latest news on tourist submarine

Titanic submersible live updates: 'Catastrophic implosion' killed five aboard, possibly Sunday

Editor's note: This page reflects the news on the missing submarine from Thursday, June 22. For the  latest updates on the missing submersible  and the recovery efforts, read our  live updates page for Friday, June 23 .

The five people aboard the submersible that had been missing for days were killed when the small vessel carrying them to the Titanic wreckage site had a "catastrophic implosion,'' the Coast Guard said Thursday afternoon.

Members of a massive international search effort found a debris field in the general area of the Titanic earlier in the day, and it was confirmed to contain parts of the Titan sub.

"The debris is consistent with a catastrophic implosion of the vessel," Rear Adm. John Mauger, commander of the First Coast Guard District, said in a news conference.

The debris was found about 1,600 feet from the Titanic's bow on the sea floor, Mauger said, adding that it was too early to tell when the Titan imploded.

However, an "anomaly'' the U.S. Navy detected Sunday was likely the small watercraft's fatal blast, according to a senior military official. The irregularity was picked up when the Navy went back and analyzed its acoustic data after the submersible was reported missing that day.

That anomaly was “consistent with an implosion or explosion in the general vicinity of where the Titan submersible was operating when communications were lost,” a senior Navy official told The Associated Press, speaking on condition of anonymity. The Navy shared the information with the Coast Guard, but the data was not considered definitive.

Paul Hankins, the U.S. Navy director of salvage operations and ocean engineering, said the debris found Thursday indicated a "catastrophic event." He and Mauger said it included a tail cone, the end bell of the pressure hull and the aft end bell, which according to Hankins, "basically comprise the totality of that pressure vessel."

The 22-foot vehicle was on a dive to the Titanic site when it lost contact with its support ship Sunday morning.

OceanGate, the company that operated the Titan – and whose CEO, Stockton Rush, piloted the watercraft – issued a statement saying the travelers "have sadly been lost.''

"We grieve the loss of life and joy they brought to everyone they knew,'' the statement said.

The other four people believed to have perished were Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood, British adventurer Hamish Harding and French deep-sea explorer and Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet.

“Our hearts go out to the families and loved ones of those who lost their lives on the Titan,” the White House said in a statement. “They have been through a harrowing ordeal over the past few days, and we are keeping them in our thoughts and prayers.”

Debris field discovered early Thursday

Search and rescue crews remotely operating an underwater vehicle had discovered debris near the Titanic earlier Thursday, the day the submersible was expected to run out of oxygen .

The debris was found by a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) associated with the Canadian vessel Horizon Arctic that reached the sea floor and began searching for the submersible early Thursday, according to the Coast Guard, which said ROVs will be used in a continued investigation of what happened.

The complex search and rescue mission attracted international attention and involved personnel from the U.S., Canada, France and the United Kingdom . Another ROV, associated with the French vessel L'Atalante, also deployed Thursday, the Coast Guard said.

The accelerating search efforts came as an updated prediction by the Coast Guard said the Titan submersible was likely to run out of oxygen roughly around 7 a.m. EDT Thursday. It initially had 96 hours of oxygen for a crew of five. Experts have noted that the estimates are imprecise. In the end, running out of oxygen was not the biggest problem.

Inside the underwater vessel: Reporter who rode Titanic submersible tells USA TODAY about 'less sophisticated' parts

Wife of OceanGate CEO descended from Titanic victims

The wife of OceanGate's CEO is descended from victims of the Titanic wreck of 1912, genealogical records suggest.

Wendy Rush, the wife of Stockton Rush, is the great-great-granddaughter of Isidor and Ida Straus , The New York Times first reported . USA TODAY confirmed the tie through genealogical records online.

The couple was last seen together on the deck of the Titanic holding hands as it sank, according to the U.K. government's National Archives. Rush's great-grandmother was their daughter Minnie, who married Richard Weil, said Joan Adler, executive director of the Straus Historical Society, a nonprofit that preserves information relating to the Straus Family.

Rush works as OceanGate's director of communications and has participated in three past OceanGate journeys to the Titanic site, according to her LinkedIn page .

Pakistani teen was student in Scotland

Suleman Dawood, the Pakistani 19-year-old aboard the vessel, was a student at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland, the university confirmed Thursday. He just completed his first year in the business school there.

"We are deeply concerned about Suleman, his father and the others involved in this incident. Our thoughts are with their families and loved ones and we continue to hope for a positive outcome," the university said.

Deep ocean salvage system arrives for search

Rescue crews on Thursday had faced wind gusts up to 19 mph and ocean swells up to 5 feet, with an air temperature of 50 degrees Fahrenheit, according to the Coast Guard.

The U.S. Navy said Wednesday afternoon that a special deep-water salvage system capable of hoisting up to 60,000 pounds had reached St. John’s, Canada, and could be used to lift the Titan to the surface, though it may not be ready for another 24 hours. The Titan weighs 23,000 pounds, according to the OceanGate website.

Submersible previously had battery issues

At least 46 people successfully traveled on OceanGate’s submersible to the Titanic wreck site in 2021 and 2022, according to letters the company filed with a U.S. District Court in Virginia.

"On the first dive to the Titanic, the submersible encountered a battery issue and had to be manually attached to its lifting platform," one filing says. "In the high sea state, the submersible sustained modest damage to its external components and OceanGate decided to cancel the second mission for repairs and operational enhancements."

Arthur Loibl, a retired businessman from Germany, took a dive to the site two years ago. "Imagine a metal tube a few meters long with a sheet of metal for a floor. You can't stand. You can't kneel. Everyone is sitting close to or on top of each other," Loibl told the Associated Press. "You can't be claustrophobic."

During the 2.5-hour descent and ascent, the lights were turned off to conserve energy, he said, with the only illumination coming from a fluorescent glow stick. The dive was repeatedly delayed to fix a problem with the battery and the balancing weights. In total, the voyage took 10.5 hours, he said.

Underwater noises heard for two days

Aircraft detected underwater noises in the search area on Tuesday and Wednesday, prompting officials to redirect rescue efforts, said Capt. Jamie Frederick, the First Coast Guard District response coordinator, in a news conference Wednesday. Navy acoustic analysts were studying the sounds, he said.

"We don't know what they are," Frederick said. "The good news is, we’re searching in the area where the noises were detected." The search net covers a surface area roughly two times the size of Connecticut and 2.5 miles deep, he said.

At the press conference Wednesday, Carl Hartsfield, director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, said the sounds have been described as "banging noises." He cautioned against jumping to conclusions and said sounds that aren’t man-made may sound man-made to the untrained ear.

Missing Titanic submersible: Maps, graphics show last location, depth and design

Who is on the passenger list of the submersible?

These are the passengers who were on the submersible :

◾ Stockton Rush, 61, CEO of OceanGate, who co-founded the company in 2009.

◾ Paul-Henry Nargeolet, 73, a French maritime explorer and director of the Underwater Research Program at Premier Exhibitions, RMS Titanic Inc., the only company with exclusive rights to recover the artifacts from the Titanic wreck.

◾ Hamish Harding, 58, a British explorer, private jet dealer and chairman of Action Aviation, a global sales company in business aviation.

◾ Shahzada Dawood, 48, a member of one of Pakistan’s most prominent families.

◾ Suleman Dawood, 19, son of Shahzada Dawood.

– Isabelle Butera, USA TODAY

Who pays the cost of Coast Guard rescues?

The cost of the search and rescue mission is likely in the millions of dollars – and will fall to taxpayers, said Chris Boyer, the executive director of the National Association for Search and Rescue, a nonprofit education, training and advocacy group.

He said the Coast Guard doesn’t charge people for search and rescue. "That’s their job," he said, noting fear of costs could deter people from seeking lifesaving help.

While some adventure expeditions require patrons to take out insurance policies, few would come close to covering the likely costs of the rescue mission, he said. High-risk adventures have long fueled complex debates about risk and rescue, he said.

"I think it's going to become a larger issue for us. Because it's not just under the water. We now have private spaceships flying private astronauts into space," he said. "What happens when that private spaceship can't come back home?"

– Chris Kenning, USA TODAY

What does it look like inside the missing submersible?

The Titan submersible was about 8 feet high, 9 feet wide and 22 feet long, according to the OceanGate website. It was designed to reach about 13,000 feet deep and travel at 3 knots, the company says. The vessel had a five-inch-thick carbon fiber and titanium hull and four 10-horsepower electric thrusters, according to court filings.

Several exterior cameras provided a live view of the outside, and passengers could access the camera views on a large digital display or on a hand-held tablet, according to court filings. Images posted to the website show people seated on the floor in the small, open space with their legs crossed.

Science writer and CBS correspondent David Pogue, who boarded the submersible for a report that aired in November , told USA TODAY he was concerned about the vessel's safety.

"There were parts of it that seemed to me to be less sophisticated than I was guessing. You drive it with a PlayStation video controller … some of the ballasts are old, rusty construction pipes," Pogue said. "There were certain things that looked like cut corners."

Contributing: Kayla Jimenez, Dinah Pulver and Anthony Robledo, USA TODAY ; The Associated Press

Watch CBS News

What we know about the tourist sub that disappeared on an expedition to the Titanic

By Emily Mae Czachor

Updated on: June 23, 2023 / 11:35 PM EDT / CBS News

Five people on board the tourist  submarine that disappeared  on an expedition to explore the  Titanic shipwreck  over the weekend did not survive a "catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber," officials said Thursday.

The announcement came after the U.S. Coast Guard said the  massive search  underway in the North Atlantic had located a debris field on the sea floor, which was confirmed to be pieces of the missing sub .

"The debris field is consistent with a catastrophic implosion of the vessel," Rear Adm. John Mauger of the Coast Guard said at a briefing, offering "deepest condolences to the families." A spokesperson for OceanGate Expeditions, the company behind the voyage, told reporters that the passengers, including OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, "have sadly been lost."

Here's what we know so far about the submersible craft and what led up to this point.

What happened?

A five-person crew on a submersible named Titan, owned by OceanGate Expeditions, submerged on a dive to the Titanic wreckage site Sunday morning, and the crew of the Polar Prince research ship lost contact with the sub about an hour and 45 minutes later, the Coast Guard   said . 

The Coast Guard first alerted mariners about the missing sub Sunday night, saying a "21 foot submarine" with a white hull was overdue and giving its last known position. "VESSELS IN VICINITY REQUESTED TO KEEP A SHARP LOOKOUT, ASSIST IF POSSIBLE," the alert message read.

The sub was lost in an area about 900 miles east of Cape Cod, in the North Atlantic, in water with a depth of about 13,000 feet, which is about level with the depth of the Titanic wreck . Amid growing concern about its  dwindling supply of breathable air , search and rescue efforts by a unified command composed of several international agencies ramped up accordingly.

The five people aboard included an operator — later identified as Stockton Rush, the CEO of OceanGate Expeditions — and four mission specialists, a term the company uses for its passengers, who paid up to $250,000 for a seat.

For days, the fate of the sub and its passengers was a mystery.

But after the debris was found, a U.S. Navy official said the Navy had detected "an acoustic anomaly consistent with an implosion" shortly after the sub lost contact with the surface Sunday, CBS News national security correspondent David Martin reported. The information was relayed to the Coast Guard, which used it to narrow the radius of the search area, the official said.

Such an implosion, under the intense pressure of the depths of the sea , would have destroyed the vessel almost instantly, experts explained.

"in a fraction of a second, it's gone," Will Kohnen, chairman of the professional group the Marine Technology Society Submarine Committee, told the Reuters news agency. 

"It implodes inwards in a matter of a thousandth of a second," Kohnen said. "And it's probably a mercy, because that was probably a kinder end than the unbelievably difficult situation of being four days in a cold, dark and confined space. So, this would have happened very quickly. I don't think anybody even had the time to realize what happened." 

The Coast Guard is leading the investigation into the incident, and the National Transportation Safety Board  said Friday  it will assist.   

Who were the passengers aboard the sub? 

CBS News confirmed that the five people aboard the submersible were  Hamish Harding , a 59-year-old British billionaire, business owner and explorer; British-Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son, Suleman; French explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet, who had made multiple dives over the years to explore the Titanic; and Stockton Rush, the CEO of OceanGate Expeditions, who was serving as pilot.

Just ahead of the Coast Guard briefing Thursday afternoon, a statement issued by OceanGate spokesperson Andrew Von Kerens offered condolences to the families of the Titan crew and recognized that all five people on board the submersible were believed to be dead.

"These men were true explorers who shared a distinct spirit of adventure, and a deep passion for exploring and protecting the world's oceans," the company said in the statement. "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."

When the Coast Guard confirmed the sub's likely implosion on Thursday, Mauger said they were communicating with consulates general in both the U.K. and France.

The Dawood family, of the large Pakistan-based global business conglomerate Dawood Group, issued a statement Tuesday confirming their family members were on the expedition.

"Please continue to keep the departed souls and our family in your prayers during this difficult time of mourning," the Hussain and Kulsum Dawood family said Thursday in a statement through the Dawood Foundation. "We are truly grateful to all those involved in the rescue operations. ... The immense love and support we receive continues to help us endure this unimaginable loss."

Nargeolet, a renowned French explorer and former diver for the French Navy who was part of the first expedition to visit the Titanic wreck in 1987, was returning for another dive aboard the Titan submersible. 

In a  Facebook  post on Monday, Rory Golden, an explorer who became the first Irish diver to visit the Titanic wreckage in 2000, said he was part of the voyage but was not on the submersible that went missing.

Search and rescue efforts

Authorities  said  early Thursday morning that a Canadian vessel, Horizon Arctic, had deployed a  remotely operated underwater vehicle that reached the sea floor . The ROV ultimately located what the Coast Guard originally described as a debris field on the sea floor, which included identifiable pieces of the sub, authorities confirmed that afternoon.

