WASHINGTON: The deep-sea submersible Titan carrying five persons on a voyage to the century-old wreck of the Titanic was found destroyed by a devastating implosion that killed all the five, including two Pakistanis, aboard, the US Coast Guard said on Thursday, that also culminated a multinational five-day search for the unfortunate vessel.
US Coast Guard Rear Admiral John Mauger told journalists that a robotic diving vehicle dispatched from a Canadian ship located a debris of the submersible Titan on Thursday morning on the seabed about 1,600 feet from the bow of the Titanic, four km beneath the water surface, in a remote section of the North Atlantic.
The Titan, owned by the US-based company OceanGate Expeditions, had been missing since it lost contact with its support ship on surface on Sunday morning about an hour, forty-five minutes into what should have been a 2-hour dive to the most famous shipwreck in the world.
Five major pieces of the 22-foot Titan were located in the debris field left from its disintegration, including the submersible’s tail cone and two pieces of the pressure hull, according to Coast Guard officials. They did not say anything whether human remains were sighted, Reuters reported.
Titan Travellers
Even before the Coast Guard’s media conference, OceanGate released a statement saying there were no survivors among the 5 men aboard the Titan, including the company’s founder and chief executive (CEO) officer, Stockton Rush, who was piloting the submersible.
The four other travellers were British billionaire and explorer Hamish Harding; Pakistani-born business personality Shahzada Dawood, and his 19-year-old son Suleman Dawood, both British citizens; and French oceanographer and well-known Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet, who had visited the historic wreck dozens of times.
Search and rescue teams from the US, France, Canada, and Britain had spent days searching thousands of square miles of open waters with planes and vessels for any sign of the Titan.
Mauger said it was premature to tell when Titan met its fate. Search teams had deployed sonar buoys in sea for more than three days in the area without locationg any loud noise that could have been heard when the submersible imploded.
But the location of the debris field relatively close the Titanic shipwreck and the time frame of the last communication with the submersible seemed to suggest the failure occurred on Sunday.
