The Titanic submersible with five people onboard including British billionaire Hamish Harding is believed to be stuck 12,500 ft below in the wreckage of the original sunken Titanic.
Operated by OceanGate Expeditions, the tourism vessel was submerging with a crew of five including company CEO Stockton Rush, French explorer PH Nargeolet and Harding to the shipwreck site as part of a $250,000 tour, The Mirror reports.
They started at 4am yesterday but comms became disconnected mothership a short while afterwards. According to OceanGate's website, the sub can withstand 96 hours underwater with five people consuming oxygen.
Rear Admiral John Mauger, assisting with the search, said the US Coast Guard is working “as hard as possible” to located the submersible, believing that it may be tangled in the wreckage of the original Titanic..
“We're working as hard as possible, bringing all assets to bear to try and find the submersible. We were notified on Sunday afternoon,” said Mauger. We began immediately to mobilise assets to search both the surface of the water, search from the air, and to detect any vessels under the water as well. "We've had a comprehensive search to find these people," he said.
He described the rescue mission as "very complicated."
The wreckage is 370 miles from Newfoundland in Canada but is in US waters, with the Coast Guard for Boston leading.
He added: “We don't have equipment onsite that can do a survey of the bottom. There is a lot of debris so locating will be difficult. We don't have the capabilities at this time. Right now, we're focused on trying to locate it.”
It is OceanGate's third annual voyage to delve into the wreckage of the ship that sunk in 1912, killing everyone except for the 700 of the roughly 2,200 passengers and crew.
Named Titan, it can dive 4,000 meters or 13,120 ft. "with a comfortable safety margin," OceanGate said in its filing with the court.
It weighs 20,000 pounds (9,072 kilograms) in the air, but is ballasted to be neutrally buoyant once it reaches the seafloor, the company said.
Chris Parry, a retired navy rear admiral from the U.K., told Sky News that the rescue taking place was "a very difficult operation."
""The actual nature of the seabed is very undulating. Titanic herself lies in a trench. There's lots of debris around. So trying to differentiate with sonar in particular and trying to target the area you want to search in with another submersible is going to be very difficult indeed."
