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Titan submersible: timeline of vessel’s voyage

As the US Coast Guard announces the vessel suffered a ‘catastrophic implosion’, we chart its journey over the last week

• Titanic sub: latest updates

The expedition sets off from St John’s, Newfoundland, Canada.

The British billionaire and adventurer Hamish Harding , one of those onboard the submersible, posts on Facebook: “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.”

8am GMT/ 4am ET: Time the submersible originally aimed to start its descent, according to a post by Harding on Instagram. It actually started its descent later, according to the US Coast Guard.

12pm GMT/ 8am ET: The submersible starts what should be a two-hour descent to the Titanic wreck, nearly 4,000 metres down, according to the US Coast Guard.

1 .45pm GMT/ 9.45am ET: Communications between the submersible and the surface vessel are lost 1 hour and 45 minutes after starting its descent.

7pm GMT/ 3pm ET: Titan is scheduled to return to the surface, the US Coast Guard says, but fails to appear.

9.40pm GMT/ 5.40pm ET: US Coast Guard receives report about an overdue submersible from the research vessel Polar Prince about 900 nautical miles east of Cape Cod on the US coast.

US and Canadian ships and planes are swarming the area , some dropping sonar buoys that can monitor to a depth of almost 4,000 metres, US Coast Guard R Adm John Mauger says. Officials have also asked commercial vessels for help.

2.50pm GMT/ 10am ET: France says it will help with search by deploying Atalante, a ship equipped with a deep-sea diving vessel. It is expected to arrive late on Wednesday.

During the day: Sounds detected over several hours by Canadian Lockheed P-3 Orion aircraft, equipped with gear to trace submarines. CNN and Rolling Stone magazine report banging sounds at 30-minute intervals had been detected.

US Coast Guard, US Navy, Canadian Coast Guard and OceanGate Expeditions establish a unified command to handle the search.

6 am GMT/ 2am ET: US Coast Guard confirms Canadian P-3 aircraft detected underwater noises . It says remotely operated vehicle (ROV) searches are directed to the area of the sounds and the data is also sent to US Navy experts for analysis.

5pm GMT/1pm ET: US Coast Guard says more underwater noises were detected and that the search area had increased to “two times the size of Connecticut”.

Late on Wednesday: More vessels, including a French research ship, equipped with a deep-sea diving vessel, were due to arrive to assist the “complex response effort”, which covers an area twice the size of Connecticut.

10 am GMT/ 6am ET: Approximate deadline for when the air in the submersible was expected to run out, based on the US Coast Guard’s estimate that the Titan could have up to 96 hours of air supply from the time it was sealed.

Around 12pm GMT/8am ET: Two remotely operated vehicles have been deployed as part of the search effort. Experts say it is still unclear whether the submersible is on the surface or on the seabed, and warn “weeks of intense survey” may be required to locate it.

Around 3pm GMT/11am ET: Canadian navy ship carrying a medical team specialising in dive medicine arrives on the scene.

3.48pm GMT/ 11.48am ET: The US Coast Guard say a debris field was discovered within the search area by a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) near the Titanic wreck.

7pm GMT/ 3pm ET: US Coast Guard to hold press conference after announcing discovery of debris.

8pm GMT/4pm ET: Five crew members aboard the submersible Titan were probably killed instantly in a “catastrophic implosion”, the US Coast Guard said. Rear Adm John Mauger, the First Coast Guard District commander, said a remotely operated vehicle discovered the tail cone of the Titan sub and the debris is “consistent with a catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber”. A large debris field containing five major pieces of the vessel wasspotted by a remotely operated vehicle scouring the seabed near the Titanic wreck site 400 miles south of St John’s, Newfoundland, officials said.

This article was amended on 22 June 2023 to correct the time conversion from GMT to ET.

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Titanic Maiden Voyage

Introduction.

Following her prestigious launch in front of a crowd of around 100,000 spectators and a throng of excited reporters, Titanic began her maiden journey, first collecting the passengers sailing – and even migrating – to America. It was a voyage that would end in disaster amidst the ice-strewn waters of the Atlantic. Read on for a comprehensive summary of the facts about this tragic trip.

Above: Footage of RMS Titanic leaving for her maiden voyage in 1912.

471 miles – the distance of the journey to deliver Titanic from Belfast – the city in which she was built – to Southampton, England – the city from which her maiden voyage would commence.

Where did the Titanic leave from?

Although Titanic initially sailed from Belfast (where she was built) to Southampton, her maiden voyage is considered to have begun in Southampton.

02 April 1912 – the date that Titanic set sail from Belfast to Southampton.

Southampton

6 – the number of days that the Titanic was at rest in Southampton, before the start of her maiden voyage to New York.

Above: The Titanic at Southampton at the beginning of her maiden voyage.

05 April 1912 – the date Titanic was briefly opened for viewing by the paying public, two days after sailing to Southampton. The ship was “dressed overall”, with flags and pennants hung from the rigging in a salute to the people of the city.

07:30 am – the time Captain Smith arrived on board on the morning of the maiden journey, along with the crew. The officers were already on board, having spent the previous night on the ship.

2 – the number of lifeboats employed in a brief safety drill, conducted at 08:00 am; starboard lifeboats 11 and 12.

Where was Titanic going?

The Titanic was on her maiden voyage, a return trip from Britain to America. The outward route was to be Southampton, England – Cherbourg, France – Queenstown, Ireland – New York, USA. The return route was going to be New York – Plymouth, England – Cherbourg – Southampton.

09:30 am – the time the second- and third-class boat trains began to arrive and passengers started to board the Titanic.

11:30 am – the time that the first-class boat train arrived from London.

Did You Know?

At the time of her maiden voyage a coal strike was on, and so coal for Titanic had to be scavenged from other company ships.

06 April 1912 – the date that the strike was ended, however there would not be time to deliver enough coal to Southampton docks before Titanic set sail on her maiden voyage.

84 miles – the length of the first leg of the journey, from Southampton to Cherbourg, France.

12.00 pm – the time Titanic cast off from Southampton Dock, towed out into the River Test by tugboats.

4 feet – the margin by which a collision with the USMS New York was averted, when the undertow from the much larger Titanic caused the smaller boat to be sucked toward the ship, snapping the six mooring ropes holding the New York in place.

60 minutes – the approximate time that departure was delayed by this incident, sailing finally resuming at 1pm.

04:00 pm – the time the boat train from Paris arrived in Cherbourg, around 90 minutes before passengers could be ferried out to the delayed Titanic.

22 – the number of cross-channel passengers who disembarked in Cherbourg.

274 – the number of passengers who boarded at Cherbourg.

08:10 pm – the time Titanic departed Cherbourg and set sail for Queenstown (now known as Cobh) in Ireland.

307 miles – the length of the next stage, from Cherbourg to Queenstown, Ireland.

Queenstown (Cobh)

11:30 am – the time Titanic dropped anchor in Queenstown, on the morning of 11th of April 1912, about 2 miles offshore.

7 – the number of passengers who disembarked in Ireland.

123 – the number of passengers who boarded at Queenstown (3 first-class, 7 second-class and 113 third-class ticket-holders).

63 – the number of male passengers who boarded in Ireland.

60 – the number of female passengers who came aboard.

2 – the number of tenders that ferried the passengers from Heartbreak Jetty to Titanic; they were named PS Ireland and PS America.

1,385 – the number of bags of mail delivered on board during the Queenstown stop.

01:30 pm – the time Titanic raised anchor and set sail on her first and last transatlantic crossing.

The Atlantic Ocean

2,825 miles – the intended distance of the longest leg of the voyage, from Queenstown to New York, USA.

137 hours – the anticipated journey time sailing from Queenstown to New York City.

How many people boarded the Titanic?

There were 2,223 people aboard Titanic for her maiden trip, 1,324 passengers and 908 crew.