"This morning, an ROV, or remote operated vehicle, from the vessel Horizon Arctic, discovered the tail cone of the Titan submersible approximately 1,600 feet from the bow of the Titanic on the sea floor," said Mauger at a news briefing. "The ROV subsequently found additional debris. In consultation with experts from within the unified command, the debris is consistent with the catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber."

"Upon this determination, we immediately notified the families," he added. "On behalf of the United States Coast Guard and the entire unified command, I offer my deepest condolences to the families. I can only imagine what this has been like for them and I hope that this discovery provides some solace during this difficult time."

Mauger said authorities were "still working to develop the details for the timeline involved with this casualty and the response," and referenced the "incredibly complex operating environment along the sea floor, over two miles beneath the surface."

Paul Hankins, an undersea expert for the U.S. Navy, explained during the news conference that crews discovered "five different major pieces of debris that told us that it was the remains of the Titan." These pieces included, initially, the nose cone, which was outside of the pressure hull. 

"We then found a large debris field," Hankins said. "Within that large debris field, we found the front end bell of the pressure hull. That was our first indication that there was a catastrophic event."

A second, smaller debris field was located shortly after, and the debris found there "comprised the totality of that pressure vessel," Hankins said. 

"The debris field is consistent with a catastrophic implosion of the vessel," he said, adding that the team will continue to map the debris field area.

Asked by a reporter what the prospects were for recovering the passengers, Mauger said, "This is an incredibly unforgiving environment down there on the sea floor, and the debris is consistent with a catastrophic implosion of the vessel. So we'll continue to work and continue to search the area down there, but I don't have an answer for prospects at this time."

Discovering the Titan debris came after multiple agencies from the U.S. and Canada spent days scouring thousands of square miles of open ocean in search of the missing sub.

The U.S. Coast Guard announced Wednesday that  underwater noises were detected  in the search area and that searches involving ROVs were  focusing on the area where the noises were heard .

On Wednesday, three more vessels had arrived to join the search, including one with side-scan sonar capabilities designed to create images of large sections of the sea floor, the Coast Guard said in a  tweet . That vessel began conducting search patterns alongside at least two others, as multiple military and other agencies worked together under a unified command. 

Frederick said Wednesday there were five "surface assets" involved in the search , and another five were expected to join the operation within the next 24 to 48 hours. He said the team also had two ROVs "actively searching," with several more due to arrive to join the search Thursday.

The Coast Guard  said  it had C-130 aircraft searching for the sub, and that the Rescue Coordination Center Halifax was assisting with a P-8 Poseidon aircraft, which has underwater detection capabilities. Canadian P-3s were also involved in the operation and deployed sonar buoys.

Just after midnight Wednesday, officials said  aircraft had detected underwater noises  in the search area, and underwater search operations were relocated as a result, though the origin of the noises remained unknown. The sounds were picked up several times Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, according to the Coast Guard. 

"With respect to the noises, specifically, we don't know what they are, to be frank with you," Frederick said. "The P-3 detected noises, that's why they're up there, that's why they're doing what they're doing, that's why there are sonar buoys in the water."

News of the vanished submersible and subsequent rescue mission originally broke Monday morning. At the time, Lt. Jordan Hart of the Coast Guard in Boston told CBS News that personnel there were leading the rescue mission, and focusing on waters off Newfoundland in eastern Canada. 

The Boston Regional Coordination Center was managing the rescue operation, as the location of the Titanic shipwreck falls within the Boston coordination center's territory, according to a  map  of jurisdictions along the East Coast of North America.

That combined search area grew to about twice the size of the state of Connecticut, and the subsurface search extended down as far as 2 and a half miles deep, Frederick said, stressing that the search and rescue teams were dealing with an incredibly complex set of circumstances.

"We also have to factor in the ever-changing weather conditions, currents and sea states that expand the search area every hour," he said earlier in the week. "There's an enormous complexity associated with this case due to the location being so far offshore and the coordination between multiple agencies and nations. We greatly appreciate the outpouring of support and offers to provide additional equipment."

What caused the noises?

Frederick acknowledged that the sounds detected underwater by Canadian aircraft could have been caused by multiple sources. 

Following the discovery of the sub debris on the sea floor, a U.S. Navy source told CBS News that the implosion would be inconsistent with banging noises heard at 30-minute intervals. Those noises, the official said, are now assessed as having come from other ships in the area.

Carl Hartsfield, an expert in underwater acoustics and the director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, which is on-site at the search area as a consultant, explained that it can be challenging to differentiate between "human sounds" and "nature sounds" coming from beneath the surface.

"The ocean is a very complex place, obviously, human sounds, nature sounds, and it's very difficult to discern what the sources of those noises are at times," Hartsfield said. 

Before the sub was found, Chris Roman, an associate professor of oceanography at the University of Rhode Island, told CBS News that, technically, it was possible that sounds from inside a submersible could have been detected, but that wasn't the only potential source of the noise.

"Sound travels very efficiently underwater. If people were intentionally making noises within the sub, it's very likely they could be detected with a sound buoy, and that position can be translated into a new search area," Roman said. But he also noted that, as Frederick mentioned in his briefing, "there's a lot of other things in the ocean that make noises."

The submarine

The unique submersible craft that disappeared was owned by OceanGate Expeditions , a company that deploys manned submarines for deep sea exploration and has in the past advertised this particular sub's voyages to carry tourists down to the wreckage of the RMS Titanic for $250,000 per seat. 

More than a century after the Titanic sank in April 1912, the wreck lies on the ocean floor about 400 miles southeast of the Newfoundland coast. 

OceanGate said recently on its website and on social media that its expedition to the shipwreck was "underway," describing the seven-night trip as a "chance to step outside of everyday life and discover something truly extraordinary." In addition to one ongoing expedition, the company had planned two others for the summer of next year, according to the site. 

Because of the sub's oxygen capacity, it can only be fully submerged for a portion of the weeklong voyage. The sub has emergency oxygen and a 96-hour sustainment capability if there's an emergency aboard, Mauger said.

In a statement Monday after news broke of the missing sub, OceanGate confirmed the missing submersible was theirs and that a rescue operation had been launched to find and recover it. The company said it was "exploring and mobilizing all options to bring the crew back safely." 

"For some time, we have been unable to establish communications with one of our submersible exploration vehicles which is currently visiting the wreck site of the Titanic," said Andrew Von Kerens, a spokesperson for OceanGate. "We pray for the safe return of the crew and passengers, and we will provide updates as they are available."

Inside the Titan

Dubbed the Titan, OceanGate's deep sea vessel, was said to be the only five-person submersible in the world with the capabilities to reach the Titanic's depth, nearly 2 and a half miles beneath the ocean's surface, CBS "Sunday Mornings" correspondent David Pogue reported last year. 

BBC News reported that the vessel typically carries a pilot, three paying guests and another person described as a "content expert" by the company.  OceanGate's site says the Titan, weighing around 23,000 pounds, has the ability to reach depths of up to 4,000 meters — over 13,000 feet — and has about 96 hours of life support for a crew of five people.

Last summer, Pogue accompanied the Titan crew on the journey from Newfoundland to the site where the Titanic as lost. Several dive attempts had to be canceled when weather conditions indicated it may not be safe. At the time, he described the Titan as a one-of-a-kind submersible craft made from thick carbon fiber and coated on both ends by a dome of titanium. 

In 2018, a former employee of OceanGate Expeditions, submersible pilot David Lochridge, voiced concerns about the safety of the Titanic tour sub and filed a lawsuit against the company . 

Lochridge, who was fired by OceanGate and sued by the company for allegedly disclosing confidential information in a whistleblower complaint to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, said in a court filing that the Titan would carry passengers as deep as 4,000 meters even though that depth had never been reached in a sub with its type of carbon fiber hull. According to his claim, he learned the vessel was built to withstand a certified pressure of 1,300 meters, although OceanGate planned to take passengers to 4,000 meters.  

Lochridge was not the only skeptic. The same year his complaint was filed, other industry leaders approached OceanGate with questions about the safety of its submersible. William Kohnen, president and CEO of Hydrospace Group, outlined his concerns in a 2018 letter to OceanGate, originally published by The New York Times, that warned of potentially "catastrophic" issues with the "experimental" sub, which was not certified. Kohnen told CBS News on Wednesday that although he did not send it, the letter was leaked to OceanGate and prompted the company to "amend a number of details that made sure the public knew" the submersible had not received its certification.

"The letter to Oceangate was meant as a professional courtesy to the CEO expressing industry concerns that the company was not following a traditional classification route for the certification of the submersible," Kohnen said. "The industry operates along an established and dynamic set of safety regulations and protocols that have served the submersible industry worldwide."

Ahead of his planned dive last summer, Pogue recalled signing paperwork that read, in part, "This experimental vessel has not been approved or certified by any regulatory body, and could result in physical injury, emotional trauma, or death." 

Space inside the submarine was similar to the interior of a minivan, and, with just one button and a video game controller used to steer it, the vessel "seemed improvised, with off-the-shelf components," Pogue said.

On his voyage, the  sub was lost for a few hours , Pogue said.

"There's no GPS underwater, so the surface ship is supposed to guide the sub to the shipwreck by sending text messages," he reported at the time. "But on this dive, communications somehow broke down."

You may remember that the @OceanGateExped sub to the #Titanic got lost for a few hours LAST summer, too, when I was aboard…Here’s the relevant part of that story. https://t.co/7FhcMs0oeH pic.twitter.com/ClaNg5nzj8 — David Pogue (@Pogue) June 19, 2023

Were conditions right for the dive?

G. Michael Harris, founder of RMS Titanic, Inc. — a company that salvages artifacts from the Titanic wreckage — told CBS News on Tuesday evening that Titanic expeditions are generally conducted within a "three-month weather window" between the end of June and September, when the ocean waters are at their calmest.

Harris, who has led several expeditions to the wreckage site, questioned why the Titan's dive was conducted as early as Sunday.

"Right now, it's really early in the season. I'm not sure why OceanGate went out this soon," Harris said.

Harris also noted that when he conducts diving expeditions, he uses a transponder system, something that he believed the Titan likely did not have.

"It's a net that we navigate in so that we know where we are at all times on the wreck of the Titanic," Harris said. "We're in constant communication with the vessel up top."

Harris said the Titan was "put on a sled and dumped in the water and their only navigation is from the support ship up top."

"I don't adhere to that myself, personally," Harris said. 

Harris noted that he has worked with Nargeolet, who is listed as director of underwater research for RMS Titanic, for the past 30 years, describing him as an "all-around good guy."

Who was Hamish Harding?

Harding, the first of the passengers to be publicly identified, had previously posted on social media about joining the Titanic shipwreck expedition.

In a post shared to his  Facebook  page on Saturday, Harding wrote: "I am proud to finally announce that I joined OceanGate Expeditions for their RMS TITANIC Mission as a mission specialist on the sub going down to the Titanic."

I am proud to finally announce that I joined OceanGate Expeditions for their RMS TITANIC Mission as a mission specialist... Posted by Hamish Harding on  Saturday, June 17, 2023

"Due to the worst winter in Newfoundland in 40 years, this mission is likely to be the first and only manned mission to the Titanic in 2023," Harding's Facebook post continued. "A weather window has just opened up and we are going to attempt a dive tomorrow. We started steaming from St. Johns, Newfoundland, Canada yesterday and are planning to start dive operations around 4am tomorrow morning. Until then we have a lot of preparations and briefings to do."

That post was Harding's most recent social media update related to the submarine trip. It included multiple photographs of him, including one that showed Harding signing his name on a banner that read "Titanic Expedition Mission V" and another that pictured the submersible vessel itself.

Richard Garriott de Cayeux, president of The Explorers Club, where Harding helped found the board of trustees, said they had spoken just a week earlier about the expedition. 

"When I saw Hamish last week at the Global Exploration Summit, his excitement about this expedition was palpable. I know he was looking forward to conducting research at the site," he said in a letter to club members after the sub's disappearance.

Harding was a veteran adventure tourist who also  traveled to space  aboard a Blue Origin rocket last year. Two years ago, he made it to the deepest part of the ocean, traveling with U.S. explorer  Victor Vescovo  to the floor of the Mariana Trench, 35,876 feet below the sea surface. That trip, in a $48 million submersible, earned both explorers the Guinness World Record for the  longest distance traveled  at the deepest part of the ocean by a crewed vessel.

"It was potentially scary, but I was so busy doing so many things — navigating and triangulating my position — that I did not really have time to be scared," Harding told  The Week  after that excursion.

This is an updated version of an article originally published on Monday, June 19. Reporting contributed by Emmet Lyons, Roxana Saberi, Alex Sundby, Aimee Picchi, Aliza Chasan, Li Cohen, Caroline Hinson, Anna Noryskiewicz, Analisa Novak and other CBS News staff.

• Newfoundland
• United States Coast Guard

Emily Mae Czachor is a reporter and news editor at CBSNews.com. She covers breaking news, often focusing on crime and extreme weather. Emily Mae has previously written for outlets including the Los Angeles Times, BuzzFeed and Newsweek.

More from CBS News

Missing Titanic submersible live updates: Texts show OceanGate CEO dismissed concerns

Five people, including the company CEO, were aboard the sub when it imploded.

All passengers are believed to be lost after a desperate dayslong search for a submersible carrying five people that vanished while on a tour of the Titanic wreckage off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada.

The 21-foot deep-sea vessel, operated by OceanGate Expeditions , lost contact about an hour and 45 minutes after submerging on Sunday morning with a 96-hour oxygen supply. That amount of breathable air was forecast to run out on Thursday morning, according to the United States Coast Guard, which was coordinating the multinational search and rescue efforts.

