The Titanic submarine's remains were found "almost immediately" by a rescue robot, according to the head of the search operation.
Ed Cassano, chief executive of the New York-based Pelagic Research Services, said the firm's ROV vehicle found the submersible four days after the OceanGate Titan went missing. It made its way to the site of the Titanic at 5am on June 22 after the vessel, which had five people on-board, lost contact with the mothership 45 minutes into the deep-sea dive.
The Mirror reports that the robot was the only vessel used during the search that was capable of diving all the way to the Titanic wreckage. Just hours into the trip, it became a rescue mission.
Mr Cassano said: “Shortly after we arrived on the sea floor, we discovered the debris of the Titan submersible. By 12 o’clock, sadly, a rescue turned into a recovery."
Stockton Rush, 61, OceanGate's founder, Paul-Henri Nargeolet, 77, Shahzada Dawood, 48; his 19-year-old son Suleman; and Hamish Harding, 58, a billionaire explorer all tragically lost their lives after the vessel suffered a "catastrophic implosion." During the operation, Mr Cassano envisaged four possible scenarios, with the best being that the Titan was resting on the seafloor but had lost the power to come back up.
He admitted: “The plan was to grab the Titan."
They would have attached a "lifting motor" to the submersible and would raise it to a depth where ROVs from another search could operate.
He said: "The sub was not being tracked. We didn't know where it was....it's essential for safe operations. The plan was to grab the Titan, and once we'd grabbed the Titan, manipulate it. Then we had her.
"Then it was going to be attaching beacons...so if we lost her, other assets could track her. At that point we would begin recovery.
“Once we came through 3,000m, these other vehicles could join us."
But as many feared of the oxygen running out on Thursday, his team were focused on the rescue.
“We were focused on the job in hand,” he said. “That’s what we did. We focused on the rescue.”
Sadly, his team found debris and last week officials recovered five fragments of the sub, including the vessel's tail cone and two sections of the pressure hell, which had been discovered less than 500m from the bow of the Titanic wreckage. Rear-Admiral John Mauger of the US coastguard said the wreckage was consistent with “a catastrophic implosion of the vehicle.”
Mr Cassano said he was "proud of the performance of our system" but was "very saddened we couldn't recover a viable sub". In addition, "presumed human remains" were also recovered from the submersible's wreckage which were sent off for testing.
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