116 – the typical number of hours taken to cover the same distance by the Titanic’s rivals, the Cunard liners Lusitania and Mauritania (the idea that the Titanic captain ignored the iceberg warnings because he was trying to set a new time record is just one of the many Titanic myths that endures).

Above: The route of the voyage of the Titanic and the location of her sinking.

4 – days into the crossing when the collision with the iceberg occurred.

How much were Titanic ticket prices?

The average cost for a First Class berth was $150 (£30). A parlour suite would have set you back the princelier sum of $4,350 (£875).

The average cost of a berth in Standard (Second) Class was $60 (£12).

The average cost of a Steerage (Third) Class berth was $15-$40 (£3-£8).

3 – the intended number of legs planned for Titanic’s return voyage (New York to Plymouth to Cherbourg to Southampton).

As she set sail on her maiden voyage, some interior work was still to be completed. For example, some areas of the ship were without heating, whilst others were too hot. A team of nine Harland & Wolff employees, including the ship’s designer, Thomas Andrews, sailed as members of a guarantee group, tasked with ensuring any problems were attended to. All died in the sinking.

More To Explore

Read about the passengers on the Titanic , about the iceberg that was her undoing, and about the spot in the Atlantic Ocean where the Titanic sank .

Titanic sub destroyed in 'catastrophic implosion,' all five aboard dead

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Reporting by Joseph Ax and Steve Gorman; Additional reporting by Rami Ayyub, Tyler Clifford, Richard Lough, Natalie Thomas, Edmund Blair, Ariba Shahid, Shivani Tanna, Caitlin Webber, David Ljunggren, William James, Steve Holland, Daniel Trotta, Brad Brooks, Gabriella Borter, Rollo Ross and Idrees Ali; editing by Grant McCool and Stephen Coates

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Titanic sub implosion: Was the deep ocean vehicle safe?

The death of five people onboard the Titan sub has prompted former passengers to step forward with tales of glitches.

The implosion of a submersible touring the deep-sea wreckage of the Titanic, killing all five passengers on board, has prompted questions about the regulations overseeing such voyages — and whether the vehicle itself was safe.

On Friday, the company responsible for the tour, OceanGate Expeditions, defended the decisions of its chief executive Stockton Rush, who died on board the submersible.

Keep reading

What are the key challenges in search for titanic submersible, titanic sub: crews exploring undersea noises in ‘complex’ search, titanic sub suffered ‘catastrophic implosion’: all we know.

“Stockton was one of the most astute risk managers I’d ever met. He was very risk-averse,” Guillermo Söhnlein, OceanGate’s co-founder, told the news agency Reuters. “He was very committed to safety.”

But in the days since the submersible first went missing, passengers have come forward to share their stories of glitches and mishaps on expeditions to the ocean floor.

What did those who have been on board say?

Josh Gates, the host of the TV series Expedition Unknown, shared his experience on board the same submersible, the Titan, that ultimately imploded on Sunday.

“Titan did not perform well on my dive,” Gates wrote in a tweet on Wednesday.

The Titan, at the time, was preparing for its maiden voyage to the Titanic, which is situated 3.8 kilometres (12,500ft) below the surface of the North Atlantic Ocean.

But even in the testing phase, Gates observed cause for alarm. “We had issues with thruster control,” he told US broadcaster NBC’s Today Show on Thursday. “We had issues with the computers aboard. We had issues with comms. I just felt as though the sub needed more time, and it needed more more testing, frankly.”

Mike Reiss, a comedy writer for The Simpsons, likewise experienced communication failures during his trips with OceanGate, one of which went down to the Titanic.

“I took four different dives with the OceanGate company,” Reiss told ABC News. “And every time they lost communication.”

But he was ambivalent about the problems: “That seems to be just something baked into the system. I don’t blame OceanGate. I blame deep water for that.”

Safety warnings ‘went unheeded’

James Cameron — director of the film Titanic and himself a deep-sea researcher — was more unequivocal in his criticism. In an interview with ABC News, he denounced the carbon-fibre construction of the Titan as “fundamentally flawed”.

“Many people in the community were very concerned about this sub,” Cameron said.

“And a number of the top players in the deep-submergence engineering community even wrote letters to the company saying that what they were doing was too experimental to carry passengers and it needed to be certified and so on.”

The Oscar-winning director drew a parallel between the Titan’s implosion and the cut corners that led to the wreckage of the Titanic itself.

“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 he steamed at full speed,” Cameron said, adding that warnings in both cases “went unheeded”.

What we know about what happened

The Titan submersible began its descent to the ocean floor on June 18. But about an hour and 45 minutes into its voyage, it lost contact with the surface.

Officials with the United States Navy later confirmed that underwater acoustic equipment captured an “anomaly consistent with an implosion or explosion” that same day. It notified the US Coast Guard command that day, but as the sound wasn’t definitively the Titan, the search went on.

After four days of search-and-rescue operations, the US Coast Guard announced on Thursday that the Titan had suffered a “ catastrophic implosion ”, leaving debris off the bow of the Titanic.

Five people were killed: the CEO Rush, Titanic researcher Paul-Henri Nargeolet, businessman Hamish Harding and father and son Shahzada Dawood and Suleman Dawood.

There were previous concerns about Titan’s safety

In the wake of the submersible’s initial disappearance, the magazine The New Republic reported on documents from a 2018 breach-of-contract case, wherein OceanGate sued a former employee for disclosing private information.

However, the employee, David Lochridge, said he was acting as a whistleblower to ensure the safety of OceanGate passengers and employees. In a counterclaim, Lochridge cited structural concerns, including “large tears of the carbon” from “constant pressure cycling”.

The New Republic also reported that Lochridge faced “hostility” when he requested more information about pressure test results.

Rush, OceanGate’s late CEO, had addressed questions about Titan’s safety standards in a February 2019 blog post. In it, Rush objected to additional safety standards and regulations for deep-sea travel, calling it a hurdle to technological advancement.

“Bringing an outside entity up to speed on every innovation before it is put into real-world testing is anathema to rapid innovation,” Rush had said. He denounced the process of “bringing in outsiders who need to first be educated before being qualified to ‘validate’ any innovations”.

Titan implosion could prompt regulation

Salvatore Mercogliano, a history professor at Campbell University in North Carolina, believes the Titan disaster may be a turning point in deep-sea regulation.

“We don’t quite have [safety standards] yet with submersibles,” Mercogliano told The Associated Press. “But I do think that one of the long-lasting implications of this disaster may be seeing that happen.”

Just like the Titanic disaster led to regulations requiring adequate lifeboats for all passengers, Mercogliano speculated the Titan implosion could likewise lead to heightened standards.

Right now, he said, deep-sea adventures like the Titan voyage are less regulated than commercial trips to space. That, in part, is because they take place in international waters, outside of the legal authority of countries like the US.

In addition, the submersible itself is towed to the exploration site, meaning that — even if it passes through US or Canadian water — it is considered cargo, not subject to the same stringent regulations that the boat carrying it might.

“There’ll be a time when you won’t think twice about getting on a submersible and going down 13,000ft,” Mercogliano said. “But we’re not there yet.”

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

Polar Prince

newfoundland

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.

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June 19, 2023 - Search mission underway for missing Titanic tour submersible

By Elise Hammond , Maureen Chowdhury and Mike Hayes, CNN

Our live coverage of the search for the missing Titanic tour submersible has moved here.

OceanGate says it's taking "every step possible" to bring missing submersible crew back to safety

From CNN’s Jackie Wattles

OceanGate Expeditions says it is taking “every step possible” to return the five crew members onboard the missing submersible to safety and focusing its entire search effort on their wellbeing, according to a statement released by the company Monday night.

OceanGate Expeditions is the group that was conducting the expedition to view the wreckage of the Titanic.

“We are deeply grateful for the urgent and extensive assistance we are receiving from multiple government agencies and deep-sea companies as we seek to reestablish contact with the submersible,” the statement read.