Latest headlines:

Rcmp to investigate the deaths aboard titan sub, us taxpayer cost for search and rescue may be $1.5 million, expert says, oceangate ceo claimed sub was safer than scuba diving, texts show.

• OceanGate co-founder defends development of submersible
• Sub's carbon-fiber composite hull was the 'critical failure,' James Cameron says
• Probe seeks answers on why Titanic sub imploded
• Navy likely detected sound of the implosion on Sunday: Official
• All lives believed to be lost: OceanGate

Officials with Canada's Transportation Safety Board said at a press conference Saturday that they have begun speaking with people on board the Polar Prince, which launched the ill-fated Titan submersible.

The Polar Prince returned to its port, St. John's, Newfoundland, on Saturday morning.

"I would say that we've received full cooperation," TSB Director of Marine Investigations Clifford Harvey said. "It's been a really good interaction thus far and is really getting full cooperation with all the individuals involved."

In addition, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) said they are "examining the circumstances" of the deaths on board Titan, and will launch a full investigation if "the circumstances indicate criminal, federal or provincial laws may possibly have been broken."

-ABC News' Matt J. Foster

A defense budget expert estimates once the U.S. military participation concludes, the cost for the search and rescue mission of the five passengers on board the Titan submersible will cost the U.S. around $1.5 million.

Mark Cancian, a senior advisor with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, came up with the estimate based on aircraft sorties, cross referencing the U.S. Department of Defense cost numbers, Coast Guard Cutter costs and flying hour costs. He said some costs have already been set aside in various budgets, with resources simply diverted to the site.

He emphasized that these are strictly well-informed guesses.

A spokesperson for the Coast Guard's District 1 in Boston would not give an estimate of costs so far, saying, "We cannot attribute a monetary value to Search and Rescue cases, as the Coast Guard does not associate cost with saving a life."

-ABC News' Jaclyn C. Lee

US Coast Guard to lead sub investigation

The U.S. Coast Guard will be the organization leading the investigation into the OceanGate sub incident.

The NTSB announced the news on Friday via Twitter, noting it will "contribute to their efforts."

A Las Vegas father and son told ABC News OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush pressured them for months into taking two seats on the now failed mission to the Titanic, making bold claims about the vessel's safety.

Financier Jay Bloom shared text messages between himself and Rush where Rush dismissed concerns from Bloom and his son Sean about taking the trip on the Titan submersible.

"While there's obviously a risk it's way safer than flying in a helicopter or even scuba diving," Rush texted.

"He sort of had this predisposition that it was safe," Bloom told ABC News. "And anybody who disagreed with him, he felt it was just a differing opinion."

Bloom added that Rush flew out to Las Vegas in a homebuilt plane to convince him to attend the voyage aboard the submersible.

"He flew it all the way to Vegas. And I was like, 'This guy is definitely down to take risk,'" Bloom said.

-ABC News' Sam Sweeney

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Missing Titanic Submersible ‘Catastrophic Implosion’ Likely Killed 5 Aboard Submersible

Pieces of the missing Titan vessel were found on the ocean floor, about 1,600 feet from the bow of the Titanic, the Coast Guard said. OceanGate Expeditions, the vessel’s operator, said, “Our hearts are with these five souls.”

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Coast Guard Says Debris of Submersible Has Been Found

The u.s. coast guard said parts of the titan submersible found on the ocean floor indicate a “catastrophic implosion” of the vessel..

This morning, an ROV or remote-operated vehicle from the vessel Horizon Arctic discovered the tailcone of the Titan submersible approximately 1,600 feet from the bow of the Titanic on the seafloor. The ROV subsequently found additional debris. In consultation with experts from within the unified command, the debris is consistent with the catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber. Upon this determination, we immediately notified the families. This is a incredibly unforgiving environment down there on the seafloor, and the debris is consistent with a catastrophic implosion of the vessel. This was a incredibly complex case, and we’re still working to develop the details for the timeline involved with this casualty and the response.

Daniel Victor ,  Jesus Jiménez and Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs

After days of searching, no hope of finding survivors remains. Here’s the latest.

The five people aboard the submersible that went missing on Sunday were presumed dead on Thursday, after an international search that gripped much of the world found debris from the vessel near the wreckage of the Titanic. A U.S. Coast Guard official said the debris was “consistent with a catastrophic implosion of the vessel.”

On Sunday, a secret U.S. network of acoustic sensors picked up indications of a possible implosion in the vicinity of the submersible around the time communications with it were lost, a senior Navy official disclosed on Thursday. The search continued because there was no immediate confirmation that the Titan had met a disastrous end, according to a second senior Navy official. Both officials spoke anonymously to discuss operational details.

However, the revelation is likely to raise further questions about a vast, multinational dayslong search and rescue effort that has ended in failure.

Those presumed lost onboard were Stockton Rush, the chief executive of OceanGate, the company that operated the submersible, who was piloting. The four passengers were a British businessman and explorer, Hamish Harding ; a British-Pakistani businessman, Shahzada Dawood, and his teenage son, Suleman ; and a French maritime expert, Paul-Henri Nargeolet , who had been on over 35 dives to the Titanic wreck site. ( Read more about the lives that were lost .)

Here’s what else to know:

A remote-controlled vehicle had located the debris from the Titan, including the submersible’s tail cone, about 1,600 feet from the bow of the Titanic on the ocean floor, according to Admiral Mauger.

Leaders in the submersible craft industry warned for years of possible “catastrophic” problems with the vehicle’s design. They also worried that OceanGate Expeditions had not followed standard certification procedures .

OceanGate has provided tours of the Titanic wreck since 2021 — for a price of up to $250,000 per person — as part of a booming high-risk travel industry . The company has described the trip on its website as a “thrilling and unique travel experience.”

The Titan squeezed five passengers into a tight space with no seats, only a flat floor and a single view port 21 inches in diameter. Here’s a closer look at the craft .

Eric Schmitt

Secret Navy sensors detected a possible implosion around the time the Titan’s communications failed.

The U.S. Navy, using data from a secret network of underwater sensors designed to track hostile submarines, detected “an anomaly consistent with an implosion or explosion” in the vicinity of the Titan submersible at the time communications with the vessel were lost on Sunday, two senior Navy officials said on Thursday.

But with no other indications of a catastrophe, one of the officials said, the search was continued.

The data from the sensors was combined with information from airborne Navy P-8 surveillance planes and sonar buoys on the surface to triangulate the approximate location of the Titan, one of the officials said. The analysis of undersea acoustic data and information about the location of the noise were then passed on to the Coast Guard official in charge of the search, Rear Adm. John Mauger.

Because there was no visual or other conclusive evidence of a catastrophic failure, one of the officials said, it would have been “irresponsible” to immediately assume the five passengers were dead, and the search was ordered to continue even though the outlook appeared grim. Both of the Navy officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss operational details.

It was not immediately clear how widely the Navy’s acoustical analysis was disseminated among the search team, nor why the Navy had not made it public earlier. The Navy’s acoustic analysis from the secret sensor network was first reported by The Wall Street Journal .

Search Vessels Around the Titanic Wreckage

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North Atlantic

the Titanic

Skandi Vinland

Deep Energy

The Canadian vessel

Horizon Arctic deployed

a remote-operated vehicle

that discovered a debris field.

The Titanic wreckage

sits on the ocean

floor, approximately

12,500 feet down.

North Atlantic Ocean

that discovered a debris field

containing remains of the Titan.

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William J. Broad

The director and deep-sea explorer James Cameron points to flaws in the Titan submersible’s design.

“We’ve never had an accident like this,” James Cameron, the Oscar-winning director of “Titanic,” said on Thursday.

Mr. Cameron, an expert in submersibles, has dived dozens of times to the ship’s deteriorating hulk and once plunged in a tiny craft of his own design to the bottom of the planet’s deepest recess.

In an interview, Mr. Cameron called the presumed loss of five lives aboard the Titan submersible from the company OceanGate like nothing anyone involved in private ocean exploration had ever seen.

“There’ve never been fatalities at this kind of depth and certainly no implosions,” he said.

An implosion in the deep sea happens when the crushing pressures of the abyss cause a hollow object to collapse violently inward. If the object is big enough to hold five people, Mr. Cameron said in an interview, “it’s going to be an extremely violent event — like 10 cases of dynamite going off.”

In 2012, Mr. Cameron designed and piloted an experimental submersible into a region in the Pacific Ocean called the Challenger Deep. Mr. Cameron had not sought certification of the vessel’s safety by organizations in the maritime industry that provide such services to numerous companies.

“We did that knowingly” because the craft was experimental and its mission scientific, Mr. Cameron said. “I would never design a vehicle to take passengers and not have it certified.”

Mr. Cameron strongly criticized Stockton Rush, the OceanGate chief executive who piloted the submersible when it disappeared Sunday, for never getting his tourist submersible certified as safe . He noted that Mr. Rush called certification an impediment to innovation.

“I agree in principle,” Mr. Cameron said. “But you can’t take that stance when you’re putting paying customers into your submersible — when you have innocent guests who trust you and your statements” about vehicle safety.

As a design weakness in the Titan submersible and a possible cautionary sign to its passengers, Mr. Cameron cited its construction with carbon-fiber composites. The materials are used widely in the aerospace industry because they weigh much less than steel or aluminum, yet pound for pound are stronger and stiffer.

The problem, Mr. Cameron said, is that a carbon-fiber composite has “no strength in compression”— which happens as an undersea vehicle plunges ever deeper into the abyss and faces soaring increases in water pressure. “It’s not what it’s designed for.”

The company, he added, used sensors in the hull of the Titan to assess the status of the carbon-fiber composite hull. In its promotional material , OceanGate pointed to the sensors as an innovative feature for “hull health monitoring.” Early this year, an academic expert described the system as providing the pilot “with enough time to arrest the descent and safely return to surface.”

In contrast to the company, Mr. Cameron called it “a warning system” to let the submersible’s pilot know if “the hull is getting ready to implode.”

Mr. Cameron said the sensor network on the sub’s hull was an inadequate solution to a design he saw as intrinsically flawed.

“It’s not like a light coming on when the oil in your car is low,” he said of the network of hull sensors. “This is different.”

A senior U.S. Navy official said that the Navy had, through acoustic analysis, “detected an anomaly consistent with an implosion or explosion in the general vicinity of where the Titan submersible was operating when communications were lost.” The official said that the identification was “not definitive,” the information was immediately shared with the search effort, and that the decision was made to continue searching to “make every effort to save the lives on board.”

Christina Goldbaum and Emma Bubola

Shahzada Dawood, Executive, 48, and Son, 19, Die Aboard Submersible

Shahzada Dawood, a British Pakistani businessman who was among the five people aboard a submersible journeying deep into the Atlantic to view the Titanic, was killed when the vessel imploded during its descent to the ocean floor, the authorities said Thursday. He was 48.

His 19-year-old son, Suleman, who was with him on the Titan submersible, was also killed.

Mr. Dawood was the vice chairman of Engro Corporation, a business conglomerate headquartered in the Pakistani port city of Karachi that is involved in agriculture, energy and telecommunications. His family is known as one of the wealthiest business families in the country.

His work focused on renewable energy and technology, according to a statement from his family.

Mr. Dawood was born on Feb. 12, 1975, in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. He studied law as an undergraduate at Buckingham University in Britain and later received a master’s degree in global textile marketing from Philadelphia University, now part of Thomas Jefferson University. In 2012, he was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum.

His son was a business student at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow and had just completed his first year, a spokesman for the school said. Like his father, he was a fan of science fiction and enjoyed solving Rubik’s Cubes and playing volleyball, according to a statement from Engro.

“The relationship between Shahzada and Suleman was a joy to behold; they were each other’s greatest supporters and cherished a shared passion for adventure and exploration of all the world had to offer them,” the family’s statement said.

The pair’s shared passion for science and discovery, friends and family said, led them to embark on the expedition to the wreck of the Titanic.

Travel and science were “part of his DNA,” said Ahsen Uddin Syed, a friend of the elder Mr. Dawood who used to work with him at Engro.

A lover of “Star Trek” and “Star Wars,” Mr. Dawood was also fond of nature and often traveled to faraway places and shared pictures of his adventures, Mr. Sayed said.

His Instagram profile is like a memory book of his love of travel and nature; it is blanketed with photos of birds, flowers and landscapes, including a sunset in the Kalahari Desert, the ice sheet in Greenland, penguins in the Shetlands and a tiny bird in London with the caption “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy.”

“Don’t adventures ever have an end?” Mr. Dawood wrote in a Facebook post last year from a trip to Iceland, quoting Bilbo Baggins from “The Fellowship of the Ring.” “I suppose not. Someone else always has to carry on the story.”

Khalid Mansoor, another former colleague of Mr. Dawood’s, said that Mr. Dawood was a passionate champion of the environment. He was also a trustee at the SETI Institute, an organization devoted to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

In his role at Engro, the company statement said, Mr. Dawood advocated “a culture of learning, sustainability and diversity.” He was also involved in his family’s charitable ventures, including the Engro Foundation, which supports small-scale farmers, and the Dawood Foundation, an education-focused nonprofit.

“Shahzada’s and Suleman’s absence will be felt deeply by all those who had the privilege of knowing this pair,” his family’s statement read.

Mr. Dawood is survived by a daughter, Alina, and his wife, Christine.

Salman Masood contributed reporting.

Sam Roberts

Stockton Rush, Pilot of the Titan Submersible, Dies at 61

Stockton Rush, the chief executive and founder of OceanGate and the pilot of the Titan submersible, was declared dead on Thursday after his vessel was found in pieces at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, near the rusting wreck of the R.M.S. Titanic. He was 61.

