General mobilization: American forces, supported by Canada and France, hope to rescue by Thursday an American, a Frenchman, a British man and two Pakistanis, passengers on a tourist submarine descending to explore the wreck of the Titanic at 4,000 meters Depth to visit North Atlantic.
Two sonars detected repetitive ‘noises’
According to Rolling Stone magazine, a Canadian P8 plane “heard pops in this area every 30 minutes.” Additional sonar was deployed four hours later and the knocking could still be heard. CNN also reported the noise, citing an internal US government document, without specifying when it was discovered.
The US Coast Guard confirms it has detected “underwater noise”.
It is not yet known whether this could be a signal from the passengers of the submarine.
At a news conference in Boston (Northeast) on Tuesday afternoon, the US Coast Guard warned that there was “approximately 40 hours of breathable air left” in this small submersible and that the research work launched on Sunday was “particularly complex”. brought no results”.
The Titan is about 6.5 meters long and is designed to carry five people into the abyss. She began her descent on Sunday off the northeast coast of America. Contact with the ship was lost less than two hours after their descent.
Among those on board is a wealthy British businessman, Hamish Harding, 58, who took to Instagram to announce his participation in this extreme, extraordinary, history-making scientific excursion.
A $250,000 dive
The famous sinking of the Titanic in 1912 is one of the greatest shipping disasters of the 20th century.
Hamish Harding is known to have also been a space tourist aboard billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin spacecraft.
Another believer in extreme heroism, former diver and former French naval officer Paul-Henri Nargeolet, 77, a Titanic debris specialist, is also on the trip, according to his family.
According to the wealthy family, the $250,000 dive also included Pakistani tycoon Shahzada Dawood, 48, and vice president of conglomerate Engro, along with his 19-year-old son Suleman.
The company OceanGate Expeditions, organizer of the trip and whose American boss Stockton Rush is also on board, assured “to mobilize all options to bring the crew back safely”.
France sends a boat and a robot
The Titan, designed to carry five people into the abyss, began its descent on Sunday at about 6.50 meters in length. According to the authorities, contact with the ship broke off less than two hours after departure.
The US Coast Guard, part of the armed forces, first dispatched two C-130 aircraft to the search area, “about 1,450 km east of Cape Cod” (northeast coast of the United States). A third C-130 and three other C-17 transport planes were due to be deployed Tuesday night, the Pentagon said.
The Canadian Coast Guard also mobilized a plane and a ship, while France announced that its research institute for the exploitation of the sea (Ifremer) is sending a boat and its robot.
US President Joe Biden wants the Coast Guard to continue their search and the Navy to be able to mobilize if necessary, said John Kirby, spokesman for the White House National Security Council.
A poorly designed porthole?
As this effort gathers momentum, an old complaint from 2018 has surfaced, also seen by AFP, showing that a former OceanGate Expeditions chief executive, David Lochridge, has been fired after raising serious doubts about the safety of the U -Bootes had expressed.
According to the former naval chief of operations, a porthole at the front of the submersible was designed to withstand the pressure at 4,000 feet (1,300 m) rather than 13,000 feet (4,000 m).
The company “refused to pay the manufacturer to build a porthole that matched the required 4,000m depth,” he said.
American screenwriter Mike Reiss, producer of the famous series The Simpsons, has sailed with OceanGate Expeditions three times, including once in 2022 aboard the same submersible as the missing one, he told the BBC on Monday.
A completely disorienting experience because “you almost always lose communication and are at the mercy of the elements and the like.”
Two possible theories
Without having studied the craft himself, Alistair Greig, professor of marine engineering at University College London, put forward two possible theories based on images of the device published in the press.
He reckons that if he had had a problem with the electricity or communications, he could have been taken to the surface where he was adrift “waiting to be found.” “Another scenario is that the hull has been damaged. So the prognosis is not good,” he said. And “very few ships can” go as deep as it could have sunk, he said.
As the Titanic left Southampton for New York on April 10, 1912, she was wrecked five days later after striking an iceberg. Of the 2,224 passengers and crew, nearly 1,500 perished.
The wreck was discovered in 1985 400 miles off the Canadian coast in the international waters of the Atlantic Ocean. Since then, to perpetuate the myth, it has been visited by treasure hunters and tourists.