Here's the full statement:

“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. Our entire focus is on the wellbeing of the crew and every step possible is being taken to bring the five crew members back safely. We are deeply grateful for the urgent and extensive assistance we are receiving from multiple government agencies and deep-sea companies as we seek to reestablish contact with the submersible. We pray for the safe return of the crew and passengers, and we will provide updates as they are available.” 

US Coast Guard to continue surface search for missing submersible throughout the evening

From CNN’s Artemis Moshtaghian

The US Coast Guard  tweeted that it will continue to conduct surface searches for the missing submersible throughout the evening.

The Coast Guard tweeted that The Polar Prince, the vessel used to transport the submersible to the site of the Titanic wreckage before the expedition, as well as aerial support from the Air Force’s 106th Rescue Wing will be involved in the surface searches. 

Canadian Coast Guard surface and subsurface search, as conducted by Canadian P8 Poseidon aircraft, will continue in the morning, according to the US Coast Guard.

Titanic's fate has long been a source of fascination. Here are some key facts about the luxury liner

From CNN Staff

The submersible that has gone missing in the North Atlantic was part of an expedition to view the wreckage of the RMS Titanic, perhaps the most famous shipwreck in the world.

More than 100 years after its disastrous maiden voyage, the fate of the luxury liner has long served as a source of fascination , and been the backdrop for countless books, fiction and non-fiction and, of course, the blockbuster movie.

The ship set sail from Southampton, England, to New York on April 10, 1912.

Then, between April 14-15, it hit an iceberg around midnight and sank in less than three hours.

A total of 1,517 people died and 706 survived out of 2,223 passengers and crew, according to the  US Senate report  on the disaster.

Here's more interesting facts on the Titanic:

The ship: The estimated cost of construction was $7.5 million. At the time, the RMS Titanic was the largest passenger ship afloat. The ship’s length was 882 feet, 9 inches, and it weighed 46,328 tons. Its top speed was 23 knots. The wreckage is located about 350 miles off the southeast coast of Newfoundland.

The cause of the crash: The iceberg punctured five of 16 supposedly watertight compartments designed to hold water in case of a breach to the hull. Investigations at the time blamed Capt. Edward Smith for going too fast in dangerous waters, initial ship inspections that had been done too quickly, insufficient room in the lifeboats for all passengers, and a nearby ship’s failure to help. Many maritime safety reforms were implemented as a result of the findings of the investigations.

Smith went down with the ship, and his body was never recovered.

Key dates post-shipwreck:

• September 1, 1985 -  Scientists from Woods Hole Deep Submergence LAB in Massachusetts, led by Dr. Robert Ballard, and IFREMER, the French Institute Francais de Recherche pour l’Exploitation des Mers, led by Jean Jarry, locate the wreckage of Titanic.
• July 13, 1986 -  Ballard and his crew use the manned deep-ocean research submersible Alvin to explore the wreckage. The Alvin is accompanied by a remotely operated vehicle named Jason Jr. to conduct photographic surveys and further inspections.
• May 31, 2009 -  The last known survivor, Millvina Dean, dies at age 97.
• April 8-20, 2012 -  The 100th anniversary of the Titanic’s voyage. The MS Balmoral traces the ship’s route from Southampton to New York and holds a memorial service, above the wreck, on April 15.

Read more here .

Aircraft and sonar deployed in search for missing submersible. Here's what we know

From CNN staff

A search and rescue operation is underway for a missing submersible operated by a company that handles expeditions to the Titanic wreckage off the coast of St John’s, Newfoundland, in Canada.

The vessel has between 70 and 96 hours of life support, officials said Monday afternoon.

Here's what we know so far:

• The timeline: The expedition began with a 400-nautical-mile journey to the wreck site, which is about 900 miles off the coast of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The submersible began its descent Sunday morning but lost contact with a crew of Polar Prince , the support ship that transported the vessel to the site, 1 hour and 45 minutes into its descent, officials said. The US Coast Guard was alerted that the submersible was overdue and it launched searches on the surface of the water and launched an aircraft to start conducting aerial and radar searches, Rear Adm. John Mauger said during a news conference Monday.

Here's a map of area:

• What we know about the vessel: The submersible, named “Titan,” is 23,000 pounds and made of carbon fiber and titanium, according to the tour operator, OceanGate Expeditions. The 21-foot vessel has life support for up to 96 hours, according to the OceanGate website . Mauger said officials "anticipate that they're somewhere between 70 to the full 96 hours " of oxygen available on the vessel at this point. The  Titanic wreckage, discovered in 1985 , sits in two parts at the bottom of the ocean nearly 13,000 feet below the surface.
• Who is on board: Five people are in the missing submersible, according to authorities. Businessman  Hamish Harding is one of the passengers, according to a social media post by his company, Action Aviation. Typically a pilot, a “content expert” and three paying passengers are on the expeditions, according to the OceanGate website. The cost of joining the eight-day expedition is "from $250,000," according to the operator. Mauger said the Coast Guard is notifying the families of the people on the submersible.
• Search efforts: The effort is incorporating aircraft, sonar buoys and "sonar on the ship that is out there to listen for any sounds that we can detect in the water column," Mauger said. The Polar Prince is also assisting with the search, a co-owner said. The Canadian Armed Forces and the US Coast Guard have deployed aircraft to the remote area of the North Atlantic.
• What's next: The Coast Guard said its priority is locating the vessel. If crews do find the vessel in the water, then rescue plans will be formed, Mauger said. At that point, the Coast Guard will reach out to the US Navy, the Canadian Armed Forces and private industry partners to assess what "underwater rescue capability might be available," Mauger said.

Businessman Hamish Harding is one of the passengers on the submersible, his company says

From CNN's Paul P. Murphy 

Businessman and adventurer Hamish Harding is one of the passengers on the submersible that went missing during a dive to the wreckage of the Titanic, according to a social media post by his company, Action Aviation. 

OceanGate, the company conducting the expedition, released a statement Monday confirming it lost contact with the submersible but did not specify who was onboard.

Harding, a British national, was one of the first people to travel  the Challenger Deep  in the Pacific Ocean — the deepest known point on Earth.

The United Arab Emirates-based businessman also made headlines in 2019 for being part of a flight crew that broke the world record for the  fastest circumnavigation  of the globe via both poles. More recently, he was a passenger on Blue Origin’s June 2022 space flight .  

Harding  posted  on Facebook on Saturday about his participation in the expedition.

“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,” the post read.

CNN has reached out to Action Aviation for comment but did not immediately receive a response. 

The Explorers Club, a New York-based group of elite explorers and scientists that’s been involved in many of the world’s most prestigious discoveries, confirmed Harding was on the submersible.

President Richard Garriott de Cayeux said he saw Hamish last week and “his excitement about this expedition was palpable,” Cayeux wrote in a statement, “I know he was looking forward to conducting research at the site.”

Harding is one of the founding members of the club.

A spokesperson for the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office told CNN it was aware of reports of a British citizen on the submersible.

“We are in contact with the family of a British man following reports of a missing submarine off the coast of North America,” the spokesperson said.

CNN’s Artemis Moshtaghian contributed reporting to this post.

Canadian Armed Forces mobilize aircraft to assist in search for missing submersible

From CNN’s Paula Newton

The Canadian Armed Forces is deploying an aircraft to assist in the search for the missing submersible near the Titanic wreckage, a spokesperson told CNN.

“A Royal Canadian Air Force CC-130 Hercules is preparing to join the search as well,” Len Hickey, a senior public affairs officer for the Canadian Armed Forces, wrote in a statement to CNN.

The US Coast Guard said earlier that it had also deployed aircraft that is searching the surface of the ocean and underwater.

Submersible has 70 to 96 hours of oxygen available, Coast Guard says

US Coast Guard Rear Admiral John Mauger said that the submersible has 96 hours of emergency oxygen on board, based on information received from the vessel operator.

The Coast Guard "anticipate that they're somewhere between 70 to the full 96 hours" of oxygen available on the vessel at this point, he said during a news conference Monday.

