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The US and Canadian search teams are using “all available resources” to search for the submarine with five people on board that disappeared in the Atlantic Ocean. The Titan, which dived on June 18 for an exploration of the wreck of the Titanic, can only count on 96 hours of oxygen autonomy.
Five people were on board when contact with the small submarine was lost, approximately one hour and 45 minutes into the dive. The rescue operation continued through the night, but so far there is no sign of the OceanGate Expeditions submarine. “It’s a challenge to conduct a search in that remote area,” a Coast Guard commander said. “But we are deploying all available resources to make sure we can locate the vessel and rescue the people on board.”
From Guinness explorer to Pakistani billionaires, who’s on board
On board the submarine are five people, customers of a shipment that costs about 150 thousand dollars. The group includes Hamish Harding, 58, founder of the investment firm Action Group and passionate about adventures: in his palmares there are three Guinness World Records, including the longest time spent crossing the deepest part of the ocean – the Trench Marianne – in a single dive, and Earth’s fastest navigation across the North Pole and South Pole by plane.
Among the other members of the submarine, which descended to a depth of 3,800 meters, are Stockton Rush, founder of OceanGate Expeditions, the company that organized the voyage to the Titanic; Shahzada Dawood and her son Suleman, members of one of Pakistan’s leading business families; the French pilot Paul Henry Nargeolet. Harding himself wrote in a June 18 Instagram post that this will likely be the Titanic’s only crewed mission in 2023 “due to the worst weather in Newfoundland in 40 years.”