US navy ‘heard Titan implosion days ago’: entire crew lost
A top secret military acoustic detection system designed to spot enemy subs first heard what the US Navy suspected was the Titan implosion hours after it launched.
A top secret military acoustic detection system designed to spot enemy submarines first heard what the US Navy suspected was the Titan submersible implosion hours after the vehicle began its mission, officials involved in the search have revealed.
The Navy began listening for the Titan almost as soon as the sub lost communications, a US defence official told the Wall St Journal. Shortly after the submersible’s disappearance on Sunday, the US system detected what it suspected was the sound of an implosion near the debris site and reported its findings to the commander on site, defence officials told the newspaper
“The US Navy conducted an analysis of acoustic data and detected an anomaly consistent with an implosion or explosion in the general vicinity of where the Titan submersible was operating when communications were lost,” a senior US Navy official said in a statement. “While not definitive, this information was immediately shared with the Incident Commander to assist with the ongoing search and rescue mission.”
The five men on board the Titan touring the Titanic wreck died after a catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber of the hull, the US Coast Guard announced early this morning (AEST).
US Coast Guard Rear Admiral John Mauger said the discovery by a remote operated vehicle of a debris field on the seafloor, just 1600 feet (500 meters) from the bow of the Titanic, on Friday morning Australian time, is “consistent with the catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber” of the missing Titan submersible.
He said families of the five onboard were immediately informed.
Some relatives including Christine and Alina Dawood, the wife and daughter of the Pakistani-British passengers Shahzada Dawood, 48, and his son Suleman, 19, had been waiting nearby to the search site waiting for news, family members said.
Suleman was “terrified” to go on the trip, his aunt has claimed, but eager to please his father, a Titanic enthusiast.
Azmeh Dawood, Shahzada’s older sister, told NBC News that her nephew Suleman told a relative that he “wasn’t very up for it” and felt “terrified” about the long trip down to the Titanic.
“I am thinking of Suleman, who is 19, in there, just perhaps gasping for breath... It’s been crippling, to be honest,” she said.
Wendy Rush, wife of Oceangate Expedition founder Stockton Rush and the company’s communications director, has ancestral connections to the Titanic. Her great great grand parents were two of the Titanic’s 1500 victims, the Macy owner Isidor Straus and his wife Ida.
Mr Rush, 61, often went on the Titanic trips, with his regular pilot the French navy veteran Paul-Henri Nargeolet. The fifth person was another paying passenger, British billionaire Hamish Harding. Mr Harding’s family have been critical of a delay taken by OceanGate Expeditions to raise the alarm with the coast guard that the sub was missing.
However it appears that the catastrophic loss of the sub may have happened around the time that the craft lost contact with the mother ship around an hour and 45 minutes after beginning their descent on Sunday.
If this is the case it may give comfort to grieving families that their loved ones died instantly, rather than perishing over a period of days due to lack of oxygen or through carbon dioxide poisoning.
Remote operated vehicles will continue to search the area, Rear Admiral John Mauger said.
OceanGate Expeditions, which operated the submersible tour of the Titanic wreck, charging wealthy customers as much as $US250,000 a seat said they believed all five on board “have sadly been lost”.
David Mearns, a fellow member of the Explorers Club and friend of Mr Harding and Mr Nargeolet, had earlier said he had direct information from the rescue team at the Titanic wreck site that the items found on the ocean floor were from the OceanGate Expedition submersible called Titan.
Mr Mearns told Sky News that the initial debris discovered by the remote operated vehicle was the landing frame and rear cover from submersible.
He said rear cover is the pointy end of it, while the landing frame is the frame it sits on, how it gets docked.
Paul Hanken, an undersea expert, said that the robot had then found and filmed the discovery of five different major pieces of debris confirmed it was remains of the Titan.
“The initial thing we found was the nose cone... then we found a large debris field. Within that large debris field, we found the front end bell of the pressure hull. That was the first indication that there was a catastrophic event,’’ he said.
“Shortly after, we found a second smaller debris field within that debris field. We found the other end of the press hull that basically comprised of the totality of that pressure chamber.’’
Rear Admiral Mauger said the banging noises picked up by sonar boys dropped into the area earlier in the week - and which gave renewed hope to the friends and families of those on board - may have been “background ocean noise’’.
The US Coast guard used specialised equipment from the recently arrived Horizon Arctic to search immediately around the last known position of the sub.
The deaths of the five people on board the Titan, a six metre, unregulated submersible which successfully started operations with OceanGate Expeditions in 2021 has raised many questions about regulations in international waters.
The wreck of the Titanic sits 3800m below in a remote area of ocean some 600km east of Newfoundland.
Rescuers had been hoping that the emergency oxygen tanks inside the sub could have kept the occupants alive for up to five days if the sub had been trapped in the Titanic wreckage or suffered a communication failure. That deadline had passed at 9pm on Thursday night.
The Titan featured a single porthole and was designed to dive be able to withstand 150 million pounds of pressure. It had 12.7cm thick carbon fibre hull, the safetyof which was the source of a legal dispute between Mr Rush and a former OceanGate Expeditions employee.
David Lochridge, the company’s former director of marine operations, settled a legal case with OceanGate Expeditions for wrongful dismissal in 2018 after he raised concerns about inadequate testing of the integrity of the hull while it was being developed.
Another ex-employee told CNN that the hull had supposed to be another four and a half centimetres thicker when it arrived from the factory.
The cavalier approach taken by Mr Rush in his quest to turn viewing the Titanic into a commercial operation, included a blog post in 2019 explaining why it was not classed by any regulators. He explained that classing innovative designs often requires multiyear approval process “which gets in the way of rapid innovation’’.
Will Kohnen, the chair of The Marine Technology Society Submersible Committee co-authored a letter to OceanGate in 2018 raising “unanimous concern” about the way the Titan sub had been “developed.”
Mr Kohnen said OceanGate had “pushed the envelope” and the company’s approach was “we intentionally break rules because can do it better and faster”.
OceanGate issued a statement this morning, after the debris discovery which said: “We now believe that our CEO Stockton Rush, Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood, Hamish Harding, and Paul-Henri Nargeolet, have sadly been lost.
“These men were true explorers who shared a distinct spirit of adventure, and a deep passion for exploring and protecting the world’s oceans. Our hearts are with these five souls and every member of their families during this tragic time. We grieve the loss of life and joy they brought to everyone they knew.
“This is an extremely sad time for our dedicated employees who are exhausted and grieving deeply over this loss. The entire OceanGate family is deeply grateful for the countless men and women from multiple organizations of the international community who expedited wide-ranging resources and have worked so very hard on this mission.
“We appreciate their commitment to finding these five explorers, and their days and nights of tireless work in support of our crew and their families.
“This is a very sad time for the entire explorer community, and for each of the family members of those lost at sea.’’
James Cameron, the filmmaker of the blockbuster movie Titanic, who is also a builder of deep sea submersibles, told American network ABC he was struck by the similarity of the OceanGate disaster with the Titanic sinking in 1912. He said the deep sea community was concerned about this particular OceanGate submarine and had written letters to the company warning that what they were doing was too experimental to carry passengers.
He said: “I am struck similarity of (the loss of Titan to the) Titanic disaster where the captain was repeatedly warned about ice and he steamed full speed into an ice field on a moonless night. This is a similar tragedy at the same exact site, it is astonishing, quite surreal.’’
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