The desperate search to find the missing Titan submersible turned into a recovery effort on Thursday after officials announced that the vessel imploded sometime this week, killing all five aboard, near the Titanic shipwreck.
Deep-sea robots will continue to search the sea floor for clues about what happened deep in the North Atlantic. The pilot and four passengers died in the catastrophic implosion.
The Titan, owned by undersea exploration company OceanGate Expeditions, had been chronicling the Titanic’s decay and the underwater ecosystem around the sunken ocean liner in yearly voyages since 2021.
Many questions about what occurred underwater remain: Exactly when and why did the implosion occur? Will the victims’ bodies ever be found? How could this tragedy have been prevented?
Here’s what we do know so far:
The craft submerged on Sunday morning, and its support vessel lost contact with it about an hour and 45 minutes later, according to the Coast Guard.
The vessel was reported overdue about 700km south of St John’s, Newfoundland, according to Canada’s Joint Rescue Coordination Centre in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
The Titan was launched from an icebreaker that was hired by OceanGate and formerly operated by the Canadian Coast Guard. The ship has ferried dozens of people and the submersible craft to the North Atlantic wreck site, where the Titan has made multiple dives.
The vessel suffered a catastrophic implosion, killing all five aboard, sometime this week after it submerged Sunday morning.
It’s not clear exactly when or where the implosion occurred. But a senior military official said Thursday that a US Navy acoustic system detected an “anomaly” on Sunday that was likely the Titan’s fatal implosion.
The Coast Guard announced that debris from the submersible had been found and the end of rescue efforts on Thursday, bringing a tragic close to a saga that included an urgent around-the-clock search and a worldwide vigil for the missing vessel.
”The debris is consistent with the catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber,” Rear Admiral John Mauger, of the First Coast Guard District, said in a news conference on Thursday.
A deep-sea robot discovered the debris, near the Titanic shipwreck, that authorities say came from the submersible.
The senior military official said that the Navy went back and analysed its acoustic data after the Titan was reported missing. That anomaly was “consistent with an implosion or explosion in the general vicinity of where the Titan submersible was operating when communications were lost”, the official said.
The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive acoustic detection system.
The Navy passed on the information to the Coast Guard, which continued its search because the Navy did not consider the data to be definitive.
Director James Cameron, who has made multiple dives to the wreckage of the Titanic, told the BBC that he knew an “extreme catastrophic event” had happened as soon as he heard the submersible had lost navigation and communications at the same time.
”For me, there was no doubt,” Cameron said. “There was no search. When they finally got an ROV (remotely operated vehicle) down there that could make the depth, they found it within hours. Probably within minutes.”
David Lochridge, OceanGate’s former director of marine operations, argued in 2018 that the method the company devised for ensuring the soundness of the hull - relying on acoustic monitoring that could detect cracks and pops as the hull strained under pressure - was inadequate and could “subject passengers to potential extreme danger in an experimental submersible”.
”This was problematic because this type of acoustic analysis would only show when a component is about to fail - often milliseconds before an implosion - and would not detect any existing flaws prior to putting pressure onto the hull,” Lochridge’s attorneys wrote in a wrongful termination claim.
OceanGate disagreed. Lochridge “is not an engineer and was not hired or asked to perform engineering services on the Titan”, it said, and it noted he was fired after refusing to accept assurances from the company’s lead engineer that the acoustic monitoring and testing protocol was, in fact, better suited to detect any flaws than a method Lochridge proposed.
The Coast Guard will continue searching near the Titanic for more clues about what happened to the Titan. Officials say there isn’t a timeframe for when they will call off the massive international search. Mauger said that the prospect of finding or recovering remains was unknown.
Stockton Rush
Although his background is in aerospace and technology, Rush founded OceanGate Inc. in 2009 to provide crewed submersibles for undersea researchers and explorers, according to the company’s website. Rush was the Titan’s pilot, said company spokesperson Andrew Von Kerens.
The private company based in Washington started bringing tourists to the Titanic in 2021 as part of its effort to chronicle the slow deterioration of the wreck.
“The ocean is taking this thing, and we need to document it before it all disappears or becomes unrecognisable,” Rush told The Associated Press in 2021.
