Sonar drones are deployed to find Titanic explorers lost in 22ft tube at the bottom of the Atlantic – as experts say the chances of success are wretched, and passengers’ best hope might be to BANG on the hull
- Experts say it may take miracle to find submarine lost at the bottom of Atlantic
- The group’s best hope may be to bang on the hull in the dark and scream for help
Lost for three days in a freezing 22ft tube at the bottom of the ocean, the missing Titanic explorers’ chances of rescue appeared wretched tonight.
If they are still alive, the terrifying reality is that their best hope is to repeatedly bang on the hull in the dark and scream for help.
Two and a half miles above, on the choppy surface of the Atlantic, sophisticated sonar buoys are bobbing around listening for any signs of life in the murky depths. They are part of a massive rescue operation launched on Sunday night that was ramped up yesterday with aircraft and ships scouring the Atlantic.
State-of-the-art underwater drones are also being deployed in the desperate hunt in the waters where the cursed Titanic sunk 111 years ago.
But experts warned that conditions are so treacherous it will take a miracle just to find the missing submarine – let alone rescue it – before its dwindling oxygen supply runs out tomorrow.
State-of-the-art underwater drones are also being deployed in the desperate hunt in the waters where the cursed Titanic sunk 111 years ago
Royal Navy Rear Admiral Chris Parry likened the bottom of the Atlantic to ‘being in space’, saying: ‘It’s utterly dark down there, and you have also got a lot of mud and other stuff getting swept up. You can only see about 20 feet in front of you with searchlights. There are very strong ocean currents which are pushing you along.’
‘Passengers have to sign a waiver which mentions DEATH three times’
A former Titan passenger has revealed how adventurers have to sign a waiver warning them of deadly risks before embarking on the submarine.
Mike Reiss, a New York-based writer who travelled on the Titan to the Titanic wreckage last year, said that communication failures were commonplace.
He told the BBC: ‘I have taken three different dives with this company, one at the Titanic and two others and you almost always lost communication.’ He added: ‘Nobody walked into this with any illusions. You sign a waiver before you even get on the boat. It mentions death, and three different ways you can die, on page one.
‘If, in the worst case, they are down at the bottom of the ocean, I can’t see how anyone can get to them, much less rescue them.’
If the mini-sub has lost power, with no working propellers, lights or heating, its five passengers will be in total darkness in temperatures of around 3C (37F) as the doomed craft rolls along the seabed.
Oceanographer and Titanic expert David Gallo said: ‘Where is it? Is it on the bottom, is it floating, is it mid-water? That is something that has not been determined yet. The water is very deep – two miles plus. It’s like a visit to another planet. It is a sunless, cold environment and high pressure.’
The basic problem is that the submersible, Titan, has stopped transmitting signals, making it almost impossible to locate. It is supposed to send a sonar ‘ping’ (radar and GPS not functioning under water) to mothership Polar Prince every 15 minutes, but the last one was at 9.45am EST (2.45pm UK time) on Sunday – an hour and 45 minutes into the dive as it was floating right above the Titanic.
For some reason, OceanGate Expeditions, the company that runs the tours of the Titanic, took eight hours to call the coastguard on Sunday. It was reported to the US Coastguard at 5.40pm (10.40pm UK time), and Canada’s coastguard was alerted even later, at 9.13pm (2am on Monday UK time).
OceanGate Expeditions charges wealthy tourists £195,000-a-head for the ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ chance to see the 1912 shipwreck up close.The last haunting photo of Titan shows it being towed along by mothership Polar Prince in grey choppy seas shortly before submerging, 350 miles off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada. The sealed vessel descended with 96 hours of air, meaning it is due to run out at 10am tomorrow UK time.
Finding a 22ft-long craft on the surface of the ocean is hard enough, let alone underwater, but a massive search is under way. A fleet of Canadian ships – the Skandi Vinland, Atlantic Merlin and Kopit Hopson, an 83 metre-long icebreaker equipped with a helicopter – steamed to the rescue area, along with tugboats, cutters, and commercial vessels.
Tonight Deep Energy, a pipe-laying ship, arrived above the Titanic site and launched its underwater drone, which is equipped with a camera, towards the sub’s last known position.
Shahzada Dawood (right), 48, a UK-based board member of the Prince’s Trust charity, and his son Sulaiman, 19, were in the tiny underwater craft when it lost signal in the Atlantic Ocean
Stockton Rush, 58, is Chief Executive Officer and founder of OceanGate Inc. He is understood to have been leading the underwater mission
World-renowned explorer Hamish Harding, 58, is among the five people who went missing aboard the tourist submarine
The Canadian and US authorities also deployed a P-8 Poseidon, a cutting-edge aircraft normally used to hunt Russian submarines, a CP-140 maritime patrol aircraft, and two C-130 Hercules planes.