Mr. Rush oversaw finances and engineering for OceanGate, a privately owned tourism and research company based in Everett, Wash., which he founded in 2009. In 2012, he was a founder of the OceanGate Foundation, a nonprofit organization that encouraged technological development to further marine science, history and archaeology.

Mr. Rush first looked skyward for adventure. In 1981, when he was 19, he was believed to be the world’s youngest jet-transport-rated pilot.

If the sky was the limit, though, it was too confining for Mr. Rush.

“I wanted to be the first person on Mars,” he told Fast Company magazine in 2017.

Ineligible for Air Force pilot training because of poor eyesight, he said, he abandoned his dream of becoming an astronaut. Interplanetary travel didn’t seem economically viable in the foreseeable future. But he saw potential in underwater travel, and he said he was willing to take on risk and bend the rules to achieve his goals.

“I mean, if you just want to be safe, don’t get out of bed,” he said in an interview with “CBS News Sunday Morning” last year. “Don’t get in your car. Don’t do anything. At some point, you’re going to take some risk, and it really is a risk-reward question. I think I can do this just as safely by breaking the rules.”

Richard Stockton Rush III was the scion of one of San Francisco’s most famous families. He was descended on his father’s side from two signers of the Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Rush and Richard Stockton.

He was born on March 31, 1962, in San Francisco. His father is chairman of the Peregrine Oil and Gas Company in Burlingame, Calif., and the Natoma Company, which manages apartment and other investment properties in and around Sacramento. His grandfather was the chairman of the shipping company American President Lines. Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco was named for his grandmother.

The Davies family’s inherited wealth was derived from Ralph K. Davies, who began at Standard Oil of California as a 15-year-old office boy and rose to become the youngest director in the company’s history.

Stockton, as Mr. Rush was known, graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire and earned a Bachelor of Science degree in aerospace engineering from Princeton University in 1984. He received a Master of Business Administration degree from the University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business in 1989.

During summer breaks, he served as a DC-8 first officer, flying out of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, for Overseas National Airways. The year he graduated, he joined the McDonnell Douglas Corporation as a flight test engineer on the F-15 program and was named the company’s representative at Edwards Air Force Base on the APG-63 radar test protocol.

Before founding OceanGate, he served on the board of BlueView Technologies, a sonar developer in Seattle, and as chairman of Remote Control Technologies, which makes remotely operated devices. He was also a trustee of the Museum of Flight in Seattle from 2003 to 2007.

In 1986, he married Wendy Hollings Wei l, a licensed pilot, substitute teacher and account manager for magazine publishing consultants. She became the director of communications for OceanGate.

Her grandfather, Richard Weil Jr., was president of Macy’s New York, and she was the great-great-granddaughter of the retailing magnate Isidor Straus and his wife, Ida, two of the wealthiest people to die when the Titanic sank.

The aging Mr. Straus, a co-owner of Macy’s, refused to board the lifeboat while younger men were being prevented from boarding. Ida Straus, his wife of four decades, declared that she would not leave her husband, and the two were seen standing arm in arm on the Titanic’s deck as the ship went down.

Information on Mr. Rush’s survivors was not immediately available.

In his CBS News interview, Mr. Rush acknowledged that it was prudent while exploring the ocean at depths of thousands of feet to avoid fish nets, overhangs and other hazards. But, he said, safety concerns could also be a drag on a swashbuckling career in which risk paid returns not only in profits but also in unforgettable experiences.

“It really is a life-changing experience, and there aren’t a lot of things like that,” he told Fast Company. “Rather than spend $65,000 to climb Mount Everest, maybe die, and spend a month living in a miserable base camp, you can change your life in a week.”

His trips in the Titan brought him the adventure he craved.

“I wanted to be sort of the Captain Kirk,” he said. “I didn’t want to be the passenger in the back. And I realized that the ocean is the universe. That’s where life is.”

Jacey Fortin

The Coast Guard says it found five major pieces of debris on the ocean floor.

The Titan submersible that vanished in the North Atlantic on Sunday appeared to have suffered a “catastrophic implosion,” the U.S. Coast Guard said on Thursday, and offered its condolences to the families of the five people who were on board.

Debris from the vessel, which vanished while descending to view the wreck of the R.M.S. Titanic, was found on the ocean floor on Thursday morning, about 1,600 feet from the bow of the shipwreck, Rear Admiral John Mauger of the Coast Guard said at a news conference on Thursday afternoon.

The debris was “consistent with catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber” of the submersible, he added.

Asked about the possibility of recovering the bodies of the victims, Admiral Mauger said that he did not have an answer. “This is an incredibly unforgiving environment down there on the sea floor,” he said.

Chances for the survival of the five passengers had begun to look grim by midweek, but rescuers had said that they were holding out hope that the Titan could be out there somewhere.

But on Thursday morning, a remotely operated vehicle discovered a debris field on the ocean bottom. Paul Hankins, a salvage expert for the U.S. Navy, said there were “five major pieces” that appeared to be parts of the Titan, a 22-foot-long vessel owned by OceanGate, including a nose cone, the front end of the pressure hull and the back end of the pressure hull.

It was too early to tell exactly when the vessel imploded, Admiral Mauger said. The implosion “would have generated significant broadband sound down there that the sonar buoys would have picked up,” he added, but listening devices in the area did not hear any signs of such a catastrophic failure.

Some underwater banging noises were picked up by searchers earlier this week, but they did not appear to have had any relation to the submersible, Admiral Mauger said. Previously, the Coast Guard had said that they repositioned their search efforts around where those noises were detected.

“I know there’s a lot of questions about how, why, when this happened,” Admiral Mauger said, adding that the authorities had those same questions. “That’s going to be, I’m sure, the focus of future review,” he said. “Right now, we’re focused on documenting the scene.”

Daniel Victor

The five people on board included the chief executive of the company that operated the submersible, a Guinness World Record-holding explorer, a man who dived to the Titanic more than 35 times, and a father-and-son duo. Read more about the lives that were lost here .

Alex Williams

Hamish Harding, an Explorer Who Knew No Bounds, Dies at 58

Hamish Harding, an aviation tycoon and ardent explorer, made it his quest to probe the heavens as well as the depths, landing him a place in Guinness World Records and ultimately leading him to a fateful plunge to the wreckage of the Titanic some two and a half miles below the surface of the North Atlantic.

The submersible craft in which he was traveling with four others lost contact with its mother ship on Sunday. After a five-day multinational search across an area the size of Massachusetts, the U.S. Coast Guard said Thursday that all five had been killed when the vessel, belonging to OceanGate Expeditions, suffered “a catastrophic implosion.”

Mr. Harding was 58.

Passengers had paid up to $250,000 each for the privilege of plunging nearly 13,000 feet below the surface for a glimpse of the remains of history’s most storied oceanic tragedy. The R.M.S. Titanic hit an iceberg and sank in 1912, four days into its maiden voyage, about 400 miles off Newfoundland. More than 1,500 people died.

At the outset of the tour, Mr. Harding saw the opportunity as an unlikely stroke of good fortune. “Due to the worst winter in Newfoundland in 40 years,” he wrote in a social media post on Saturday, “this mission is likely to be the first and only manned mission to the Titanic in 2023.”

He described himself as a “mission specialist” on the expedition.

Mr. Harding seemed to presage his own fate in a 2021 interview after a record-setting plunge to Challenger Deep, the deepest part of the ocean in the Mariana Trench.

At nearly 36,000 feet below the western Pacific Ocean, deeper than Mount Everest is tall, that four-hour, 15-minute voyage took him nearly three times further down than the Titanic site. That expedition, with the American explorer Victor Vescovo, earned two citations by Guinness World Records, for the longest distance traversed at full ocean depth by a crewed vessel and the longest time spent there on a single dive.

As Esquire Middle East magazine pointed out at the time, only 18 people had ever journeyed to the bottom of the Challenger Deep, as opposed to the 24 astronauts who had orbited or landed on the moon and the thousands who successfully had scaled the peak of Mount Everest.

Mr. Harding knew the risks. “If something goes wrong, you are not coming back,” he told The Week, an Indian newsmagazine. But in business, and in his life of adventure seeking, he seemed to embrace them.

A pilot licensed to fly both business jets and airliners, Mr. Harding started the first regular business jet service to the Antarctic in 2017, in partnership with the luxury Antarctic tourism company White Desert. The service landed its first flight, a Gulfstream G550, on a new ice runway known as Wolf’s Fang.

A lifelong space buff, he traveled to Antarctica in 2016 with Buzz Aldrin, the Apollo 11 astronaut and the second man to walk on the moon. At 86, Mr. Aldrin became the oldest person to reach the South Pole. Four years later, Mr. Harding took a similar journey with his son Giles, who at 12 became the youngest person to accomplish that feat.

In 2019, Mr. Harding set off on another record-setting venture with a former astronaut when he and the former International Space Station commander Col. Terry Virts completed the fastest circumnavigation of the world over both the North and South Poles in a Qatar Executive Gulfstream G650ER long-range business jet.

In June 2022, Mr. Harding finally got to experience the wonder of being an astronaut himself, soaring some 60 miles aboard the New Shepard spacecraft, from Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin space tourism company, to the edge of outer space.

“Once the liquid hydrogen/oxygen booster rocket gets the capsule to the edge of space, 350,000 feet above the earth,” he said in an interview last year with Business Aviation Magazine , “the sky above you is totally, completely black, even right next to the sun.”

Despite a life of dramatic quests that seemed drawn from boys’ adventure books, Mr. Harding was by nature “an explorer, not a thrill seeker,” Colonel Virts said in an interview with the BBC .

Mr. Harding apparently agreed. In discussing the Challenger Deep mission, he emphasized science, not derring-do.

“As an explorer and adventurer, I want this expedition to contribute to our shared knowledge and understanding of planet earth,” he said in the Esquire interview. He spoke of collecting samples from the ocean floor “that could contain new life forms and may even provide further insights into how life on our planet began.”

“And in searching for signs of human pollution in this remote environment,” he continued, “we hope to aid scientific efforts to protect our oceans and ensure they flourish for millennia to come.”

George Hamish Livingston Harding was born on June 24, 1964, in Hammersmith, London.

He was always drawn to the skies, and beyond. “I was 5 years old when the Apollo landing took place,” he said in the Business Aviation interview. “I vividly remember watching the event on an old black-and-white TV set with my parents in Hong Kong, where I grew up.”

“This event set the tone of my life in a way,” he continued. “We sort of felt that anything was possible after that, and we fully expected there to be package holidays to the moon by now.”

At 13, he became a cadet in the Royal Air Force flying Chipmunk trainer airplanes. He earned his pilot’s license in 1985 while an undergraduate at the University of Cambridge, where he studied chemical engineering and natural sciences.

In the 1990s, he built a career in information technology, rising to managing director of Logica India, a company based in Bangalore. He used the money he made in that industry to found Action Group, a private investment company, in 1999. He started Action Aviation in 2002.

His survivors include his wife, Linda; his sons, Rory and Giles; a stepdaughter, Lauren Marisa Szasz; and a stepson, Brian Szasz.

In the Business Aviation interview, Mr. Harding said that the Titanic dive, initially scheduled for last June, had been delayed because “the submersible was unfortunately damaged on its previous dive.” Instead, that summer he climbed Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania with 20 family members and friends.

When asked about the risks of his boundary-pushing ventures, Mr. Harding, who was the chairman of the Middle East chapter of the Explorers Club, said, “My view is that these are all calculated risks and are well understood before we start.”

“I should add that I do not go out seeking these opportunities,” he continued. “People tend to bring them to me, and I keep saying ‘Yes!’”

Anushka Patil

The implosion “would have generated significant broadband sound down there that the sonar buoys would have picked up,” Mauger said. Listening devices in the area, which were dropped Monday, did not hear any signs of such a catastrophic failure, he reported earlier.

Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs

The underwater banging noises that were picked up by the authorities earlier this week do not appear to have had any relation to the site of the submersible’s wreckage. “There doesn’t appear to be any connection between the noises and the location on the sea floor” where the debris was found, Mauger said. Previously, the Coast Guard had said that they repositioned their search efforts around where those noises were detected.

Jesus Jimenez

Asked about the prospect of recovering the bodies of the victims, Mauger said he did not have an answer. “This is an incredibly unforgiving environment down there on the sea floor,” he said.

“I know there’s a lot of questions about how, why, when this happened,” says Admiral Mauger of the U.S. Coast Guard, adding that the authorities have those same questions. “That’s going to be, I’m sure, the focus of future review. Right now, we’re focused on documenting the scene.”

Mauger said it was too early to tell when the vessel imploded. Remote operations will continue on the sea floor, he said.

Where the Titan submersible was found — 1,600 feet from the bow of the Titanic — and the size of the debris field indicates that the vessel imploded, according to Carl Hartsfield, an expert with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. There does not appear to be any indication that it collided with the wreckage.

The authorities found “five major pieces of debris” that indicated they were from the Titan, including a nose cone, the front end of the pressure hull and the back end of the pressure hull, said Paul Hankins, a salvage expert for the U.S. Navy. He said that finding these pieces of debris indicated there was a “catastrophic event.”

Mauger said that officials are still working to come up with a timeline of events.

The debris found today was “consistent with catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber” in the submersible, Mauger said.

Debris from the Titan submersible, including its tail cone, was found on the ocean floor on Thursday morning, about 1,600 feet from the bow of the Titanic, said Rear Admiral John Mauger of the U.S. Coast Guard.

In a few moments, Rear Adm. John Mauger and Capt. Jamie Frederick of the U.S. Coast Guard will provide updates on findings from the sea floor near the Titanic.

The announcement by the company that all five passengers on the submersible are believed to be dead appears to cap an international search that stretched across several days and gripped much of the world. Even as the chances of survival looked grim, rescuers had said they were holding out hope that the Titan could be out there somewhere, hopes that appear to have been dashed by the discovery of debris.