Priority on Monday is to locate missing Titanic submersible, Coast Guard commander says

Right now the Coast Guard said its priority is locating the missing submersible that didn’t emerge on Sunday after an expedition to the Titanic wreckage.

Rear Adm. John Mauger, the commander of the First Coast Guard District that is in charge of operations, said that if crews do find the vessel in the water, then rescue plans will be formed. 

Mauger said the Coast Guard is "reaching out to different partners within the US Navy, within the Canadian Armed Forces and within private industry to understand what underwater rescue capability might be available."

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Experts raised safety concerns about OceanGate years before its Titanic sub vanished

Rachel Treisman

OceanGate uses its Titan vessel to take tourists deep below sea level to visit the Titanic shipwreck. It disappeared in the North Atlantic during one such trip on Sunday. AP hide caption

OceanGate uses its Titan vessel to take tourists deep below sea level to visit the Titanic shipwreck. It disappeared in the North Atlantic during one such trip on Sunday.

Experts from within and outside OceanGate raised concerns about the safety of its Titan submersible as far back as 2018, years before it went missing during a deep-sea dive to the Titanic shipwreck site.

Several of those complaints have resurfaced this week, as the frantic search for the vessel — and its five passengers — continues.

Missing Titanic sub search enters a critical phase as the Titan's oxygen supply drops

"It hasn't surprised us," said Will Kohnen, the chair of the Marine Technology Society's Submarine Committee (formerly the Manned Underwater Vehicles Committee), about the Titan's disappearance. "We've been aware of this project for some time and have had some concerns."

In March 2018, after one of the international industry group's annual conferences, Kohnen drafted a letter to OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush — the pilot of the missing vessel — expressing "unanimous concern" on behalf of its members about the development of the Titan and its planned Titanic expeditions.

"Our apprehension is that the current experimental approach adopted by Oceangate could result in negative outcomes (from minor to catastrophic) that would have serious consequences for everyone in the industry," he wrote, according to a copy obtained by the New York Times .

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

NPR has reached out to OceanGate for comment.

Kohnen told Morning Edition 's A Martínez on Wednesday that the group's main concern was a lack of oversight and adherence to industry-accepted safety guidelines.

"Most of the companies in this industry that are building submersibles and deep submersibles follow a fairly well-established framework of certification and verification and oversight, through classification societies," he said. "And that was at the root of OceanGate's project, is that they were going to go solo, going without that type of official oversight, and that brought a lot of concerns."

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

Kohnen doesn't see Titan's disappearance as a reason to take a step back from deep sea explorations as a whole.

"We have submarines all over the world diving 12,000 to 20,000 feet every day of the year for research," he said. "We know very well how to build and how to design these machines and how to operate them safely."

The same is true for tourism purposes, he adds: "It just gets expensive."

OceanGate's push to innovate worried industry experts

Third-party agencies around the world, like the American Bureau of Shipping and DNV in Europe, are responsible for overseeing structures like ships, oil platforms and submarines to ensure that they're designed to specification, Kohnen explained.

That process involves publishing rules and sending out engineers to review designs and inspectors to witness testing.

Most major marine operators require chartered vessels to be "classed" by one of these independent groups, OceanGate acknowledged in a 2019 blog post . However, it said that process only assesses physical vessels, not a company's operating procedures and decision-making processes, which are more often to blame for accidents.

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

The company affirmed its commitment to operational safety and risk mitigation, touting its "constant, committed effort and a focused corporate culture." But it also painted the third-party approval process as "anathema to rapid innovation," its founding principle.

"By definition, innovation is outside of an already accepted system," the blog post reads. "However, this does not mean that OceanGate does meet standards where they apply, but it does mean that innovation often falls outside of the existing industry paradigm."

Kohnen said that while his letter was never officially submitted to OceanGate, he did have a conversation with Rush in which the two "agreed to disagree." He points out that the complaint that regulatory bodies are slow to react to new innovations isn't unique to submarines.

"All industries face the same issue," Kohnen added. "And it is a careful dance of how do you push regulations forward in the face of rapid-changing technology."

The OceanGate logo is pictured on a boat at the Port of Everett Boat Yard in Everett, Wash., on Tuesday. Jason Redmond/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

The OceanGate logo is pictured on a boat at the Port of Everett Boat Yard in Everett, Wash., on Tuesday.

A former employee says he was fired after raising concerns

OceanGate's own former director of marine operations also flagged potential safety issues with the Titan around the same time — and says he was fired after doing so, as NPR station WBUR reported .

David Lochridge, himself an experienced submarine pilot, alleged in a 2018 lawsuit that he was fired after raising concerns that the company wasn't properly testing the vessel's carbon fiber hull. He had also pushed for the company to utilize a classification agency to inspect and certify it.

Lochridge said he first raised his safety and quality control concerns verbally to executive management, which ignored them. He then sought to address the problems and offer solutions in a report.

'Tiny sub, big ocean': Why the Titanic submersible search is so challenging

The day after it was submitted, the lawsuit says, various engineering and HR executives invited him to a meeting at which he learned that the viewport of the submersible was only built to a certified pressure of 1,300 meters, even though the Titanic shipwreck lies nearly 4,000 meters below sea level.

Lochridge reiterated his concerns, but the lawsuit alleges that rather than take corrective action, OceanGate "did the exact opposite."

"OceanGate gave Lochridge approximately 10 minutes to immediately clear out his desk and exit the premises," it said.

OceanGate said in legal filings that it had relied on acoustic tests "better suited" to detect safety issues, and accused Lochridge of breaching his contract, according to WBUR.

"The company said Lochridge was not an engineer and refused to accept assurances from the lead engineer that testing was sufficient," WBUR's Walter Wuthmann told Morning Edition .

They settled out of court in 2018.

Previous expeditions haven't all gone smoothly

The Titan made its first dive to the Titanic wreck site in 2021 and returned the following year — though those trips haven't been without issue .

Greek court orders smuggling suspects held pending trial over migrant ship disaster

OceanGate acknowledged in legal filings that the vessel had encountered a battery issue and some external damage during its maiden voyage.

CBS Sunday Morning correspondent David Pogue said the submersible lost contact with the surface crew for about five hours during his expedition in 2022 and told NPR that a mechanical issue forced the vessel to abort a November trip after making it 37 feet down.

He said he's since learned that such dives "rarely go to plan."

"With each of these expeditions that OceanGate makes, they spend five days over the [Titanic] shipwreck," Pogue said. "And typically of those five days, they managed to get down only once or twice. And this season it's been zero."

• Titan submersible
• deep sea exploration

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

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 desperate search for the missing submersible ended Thursday with the Coast Guard announcing that debris from the vessel was found. The five passengers are presumed dead.

It brings a close to the four-day race to find the Titan after it lost contact with its mother ship during a Sunday dive to the Titanic, 12,500 feet below the surface.

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

Malfunctions left passengers like 'sitting ducks'

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. 

“This was supposedly two months before they were supposed to take their first dive down to the Titanic, and that was very worrying for me. We were supposed to be on one of those first dives,” he said. 

He was also concerned that the door was bolted from the outside, saying, “There’s still a potential that there’s no way out even if you’re on the surface.”

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.

“The thought of going down and seeing the Titanic really clouds your mind. You want this to be possible. You want this to be true. Your brain is willing to overlook some really glaring problems,” he said.

“The thought of going down and seeing the Titanic really clouds your mind. You want this to be possible. You want this to be true. Your brain is willing to overlook some really glaring problems.”

Weed declined an invitation to dive again a week later.  

Weed, no stranger to risky situations, said that “something about this felt like there wasn’t a plan” and that “the reward is not worth the risk.”

Josh Gates, the host of “Expedition Unknown,” told NBC News’ Tom Costello on that dive: “We had issues with thruster control. We had issues with the computers aboard. We had issues with comms."

“I just felt as though the sub needed more time and it needed more testing, frankly,” he said.

