Titanic submersible destroyed in 'catastrophic implosion', all 5 aboard killed

NEW YORK - A deep-sea submersible carrying five people on a voyage to the century-old wreck of the Titanic was found in pieces from a “catastrophic implosion” that killed everyone aboard, the US Coast Guard said on Thursday.

It brings a grim end to the massive international search for the vessel that went missing on Sunday.

A robotic diving vehicle deployed from a Canadian ship discovered a debris field from the submersible Titan on Thursday morning on the seabed some 488m from the bow of the Titanic, which is about 4km beneath the surface, in a remote corner of the North Atlantic, US Coast Guard Rear Admiral John Mauger told reporters.

The Titan was operated by the US-based company OceanGate Expeditions.

It had been missing since it lost contact with its surface support ship on Sunday morning about an hour and 45 minutes into what should have been a two-hour dive to the world’s most famous shipwreck.

Rear-Admiral Mauger said it was too early to tell whether the vessel’s failure occurred then or at a later time.

Five major fragments of the 6.7m Titan were located in the debris field left from its disintegration, including the vessel’s tail cone and two sections of the pressure hull, Coast Guard officials said.

No mention was made of whether human remains were sighted.

“The debris field here is consistent with a catastrophic implosion of the vehicle,” Rear-Admiral Mauger said.

Even before the Coast Guard’s press conference, OceanGate issued a statement saying there were no survivors among the five men aboard the Titan.

“These men were true explorers who shared a distinct spirit of adventure, and a deep passion for exploring and protecting the world’s oceans,” OceanGate said in the statement.

“Our hearts are with these five souls and every member of their families during this tragic time.”

The five people aboard were British billionaire and explorer Hamish Harding, 58; Pakistani-born business magnate Shahzada Dawood, 48, and his 19-year-old son, Suleman, both British citizens; French oceanographer and Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet, 77, who had visited the wreck dozens of times; and Stockton Rush, the American founder and chief executive of OceanGate, who was piloting the submersible.

Rescue teams from several countries had spent days searching thousands of square kilometres of open seas with planes and ships for any sign of the 6.7m-long Titan.

Intense worldwide media coverage of the search largely overshadowed the aftermath of a far greater maritime disaster stemming from the wreck of a migrant vessel off the coast of Greece last week, killing hundreds of people.

The detection of undersea noises on Tuesday and Wednesday using sonar buoys dropped from Canadian aircraft had temporarily offered hope that the people on board the submersible were alive and trying to communicate by banging on the hull.

But officials had warned that analysis of the sound was inconclusive and that the noises might not have emanated from the Titan at all.

“There doesn’t appear to be any relation between the noises and the location of the debris field on the sea floor,” Rear-Admiral Mauger said on Thursday.

Robotic craft on the ocean floor will continue to gather evidence, Rear-Admiral Mauger said, but it was not clear whether recovering the victims’ remains will be possible given the nature of the accident and the extreme conditions at those depths.

The search had grown increasingly desperate on Thursday, when the estimated 96-hour air supply was expected to run out if the Titan were still intact.

The Titanic, which sank in 1912 on its maiden voyage after hitting an iceberg, killing more than 1,500 people, lies about 1,450km east of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and 640km south of St John’s, Newfoundland.

The expedition to the wreck, which OceanGate has been operating since 2021, cost US$250,000 (S$330,000) per person, according to OceanGate’s website.

Questions about Titan’s safety were raised in 2018 during a symposium of submersible industry experts and in a lawsuit by OceanGate’s former head of marine operations, which was settled later that year.

The sweeping search covered more than 25,000 sq km of ocean - about the size of the US state of Massachusetts.

On Thursday, the deployment of two specialised deep-sea unmanned vehicles expanded the effort to the ocean’s depths, where immense pressure and pitch-black darkness had promised to complicate any rescue mission.

The missing submersible and subsequent hunt captured worldwide attention, in part due to the mythology surrounding the Titanic.

The “unsinkable” British passenger liner has inspired both nonfiction and fiction accounts for a century, including the James Cameron blockbuster 1998 movie, which rekindled popular interest in the story.