“These men were true explorers who shared a distinct spirit of adventure, and a deep passion for exploring and protecting the world’s oceans,” the company said. “Our hearts are with these five souls and every member of their families during this tragic time.”

OceanGate said in a statement that “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.”

Jacey Fortin and Eric Schmitt

Here is why the U.S. Coast Guard led the search effort.

It would be a tall order for any agency: finding a submersible vessel that could be more than two miles below the surface of the ocean and hundreds of miles away from land.

But the United States Coast Guard was the best trained and equipped agency for the task, government officials and outside analysts said.

Most Americans are familiar with Coast Guard operations closer to home — from interdicting drug smugglers to assisting recreational boaters — but the maritime force has long been dedicated to search and rescue efforts at sea, including those in international waters.

For the past week, the Coast Guard oversaw an armada of vessels, aircraft and specialists from North America and Europe to find the Titan. International agreements divide the ocean into regions and offer guidance about which nations and agencies take primary responsibility for search and rescue in each. The site of the Titanic wreck is in an area generally assigned to the Coast Guard , even though it is closer to the coast of Newfoundland, Canada, than that of the continental United States.

Beyond that, the U.S. Coast Guard is considered “the premier maritime search and rescue agency in the world,” said Aaron C. Davenport, a senior researcher at the Rand Corporation and 34-year veteran of the service.

Chris Boyer, the executive director of the National Association for Search and Rescue, a nonprofit advocacy group, called the Coast Guard “the best prepared and the best choice, given the circumstances.” He added that while the United States Navy also had underwater rescue capabilities and was participating in the search, it was more focused on defense than on this type of mission.

The disappearance of the Titan, which vanished while descending to view the wreck of the Titanic, presented a unique challenge. The small, privately owned vessel was sealed shut from the outside, and rescuing people from it far below the surface would have been very difficult, Mr. Boyer said.

The Coast Guard handles thousands of rescues every year, but many are comparatively straightforward, like finding a lost fishing boat, according to Robert B. Murrett, a retired Navy vice admiral who is now deputy director of the Syracuse University Institute for Security Policy and Law.

“This one’s a little bit different because of the water depth involved, and the nature of the vehicle,” Professor Murrett said.

Even so, he said, the Coast Guard is adept at coordinating search efforts involving different agencies from different countries.

The search for the Titan was “an incredibly complex operation,” Rear Adm. John Mauger, a Boston-based Coast Guard commander, told reporters on Thursday.

“We were able to mobilize an immense amount of gear to the site in just a really remarkable amount of time, given the fact that we started without any sort of vessel response plan for this or any sort of pre-staged resources,” he said.

Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs ,  Jenny Gross and Anna Betts

OceanGate was warned of potential for ‘catastrophic’ problems with its Titanic mission.

Years before OceanGate’s submersible craft went missing in the Atlantic Ocean with five people onboard, the company faced several warnings as it prepared for its hallmark mission of taking wealthy passengers to tour the Titanic’s wreckage.

In January 2018, the company’s engineering team was about to hand over the craft — named Titan — to a new crew who would be responsible for ensuring the safety of its future passengers. But experts inside and outside the company were beginning to raise concerns.

OceanGate’s director of marine operations, David Lochridge, started working on a report around that time, according to court documents, ultimately producing a scathing document in which he said the craft needed more testing and stressed “the potential dangers to passengers of the Titan as the submersible reached extreme depths.”

Two months later, OceanGate faced similarly dire calls from more than three dozen people — industry leaders, deep-sea explorers and oceanographers — who warned in a letter to its chief executive, Stockton Rush, that the company’s “experimental” approach and its decision to forgo a traditional assessment could lead to potentially “catastrophic” problems with the Titanic mission.

A spokesman for OceanGate declined to comment on the five-year-old critiques from Mr. Lochridge and the industry leaders. Nor did Mr. Lochridge respond to a request for comment.

The United States Coast Guard said on Twitter that a debris field was found in the search area by a remote-operated vehicle. Experts are evaluating the information, the Coast Guard said.

The Coast Guard said it would hold a news conference at 3 p..m. Eastern time in Boston to address findings from a remote-operated vehicle deployed by the Canadian vessel Horizon Arctic on the sea floor near the Titanic.

Jenny Gross

Another remotely controlled deep-sea vehicle is en route to the search area.

A remotely operated vehicle that can reach 6,000 meters (about 19,700 feet) below the surface of the ocean was en route to join the search for the missing Titan submersible in the North Atlantic, the Explorers Club, a New York-based organization that counts two of the missing passengers among its members, said on Thursday.

The vehicle, owned by Magellan, a deepwater seabed-mapping company, was being transported from Britain to St. John’s, Newfoundland, where it was expected to land early afternoon local time on Thursday. Two other remotely controlled vehicles are already at the search site around the wreckage of the Titanic. The Titan was on a voyage to visit the shipwreck when it disappeared on Sunday.

Magellan’s vehicle has been to the wreckage of the Titanic — which sits at a depth of about 12,500 feet — more than any other vehicle and has mapped the site , including the surrounding debris, Richard Garriott de Cayeux, president of the Explorers Club, said in a statement. It has manipulator arms that can attach lifting cables directly to a submersible, and “may prove invaluable” to the ongoing search and rescue efforts, Mr. Garriott de Cayeux said. Magellan did not respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Garriott de Cayeux said that other club members with experience diving to similar depths had a sense of what the passengers on the Titan may be facing.

“While the planned life support supply depletes, we believe crew conservation and the near freezing temperatures could prolong life support by some time and the crew knows this,” he said in the statement.

“While the situation is very difficult, we can all be grateful and hopeful as the very best people are on the job,” Mr. Garriott de Cayeux said.

Derrick Bryson Taylor

The University of Strathclyde in Glasgow confirmed on Thursday that Suleman Dawood, the 19-year-old man who is on board the missing submersible along with his father, is a business student at the school. He recently completed his first year, a spokesman for the university said.

“We are deeply concerned about Suleman, his father and the others involved in this incident,” the spokesman said. “Our thoughts are with their families and loved ones and we continue to hope for a positive outcome.”

In discussing the amount of oxygen left on the Titan, Rear Adm. John Mauger of the U.S. Coast Guard said on Thursday that “people’s will to live really needs to be accounted for, as well.”

Rear Adm. John Mauger of the U.S. Coast Guard speaks to TODAY about the latest efforts to rescue the five people on board the missing submersible Titan as it runs low on oxygen. “People’s will to live really needs to be accounted for, as well,” he says. pic.twitter.com/6FJ3w1Z0Ty — TODAY (@TODAYshow) June 22, 2023

The search for the missing submersible was well underway as of Thursday morning. The Canadian vessel Horizon Arctic has deployed a remotely operated vehicle that has reached the sea floor, the U.S. Coast Guard said on Twitter.

The French vessel Atalante is also preparing to deploy its remotely operated vehicle.

Victoria Kim

Photos from an early test of the Titan show how the submersible is deployed.

OceanGate Expeditions , the company behind the Titan submersible missing in a remote part of the North Atlantic since Sunday, conducted tests of its craft in early 2018 outside a marina at its headquarters in Everett, Wash.

It was one of the first saltwater test dives of the vessel, made of carbon fiber and titanium, that was billed as the largest submersible of its type in the world. The company said at the time that the Titan was meant to dive far deeper than its earlier submersibles, and was made out of different material.

The company announced plans to take visitors to the Titanic wreckage in 2017, as its co-founder and chief executive Stockton Rush emphasized the rarefied nature of the experience. “Since her sinking 105 years ago, fewer than 200 people have ever visited the wreck, far fewer than have flown to space or climbed Mount Everest,” he said in a news release at the time. Mr. Rush is on board the missing submersible.

The Titan’s lighter weight and launch and recovery platform would make it “a more financially viable option for individuals interested in exploring the deep,” the company said in a 2018 news release.

But even before the April 2018 saltwater test, experts inside and outside the company had begun warning of potentially “catastrophic” problems that could result from what they said was the company’s “experimental” approach.

Implosion of Titanic sub fuels grief as search for answers continues

As the families of the five men who lost their lives on the Titan submersible grieve, the focus has turned to finding out what caused the "catastrophic implosion" believed to have killed the explorers.

The U.S. Coast Guard said yesterday that debris had been discovered on the ocean floor near the bow of the wrecked Titanic after a frantic international search in the North Atlantic.

A U.S. Navy analysis of acoustic data had “detected an anomaly consistent with an implosion or explosion” near the Titan around the time it lost communications Sunday, a senior Navy official said. The sound was not definitive, but it was immediately shared with commanders, who decided to keep searching, the official said.

The investigation will now turn to determining what caused the implosion as questions remain about the fate of the submersible and the search that captivated people around the world.

What to know about the search for answers

• The submersible disappeared Sunday during a mission to survey the wreckage of the Titanic, which is 900 nautical miles east of Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
• The Coast Guard said Thursday that a "debris field" had been found in the search area, later saying the debris found on the ocean floor was "consistent with a catastrophic implosion of the vessel."
• Stockton Rush, the CEO of OceanGate Expeditions, the company behind the mission; British billionaire Hamish Harding, the owner of Action Aviation; French dive expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet; and prominent Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son, Suleman, are all presumed dead.
• In the days before the Titan's mission, Suleman, 19, said he felt "terrified" about the journey, his aunt said in an interview with NBC News yesterday.

What was the ‘catastrophic implosion’ like for the passengers?

Alexander Smith

The five people aboard  the Titan submersible  most likely died instantaneously in what officials called a “catastrophic implosion.”

The deep-sea water pressure  that appears to have crushed the 22-foot craft  would have been roughly equivalent in weight to the 10,000-ton, wrought-iron Eiffel Tower, experts told NBC News today.

The colossal forces would have acted so quickly that it would be like the vehicle’s carbon-fiber hull “suddenly vanishing”  before anyone inside knew what was happening , one expert said.

“They would have known nothing — the minute this body of water hit them, they would have been dead,” said Paul White, a professor at England’s University of Southampton, who specializes in underwater acoustics and forces.

Read the full story.

Las Vegas businessman and son backed out of Titan trip over safety concerns

Marlene Lenthang

Las Vegas businessman Jay Bloom and his son Sean, 20, were supposed to be on the tragic Titan voyage that imploded. 

In a horrifying parallel, they believe their seats were taken by prominent Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son, Suleman, 19.

Bloom said OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush contacted him a year ago to tell him about the opportunity to visit the wreckage of the Titanic. Bloom said he wanted to go with his son, who was a fan of the iconic sunken ship. 

“My son and his friend raised a lot of concerns about what kind of marine life we’re going to run into, there’s really no escape plan if something goes wrong,” Bloom told NBC News today. 

The father was also concerned about the Titan's hatch, which could be opened only from the outside, and the hull's carbon fiber material, which reacts differently to pressure than steel. 

Rush assured him the journey was “safer than flying a helicopter, safer than crossing the street,” Bloom recalled. 

Two planned voyages were canceled in May because of the weather and rescheduled to June 18, and Bloom ultimately decided they couldn't make it.

“I was just not comfortable with the kind of resources that he had to pull this off, that it could be done safely,” Bloom said. “Looking back, I’m very relieved and glad that my son and I did not go, just feel terrible for the people who did.”

Sean said he’s grateful his father listened to his concerns. 

“The more I stared to think about it, I was like, 'I don’t think this is a good idea,'" he said. “It’s really tragic. It’s crazy that the two people that took our seats were in a very similar situation, father-son. I can’t believe it happened.”

The Blooms said Rush had visited them to talk about the mission, traveling in a small plane he had built himself. 

“I love the confidence in his inventions, but he built a plane by hand and flew it," Sean Bloom said. "No way am I getting on a submarine to the bottom of the ocean, which is way more dangerous than flying an experimental plane." 

Jay Bloom, who shared text messages on Facebook that he exchanged with Rush, remembered the CEO as a “good man with a good heart” who “believed in what he was doing and just wanted to share his passion.”

NTSB to assist in Titan investigation, source says

Jay Blackman

The U.S. Coast Guard has asked the National Transportation Safety Board to assist in the investigation into Titan's implosion, a source close to the investigation told NBC News today.

The NTSB's office of Marine Safety, in conjunction with the Coast Guard, will attempt to find the potential cause of the deep-sea catastrophe, the source said. 

The Coast Guard will be the lead agency in the investigation.  

Time to consider ending visits to Titanic wreck, Titanic International Society says

“Titanic has claimed five additional victims 111 years after her loss,” Charles Haas, the president of the Titanic International Society , said following the deaths of the five people on board Titan. 

“It is time to consider seriously whether human trips to Titanic’s wreck should end in the name of safety, with relatively little remaining to be learned from or about the wreck," he said, noting further surveying can be left to autonomous underwater vehicles.

He called for an “extensive” investigation into the implosion, the submersible’s design and safety, and deep-sea rescue systems.

“Intensive pre-service inspection of deep-sea submersibles should be required by international regulation," he added. " Just as Titanic taught the world safety lessons, so, too, should Titan’s loss."

Titan passengers share accounts of safety issues on the sub's past expeditions

Melissa Chan

The Titan was touted as a groundbreaking submersible that could give tourists the extraordinary chance to visit the deep-sea grave of the Titanic — but past passengers have shared chilling accounts of safety issues, communication failures and design concerns.

The 21-foot,  carbon fiber and titanium submersible  fit five people, with no seats and a curtained-off area for a makeshift bathroom.

Brian Weed, 42, a camera operator for Discovery Channel’s “Expedition Unknown,” did a test dive on the Titan in May 2021 and said, “The moment we started the test dive, things started going wrong.”