OceanGate completed successful expeditions to the wreckage in 2021 and 2022 before the Titian disappeared on the third trip.

Lost communications; wandering for hours underwater

Colin Taylor, who went on the submersible when it explored the Titanic site last July with his 22-year-old son, described the communication system as “very difficult.”

“There’s a text-based communication system that’s two-way, very slow,” he said. “I mean, when you’re sending signals through that amount of water, it’s very, very difficult.”

Mike Reiss, a writer and producer who has worked on “The Simpsons,” told ABC News he went on four 10-hour dives with OceanGate, including to the Titanic. The crews lost communication with the host ship each time.

When his vessel touched the bottom of the ocean on one of his OceanGate journeys to the Hudson Canyon, “a loud squawk came on the radio,” he recalled in an e pisode of the podcast “What Am I Doing Here?” that aired a year ago.

“The sonar, the computers, the lights all stopped working. We went back to the surface immediately,” he said.

Two years later, he took another expedition to the Titanic site in the submersible, describing it as “a car that you drunkenly drove into the ocean” steered by a video game controller.

When the team touched down, they faced a myriad of issues.

"We were nowhere near the Titanic. There were underwater currents pushing us farther and farther in the wrong direction. The sonar wasn’t working, and the compass kept flopping from east to west, north to south," he said. "There was also a time crunch. We started late, and there was a hurricane rolling in on the surface.”

David Pogue, a CBS News correspondent, tweeted that last year the submersible got “lost on the seafloor" for about five hours when he was on an OceanGate expedition to the Titanic’s resting place. A segment on the trip aired in November . 

Pogue wasn’t in the Titan — he was in a control room on a ship at the surface.

“They could still send short texts to the sub, but did not know where it was. It was quiet and very tense,”  he tweeted  Monday.

Former employee warned Titan's shell wasn't tested to descend deep safely

A former OceanGate pilot, David Lochridge, who was hired to run manned tests of submersibles, claimed five years ago in court papers that he was fired after he warned that the Titan’s carbon shell was not properly tested to ensure it could descend safely to 4,000 meters, the estimated depth of the Titanic. 

He also claimed OceanGate refused to pay extra for a viewport that could be used safely at a depth of 4,000 meters.

When he complained that OceanGate would be endangering customers, Lochridge said in the court papers, he was given “10 minutes to immediately clear out his desk.”

Lochridge’s claims, which were first reported by  The New Republic , were in his counterclaim to a 2018 breach of contract lawsuit OceanGate filed saying he was not an engineer. The two sides settled a few months later. The details of the settlement were unclear.

Expeditions are always a 'risk'

Aaron Newman, a former passenger on the missing Titan and an investor in OceanGate, said he felt “safe” during his journey but acknowledged that risks are involved in such expeditions.

“They were a professional crew. They did a lot of training around safety and the backup systems around dropping weights,” Newman said. “We’re going places that a very few people have been. This is inventing things. There are risks, right? And we know that.”

Newman said the explorers on the missing submersible — OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, British billionaire Hamish Harding, French dive expert Paul Henry Nargeolet, and prominent Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son, Suleman — are a “good set of people” who were likely doing what they could “to stay alive.”

Arthur Loibl, 61, a retired businessman and adventurer from Germany, went on a voyage to the Titanic site in 2021 with Rush and Nargeolet, he told The Associated Press . 

He said that while he was able to get a view of the iconic ocean liner, in hindsight he felt “a bit dubious” about how the dive was carried out. 

“I was a bit naive, looking back now,” he said. “It was a kamikaze operation.”

Breaking News Reporter

Melissa Chan is a reporter for NBC News Digital with a focus on veterans’ issues, mental health in the military and gun violence.

The (incredibly expensive) Titanic tourism industry that just lost a submarine

When OceanGate Expeditions began operations in 2018, they boasted of having the world’s only privately-owned vehicles capable of reaching the Titanic

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Only a few days after setting out from St. John’s, N.L., a tourist expedition to the wreck of the RMS Titanic has gone missing .

The (incredibly expensive) Titanic tourism industry that just lost a submarine Back to video

Both the U.S. Coast Guard and Canada’s Joint Rescue Coordination Centre in Halifax confirmed that a deep-sea submersible was reported overdue on Sunday night. An RCAF Aurora patrol aircraft and the Canadian Coast Guard vessel Kopit Hopson were soon underway to assist in search and rescue operations.

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There was no sign of the submersible as of press time, but the incident may already have done inalterable damage to what has previously been one of the world’s most exclusive tourist experiences.

Climbing Mount Everest costs about $50,000 . A ticket to space could soon cost only $100,000 . But descending to the RMS Titanic currently costs US$250,000 ($330,000) per person.

The missing submersible is owned by OceanGate Expeditions, a U.S.-based company whose vessel, the Polar Prince, is partially owned by the Newfoundland and Labrador-based Miawpukek First Nation. “This is your chance to step outside of everyday life and discover something truly extraordinary,” reads a description for the company’s June 2023 Titanic expedition.

On Monday, it emerged that one of the missing submersible’s passengers is U.K. billionaire Hamish Harding.

Although media reports said the search was being conducted “off the coast of Canada,” that’s only technically true: The search area is a remote patch of the North Atlantic more than 600 kilometres from Newfoundland.

Get a dash of perspective along with the trending news of the day in a very readable format.

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The isolation of the area is one of the reasons that the Titanic disaster was so deadly; although many vessels heard the liner’s wireless calls for distress, none were close enough to get to the ship before it had foundered and most of its passengers had died of exposure.

The RMS Titanic is not only the world’s most famous shipwreck, but it’s one of the hardest to reach.

The vessel — which sank on its maiden voyage in April, 1912 — lies under nearly four kilometres of Atlantic Ocean. That’s 12 times deeper than history’s deepest scuba dive , and four times deeper than the lowest depth ever reached by a conventional U.S. Navy submarine. Merely descending to the wreck takes about two hours.

That’s one of the reasons the wreck wasn’t discovered until 1985.

It wasn’t until after the Second World War that marine technologists — most notably the French oceanographer Jacques Cousteau — were able to pioneer the development of submersibles that could reach the bottom of the mid-Atlantic without getting crushed.

To this day, there’s still only a handful of vehicles that can safely carry humans to the wreck, almost all of which are in the hands of militaries and research institutions.

The wreck was first explored in the 1980s with ALVIN, a research submersible owned by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. And when Canadian filmmaker James Cameron dove to the site to shoot footage for his 1997 blockbuster Titanic, he hired Mir 1 and Mir 2; deep-sea submersibles operated by the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Ever since the 1990s, there has been a steady trickle of sightseeing expeditions to the Titanic wreck. The two Mir submersibles were contracted for a tourist expedition in 1998 , and in 2001 an American couple even arranged to be married in a submersible perched on the bow of the sunken vessel; they’d won the dive in a competition offered by the British company SubSea Explorer.

These have not been uncontroversial. The sinking claimed the lives of more than 1,500 people, only a few hundred of which had their bodies recovered, meaning that the wreck is officially a mass grave. RMS Titanic Inc. — the U.S. company that owns salvage rights to the wreck — has also sought court injunctions against earlier sightseeing visits.

When OceanGate Expeditions began operations in 2018, they boasted of having the world’s only privately-owned vehicles capable of reaching the Titanic.

The missing craft is the Titan submersible, which has room for four passengers and one crew member. Specs released by OceanGate note that it is lighter than most of its deep-sea submersible peers by virtue of being partially constructed from carbon fiber rather than the traditional titanium.

“In coastal waters this means we do not need a large support ship with a crane or A-frame,” they write.

• The boy who slept through the sinking of the Titanic
• How a baker survived the Titanic by getting spectacularly drunk

Quick facts about the missing Titanic submersible, Titan, and owner OceanGate Expeditions

A search is underway in an area of the Atlantic Ocean about 700 kilometres south of Newfoundland for a small submersible reported missing during a dive to view the wreckage of the Titanic. Here are a few facts about the missing vessel and its owner, Washington-based OceanGate Expeditions.