In an interview with CBS News last year, Rush defended the safety of his submersible but said nothing is without risk.
”What I worry about most are things that will stop me from being able to get to the surface - overhangs, fish nets, entanglement hazard,” he said, adding that a good pilot can avoid such perils.
Rush became the youngest jet transport-rated pilot in the world at age 19 in 1981, and flew commercial jets in college, according to his company biography.
He joined McDonnell Douglas Corp. in 1984 as a flight test engineer. Over the past 20 years, he oversaw the development of multiple successful IP ventures.
Greg Stone, a longtime ocean scientist and a friend of Rush, called him “a real pioneer” in the innovation of submersibles.
”Stockton was a risk-taker. He was smart. He was, he had a vision, he wanted to push things forward,” Stone said on Tuesday.
Hamish Harding
A British businessman, Harding lived in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.
Action Aviation, an aircraft brokering company for which Harding served as chairman, said he was one of the mission specialists, who paid to go on the expedition.
Harding was a billionaire adventurer who held three Guinness World Records, including the longest duration at full ocean depth by a crewed vessel.
In March 2021, he and ocean explorer Victor Vescovo dived to the lowest depth of the Mariana Trench. In June 2022, he went into space on Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket.
”Both the Harding family and the team at Action Aviation are very grateful for all the kind messages of concern and support from our friends and colleagues,” the company said in a statement.
In a Facebook post on Saturday, Harding said he was “proud” to be part of the mission.
”Due to the worst winter in Newfoundland in 40 years, this mission is likely to be the first and only manned mission to the Titanic in 2023,” he posted. “A weather window has just opened up and we are going to attempt a dive (Sunday).”
Harding was “looking forward to conducting research” at the Titanic site, said Richard Garriott de Cayeux, the president of The Explorers Club, a group to which Harding belonged.
Shahzada and Suleman Dawood
Father-and-son Shahzada and Suleman Dawood were members of one of Pakistan’s most prominent families. Their family had said in a statement that they were both aboard the vessel.
Their firm, Dawood Hercules Corp, based in Karachi, is involved in agriculture, petrochemicals and telecommunication infrastructure.
Shahzada Dawood also was on the board of trustees for the California-based SETI Institute that searches for extraterrestrial intelligence.
The Dawoods lived in the UK, according to SETI.
Shahzada Dawood was also a member of the Global Advisory Board at the Prince’s Trust International, founded by Britain’s King Charles III to address youth unemployment.
He had degrees from the University of Buckingham in the United Kingdom and Philadelphia University (now Thomas Jefferson University) in the US.
Condolences poured in from Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry, government officials, friends and ordinary Pakistanis. Pakistani TV stations halted their routine broadcasts and shared the news.
Salman Sufi, an adviser to Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif, wrote on Twitter: “Very sad and unfortunate news. Prayers for the families of deceased. Mr Dawood and family are in our prayers.”
Paul-Henri Nargeolet
Nargeolet was a former French navy officer who was considered a Titanic expert after making multiple trips to the wreckage over several decades.
He was director of underwater research for E/M Group and RMS Titanic Inc, had completed 37 dives to the wreck and supervised the recovery of 5000 artifacts, according to his company profile.
RMS Titanic, Inc, the company that owns the salvage rights to the Titanic shipwreck, mourned the longtime employee known as “PH”.
“The maritime world has lost an iconic and inspirational leader in deep-sea exploration, and we have lost a dear and treasured friend,” the company said in a statement on Thursday.
Friend and former colleague Matthew Tulloch said Nargeolet loved his work from the time they first collaborated in the 1990s up until Nargeolet’s death.
”I never got the impression that he was looking forward to retirement,” Tulloch said with a small laugh. “You sort of think of people as they retire, then they can go on and do things that they love to do. This was exactly that for him - I can’t think of anything that I’m aware of that he would enjoy doing more than traveling around and sharing information and his experiences with people.”
Nargeolet was expedition leader on the most technologically advanced dive to the Titanic in 2010, which used high-resolution sonar and 3D optical imaging on the Titanic’s bow and stern sections as well as the debris field.
While with the French Institute for Research and Exploitation of Sea, he led the first recovery expedition to the Titanic in 1987.
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