The US and Canadian Coast Guards were searching on Monday for a small tourist submarine carrying five people, used to travel to the sinking area of the Titanic and missing in the Atlantic Ocean off North America .
The US Coast Guard said in a statement it was looking for “five people after the Canadian research vessel Polar Prince lost contact with the submersible during a dive, about 1,450 km east of Cape Cod on Sunday morning “.
AFP
Among those on board would be the wealthy British businessman Hamish Harding, CEO of the company “Action Aviation”.
- Listen to Langis Dubé, the man who dived 369 times to the wreck of the Empress of Ireland at the microphone of Jean-François Baril via QUB-radio :
An American C-130 plane as well as a Canadian P8 device equipped with a sonar capable of detecting submarines are involved in the search, according to the American Coast Guard.
At a press briefing, Rear Admiral John Mauger said there were between “70 and 96 hours” of oxygen left in the submersible vessel.
The company organizing this trip, OceanGate Expeditions, said in a press release quoted by the media “to explore and mobilize all options to bring the crew back safely”.
The company did not respond to requests from AFP.
Hamish Harding recently posted on social media that he was going to be part of the crew.
“I am proud to finally announce that I have joined @oceangateexped for their RMS Titanic mission as Mission Specialist on the submarine that descends to Titanic,” he wrote on Instagram, in a message. dating from Saturday.
“A weather window has just opened and we will try to dive tomorrow,” he added.
“The submarine’s crew is made up of some legendary explorers, some of whom have completed more than 30 dives on the RMS Titanic since the 1980s,” Hamish Harding wrote in the post.
Joined by AFP, his company declined to comment. According to the Guardian, he would be one of the few tourists to have already been in space.
On the page of its site explaining the modalities of its activities, OceanGate Expeditions indicates that a mission visiting the Titanic was “in progress”, from June 12 to 20.
You had to pay $250,000 to be part of it.
The company’s only device capable of going to the depths of the Titanic is the Titan, “a submersible designed to take five people to depths of 4,000 meters,” with a 96-hour endurance for a crew of five.
PHOTO FROM INSTAGRAM/@actionaviationchairman
Without having studied the craft itself, Alistair Greig, professor of marine engineering at University College London, raised two possible theories based on images of the device published by the press.
He reckons that if he had an electrical or communications problem he could have been brought to the surface, floating ‘waiting to be found’.
“Another scenario is that the hull has been compromised,” and there has been a leak. “So the prognosis is not good,” he added.
And “very few vessels can go” to the depth it might have sunk, he said.
Leaving Southampton on April 10, 1912 to reach New York, the Titanic, a gigantic ocean liner, the largest in the world when it was launched, was shipwrecked after hitting an iceberg five days later. Of the 2,224 passengers and crew, nearly 1,500 perished.
The wreck was discovered in 1985 650 kilometers off the Canadian coast, at a depth of 4000 meters in the international waters of the Atlantic Ocean. Since then, treasure seekers and tourists have been visiting it.