1. The Titan is a 6.4-metre manned submersible made of carbon fibre and titanium, designed to carry five people to depths of up to 4,000 metres for “site survey and inspection, research and data collection, film and media production, and deepsea testing of hardware and software,” according to OceanGate’s website. The craft includes a large viewport to allow passengers to view their surroundings, and is lowered into the water with the help of what the company calls a “patented, integrated launch and recovery platform.”

2. The vessel carried a combination of crew and tourists, who pay huge fees to view the wreck site and participate in research tasks. The Canadian Press reported that in 2019, the price was about $168,000 per ticket — an amount said to subsidize the company’s Titanic research mission.

3. The company says its mission includes chronicling the deterioration of the wreck of the Titanic, which sank in 1912, leading to the deaths of more than 1,500 people. The expeditions capture photos and video to document the condition of the site, as well as the plants and animals in and around it. “What we’re doing is something that’s going to add to the historical record of the Titanic — what is it like now, how is it decaying, what kind of marine life is there,” CEO Stockton Rush told The Canadian Press in 2019.

4. A promotional video on the company’s YouTube channel says the passengers depart from St. John’s, N.L., aboard a surface vessel for an eight-day journey. The trips down to the Titanic wreck are monitored by specialists in a command centre aboard the ship, on which guests are treated to lectures and conversations with scientists, and help out with various tasks related to research.

5. The company says the submersible includes a real-time health monitoring system, which makes it possible to analyze the effects of changing pressure on the submersible as it dives. The submersible is said to have a life-support system lasting 96 hours.

6. Rush founded OceanGate in 2009. It carried out successful Titanic expeditions in 2021 and 2022, the website says.

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NEWS... BUT NOT AS YOU KNOW IT

Loud banging and 360 degree spins: Inside the horrifying history of Titan sub dives

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The OceanGate submersible Titan that went missing on an expedition to the Titanic shipwreck suffered a ‘catastrophic implosion’.

Five passengers were on the Titan when it went missing in the North Atlantic Ocean on Sunday, June 18 – and a days-long rescue mission ensued in a bid to save them, before it was concluded all five lives were lost.

The passengers embarking on the expedition were British billionaire explorer Hamish Harding , French diver Paul-Henri Nargeolet , Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood, his 19-year-old son Suleman, and OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush.

Debris from the Titan has now been recovered following the tragic incident – with new details emerging on what it was like inside the 22ft-long sub during the dive , and what the crew’s final moments may have been like .

However, this trip was not the first time that the Titan submersible had been on voyage to explore the infamous shipwreck and a BBC documentary has revealed that on a previous mission, the vessel span out of control.

But how many times had it visited the Titanic before?

How many times did the Titan go to the Titanic?

The Titan made the voyage to the Titanic three times , once a year since 2021.

Sorry, this video isn't available any more.

The trip, which cost around $250,000 (£195,000) , was intended as an annual event which allowed tourists to see the shipwreck up close.

OceanGate has previously stated that the Titan completed over 50 test dives, including to depths similar to those of the Titanic, both in waters around the Bahamas as well as in a pressure chamber.

However, previous trips in the Titan also encountered issues , which had raised concerns about the safety of the vessel .

Reporter David Pogue was onboard the vessel in 2022 when communication was lost with the main ship for two and a half hours.

He later challenged Mr Rush in an interview, saying: ‘It seems like this submersible has some elements of MacGyver jerry-riggedness’.

Additionally, a BBC documentary shows footage of the sub losing contol and spinning 360 degrees on a previous trip.

The concerned pilot told the adventurers: ‘I don’t know what’s going on, I feel like… I don’t know what’s going on. 

‘There’s something wrong with my thrusters. I’m thrusting and nothing is happening.’

The documentary also shows the OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, downplayed really loud banging noises on a previous mission.

Titan was driven by a reinforced Logitech game controller and touch screens, and the dive was said to have taken place in darkness in a bid to save battery power on lighting .

Crew members communicated with the mothership via text message and there was no GPS system.

Mr Rush previously said: ‘We’ve taken a completely new approach to the sub design and it’s all run with this game controller and these touch screens. 

‘It’s bluetooth so I can hand it to anybody and it’s meant for a 16-year-old to throw it around and super durable. We keep a couple of spares on board just in case.’

It is also believed that bluetooth speakers were used to play music during the expeditions.

How deep is the wreck of the Titanic?

The wreck of the Titanic lies at a depth of about 12,500 feet (3,800 metres).

It is located around 370 nautical miles (690km) south-southeast off the coast of Newfoundland, with the ship lying in two parts around 2,000 feet apart.

The boat sank in the early hours of April 15, 1912, during its maiden voyage, after a collision with an iceberg.

However, the wreck was not discovered until September 1, 1985 , during a joint mission between the US’s Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and French National Institute of Oceanography

Team leaders Dr. Robert D. Ballard of WHOI and Jean Louis Michel of IFREMER researched the history of the  Titanic  disaster and had a thorough knowledge of the ship and of previous efforts to find her. They narrowed the search field to 100 square miles.

Rather than search for one large object – Titanic’s massive hull – they used imaging tools and the newly developed sonar and video camera system  Argo , to scour the seafloor for debris dispersed from the wreck in the current.

Just after 1am on September 1, 1985, they identified one of Titanic’s boilers, confirming the wreck had been found. 

MORE : Subway condemned for ‘tone-deaf’ sign after Titanic submarine tragedy

MORE : People are only just realising how fake the Titanic movie actually was: ‘No way that’s a real scene’

MORE : Ross Kemp actually would have boarded Oceangate Submersible Titanic trip which killed 5 people

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Encyclopedia Titanica

Titanic archive.

RMS Titanic departed on her maiden voyage at 12pm on 10 April 1912. Large crowds gathered at the ocean terminal in Southampton to see her off. Prior to departure some passengers, including Lawrence Beesley and Adolphe Saalfeld had welcomed guests on board to show them around the new ship. The voyage was almost cut short by a near disaster with the SS New York as Titanic steamed slowly passed laid up ships on Southampton water, but swift action averted a collision and after a short delay she reached open sea and set course for Cherbourg.

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He took an OceanGate sub trip to the Titanic. Now he has ‘survivor’s guilt’

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Bill Price had complete faith in Stockton Rush.

Even when Rush’s experimental submersible Titan lost communication with the mother ship about an hour into its descent toward the Titanic shipwreck on its maiden voyage in 2021.

Even when Price realized the vessel’s propulsion system was malfunctioning.

Even after he became aware there was an issue with the mechanism that releases weights off the craft so that it rises back to the surface.

“There was some apprehension of how are we going to get back up,” Price told The Times on Thursday.

World & Nation

5 aboard Titanic tourist sub are dead after ‘catastrophic implosion’

The five people aboard a submersible that vanished on a trip to explore the Titanic wreckage have died after a catastrophic implosion, the U.S. Coast Guard says.

June 22, 2023

For the record:

7:23 a.m. June 23, 2023 In an earlier version of this article, the first name of Paul-Henri Nargeolet, a French explorer known as “Mr. Titanic,” was misspelled as Paul-Henry.

Rush, the chief executive of OceanGate, which designed and operated the submersible, and Paul-Henri Nargeolet, a French explorer known as “Mr. Titanic,” remained calm.

They came up with a solution to get the sub back to the ocean’s surface, Price said. Nargeolet and Rush urged Price and his fellow passengers to rock from side to side, swaying the sub to dislodge the weights that held it down. Slowly, they began to hear the sound of metal falling from the vessel.

“When we heard our first clunk, that was such a relief,” Price recalled.

How The Times covered the sinking of the Titanic: ‘The annihilated Leviathan’

On April 16, 1912, the Los Angeles Times chronicled the sinking of the Titanic. This coverage is republished here in full, with changes only to capitalization and punctuation for ease of readability.

