Titanic submersible missing for 3 days, US and Canada race against time to save billionaires onboard
Search operations for the missing OceanGate Titanic submersible have entered Day 3, with US and Canada joining forces to save the 5 people onboard. The tourist submersible is left with some 25 hours of oxygen supply. The OceanGate submersible, named Titan, lost contact with its mothership Polar Prince on Sunday, June 18, in the North Atlantic, off the coast of Newfoundland.
The latest
Officials from both US and Canada have started working jointly to locate the tourist company OceanGate-owned submersible, which was carrying 5 individuals to the Titanic wreckage site.
According to calculations by experts, the ‘Titan’, as the submersible is known, has about 25 hours of oxygen supply left. If these calculations are accurate, the oxygen on the submersible could get depleted by Thursday morning.
Recently, both CNN and Rolling Stone reported that on Tuesday, June 19, while the search and rescue operation was in process, the sonar picked up repetitive banging sounds at a 30-minute interval in the North Atlantic Ocean. But, according to both their memos, it was difficult to understand exactly when the banging was heard on Tuesday.
A later update from the rescue team officials said that the sounds could not exactly be described as “banging”.
Later, it was also reported that a Canadian P-3 aircraft, involved in the search and rescue operation, located a white rectangular object in the North Atlantic waters.
Search and rescue operations
Three C-130 aircraft and three C-17 transport planes from the US military and a patrol aircraft along with two surface ships have been further deployed to look for the missing submersible. So far, an area of 7,600 sq miles (1970 sq km) has been covered, a distance which scales beyond the US state of Connecticut.
Who are onboard
Five individuals are onboard the tourist submersible. OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, French navigator and diver Paul-Henri Nargeolet, British billionaire Hamish Harding, and British-Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood with his son Sulaiman are on the submersible. Hamish Harding posted to his Facebook account a photo of the Titan submersible before boarding it.
Shahzada Dawood's family, meanwhile, confirmed to the media that he and his son Sulaiman are onboard the Titan.
The tourists each paid $250,000 to go down the submersible to see the Titanic wreckage.
The OceanGate submersible has completed 18 dives in the past, according to its website. It visited the Titanic wreckage site in 2021 and 2022. However, OceanGate's 'experimental' submersible had received several warnings from deep-sea experts in the past, some of whom warned the company of potential for 'catastrophic' problems.
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