The submersible descended, but not all the way to the shipwreck. The launch was “clumsy,” and less than a quarter of the dive in, “there were malfunctions with the propulsion system,” leaving the passengers like “sitting ducks in the water,” Weed said. 

But it was the allure of the Titanic — the ocean liner that sank on its maiden voyage from England to New York in 1912 — that drew him to the project.

Read the full story here.

Shahzada Dawood's relationship with son was a 'joy to behold,' obituary says

Mushtaq Yusufzai

Chantal Da Silva

The relationship between Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son, Suleman, was a "joy to behold," an obituary from the father and son's family says.

"With profound sorrow, we mourn the tragic loss of Shahzada and his beloved son, Suleman, who had embarked on a journey to visit the remnants of the legendary Titanic in the depths of the Atlantic Ocean," the obituary, shared by The British Asian Trust, says. "In this unfathomable tragedy, we try to find solace in the enduring legacy of humility and humanity that they have left behind and find comfort in the belief that they passed on to the next leg of their spiritual journey hand-in-hand, father and son," it says.

"The relationship between Shahzada and Suleman was a joy to behold; they were each other’s greatest supporters and cherished a shared passion for adventure and exploration of all the world had to offer them," it says.

The family remembered Shahzada Dawood as someone who was "passionate about philanthropy and giving back because above all, he cared deeply about people and human development."

Suleman was remembered as someone who loved science fiction literature and volleyball, but whose "greatest quality was the humility he espoused which was a true reflection of his parents’ upbringing."

19-year-old Titan passenger was ‘terrified’ before trip, his aunt says

Daniel Arkin

In the days before the Titan vessel  went into the ocean  off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada, the 19-year-old university student accompanying his father on the expedition expressed hesitation about going, his aunt said in an interview Thursday.

Azmeh Dawood — the older sister of Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood — told NBC News that her nephew, Suleman, informed a relative that he “wasn’t very up for it” and felt “terrified” about the trip to explore the wreckage of the Titanic.

But the 19-year-old ended up going aboard  OceanGate’s 22-foot submersible  because the trip fell over Father’s Day weekend and he was eager to please his dad, who was passionate about the lore of the Titanic, according to Azmeh.

Implosion 'like crushing a can of Coca-Cola,' ex-Coast Guard commander says

As investigators look for answers on what caused the apparent implosion, experts are weighing in on what might have unfolded.

"From my understanding, the submersible imploded. In other words, the force of the water was so strong that it blew the back and the front of the submersible off," said Armin Cate, a former Commander in the United States Coast Guard Reserve and retired Senior Special Agent with the Department of Homeland Security.

"When you crush that tube in the middle it’s like crushing a can of Coca-Cola you might say," Cate said.

He said that in such an incident, "bolts are going to come free. And so the fact that they found the front cap and the back and different parts of the bottom and the middle tube no longer was connected to them tells me that’s what happened."

"And it appears to me that both the front and the rear cap were blown out about the same time. So, it was a catastrophic failure due to the outside pressure of the water ... on the actual hull or the canned part of the submersible."

Study of wreck could help us 'learn from this tragedy,' expert says

Learning what exactly happened in the suspected implosion of the Titan could help us "learn from this tragedy," a former Coast Guard Reserve commander said.

Armin Cate, a former commander in the U.S. Coast Guard Reserve and retired senior special agent with the Department of Homeland Security said the mission the Titan embarked on was much "like going to the moon."

"The only difference is in the moon you don’t have that type of pressure," he said. "The remoteness of this location combined with the pressure of the water, there’s just so many points of failure that could occur."

"I think that’s why they’re trying to retrieve these objects so they can study them so they can determine you know where the weak areas were, so that people can learn from this tragedy and be able to make stronger more capable vehicles in the future," he said.

Organization launched by King Charles pays tribute to Dawood

Prince’s Trust International, a charitable organization founded by King Charles III, has paid tribute to Shahzada Dawood, who served as an adviser to the organization. His father, Hussain, was also one of the trust’s founding patrons.

“We are deeply saddened by this terrible news. Prince’s Trust International has had a longstanding relationship with Shahzada Dawood and his family, and we have valued their support of our work in Pakistan for many years," the organization said. "Our thoughts are with Shahzada’s family and all those on board at this immensely tragic time."

Dawood had been an advisor to Prince’s Trust International in various capacities, including work on its Global Advisory Board, with a focus on the organization's work in Pakistan, the group said.

Both he and his son, Suleman, were presumed dead in the submersible disaster.

Canadian assistance with 'recovery and salvage' under discussion

The "extent of Canadian assistance with recovery and salvage" was being discussed on Thursday, the Joint Rescue Coordination Centre and the Canadian Armed Forces said in a statement.

Offering "sincere condolences to the family and friends of the crew of the Titan for their tragic loss," they said: "This is a truly unfortunate outcome that concludes the great efforts and cooperation between countries, militaries and partners."

With the operation "transitioning to recovery and salvage," they said that "all JRCC rescue assets will return to base to regenerate search and rescue capability and prepare for future search and rescue events."  

Explorers might not have had 'time to realize what happened,' expert says

The five people who died on the Titan may not have "had the time to realize what happened" if the submersible imploded as believed, an expert said.

If the vessel did implode, it would likely have essentially "exploded inwards in a matter of a thousandth of a second," Will Kohnen, chairman of peer-review group Marine Technology Society’s committee on manned submersibles, told Reuters.

"And it’s probably a mercy because that was probably a kinder end than the unbelievably difficult situation of being four days in a cold, dark and confined space," he said. "So, this would have happened very quickly. I don’t think anybody even had the time to realize what happened," he said.

Photo: Titan search vessels seen from space

Max Butterworth

Satellite images courtesy of Maxar Technologies show deep-sea recovery vessels searching for the OceanGate Titan submersible near the Titanic wreck site on Thursday.

From top: The Canadian Horizon Arctic, Bahamian vessel Deep Energy and Canadian registered Skandi Vinland.

Friend of Rush describes the appeal of extreme adventures

Henry Austin

It’s not for everyone but, for a certain type of adventurer, descending to the depths of the ocean inside a small and cramped vessel means “doing something extraordinary,” a friend of two of the people aboard the missing  Titan submersible  told NBC News Thursday.

Per Wimmer, who describes himself as an astronaut, adventurer, explorer, philanthropist, global financier, author and private island owner, operates in those circles. 

The Danish national, 54, said in a telephone interview that he is friends with Stockton Rush, CEO of  OceanGate , the company that chartered the submersible, and British billionaire adventurer Hamish Harding, who were among the five aboard the vessel.

Describing them as “adventurers,” Wimmer said they tried to “test the boundaries” and “do something extraordinary.”

Focus turns to determining what caused 'catastrophic implosion'

The dayslong search for Titan has come to a devastating end as officials turn their focus to what caused the "catastrophic implosion" believed to have killed the five people onboard.

The U.S. Coast Guard said on Thursday that debris discovered in the search for the sub was consistent with a catastrophic explosion. The debris was found off the bow of the sunken Titanic, officials said.

A U.S. Navy analysis of acoustic data had “detected an anomaly consistent with an implosion or explosion” near the Titan around the time it lost communications, a senior Navy official said. The sound was not definitive, but it was immediately shared with commanders, who decided to keep searching, the official said.

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All 5 passengers aboard Titan sub are dead after a 'catastrophic implosion'

Emily Olson

Vanessa Romo

Rear Adm. John Mauger, the U.S. Coast Guard District commander, speaks during a news conference in Boston on Thursday about the search for the missing OceanGate submersible Titan. Brian Snyder/Reuters hide caption

Rear Adm. John Mauger, the U.S. Coast Guard District commander, speaks during a news conference in Boston on Thursday about the search for the missing OceanGate submersible Titan.

All five passengers aboard the missing Titan submersible have died following a "catastrophic implosion of the vessel," the U.S. Coast Guard said Thursday.

Speaking at a news conference in Boston, Rear Adm. John Mauger said the debris found by a remotely operated vehicle on the sea floor near the wreck of the Titanic – roughly 900 miles east of Cape Cod in Massachusetts – indicated the crew and passengers likely died from the failure of the craft.

"The debris is consistent with the catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber," he said. "Upon this determination, we immediately notified the families ... I can only imagine what this has been like for them. And I hope that this discovery provides some solace during this difficult time."

The 5 men who were aboard the wrecked Titan sub loved adventures — and taking risks

OceanGate, the company that developed the submersible, said officials "now believe that our CEO Stockton Rush, Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood, Hamish Harding, and Paul-Henri Nargeolet, have sadly been lost,"

Titan set out on its journey Sunday morning and lost contact with its support ship less than two hours later. Coast Guard officials said they will begin to withdraw vessels from the scene over the next 24 hours but added that remote operations will continue on the sea floor.

When asked about the likelihood of recovering the bodies, Mauger said he does not have an answer and noted the "incredibly unforgiving environment" of the sea floor.

A boat near the U.S. Coast Guard base in Boston, Mass., on Wednesday, where rescue teams raced to find a missing submersible with five people on board. Fatih Aktas/Getty Images hide caption

A boat near the U.S. Coast Guard base in Boston, Mass., on Wednesday, where rescue teams raced to find a missing submersible with five people on board.

Earlier Thursday, rescue teams hunting for the missing submersible uncovered a field of debris near the site of the wrecked ocean liner, the Coast Guard said.

Here's a guide to what we know.

What do we know about the debris field?

The Coast Guard said that the debris field was uncovered by an ROV deployed by the Canadian ship Horizon Arctic , which had reached the sea floor early Thursday.

Experts say the seabed around the Titanic is littered with bits of the wreck , which shows tell-tale signs of its age, including the effects of an iron-eating bacteria.

Deep sea rescues have a mixed track record. The Pisces III is one that succeeded

The Coast Guard said that maritime surveillance planes operated by Canada detected underwater sounds late Tuesday, then again on Wednesday.

Various underwater search efforts were moved to the location of the noise to discover its source, but the Coast Guard said efforts "yielded negative results" up until news of the debris field.

As of Wednesday, underwater acoustic experts from the U.S. Navy were still analyzing the sounds, which one expert described as "banging noises."

What kind of equipment is being used in the search?

A photo provided by the U.S. Coast Guard on Wednesday shows a ship searching for the lost submersible near the wreck site of the Titanic. U.S. Coast Guard hide caption

A photo provided by the U.S. Coast Guard on Wednesday shows a ship searching for the lost submersible near the wreck site of the Titanic.

The Coast Guard says that the data from the Canadian aircraft, a P-3 Orion, served as a focus point for its unified search efforts.

The remoteness of the location and the size of the search area — extending 10,000 miles on the surface and 2.4 miles down to the ocean floor — complicated efforts to locate the vessel and its passengers. Thursday's weather, at least, may have proved more favorable to search crews, with winds slowing to 14 mph and wave swells dropping around 4 to 5 feet.

In addition to the remote-operated vehicles deployed by Horizon Arctic, a second deep-diving ROV, deployed by the French vessel L'Atalante , was searching for the Titan.

The unified search command led by the Coast Guard has been criticized by industry experts and U.S. lawmakers who say the teams didn't send equipment to the site early enough.

The wife of OceanGate's CEO is descended from a famous couple who died on the Titanic

Richard Garriott de Cayeux, president of the Explorers Club, tweeted that members of the research group continually offered their expertise and equipment — including a deep-diving ROV with the ability to attach a lift cable to the Titan — but were not approved to send the equipment until Wednesday, putting the estimated arrival time hours behind when the Titan's emergency oxygen supply was due to expire.

When would the sub's oxygen supply have run out?

The Coast Guard said it was first notified of the missing vessel at 5:40 p.m. ET Sunday, nearly three hours after the Titan was expected to resurface.

At the beginning of the search, officials estimated the submersible, if still fully functional, contained about 96 hours of reserve oxygen. At a 1 p.m. ET press conference on Wednesday, the Coast Guard estimated that supply was down to about 20 hours.

A former passenger details what it's like inside the missing Titan submersible

That means the oxygen on board the Titan would have run out early Thursday morning, when crews were continuing search-and-rescue efforts on the assumption that the people on board were still alive.

Rear Adm. John Mauger of the U.S. Coast Guard speaks to TODAY about the latest efforts to rescue the five people on board the missing submersible Titan as it runs low on oxygen. “People’s will to live really needs to be accounted for, as well,” he says. pic.twitter.com/6FJ3w1Z0Ty — TODAY (@TODAYshow) June 22, 2023

What was the sub's mission?

The missing vessel is owned by OceanGate, a company based in Washington state that's become a major chronicler of the Titanic's decay.

In May, OceanGate shared the first-ever full-size digital scan of the wreck site , which is slowly succumbing to a metal-eating bacteria and at risk of disintegrating in a matter of decades.

For $250,000 a person, the company promises tourists an underwater voyage to explore the remains of the Titanic from the seafloor. From St. John's, explorers travel 380 miles offshore and 2.4 miles below the surface. A full trip can take eight days and include multiple dives.

If successful, the dives offer a glimpse of what's left of the 1912 crash into an iceberg, which took the lives of all but 700 of the Titanic's 2,200 passengers and crew.

Did anyone warn OceanGate that the Titan wasn't safe?

Years before the Titan went missing, OceanGate faced several complaints and warnings about the safety of its submersible vessels.

While sub disappearance transfixes some, many say their focus is on other calamities

Records from a 2018 lawsuit show that the company's former director of marine operations, David Lochridge, flagged potential safety issues with the Titan as it was under development in 2015.

Lochridge was particularly concerned about the company's lack of testing on the Titan's 5-inch-thick carbon fiber hull , which employed an experimental design developed in collaboration with NASA. He also said that the Titan's port window was only designed to withstand depths of about 4,200 feet — far shallower than the 13,000-foot depth of the Titanic.

