Coast Guard to continue search-and-rescue for missing Titanic tourist sub

Search-and-rescue operations for the Titan, a missing submersible carrying five people that vanished en route to the Titanic shipwreck, are not transitioning into recovery, the Coast Guard said on Wednesday afternoon.

Titan, the 21-foot tourist submersible, lost contact with its parent ship, the Canadian-owned Polar Prince, on Sunday morning. The U.S. and Canadian Coast Guards have joined forces with commercial, research and private vessels and aircraft, as well as teams from other countries, to search a span of the North Atlantic now twice the size of Connecticut.

OceanGate Exploration, the company that owns Titan and operates dives to the Titanic, made successful dives to the shipwreck in 2021 and 2022, according to the company’s website. Taking a journey with OceanGate, the only company offering dives to the Titanic site, can cost a “citizen scientist” $250,000.

U.S. and Canadian officials projected their hope that the Titan and the five passengers on board would be rescued, despite the adverse conditions.

“This is a search-and-rescue mission, 100 percent,” U.S. Coast Guard Capt. Jamie Frederick said at a news conference in Boston on Wednesday. “We are smack dab in the middle of search and rescue, and we’ll continue to put every available asset that we have in an effort to find the Titan and the crew members.”

Coast Guard officials told reporters on Tuesday that the submersible had about 40 hours of oxygen remaining; Coast Guard officials on Wednesday declined to provide specific estimates when asked by reporters.

“We just have to remain optimistic. We’ll keep working until we find the submersible, and again, I — I am very mindful of just how stressful and worrisome this is for the families, and — and of course the submersible team, the explorer team,” Joyce Murray, minister of Fisheries, Oceans and the Canadian Coast Guard, said at a news conference in Ottawa on Wednesday.

The Coast Guard has deployed C-130 aircraft searching by sight and radar and P-3 aircraft dropping monitor sonar buoys to help locate the submersible. Additional equipment and international vessels are expected to be deployed in the coming days; a French team is expected to arrive on Wednesday with a vessel that can reach even further depths than those currently deployed.

A Navy official told reporters on Wednesday that the Flyaway Deep Ocean Salvage System, or FADOSS, was on standby in Newfoundland for lifting the submersible once it is found. FADOSS equipment, typically used by the Navy to recover aircraft and other equipment at depths of up to 20,000 feet below sea level, must be welded onto a ship to provide for recovery, a process that is estimated to take 24 hours to complete.

Coast Guard and rescue team officials also confirmed that multiple P-3 planes flying over the search area detected noises. Though officials have not yet identified their nature or origin, officials confirmed that they have honed their search to the areas where the noises were detected.

While the Coast Guard has not yet released the log of passengers on the voyage, family members and associates have confirmed the identities of the passengers aboard the Titan: Hamish Harding, 58, a billionaire British explorer; Paul-Henri Nargeolet, 77, a French Titanic expert; British businessman Shahzana Dawood, 48, and his son, Suleman, 19; and Stockton Rush, 61, founder and CEO of OceanGate Expeditions.

Experts have underscored the scope of resources deployed to the search.

“The assets that are deployed out there are significant,” Larry Daley, president of Titanic Expeditions and an expert on the Titanic, said Wednesday on MSNBC. “I’ve never seen anything like this in my life. I haven’t seen this in a movie.”