READ MORE: COASTGUARD SAYS IT CAN’T GUARANTEE RESCUE OF MISSING TITANIC SUBMARINE
At a press conference at the US Coast Guard Station in Boston – which is coordinating the search and rescue effort – First District Response Coordinator Capt. Jamie Frederick said it was not certain the sub could be saved – even if it is found today
The P-8 carries 129 sonar buoys, which are dropped on to the surface of the water and ‘ping’ for submarines, working out the location of underwater objects by the speed and trajectory of the returning echo. But they are scanning for a small craft on a search area of 7,600 square miles.
Horrifyingly – even if Titan had made it to the surface – the passengers would still face suffocation unless they were located because the submarine cannot be opened from the inside. Its door is sealed by 17 bolts to withstand the enormous water pressure at depth.Titan is designed to automatically resurface after a certain number of hours underwater, even if it has lost power, with weights being dropped to make the craft buoyant.
But the US admiral leading the search said the craft might have become entangled in the Titanic’s wreckage, meaning it would have to be cut free by force. No human can dive so deep, and even nuclear submarines cannot safely go there, with both the US and British navies saying the depths ‘greatly exceed’ their operating capabilities.
In contrast however, France has dispatched a research vessel equipped with a deep-sea robot whose umbilical cord can extend five miles, which is expected to arrive this morning.
Ultimately there may be only two underwater vessels on Earth with a chance of completing the deepest undersea rescue mission ever. CURV-21, a remote-operated vehicle (ROV) can reach depths of 20,000 feet – almost twice the depth of the Titanic – and was used by the US Navy last year to salvage a crashed F-35 Joint Strike Fighter in the South China Sea.
It is unclear where CURV-21 is, but in any case the kinds of ships that transport it normally move no faster than about 20mph. Triton, an American manufacturer of deep-sea submersibles, has a two-person deep-sea model.
A British-based firm, Magellan Limited, also has a vehicle that could dive that deep, but it says the US government had allegedly blocked them from joining the mission. But even if an ROV could find the missing sub, pulling it free and bringing it to the surface would be an immense and unprecedented challenge.
In full working order, it takes Titan two hours to make a safe ascent. Winching it to the surface – even if a three-mile sturdy chain was readily available – would be fraught with peril.
Back at the surface, the sub would then urgently need to be opened – no easy task for a craft designed to withstand 6,000lbs of pressure and which might be damaged. When British engineers Roger Mallinson and Roger Chapman were rescued from their submersible Pisces III in 1973, they had an estimated 12 minutes of air left when the hatch was finally jemmied open.
In Titan’s case, it could require what one expert called a ‘serious tin opener’ to break through the armour plating without harming the occupants.
The French vessel Atalante, which was on a mission for the French Research Institute for Exploitation of the Sea, should arrive in the area today at around 6pm UK time.
Its deep-sea underwater robot, Victor 6000, operates from an umbilical cord that can extend five miles and is able to work in deep seas up to 18,000ft.
However last night an experienced diver who has travelled far into the depths of the ocean to view the Titanic wreckage fears the submersible may have simply ‘imploded’.
An implosion would mean any hope is long gone. If any part of the submersible’s carbon-fibre and titanium hull had suffered a small crack or fault, under the weight of two-and-a-half miles of water, the craft would have been squashed flat within a fraction of a second.
The search site is some 900 miles off the coast of Cape Cod, 400 miles southeast of Newfoundland. Getting there is a difficult enough feat without finding the missing sub beneath the ocean surface
The 21ft submersible has an oxygen supply of up to 96 hours
At 9.45am – an hour and 45 minutes into the dive – it lost contact with its mothership, the Polar Prince. But it wasn’t reported as missing to the US Coast Guard until 5.40pm, eight hours later. Canada ‘s Coast Guard wasn’t alerted until even later – 9.13pm on Sunday night.
The logistical challenge is immense; the Titanic wreck is situated some 400 miles southeast of St Johns, Newfoundland – around 900 miles east of Cape Cod.
A Canadian Coast Guard cutter is expected to arrive at the search area this evening.
It takes several days for Coast Guard ships to reach the site from the US.
In addition to the underwater remote operated vehicles and Coast Guard ships, several aircraft are surveying the water for any signs of the sub on the surface.
‘We don’t want to exhaust one possibility in place of another. We don’t want to rule out that it is on the surface.
‘If it is on the surface we are fairly certain we will be able to find it,’ U.S. Coast Guard First District Captain Robert Simpson added.
DailyMail.com previously revealed it took OceanGate eight hours to report the submersible as missing.
The company has not yet explained why it took so long to raise the alarm.
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