OceanGate responded in legal filings by saying it relied on acoustic testing "better suited" to detect safety issues. The company fired and sued Lochridge, accusing him of breaching his contract.

OceanGate wants to change deep-sea tourism, but its missing sub highlights the risks

Separately, but in the same year the lawsuit was settled, the chairman of the Marine Technology Society's Submarine Group wrote a letter to OceanGate saying 38 industry experts had "unanimous concern" about the Titan's lack of adherence to industry standards.

"We have submarines all over the world diving at 12,000 to 20,000 feet every day of the year, for research. We know very well how to design these machines and operate them safely," the chairman, Will Kohnen, told NPR's Morning Edition on Wednesday.

How did OceanGate respond to warnings about Titan's safety?

OceanGate has seen at least two documented safety incidents with the Titan after these warnings.

During a 2022 expedition, OceanGate reported that its sub had experienced a battery issue during a dive and had to be manually reattached to its lifting platform, court filings show.

A remarkable new view of the Titanic shipwreck is here, thanks to deep-sea mappers

In the same year, the vessel lost contact with its surface crew for nearly five hours during a dive, according to CBS correspondent David Pogue , who was observing the mission for a journalistic report on the company.

Pogue reported that a waiver for passengers of the Titan clearly states the vessel has not been approved or certified by any regulatory body.

Rush, OceanGate's founder, said in a 2019 interview that the commercial submarine industry's regulations stood in the way of progress.

"It's obscenely safe because they have all these regulations," Rush told The Smithsonian Magazine. "But it also hasn't innovated or grown."

NPR's Willem Marx , Ayana Archie and Juliana Kim contributed reporting.

Correction June 22, 2023

An earlier version of this story omitted Richard Garriott de Cayeux's last name.

• Titan submersible
• U.S. Coast Guard
• deep sea exploration

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June 22, 2023 - Missing Titanic sub crew killed after 'catastrophic implosion'

By Helen Regan , Adam Renton, Rob Picheta , Aditi Sangal , Elise Hammond , Matt Meyer , Tori B. Powell and Maureen Chowdhury , CNN

Our live coverage of the Titan submersible tragedy has moved here.

"Titanic" director worries implosion will have a negative impact on citizen explorers

Film director James Cameron said Thursday he's worried that the Titan submersible's implosion will have a negative impact on citizen explorers.

"These are serious people with serious curiosity willing to put serious money down to go to these interesting places," the "Titanic" director told CNN's Anderson Cooper. "I don't want to discourage that. But I think that it's almost now a lesson. The takeaway is, make sure if you're gonna go into a vehicle, whether it's an aircraft or surface craft or a submersible, that it's been through certifying agencies."

Some background: Stockton Rush, the CEO of OceanGate Expeditions, which operated the Titan submersible, and who died in the implosion, had spoken about his antipathy to regulations .

“At some point, safety just is pure waste,” Stockton  told journalist David Pogue  in an interview last year. “I mean, if you just want to be safe, don’t get out of bed. Don’t get in your car. Don’t do anything.”

"Titanic" director says news of submersible's implosion did not come as a surprise

From CNN's Sabrina Souza

James Cameron, director of the hit 1997 film “Titanic,” says news of the Titan submersible's explosion "certainly wasn't a surprise."

Cameron, who has made 33 dives to the wreckage himself, told CNN's Anderson Cooper that when he first heard the news of the Titan incident Monday morning, he connected with his small community in the deep submergence group and found out within about a half-hour that the submersible had lost communication and tracking, simultaneously. 

“The only scenario that I could come up with in my mind that could account for that was an implosion,” he told Cooper on Thursday. “A shockwave event so powerful that it actually took out a secondary system that has its own pressure vessel and its own battery power supply which is the transponder that the ship uses to track where the sub is." 

Cameron said he did more digging and got some additional information that seemed to confirm that the submersible had imploded.

"I encouraged all of them to raise a glass in their honor on Monday,” Cameron said of his community group.

He said false-hopes kept getting dangled as search teams looked for the missing passengers over the following days.

"I watched over the ensuing days this whole sort of everybody-running-around-with-their-hair-on-fire search, knowing full well that it was futile, hoping against hope that I was wrong but knowing in my bones that I wasn’t,” Cameron told Cooper.

He expressed condolences for the families of the passengers.

Submersible heading to Titanic wreckage suffered "catastrophic implosion." Here's what we know

From CNN staff

The five passengers on the Titan submersible that was diving 13,000 feet to view the Titanic on the ocean floor died in a "catastrophic implosion," authorities said Thursday, bookending an extraordinary five-day international search operation near the site of the world's most famous shipwreck.

The tail cone and other debris were found by a remotely operated vehicle about 1,600 feet from the bow of the Titanic, deep in the North Atlantic and about 900 east of Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

“This is an incredibly unforgiving environment down there on the sea floor and the debris is consistent with a catastrophic implosion of the vessel,” US Coast Guard Rear Adm. John Mauger, the First Coast Guard District commander, told reporters.

Here's what we know:

• Debris: The remotely operated vehicle found " five different major pieces of debris " from the Titan submersible, according to Paul Hankins, the US Navy's director of salvage operations and ocean engineering. The debris was "consistent with the catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber " and, in turn, a " catastrophic implosion ," he said. As of now, there does not appear to be a connection between the  banging noises picked up by sonar  earlier this week and where the debris was found.
• Timing: The US Navy detected an acoustic signature consistent with an implosion on Sunday and relayed that information to the commanders leading the search effort, a senior official told CNN. But the sound was determined to be “not definitive,” the official said. Mauger, for his part, said rescuers had sonar buoys in the water for at least the last 72 hours and had "not detected any catastrophic events." Listening devices set up during the search also did not record any sign of an implosion, Mauger added.
• What comes next: The remotely operated vehicles will remain on the scene  and continue to gather information, Mauger said. It will take time to determine a specific timeline of events in the "incredibly complex" case of the Titan's failure, Mauger said. The Coast Guard official said the agency will eventually have more information about what went wrong and its assessment of the emergency response.
• Response: Mauger applauded the “huge international” and “interagency” search effort. He said teams had the appropriate gea r and worked as quickly as possible. The Coast Guard official also thanked experts and agencies for assisting with the search for the Titan submersible.

• Who was on board: Tour organizer OceanGate Expeditions said Hamish Harding, Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood, Paul-Henri Nargeolet and  OceanGate CEO  Stockton Rush died in the submersible. They "shared a distinct spirit of adventure," the company in a statement .
• Reaction: Nargeolet, a French diver, was an incredible person and highly respected in his field , said his friend Tom Dettweiler, a fellow ocean explorer. The president of The Explorers Club said the group is heartbroken over the tragic loss. Two passengers, businessman Harding and Nargeolet, were members, it said. Engro Corporation Limited, of which Shahzada Dawood was Vice Chairman, said the company grieves the loss of him and his son. The governments of Pakistan and the United Kingdom also offered condolences .

White House thanks Coast Guard and international partners for search efforts

From CNN's Jeremy Diamond

The White House thanked the US Coast Guard and international partners for their search and rescue efforts for the submersible that went missing on its way to the Titanic wreckage.

"This has been a testament to the skill and professionalism that the men and women who serve our nation continue to demonstrate every single day," a White House spokesperson said.

Earlier Thursday, the Coast Guard thanked experts and agencies from all over the world for assisting in the effort, calling it a “huge international” and “interagency” search.

The White House spokesperson also expressed sympathy for the families of the five passengers onboard the submersible.

“Our hearts go out to the families and loved ones of those who lost their lives on the Titan. They have been through a harrowing ordeal over the past few days, and we are keeping them in our thoughts and prayers," the spokesperson said.

Passengers lost in the "catastrophic implosion" of the Titan submersible remembered by loved ones

From CNN's Sugam Pokharel, Francesca Giuliani-Hoffman, Mostafa Salem in Abu Dhabi and Sofia Cox in Atlanta

The Titan submersible bound for the Titanic that went missing on Sunday with five people on board suffered a “catastrophic implosion,” US Coast Guard Rear Adm. John Mauger said Thursday.

Now those who knew the passengers are grappling with their tragic loss and some have sent messages of condolences as their legacies are remembered.

Engro Corporation Limited, where Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood was vice chairman, issued a statement on the deaths of Dawood and his son Suleman — who were among the five people on board the Titan submersible .

“With heavy hearts and with great sadness, we grieve the loss of our Vice Chairman, Shahzada Dawood, and his beloved son, Suleman Dawood. Our thoughts and prayers are with the Dawood family at this tragic time. We extend our heartfelt condolences to the family, colleagues, friends, and all those around the world who grieve this unthinkable loss,” the company tweeted on Thursday.

Dubai-based Action Aviation, the company owned by passenger Hamish Harding released a statement on behalf of his family.

“Today, we are united in grief with the other families who have also lost their loved ones on the Titan submersible," the statement read. "Hamish Harding was a loving husband to his wife and a dedicated father to his two sons, whom he loved deeply. To his team in Action Aviation, he was a guide, an inspiration, a support, and a Living Legend."

The statement went on to praise the efforts made to search for the Titan sub.

"We know that Hamish would have been immensely proud to see how nations, experts, industry colleagues and friends came together for the search, and we extend our heartfelt thanks for all their efforts. On behalf of the Harding family and Action Aviation, we would like to politely request privacy at this incredibly difficult time," it said.

The family of French diver Paul-Henri Nargeolet said he will "be remembered as one of the greatest deep-sea explorers in modern history."

The statement signed by Nargeolet’s children and wife said that they hope people think about Paul-Henri and his work when they think about the Titanic, "but what we will remember him most for is his big heart, his incredible sense of humor and how much he loved his family. We will miss him today and every day for the rest of our lives."

His stepson, John Paschall, described him as an “incredible stepfather” and someone who was caring and had a great sense of humor. He recalled how his mother and Nargeolot drove across the country to attend his college graduation in 2014 after their flight got canceled.

“They hop into their small, blue Mini Cooper and they drive 16 hours across the country from Connecticut to Chicago, drive through the night. I am quite certain that he did a lot of the driving. They showed up with one hour to spare for graduation,” he told CNN. “They made it there. At that time, my mom was very sick of cancer and meant so much to me that she could be there for that moment. That is something I will never forget about him.”

US Navy detected implosion on Sunday and relayed information to search efforts, official says

From CNN's Oren Liebermann

The US Navy detected an acoustic signature consistent with an implosion on Sunday in the general area where the Titan submersible was diving in the North Atlantic when it lost communication with its support ship, according to a senior Navy official.

The Navy immediately relayed that information to the on-scene commanders leading the search effort, the official said Thursday, adding that information was used to narrow down the area of the search.

But the sound of the implosion was determined to be “not definitive,” the official said, and the multinational efforts to find the submersible continued as a search and rescue effort.

The Wall Street Journal was the first to report about the acoustic signature picked up by the Navy.

Audio of the implosion was picked up by a network of sensors as part of an underwater Navy acoustic listening system, said the official, who declined to go into more detail about the secret system. The network of sensors allowed the Navy to zero-in on a possible location of the noise, providing search teams with a more refined area. 

The Navy also helped analyze the audio signatures of banging and other acoustic data that were heard throughout the search efforts. Those were likely some form of natural life or sounds given off by other ships and vessels that were part of the search effort, the official said.

Expert describes how robots and other machinery will help recover Titan wreckage

A single vessel, if properly equipped, and remotely controlled vehicles on the seafloor would likely be capable of recovering the wreckage of the Titan submersible, Capt. Mark Martin, a salvage master and deep submergence pilot, said Thursday.

The ship would need a crane with a wire that can reach a depth of 4,000 meters (about 2 and a half miles), which can be found on many vessels involved in offshore gas and oil construction, Martin said in an interview with CNN's Jake Tapper.

Recovery crews will also need one or two remotely operated vehicles, or ROVs, which have already played a key role in the search for signs of Titan, the captain said. The ROVs are large, powerful machines that can be controlled from the vessel above them.

The ROVs will work in concert with the crane to scoop pieces of the sub into large "recovery baskets," which Martin said look like half of a shipping container made of mesh.

ROVs will pick up pieces with their arms and move them into baskets, or help attach pieces to straps for the crane, which will lift pieces to the surface, he said.

Director James Cameron says he sees similarities between Titanic wreck and submersible tragedy

From CNN’s Lisa France

James Cameron, who directed the hit 1997 film "Titanic" and has made 33 dives to the wreckage, said he saw some similarities between the Titan traged y and the sinking of the famous ship it was bound for.

"I'm struck by the similarity of the Titanic disaster itself, where the captain was repeatedly warned about ice ahead of his ship and yet steamed at full speed into an ice field on a moonless night and many people died as a result," Cameron told  ABC News Thursday.

He added, "And with a very similar tragedy where warnings went unheeded to take place at the same exact site with all the diving that's going on all around the world I think it's just astonishing. It's really quite surreal."

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UPDATED with latest: The U.S. Coast Guard confirmed at a news conference today that “a debris field was discovered within the search area by an ROV near the Titanic ” is, in fact, from the Titan submersible. The five people aboard are feared dead after what one official termed as a debris field consistent with a “catastrophic implosion.”

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“The debris is consistent with catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber,” he added.

Multiple media outlets received a statement from OceanGate, the company which operated the sub, that read in part, “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.” Read its statement below:

RELATED:  NewsNation Criticized For “Oxygen Remaining” Countdown Clock Featured In Coverage Of Missing Titanic Sub

OceanGate: “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.” @ABC Special Report is moments away. pic.twitter.com/IumSBMpHM2 — Gio Benitez (@GioBenitez) June 22, 2023

Titan dived Sunday to take adventurers on a pricey deep-sea exploration of the century-old wreckage of the ship that was the subject of James Cameron ‘s Oscar-winning 1997 blockbuster Titanic. Apparently, those analyses are now complete.