The sub resurfaced, and despite the mishaps, Price felt confident in the craft and its operator. He and the other passengers all opted to join Rush and Nargeolet for another trip the next day.

Video taken by a passenger on the first trip Titan took to the Titanic shows Stockton Rush and Paul-Henri Nargeolet, two of the men who died this week when the submersible imploded in the Atlantic Ocean.

Rush and Nargeolet were two of the five occupants of Titan when it imploded near the site of the Titanic wreckage Sunday. The craft’s disappearance less than two hours into its latest voyage sparked a massive manhunt involving U.S., French, British and Canadian governments as planes, boats and submarines desperately scanned the North Atlantic for the lost submersible, fearing it was stuck underwater with a 96-hour supply of oxygen.

Debris from the demolished sub was discovered Thursday on the seafloor by underwater robots. The wreckage was consistent with the “catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber,” officials with the U.S. Coast Guard said.

Price, a 71-year-old retiree from Manhattan Beach, worked in the travel business his whole career. He is not a billionaire. He was able to afford the trip on Titan, which costs around $250,000, by doing some marketing work for OceanGate and using money he received from the sale of a property. An explorer and a history buff, Price was delighted by the opportunity to see the Titanic up close.

“It was something I’ll never forget the rest of my life,” he said.

He recalls the wall of the bow as they first approached in the dark depths, around 13,000 feet below the surface. Nargeolet pointed out the captain’s quarters, where they could see the captain’s bathtub filled with debris. He remembers the decay of the wooden decks. He also remembers the poise of Rush maneuvering the vessel with a video-game controller, and Nargeolet’s encyclopedic knowledge as they traversed the resting place of the doomed ship

Entertainment & Arts

Commentary: As those aboard the Titan submersible suffered, social media laughed

The exploitative coverage of the death and terror unfolding in real time as the search for the Titan sub continued was compounded by the public’s reaction on TikTok and Twitter.

Now, Price is struggling knowing what could have occurred on his trip, as well as grieving the loss of two men he respected deeply.

“I do have survivor’s guilt,” Price said.

Price now carries a coin he was given, courtesy of OceanGate, after his dive down to the Titanic.

“Titan,” the coin reads. “A new era of exploration.”

“Inaugural Dive Coin,” it says. At the top: “Respect, Honor, Remember.”

Price, along with some others who have worked with OceanGate, is hoping to reframe the narrative around Rush and the company. Some in the industry raised concerns about the safety of the Titan sub, which did not follow all of the protocols expected in the submersible industry.

Rush chafed at regulations, which he said slowed innovation and made private enterprise in submersibles more costly.

“One of the jabs that gets thrown at us is: ‘Hey, you aren’t certified.’ But how can you do something new and get certified?” Rush said in a 2022 interview in Maptia. “If the rules exist for how to do it, then you are operating outside of the rules by doing something different. I think it was MacArthur who said, ‘You are remembered for the rules you break.’ We try to break the rules intelligently and intentionally.”

Still, Price believes that Rush, an aerospace engineer, was cautious and methodical.

“I certainly didn’t feel that Stockton was a daredevil — not even close. It was pretty much the opposite,” Price said. “Every evening after the dive everyone would get together in the briefing room and do a debriefing, and he was adamant that he doesn’t care, you can’t hurt his feelings, say whatever you want to say.”

Officials say an investigation into the implosion will probably examine industry regulations and standards. But it remained unclear Friday which country would lead the probe. The catastrophe occurred in international waters, and search efforts included resources from several countries.

A government official familiar with the investigation but not authorized to discuss it publicly said Canada probably would take a leading role. The Canadian research vessel Polar Prince was the point of contact for the Titan after it launched from St. John’s, on the Canadian island of Newfoundland, and before it went missing.

The official told The Times that crews would collect the Titan’s wreckage in an effort to reconstruct the vessel’s final hours and determine what led to the implosion.

Price trusted Rush with his life and said he still would, despite the fact that the Titan’s final dive ended in catastrophe.

“In terms of regret, I certainly don’t have any regrets. I do feel that maybe at the time I jumped into it without knowing everything,” he said.

It had not yet become a massive international story when Price heard from associates at OceanGate that the submersible was missing. Still, he knew something was wrong.

“The amount of time that had gone by, I think six or eight hours. Something should have happened by then,” he said.

Though Price hoped for a rescue, he thought it more likely that the submersible had imploded. He said he preferred knowing that the occupants’ deaths were speedy and without suffering, rather than a slow demise as the oxygen supply ran out.

“It does give me solace, a limited amount, to know that they didn’t have to endure extreme anxiety and concerns over a period of time,” he said.

Times staff writers Richard Winton and Alexandra E. Petri contributed to this report.

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Noah Goldberg covers breaking news for the Los Angeles Times. He worked previously in New York City as the Brooklyn courts reporter for the New York Daily News, covering major criminal trials as well as working on enterprise stories. Before that, he was the criminal justice reporter for the Brooklyn Eagle.

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Everything to know about the sub Titan — and its voyage to the Titanic wreck

The titanic sits at the bottom of the ocean floor in the deep sea where there’s intense pressure, cold temperatures and no light.

By Hanna Seariac

On April 10, 1912, the Titanic launched its maiden voyage from Southampton, England, to New York. The massive ship was known for its luxurious accommodations.

On April 14, the ship made contact with an iceberg and the blow was fatal — early in the morning on April 15, the ship began sinking, leading to the deaths of more than 1,500 passengers and crew members who were on board.

The boat has been the subject of cultural interest since it sank over 100 years ago. James Cameron’s 1997 movie “Titanic” is just one example of the ways the Titanic has cultivated interest since its sinking. The Titanic sits at the bottom of the ocean floor in the deep sea where there’s intense pressure, cold temperatures and no light.

To see the remains of the Titanic, a submersible called Titan dove down into the ocean on Sunday. The U.S. Coast Guard said the crew on the submersible lost contact with the Canadian research ship Polar Prince about an hour and 45 minutes after the dive. 

On Thursday, Rear Adm. John Mauger of the Coast Guard said the debris found “is consistent with the catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber,” according to Deseret News . This means the Coast Guard believes the sub imploded and the five passengers on board are believed to be dead.

Here’s a deeper look at the Titan, the search and rescue efforts that were conducted and what the conditions of the sub were.

Who are the Titan passengers?

There are five people aboard the Titan — Stockton Rush, CEO of OceanGate; Hamish Harding, a British aviator; Shahzada Dawood, a British Pakistani businessman; Suleman Dawood, son of Shahzada Dawood; and Paul-Henry Nargeolet, director of Underwater Research for E/M Group and RMS Titanic Inc.

According to The New York Times , “The dozens of dives Mr. Nargeolet has made to the wreck site include previous OceanGate expeditions on the Titan, the missing submersible.” The first time he made the dive to the Titanic was in July 1987. 

What is the Titan?

The Guardian described the Titan as “a research and survey submersible that can carry five people, usually a pilot and four ‘mission specialists’ who can include archaeologists, marine biologists or anyone who can afford the experience as a tourist.” It weighs 23,000 pounds and has a 96-hour system of bottled oxygen. 

The Titanic is on the ocean floor around 12,500 feet below sea level, according to The Guardian . The submersible can go down to the depth of 13,120 feet. 

Titan sub parts believed to be found among the debris from near Titanic wreckage site https://t.co/eHFhTHtFaM pic.twitter.com/KRTzNQoXEL — BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) June 22, 2023

The submersible is around 22 feet long and travels at about 3 knots, according to The Conversation . Guests on board paid $250,000 for the trip. 

Rush is the creator of the Titan, according to The Guardian .

What’s the difference between a submersible and a submarine?

The Titan is a submersible which has less power than a submarine. ABC 7 News said, “A submarine has enough power to leave port and come back to port under its own power.” On the other hand, a submersible launches from a mother ship, has less power than a submarine and needs a mother ship for support. 

What’s it like inside the Titan?

