Search and rescue crews in the north Atlantic on Wednesday were redirecting a critical part of their efforts to find a missing submersible and the five people on board after underwater sounds were identified by a Canadian submarine-hunting aircraft.
The US Coast Guard’s north-east region wrote on Twitter just after midnight that a P3 aircraft had “detected underwater noises” in the area of the search for the Titan submersible, which has been missing since Sunday.
Searchers have said the five passengers should have enough oxygen to last about 96 hours from the start of their dive to the wreckage of the ocean liner Titanic. That gives them just over 24 hours left, until early Thursday morning local time.
“ROV operations were relocated in an attempt to explore the origin of the noises,” the coast guard wrote, referring to a submersible remotely operated vehicle deployed by the Bahamas-flagged research vessel Deep Energy, which is being used in the search. “Those ROV searches have yielded negative results but continue.”
It is not known if the sounds detected came from the Titan or whether those on board can be rescued in time.
The Polar Prince, the support vessel from which the Titan launched on its 3,800m dive to the wreckage of the Titanic, lost contact with the submersible an hour and 45 minutes into the mission. At that time, the vessel should have been at the bottom of its dive, where pressure is about 380 times that of the atmosphere at the surface.
The US Coast Guard said data from the Canadian aircraft had been shared with US Navy experts for analysis that would be “considered in future search plans”.
The search effort is covering an area that the US authorities have said is the size of the state of Connecticut, about 900 nautical miles east of Cape Cod.
The Titan, a 10-tonne submersible made of titanium and carbon fibre, is operated by OceanGate, a privately held company that charges passengers about $250,000 a person to visit the wreckage of the Titanic. The liner sank on its maiden voyage in 1912, resulting in the loss of about 1,500 lives.
The missing Titan passengers include Hamish Harding, a British entrepreneur, Shahzada Dawood, a Pakistani businessman, and his son Suleman, whom family friends said was just 19.
There has been no official confirmation of the names of all five passengers, but multiple reports said Paul-Henry Nargeolet, a French explorer, was on board along with Stockton Rush, the founder of OceanGate.
News of the detected noises came shortly after the US Coast Guard announced it was establishing a unified joint command to co-ordinate rescue efforts alongside the US Navy, Canadian Coast Guard and OceanGate.
The press release announcing the command said four more Canadian Coast Guard vessels, as well as a Canadian naval vessel, a commercial tug, an offshore support vessel and a French research ship, were on their way to the site. Three of the vessels were carrying ROVs for use in the search.
The Canadian naval vessel, the Glace Bay, is carrying medical personnel and a decompression chamber, which is used to treat people returning from significant ocean depths.
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