The 21-foot Titan submersible has been missing since Sunday, and officials worried its oxygen supply is running dangerously low.

RELATED: ‘The Simpsons’ Writer And Former Showrunner Mike Reiss Talks About His Trips On The Missing Titanic Submarine

Mauger was interviewed on Today this morning. Watch that below.

Rear Admiral John Mauger, who is spearheading the Coast Guard’s search for the missing Titanic tourist submersible, speaks if there could be a possibility that the 96-hour supply of oxygen has been extended, the support on the search, and more. pic.twitter.com/l4bncHBWpp — TODAY (@TODAYshow) June 22, 2023

RELATED: CBS Story On Missing Titanic Sub Goes Viral After Reporter Got Jitters Over Its “Jerry-Rigged” Design

A debris field was discovered within the search area by an ROV near the Titanic. Experts within the unified command are evaluating the information. 1/2 — USCGNortheast (@USCGNortheast) June 22, 2023

U.S. and international media have been covering the search since Titan was reported missing Sunday by the crew of the Canadian vessel Polar Prince, which launched the truck-sized sub and lost contact with them “about 1 hour and 45 minutes into its dive.” The five people aboard the Titan are Stockton Rush, CEO of Ocean Gate, the company leading the voyage; Pakistani billionaire Shahzada Dawood and his son Sulaiman Dawood; British businessman Hamish Harding; and veteran French diver Paul-Henri Nargeolet. They reportedly paid for $250,000 apiece for the trip.

The search area was 7,000 square miles, which one official noted is “an area larger than the state of Connecticut.”

RELATED: Quickie Titanic Sub Documentary Set On British TV Just Hours After Air Onboard The Craft Is Expected To Run Out

On Wednesday, officials said that that a surveillance plane looking for the missing submersible “detected underwater noises in the search area,” described as “banging noises,” about 900 miles off Cape Cod.

“There have been multiple reports of noises and those noises are being analyzed,” Frederick said during a news conference Wednesday. “The noises were detected by a Canadian P-3 search plane today and yesterday. Frederick said recordings of those noises had been analyzed overnight by U.S. Navy experts, but the results were inconclusive.

“We need to have hope,” he said, “but I can’t tell you what the noises are.”

One piece of good news: While at least one previous sojourn with this submersible was made without supplies of food and water, this time there are “some limited rations aboard,” Frederick said.

CBS News’ David Pogue, whose excellent piece on the Titan sub last summer has gone viral, described the sub’s multifaceted breathing apparatus to News Nation this week.

“There are carbon dioxide scrubbers, exactly the same thing you would have in a spacecraft; then there are these emergency scrubbers that look like fly strips they hang from the ceiling and convert C02 to oxygen. And then if those get exhausted there are actual scuba oxygen tanks under the floor panels that they can put on.”

He also described the multiple ways the sub can resurface if there is an emergency.

“This thing has seven different ways of returning to the surface. It has different kinds of ballasts that can let go, it has an inflatable air bladder and has propellers.”

Even if it has returned to the surface, however, the sub has limited communication abilities. The Titan generally communicates with the Polar Prince mothership only by text message. On Pogue’s trip down in the sub, the craft lost touch with the Polar Prince and never found the wreck.

Another issue: opening the hatch.

“The crew closes the hatch, from the outside, with 17 bolts. There’s no other way out,” Pogue said in CBS Sunday Morning piece last year. That means there is no way for those inside the sub to open the hatch from the inside to get more air, should they surface.

Pogue reposted video from a CBS Sunday Morning piece he did while on an OceanGate expedition last summer, which he says “got lost for a few hours” while he was on board and never found the wreck. Watch it here:

“Our entire focus is on the crew members in the submersible and their families,” reads a statement from OceanGate provided to The New York Times . “We are deeply thankful for the extensive assistance we have received from several government agencies and deep sea companies in our efforts to reestablish contact with the submersible.”

Per the Times , which did a piece on OceanGate last summer: “The dives last about eight hours, including the estimated 2.5 hours each way it takes to descend and ascend. Scientists and historians provide context on the trip and some conduct research at the site. … The team also documents the wreckage with high-definition cameras to monitor its decay and capture it in detail.”

Titanic sank on its maiden voyage in April 1912 after hitting an iceberg, killing about 1,500 passengers and crew. The wreckage was found in 1985, and inspired diving enthusiast Cameron to make Titanic . The film went on to win 11 Oscars and gross more than $2.26 billion worldwide. It remains among the Top 10 films of all time both domestically and worldwide, ranking No. 4 on the latter list.

“I made  Titanic  because I wanted to dive to the shipwreck, not because I particularly wanted to make the movie,” Cameron told Playboy in 2009. “The Titanic was the Mount Everest of shipwrecks, and as a diver I wanted to do it right. When I learned some other guys had dived to the Titanic to make an Imax movie, I said, ‘I’ll make a Hollywood movie to pay for an expedition and do the same thing.’ I loved that first taste, and I wanted more.”

Erik Pedersen contributed to this report.

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Titanic tourist submersible: desperate search for sub missing with five onboard

French expert and British explorer believed to be among five onboard submersible missing in north Atlantic since Sunday

• Explainer: what is the Titan tourist sub and what might have happened to it?

Search and rescue teams were racing against time on Monday to find a tourist sub that went missing in the north Atlantic while on a dive to the wreck of the Titanic.

The US Coast Guard said “a small submarine with five persons onboard” had gone missing in the vicinity of the Titanic wreck and that the vessel had the capacity to be submerged for 96 hours, but it was unclear whether it was still underwater or had surfaced and was unable to communicate.

The submersible was reported overdue on Monday but contact was lost 1 hour 45 minutes into its dive on Sunday afternoon, the coast guard said.

A British explorer and a French military veteran and submarine expert were believed to be among those onboard the Titan, a deep diving submersible operated by underwater tourism company Oceangate.

Rear Admiral John Mauger, first district commander of the US coast guard, overseeing the search-and-rescue operation, told a press conference late on Monday afternoon that “we are doing everything we can do” to find the sub and its occupants.

US and Canadian ships and planes swarmed the area about 1,450km east of Cape Cod, some dropping sonar buoys that can monitor to a depth of almost 4,000m, the US Coast Guard said, but the search was “complex” because crews did not know if the vessel had surfaced, meaning they must scour both the surface and the ocean depths of nearly 13,000 feet.

“We’re making the best use of every moment of that time. What we’re focused on is finding those five people,” Mauger said.

David Concannon, an adviser to OceanGate, said the submersible’s 96-hour oxygen supply started at roughly 6am Sunday. In an email to the Associated Press, Concannon said officials were working to get a remotely operated vehicle that could reach a depth of 6,000m to the site as soon as possible.

Despite the wreck of the Titanic resting south-east of the coast of Newfoundland, Canadian authorities told the Guardian the search efforts were under the jurisdiction of the US Coast Guard’s Boston fleet.

OceanGate Expeditions , the company that offers the visits to the wreck, which lies on the ocean floor at a depth of almost 4,000m and about 370 miles off the coast of Newfoundland, has been running expeditions since 2021.

A statement on the company’s website on Monday read: “Our entire focus is on the crew members in the submersible and their families. We are deeply thankful for the extensive assistance we have received from several government agencies and deep sea companies in our efforts to re-establish contact with the submersible.”

One of those believed to be on board is Paul Henry Nargeolet, a former French navy commander, a deep diver and a submersible pilot. As director of underwater research for E/M Group and RMS Titanic, Inc, he is widely considered the leading authority on the wreck site and it is possible he was in charge of the submersible on the dive, with four passengers alongside.

Nargeolet has led several expeditions to the Titanic site and supervised the recovery of 5,000 artifacts, including the recovery of the “big piece”, a 20-tonne section of Titanic’s hull.

British businessman Hamish Harding, a well-known aviator and explorer who is one of the tiny group of tourists who have been to space, was booked on the trip. His stepson, Brian Szasz, posted on Facebook his “thoughts and prayers” as “his submarine has gone missing” and then later deleted the post.

Harding, 58, posted on Instagram on Saturday: “Due to the worst winter in Newfoundland in 40 years, this mission is likely to be the first and only manned mission to the Titanic in 2023. A weather window has just opened up and we are going to attempt a dive tomorrow.” In a previous post he described himself as “a mission specialist” on the trip.

The RMS Titanic, a British passenger liner which had been marketed as “unsinkable”, sank on its maiden voyage in April 1912. It had been en route from Britain to the US when it was holed by an iceberg. The lives of 1,514 of the 2,224 passengers and crew were lost and the Titanic became perhaps the most famous civilian shipwreck of all time. The wreck itself was not found until the 1980s .

OceanGate started taking small crews of “citizen scientists” in a five-person mini sub two years ago. A ticket costs $250,000.

According to the company’s website, Oceangate had an eight-day, seven-night expedition to the wreck planned for 12-20 June. A maximum of six visitors were scheduled to depart and return to St John’s, Newfoundland, Canada.

Since 2021, the Bahamas-based OceanGate Expeditions has ferried about 60 paying customers and 15-20 researchers to the wreck.

“We started the business and it was this idea of researchers and wealthy people,” OceanGate founder Stockton Rush told the Guardian in January . “Is there a way to match those people who wanted to have an adventure travel experience with researchers who need funding and a sub?”

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How likely is it that the noises detected are coming from inside OceanGate's missing Titanic tourist submersible?

A few days after a submersible with five people aboard went missing, a Canadian surveillance vessel detected underwater noises, more narrowly defining the search area for rescue crews.

But the question remains: did the noises come from the tourist submarine?

Here's the latest news on the noises coming from the missing Oceangate submersible which was headed for the Titanic. 

What has happened to the submersible? 

The diving vessel, named Titan, went missing while descending to the wreck of the Titanic, which lies at a depth of almost 4,000 metres.

Aboard the submersible are billionaire adventurer Hamish Harding, renowned Titanic expert Paul-Henry Nargeolet, two members of one of Pakistan's wealthiest families, Shahzada and Suleman Dawood, and the CEO of the company leading the expedition, Stockton Rush.

Retired Navy Captain Carl Hartsfield, now director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Systems Laboratory, said the sounds detected had been described as "banging noises".

He also warned that search crews had to "put the whole picture together in context and they have to eliminate potential man-made sources other than the Titan".

With the oxygen supply due to run out, Coast Guard officials are bringing in more ships and other vessels to search the area, including a French robot that can dive to 6,000 metres.

How were the noises detected?

A Canadian military surveillance aircraft with underwater sonar capabilities first detected underwater noises in the search area on Tuesday, which prompted a search of the region by a robotic vessel.

The search "yielded negative results", the US Coast Guard wrote on Twitter.

The sounds in the Titan search were picked up using devices called sonobuoys, which can be tossed out of aeroplanes to detect noises, to avoid interference with ship sounds, said Matt Dzieciuch, an ocean acoustics expert at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

These devices could help triangulate the location of the sub, but searchers would need to deploy many buoys to make it work, experts said.

Could the sounds be coming from something other than the submersible?

The ocean is a "noisy place," Dr Dzieciuch said. There are many other potential sources of sound underwater, including from fish, other animals and of course human-made instruments, he explained.

Coast Guard Captain Jamie Frederick said at a press conference that analysis of the noises has been "inconclusive".

"When you're in the middle of a search-and-rescue case, you always have hope," he said.

"With respect to the noises specifically, we don't know what they are, to be frank with you."

Officials did not offer a detailed description of the sounds.

The Coast Guard said search teams heard banging noises at 30-minute intervals.

But it's still "speculative" whether the banging noises were a true signal of life, said Art Trembanis, a marine scientist at the University of Delaware.

Even this kind of pattern could come from an underwater instrument making repeated noise.

How likely is it that the noises came from the submersible?

While officials are trying to trace the sounds heard from the depths of the North Atlantic and say analysis has been inconclusive, an Australian former submarine officer who now directs search-and-rescue operations is confident the sounds are coming from inside the Titan.

Frank Owen told the New York Post  that those aboard were well-trained in emergency submarine situations.

Mr Owen explains that French former Navy diver and Titanic expert Paul-Henry Nageolet understands the way search forces look for submarines that are lost.

"Submariners are taught that if they're stuck in a disabled submarine, on the hour and the half-hour they bang the hull for three minutes, then they stop. They don't make any more noise.

"So the fact that we're hearing banging at 30-minute internals tells me that the people inside are sending a message that says, 'We understand that you would be looking for us and this is how you might expect us to react.' So, it's very encouraging," he said.

One expert warned against "wishful thinking", saying that the sounds were most likely debris and junk from the wreckage of the Titanic.

Jeff Karson, Professor Emeritus of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Syracuse University, told The Daily Mail  that it's similar to dropping a marble in a tin can.

"It's rattling around and that would confuse the location. The banging — I have to say, I hear the Coast Guard guys talking about this, I wonder how much of this is just wishful thinking.

"Is it really banging or just some unidentified sound, I think. I think that is a more accurate description right now." 

Why is it so hard to detect the source of the sounds?

Sound gets bent as it travels underwater, because of how pressure and temperature change at different depths , Dr Dzieciuch said.

This can create echo-like effects and make it hard to locate the source of a particular sound.

"Someone tapping, say, an SOS at the bottom of the ocean might sound like just some random banging at the surface of the ocean," he said.

"It's like shouting in a canyon. You can't really understand what the person at the other end of the canyon is saying."

Still, according to Lora van Uffelen, an ocean engineering researcher at the University of Rhode Island, "sound is one of the best hopes they have of finding it. Sound waves move farther underwater compared to on land". 

And in the underwater environment, sound also travels farther than light, she pointed out — so "it's going to be easier to find it by listening than it would be by looking".

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