Despite fears about the lack of oxygen on board, the goal of the search teams is still to save the occupants of the submersible alive, US Coast Guard operations director John Mauger told NBC television on Thursday morning. Difficult situations show again and again “that the will to survive also counts”.
The submarine “Titan”, operated by the company OceanGate Expeditions, set off on a tourist dive trip to the wreck of the sunken “Titanic” on Sunday. After almost two hours, contact with the escort ship broke off, and since then there has been no trace of the 6.5 meter long submarine. When it launched, the submersible had oxygen for the five men on board for around 96 hours – theoretically enough until Thursday.
The US Coast Guard and the Canadian Coast Guard have been searching an area of around 20,000 square kilometers almost 650 kilometers off the coast of the Canadian province of Newfoundland from the air and on the water for days. The search teams are primarily concentrating on a region in which sonar devices recorded underwater noises on Tuesday. However, the origin of the noise is unclear.
The diving robot “Victor 6000”, brought into the search area by the French special ship “Atalante”, can dive up to six kilometers deep and thus search the seabed around the “Titanic” wreck at a depth of around 3800 meters. He has powerful searchlights and two gripper arms with which he could attach ropes for a salvage to the “Titan” – if he finds the submersible. After arriving in the search area, the “Atalante” began to measure the seabed in the region with special echo sounders in order to enable a more targeted use of the diving robot.
British Antarctic Society expert Rob Larter called Victor 6000 the “best hope” for rescuing those missing aboard Titan. However, it could “possibly take weeks of intensive search” to find the tiny submarine in the huge search area. “An objective assessment of the state of affairs: It doesn’t look good,” Larter said.
It usually takes about two hours for a diving robot like “Victor 6000” to descend to the depth of the “Titanic” wreck and just as long until it reappears, said Professor Alistair Greig from University College London.
Aboard the missing mini-sub are OceanGate Expeditions chief Stockton Rush, British entrepreneur and adventurer Hamish Harding, Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son Suleman, and French Titanic expert Paul- Henri Nargeolet.
