The US Coast Guard was looking for a small tourist submarine on Monday that went missing in the Atlantic Ocean, off North America, on board a wealthy British businessman for an expedition to the area of ??the sinking of the Titanic.
“We are looking for” the device, told AFP an official of the Coastguard Rescue Mission Coordination Center in Boston.
Canada is also involved, helping the search with a boat and a plane, the Canadian Coast Guard told AFP.
The mobilized boat “was off eastern Newfoundland and left for the search area,” they said.
Without saying how many people were on board, the company organizing the trip, OceanGate Expeditions, said in a statement quoted by media “to explore and mobilize all options to bring the crew back safely”.
The company did not respond to requests from AFP.
According to the Guardian, five people are on board.
British businessman Hamish Harding, CEO of the company “Action Aviation”, recently indicated on social networks that he was going to be part of the crew.
“I am proud to finally announce that I have joined @oceangateexped for their RMS Titanic mission as Mission Specialist on the submarine that descends to Titanic,” he wrote on Instagram, in a post. dating from Saturday.
“A weather window has just opened and we will try to dive tomorrow,” he added.
“The submarine’s crew is made up of some legendary explorers, some of whom have completed more than 30 dives on the RMS Titanic since the 1980s,” Hamish Harding wrote in the post.
Joined by AFP, his company declined to comment. According to the Guardian, he would be one of the few tourists to have already been in space.
On the page of its site explaining the modalities of its activities, OceanGate Expeditions indicates that a mission visiting the Titanic was “in progress”, from June 12 to 20.
You had to pay $250,000 to be part of it.
The company’s only device capable of going to the depths of the Titanic is the Titan, “a submersible designed to take five people to depths of 4,000 meters”, with a range of 96 hours for a crew of five.
Without having studied the craft itself, Alistair Greig, professor of marine engineering at University College London, raised two possible theories based on images of the device published by the press.
He reckons that if he had a problem with the electricity or communications, he could have been brought to the surface, floating “waiting to be found”.
“Another scenario is that the hull has been compromised,” and there has been a leak. “So the prognosis is not good,” he added.
And “very few vessels can go” to the depth it might have sunk, he said.
Leaving Southampton on April 10, 1912 for New York, the Titanic, a gigantic liner, the largest in the world when it was launched, was shipwrecked after hitting an iceberg five days later. Of the 2,224 passengers and crew, nearly 1,500 perished.
The wreck was discovered in 1985 650 kilometers off the Canadian coast, at a depth of 4,000 meters in the international waters of the Atlantic Ocean. Since then, treasure seekers and tourists have been visiting it.
06/19/2023 21:34:13 – Boston (United States) (AFP) – © 2023 AFP