2 new vessels arrive on scene, conducting search patterns
Two new vessels have arrived on the scene and are conducting search patterns in the bid to find Titan, a U.S. Coast Guard spokesperson said Thursday morning.
Canadian CGS Ann Harvey and the Motor Vessel Horizon Arctic, a remotely operated vehicle (ROV), arrived to aid in the bid to find the missing submersible, Petty Officer Ryan Noel said.
The Coast Guard had previously said the two vessels were en route to the search site.
Noel said rescuers were also in the process of trying to get “one of the newer ROVs onsite down there.” He could not confirm which ROV that was, but said the Coast Guard would be providing updates as more information became available.
Search patterns show more sea scanned in bid to find Titan
The Coast Guard released a new image on Wednesday showing search patterns so far as efforts expanded in the race to find the missing sub.
The Coast Guard also released search patterns Tuesday, with the difference depicted below.
Right: Search patterns used in the search for Titan as of Tuesday.@USCGNortheast via Twitter / Briana carter/U.S. Coast Guard District 1
Searchers had covered an area twice the size of Connecticut on the surface, and the search underwater is about 2 ½ miles deep, officials said Wednesday.
Ex-senior naval officer has ‘no optimism’ about underwater noises
The search and rescue mission was given fresh hope after a Canadian aircraft detected “underwater noises” on Tuesday and Wednesday. But Chris Parry, a former rear admiral in the British Royal Navy, says he isn’t greatly encouraged.
“I’ve got no optimism about that at all,” Parry told NBC News. “Put your head in the water, you’re going to hear a lot of mechanical noises, particularly in the vicinity of a disintegrating wreck like the Titanic.”
He called the optimism “clutching at straws.”
The Titanic brought them together, and a tiny vessel could doom them
The five-person crew rescuers are racing to find went missing after departing on a mission Sunday morning from the Polar Prince, a Canadian research vessel, to survey the Titanic firsthand.
The passengers are now at the center of a much higher-stakes race against the clock — a frantic international search-and-rescue effort that must succeed before the 22-foot vessel runs out of oxygen Thursday morning.
The passengers are Rush, who lives in Seattle and served as the vessel’s pilot; Hamish Harding, a British tycoon who lives in the United Arab Emirates; Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman, scions of a Pakistani business dynasty; and the French mariner and Titanic expert Paul Henry “P.H.” Nargeolet, who has been nicknamed “Mr. Titanic.”
The men are likely bound together forever, no matter what happens next.
Read the full story here.
French deep sea robot arrives to join search
Due to join the hunt Thursday was Victor 6000, an undersea robot dispatched by the French government that has the rare ability to dive deeper than the Titanic wreck.
The French research vessel L’Atalante, which is carrying the robot, has now arrived in the same area as other ships involved in the search as of 4 a.m. ET., according to the tracking website Marine Traffic.
Victor 6000 is so named because it can dive to 6,000 meters — some 20,000 feet. That puts the Titanic, 12,500 feet down, easily within its range.
It’s familiar territory for Ifremer, the state-run French ocean research institute that operates the robot and was part of the team that first located the Titanic wreck in 1985. The institute dispatched the the remotely operated vehicle, or ROV, this week at the request of the U.S. Navy.
It isn’t able to lift the missing submersible own its own, but it could hook up the 10-ton carbon-fiber and titanium tube to another ship capable of bringing it to the surface, Olivier Lefort, the head of naval operations at Ifremer, told Reuters. “This is the logic of seafarers. Our attitude was: We are close, we have to go,” he said.
Desperate search for sub as oxygen supply dwindles
The search for the missing submersible grew more frantic Thursday morning, with officials fearing the oxygen supply on the vessel could soon run out.
U.S. Coast Guard officials estimated that Titan, which had a 96-hour oxygen supply, could run out of air just before 7:10 a.m. ET on Thursday, but the exact situation onboard the vessel, including potential efforts to conserve oxygen, is not clear.
The search for the sub, which went missing Sunday after embarking on a mission to explore the Titanic, has been focused on an area where Canadian aircraft detected “underwater noises” Tuesday, and again on Wednesday.