbon fiber structure that we know of,” with 5-inch-thick carbon fiber and 3.25-inch-thick titanium.
Other passengers included Harding, a billionaire adventurer who lives in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates; Pakistani nationals Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman, whose eponymous firm invests across the country in agriculture, industries and the health sector; and French explorer and Titanic expert Paul-Henry Nargeolet.
Greg Stone, a longtime ocean scientist based in California and a friend of Rush, called the lost submersible “a fundamentally new submarine design” that showed great promise for future research. Unlike its predecessors, the Titan was not spherical in shape.
“Stockton was a risk taker. He was smart ... he had a vision. He wanted to push things forward," Stone said.
The expedition was OceanGate’s third annual voyage to chronicle the deterioration of Titanic, which struck an iceberg and sank in 1912, killing all but about 700 of the roughly 2,200 passengers and crew. Since the wreckage’s discovery in 1985, it has been slowly succumbing to metal-eating bacteria.
OceanGate’s website described the “mission support fee” for the 2023 expedition as $250,000 a person.
Recalling his own trip aboard the Titan, Pogue said the vessel got turned around looking for the Titanic.
“There’s no GPS underwater, so the surface ship is supposed to guide the sub to the shipwreck by sending text messages,” Pogue said in a segment aired on “CBS Sunday Morning.” “But on this dive, communications somehow broke down. The sub never found the wreck.”
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Associated Press writers Danica Kirka, Jill Lawless and Sylvia Hui in London, Rob Gillies in Toronto, Olga R. Rodriguez in San Francisco, Jon Gambrell in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and Munir Ahmed in Islamabad contributed to this report.