The Titan’s passengers are running out of time. Victor may be their last chance

Contact with Titan was lost on Sunday, June 18. The submarine, on board of which 5 passengers were taken (including the British billionaire and explorer Hamish Hardin), was lost while trying to descend to the wreck of the Titanic, resting on the bottom of the North Atlantic (about 3810 meters).

For several days, intensive searches for the bathyscaphe have been going on, which are extremely difficult, if only because of their gigantic area. According to expert estimates shared by the US Coast Guard, the boat’s oxygen supply may run out around noon on Thursday. So it’s a race against time, and the hopes of saving Titan’s passengers are diminishing.

“The good news is that we are investigating the area where the sounds were detected,” Captain Jamie Frederick of Coast Guard District 1 said Wednesday evening. due to reports of pounding noises appearing below the surface of the water. It was also ensured that every sound was analyzed and the best specialists were dealing with the matter.

Our thoughts are with the families of those aboard the Titan

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When asked if families can hope for a positive end to the search, he said: “We have to be careful, we have to hope.” Frederick stressed that the operation to find the submarine is “100 percent” still a search and rescue mission. “We will continue to use all available resources to find Titan and crew members.”

However, a diver from OSPP Harpun, Lieutenant Commander Robert Polewski, is definitely less optimistic in his forecasts. On Tuesday, in an interview with Gazeta.pl, the expert emphasized that the chances of saving the passengers are small, and the search operation is aimed at “searching for the missing boat and its subsequent extraction”.

The hull in the bathyscaphe could unseat, there was a leak. If such a hull loses even a little airtightness, the pressure inside will equalize with that outside. At these pressures, at a depth of 1,500 meters, there’s not the slightest chance of getting back safely. At such a moment, no rescue operation is carried out, but a search and extraction operation, because it is known that no one in such a unit survived. And when there is no communication, the search is very difficult

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Robot Victor is the last chance for Titan?

On the night from Wednesday to Thursday, a specialized underwater robot was included in the Titan search operation Victor 6000. According to Reuters, this UAV is able to dive at a depth of up to 6,000 meterswhich is much larger than the one on which the wreck of the Titanic is located.

Olivier Lefort, head of marine operations at Ifremer, a French ocean research institute, told Reuters that although Victor wouldn’t be able to bring the Titan boat to the surface on its own, but it can help connect a 10-ton submarine to a larger vessel.

Victor is capable of doing visual exploration with all the video equipment he has. It is also equipped with manipulators that can be used to extract the submersible, for example by cutting cables or other things that would block it at the bottom

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The Victor 6000 is manned by a crew of 25. “We can work non-stop for 72 hours, we don’t have to stop working at night,” said Lefort.

Ifremer was part of the team that in 1985, together with the American underwater archaeologist Robert Ballard, located the wreck of the Titanic. An employee of the French company in the past was also Paul-Henri Nargeolet, who, according to media reports, is currently on board the Titan.

Titanic disaster

The wreck of the Titanic has been lying more than 600 km east of the coast of Newfoundland in Canada for over 100 years, almost 4 km under water. The British ocean liner sank on the night of April 14/15, 1912, nearly three hours after hitting an iceberg. Estimates indicate that as many as 1,635 people may have died as a result of the disaster.