pilot and passenger of titan submersible missing Oceangate, the company that operated deep-sea submersibles for the Titanic wreckage, said on Thursday that these people are believed to be dead.
Oceangate Expeditions said Thursday that its pilot and chief executive Stockton Rush, along with passengers Prince Dawood and his son Sulaiman Dawood, Hamish Harding and Paul-Henri Nargiolet, are “tragically lost.”
Oceangate did not provide details on when the company announced the “loss of life” in a statement or how officials knew the crew members were killed.
The search for the missing submarine, including five people on board, took a depressing turn on June 22, when the US Coast Guard said a wreckage area had been found on the ocean floor near the Titanic, and the crucial 96-hour mark had passed. when the air to breathe could run out,
The Coast Guard’s post on Twitter did not say whether officials believe the debris is linked to the Titanic, which was on an expedition to view the wreckage of the Titanic. It added that the wreckage was discovered within the search area by a remotely operated underwater robot and is being evaluated.
Titan was estimated to have about a four-day supply of breathable air when it launched into the North Atlantic on Sunday morning — but experts have stressed that was a vague estimate to begin with and if the passengers This can be increased if measures are taken to conserve the breathable air. , And it is not known whether they have survived since the sub’s disappearance.
Rescue workers have sent ships, aircraft and other equipment to the missing site. On Thursday, the US Coast Guard said an undersea robot sent by a Canadian ship had reached the ocean floor, while a French research institute said a deep-diving robot with cameras, lights and arms was also involved in the operation. Done.
Authorities hope the underwater soundings can help narrow their search, whose coverage area has extended thousands of miles — twice the size of Connecticut and in water 2 1/2 miles (4 kilometers) deep. . Coast Guard officials said underwater noises were detected in the search area on Tuesday and Wednesday.
Jamie Pringle, a specialist in forensic geosciences at Keele University in England, said that even if the sounds were coming from the submersible, “the lack of oxygen is now the dominant one; even if they detect it, they still have to go to the surface and unbolt it.” “
The Titan was reported late Sunday afternoon about 435 miles (700 kilometers) south of St. John’s, Newfoundland, as it headed to the spot where the iconic ocean liner sank more than a century ago. Oceangate Expeditions, which is leading the voyage, is detailing the decay of the Titanic and the ecosystem of its surrounding waters through annual visits through 2021.
By Thursday morning, there was little hope that anyone aboard the ship would be found alive.
Many hurdles still remain: from locating the ship, to reaching it with rescue equipment, to bringing it to the surface – assuming it’s still intact. And all this before the passengers’ oxygen supply runs out.
Dr Rob Larter, a marine geophysicist at the British Antarctic Survey, stressed the difficulty of finding something the size of the sub – which is about 22 feet (6.5 metres) long and 9 feet (about 3 metres) high.
“You’re talking about a completely dark environment,” in which an object several dozen feet away can be missed, he said. “It’s just a needle in a haystack position until you’ve got a very precise spot.”
Newly unearthed allegations reveal that significant warnings about ship safety were raised during the submarine’s development.
Broadcasters around the world began their newscasts on Thursday with news of the submersible at a crucial time. Saudi owned satellite channel al arabia A clock was shown on the air counting down to their estimate of when the air could potentially end.
Captain Jamie Frederick of the First Coast Guard District said a day earlier that authorities still hoped to rescue the five passengers aboard the ship.
“It is a 100% search and rescue mission,” he said on Wednesday.
Retired Navy Capt. Carl Hartsfield, who is now director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Systems Laboratory, described the detected sounds as “thumping noises”, but warned that the search team had to “put the whole picture in context”. They have to stick together and they have done that.” To eliminate possible man-made sources other than Titan.” Capt. Frederick acknowledged Wednesday that the officers didn’t make the noises appear.
Reports of sounds were encouraging to some experts because submarine crews unable to contact the surface are taught to bang on their submarine’s hull to be detected by sonar.
The US Navy said in a statement on Wednesday that it is deploying a specialized rescue system capable of lifting “large, heavy and bulky undersea objects such as aircraft or small ships”.
Titan weighs 20,000 pounds (9,000 kg). The US Navy’s Flyaway Deep Ocean Salvage System is designed to lift weights of up to 60,000 pounds (27,200 kg), the Navy said on its website.
On board the ship the CEO of Oceangate, pilot Stockton Rush, is lost. His passengers are: British adventurer Hamish Harding; Pakistani businessman Prince Dawood and his son Sulaiman; and French explorer and Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargiolet.
In the first comments from Pakistan since the disappearance of Titan, Pakistani Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mumtaz Zahra Baloch said on Thursday that authorities were confident of the search efforts.
“We would not like to speculate on the circumstances of this incident and we would also like to respect the wishes of the Dawood family that their privacy be respected,” he added.
In 2021 and 2022, at least 46 people have successfully traveled from Oceangate’s submersibles to the Titanic wreck site, according to papers filed by the company in the US District Court in Norfolk, Virginia, which oversees cases related to the Titanic wreck.
One of the company’s first customers described a dive carried out at the site two years earlier as a “kamikaze operation”.
“Imagine a metal tube a few meters long with a sheet of metal for a floor. You can’t stand it. You can’t kneel. Everyone is sitting close to each other or on top of each other,” said Arthur Loible, a retired businessman and adventurer from Germany. “You can’t be claustrophobic.”
During the 2 1/2-hour descent and ascent, the lights were turned off to save energy, he said, with the only light coming from a fluorescent glow stick.
The dive was repeatedly delayed to fix problems with batteries and balance weights. In total, the journey took 10 1/2 hours.
The submersible had seven backup systems for returning to the surface, including sandbags and lead pipes that would collapse and an inflatable balloon.
Nick Rotker, who is the leader of underwater research for the non-profit research and development company MITRE, said the difficulty of exploring Titan underscores the US need for more underwater robots and remotely operated underwater vehicles. Have done
“The issue is that we don’t have the capability or the systems to go to the depth that this ship was going,” Mr. Rotkar said.
Nikolai Rotterman, a deep-sea ecologist and lecturer in marine biology at the University of Portsmouth in England, said Titan’s disappearance highlights the dangers and unknowns of deep-sea tourism.
“Even the most reliable technology can fail, and therefore accidents will happen. With the rise in deep sea tourism, we should expect more incidents like this.
(With inputs from AP and Reuters)