“CBS News Sunday Morning” correspondent David Pogue, who went on the OceanGate Titan in November, told NPR that being inside the submersible was like being in a “minivan without seats.” Inside, there are computer screens, as well as a porthole that looks out into the ocean. 

Pogue said to NPR , “There really is no safety gear in there except for a fire extinguisher and fire masks, which we practiced putting on and taking off. That’s pretty much it, because there’s not much you can do if something goes wrong.” He said if something goes wrong, the sub has seven different ways to return to the surface. 

The hatch of the submersible is closed by 17 bolts, according to The Boston Globe . The submersible communicates by exchanging text messages using an ultra-short baseline acoustic system and is supposed to communicate with the mother ship — the Polar Prince — every 15 minutes. CNN correspondent Gabe Cohen, who sat inside the Titan in 2018, said, according to ABC 7 , “You have to sit inside of it, shoes off.”

Rush, CEO of OceanGate, previously told The Guardian that the submersible was custom-made for seeing the Titanic. “We had to make our own sub. So our sub weighs about half as much as any other deep diving sub, or research sub, that’s been down there. And it because it’s smaller and lighter, it’s much more manoeuvrable. And so we can get very close.”

About the space inside Titan, The Guardian reported Rush had compared it earlier to what it’s like to be in an airplane. 

The sub is controlled by a video game controller. Vox reported, “Even the U.S. Navy uses Xbox controllers to operate the photonic scopes that replaced periscopes on submarines.” At the depth the Titan goes, they are unable to use GPS.

"Five months ago, correspondent David Pogue took a trip inside the Titan, where he said, "Pieces of this sub seem improvised." Inside, a handle was installed from Camper World, and a guide shares, "We run the whole thing with this game controller."" pic.twitter.com/jgPDQbtye7 — Everdark Omnis (@Everdark_Omnis) June 21, 2023

Retired Navy Capt. David Marquet told CNN what the possible conditions are for those in the submersible, “They’re freezing cold. The water entirely surrounding the ship is at freezing or slightly below. When they exhale, their breath condenses. There’s frost on the inside of the parts of the submarine. They’re all huddled together trying to conserve their body heat. They’re running low on oxygen and they’re exhaling carbon dioxide.”

On Thursday, the Coast Guard said the sub is believed to have imploded.

Who was involved in the search and rescue effort for the Titan?

The search area spanned around twice the size of Connecticut and went down 2 1 ⁄ 2 miles into the ocean, according to The Associated Press .

The U.S. Navy, Canadian Coast Guard and OceanGate Expeditions were all involved in the search and rescue, per USA Today . A French team, a submariner from the British Royal Navy and experts from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution have also joined the effort.

The search and rescue team used “aircraft fitted with sonar, various sea vessels and deep-sea exploration tools” in its effort, per the New York Post.

How safe is the Titan?

More than three dozen people in the submersible craft industry signed a joint letter in 2018, “warning of possible ‘catastrophic’ problems with the submersible’s development and its planned mission to tour the Titanic wreckage,” per The New York Times . The letter was sent to OceanGate CEO Rush, who is on board the missing sub.

The letter said, “Our apprehension is that the current experimental approach adopted by Oceangate could result in negative outcomes (from minor to catastrophic) that would have serious consequences for everyone in the industry,” per The New York Times .

In 2019, OceanGate published a blog post titled “Why Isn’t Titan Classed?” In part, the blog post said, “When OceanGate was founded the goal was to pursue the highest reasonable level of innovation in the design and operation of manned submersibles. By definition, innovation is outside of an already accepted system. However, this does not mean that OceanGate does meet standards where they apply, but it does mean that innovation often falls outside of the existing industry paradigm.”

What does the Titanic wreckage look like?

The Titanic wreckage wasn’t discovered until 1985, according to NBC News . The wreckage was found around 350 miles off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada. Large amounts of the ship remain intact, like the steering motor. In photographs of the wreckage, it’s possible to see smaller items, like a coat and boots, as well as the remains of the dining room.

Boilers have been discovered, per NBC News , as well as the anchor.

Around the site of the Titanic, there’s bits of the wreck, according to NPR . The wreckage has been underwater for over a century and has signs of aging, like an iron-eating bacteria.

The bacteria is called Halomonas titanicae and eats the iron in the hull of the ship. Per the Smithsonian Institution, “They will eventually consume the entire ship, recycling the nutrients into the ocean ecosystem.”

Where did the Titanic sink?

The Titanic wreckage was discovered around 350 miles off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada, according to NBC News . It’s in the northern part of the Atlantic Ocean.

Missing Titan: The Titanic sub has a history of malfunction - adventurer

60-year-old arthur liobl described his trip aboard the titan as a "suicide mission.".

Conditions aboard the Titan 

To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories .

The Grimly Absorbing Mystery of the Missing Submersible

By Raven Smith

It’s been a busy week. Kourtney Kardashian—holding a large sign at a gig— is with child . We have mere days until And Just Like That season two , and softboi Aidan’s comeback, torments our screens. But even as covetable Pharrell-designed Louis Vuitton garments paraded the catwalk yesterday, my mind couldn’t stop refocusing on a specific spot in the North Atlantic and an ongoing search for a missing vessel.

I’m sure you’re caught up on the Titanic submersible developments , the news notifications bothering your screen as you, erm, dive into the distressing facts and forecasts. On Sunday, five deep-sea tourists boarded the Titan, a carbon-fiber-and-titanium craft, in order to visit history’s most renowned shipwreck, the RMS Titanic . The sub lost radio contact and radar tracking two hours into its nearly 13,000-foot descent to the ocean floor. Nothing has been heard since, though a Canadian plane recently reported underwater noise at 30-minute intervals in the search area. At last—rather disturbing—count, the Titan has 40 hours of breathable air left.

The story has a chokehold on the global consciousness. We simply cannot shake the mental imagery of these men, miles under the surface, huddled together in the closest of quarters, with a limited air supply, a single porthole, and a petrol-can-size toilet to pee into. I’m struggling to move beyond the literal, visceral horror of five people suffocating to death in a pod at the bottom of the ocean. It is a genuine, real-time horror story.

Theirs is, at this point, quite a well-known square of the Atlantic, notoriously iceberg-y. In 1912, Jack Dawson debatably had room on a floating door, and in 1997 Rose DeWitt Bukater dropped her necklace in the same spot. Thanks to James Cameron, we are all Titaniacs in some way or another, captivated by that ill-fated maiden voyage. The Titanic’s easily thwarted unsinkable-ness is a cautionary tale of mankind’s belief in science dominating nature, of arrogance. After we fucked around and found out a century ago, it still seems inherently unwise to board a large metal Tic Tac, especially having signed a waiver that mentions death three times on the first page.

The exercise feels moneyed and indulgent and, above all, unnecessary. It’s quite a Succession sort of trip, actually: a deep-sea splurge for the superrich (these expeditions cost $250,000 per person), the sub’s disappearance joked about online as some sort of luxury comeuppance. It would be a little farfetched to think of Titanic-adjacent voyages as universally jinxed, and yet that’s part of the reason we’re incapable of looking away.

By Margaux Anbouba

By Hannah Coates

By Amel Mukhtar

I am still Hungry Caterpillar –ing facts: about submersibles; about survival stories; about the vast, sunless, pressurized leagues of water that surround the tiny vessel. I do not enjoy knowing more, and yet I cannot stop myself from trying to gain some understanding in this macabre mess. Hopefully this will be a survival story, like the boys in the Thai cave who were given ketamine and K-holed out. I’m currently reading The Wager by David Grann, and though the shipmates are demented with scurvy, I know some do make it home. With luck, the tale of the Titan will be one we’ll rubberneck binge in a Disney+ doc next spring, a reversal of the fortunes of the Titanic herself. But I can’t shake the feeling we’re witnesses to a preemptive tragedy unfolding—a slow-motion misadventure, drip-fed to us in push notifications as we wait for absolution.

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