The Momma Clan

(Titan submarine. Image courtesy: New York Post)

The five men on board the missing Titanic-bound submersible have been announced dead.

The bodies of the team may not be reclaimed, as there is no association between the noises picked up from the seafloor and the submarine’s direction.

About five days of a frantic search for the lost five-person submersible, from Sunday evening to Thursday evening, has ended after chunks of the vessel were detected following a possible awful implosion, the U.S. Coast Guard said on Thursday. 

Five crucial components of the 22-foot (6.7-meter) Titan were discovered in the debris field left from its breakdown, containing the vessel’s tail cone and two columns of the pressure hull, Coast Guard officials indicated. No remark was made of whether human remains were spotted.

At the press conference, U.S. Coast Guard Rear Admiral John Mauger declared a remote-operated Robot vehicle found debris roughly 1600 feet from the bow of the Titanic on the seafloor.

(Robot vehicle. Image courtesy: Ifremer BBC)

The remains “is consistent with the catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber of the missing submersible,” Mauger told.

Families of those on board were informed immediately after the finding. The five people clasped inside the Titan submarine were:

Paul-Henry Nargeolet, 73

Stockton Rush, 61

Hamish Harding, 58

Shahzada Dawood, 48

Sulaiman Dawood, 19

Explorers Club Conveys Tribute To Members Who Died On Board Titan –

The president of The Explorers Club, a professional society concentrated on field study, delivered a heartfelt tribute to those lost on board the Titan, comprising two of the members of the club.

“Our hearts are broken. I am so sorry to have to share this tragic news. Hamish Harding, one of the victims, is a dear friend to me,” Richard Garriott de Cayeux, president of The Explorers Club, announced in the news.

The condolence was paid at 1.16 a.m. June 23, 2023.

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Features of the submarine –

The Titan submarine is very small and slim measuring barely 670 cm x 280 cm x 250 cm (22ft x 9.2ft x 8.3ft) and can carry a team of only five people, a pilot and four passengers, who have to squat on the ground and have insufficient space to move over. The price for an expedition to the Titanic wreck cost about $250,000.

The sinking from the surface to the Titanic normally takes three hours during which the lights are blurred and the passengers can see the underwater activity through a porthole. There are no windows inside the submersible which is needed to show a safety ping every 15 minutes to be monitored by the above-water squad. 

(Submarine’s interiors and exteriors. Image courtesy: New York Post)

The vessel and surface team can also express via short text messages. The ship doesn’t have an onboard navigation system. It’s the support ship, monitoring the position of Titan relative to its target, that sends text messages to the sub, giving distances and locations.

Apart from sending divers to the wreck of the Titanic, it’s utilized for site analysis and study, research and data collection, film and media production, and deep sea exploration of hardware and software.

According to the company, OceanGate Expeditions, the Titan is “outfitted with state-of-the-art lighting and sonar navigation systems plus internally and externally mounted 4K video and photographic equipment”.

The BBC’s US collaborator CBS sent one of its reporters on a voyage with the same company last year to glimpse the wreck of the Titanic, in the North Atlantic Ocean.

Stockton Rush then provided him a tour of the submersible, where he disclosed the vessel just has one button and is operated employing a video game controller.

It is not rare for off-the-shelf game regulators to be utilized in real-life vehicles. But, the Washington Post notes that the one noticed in the CBS report seemed to be an old replica.

The Polar Prince first came near the Titanic wreck on the 18th of June on Sunday morning and the Titan was launched at 8:00 a.m local time. It was anticipated to resurface at 3:00 p.m. Connection was lost one hour and 45 minutes into its dive, at about 9:45 a.m.

(Titan’s launch. Image courtesy: Twitter)

The Coast Guard said they were instructed of the crisis at about 5:45 p.m., eight hours later. The agency’s command center in Boston then began organizing search undertakings. The Titanic wreck at a depth of 4 km or 12,500 feet is nearly 600 km (370 miles) off the coast of Newfoundland.

A CBS News column claimed that all passengers who enter the Titan sign a disclaimer upholding their knowledge that it is an “experimental vessel that has not been verified or insured by any regulatory body, and could lead to physical injury, disability, emotional trauma or death.”

Now, most underwater research and offshore industrial tasks are performed using unmanned and robotic carriers. A casualty to one of these wagons might jeopardize the job being done, but at least lives aren’t at risk. Due to these very incidents, there will be a serious debate about the dangers related to adopting these operations to aid deep-sea tourism.