Passengers on the Titan submarine died after a “catastrophic implosion.” How is the operation going?

() — All five passengers of the Titan submarine died in a “catastrophic implosion,” US authorities said Thursday, ending an extraordinary five-day international search operation near the world’s most famous shipwreck site.

The tail cone and other remains were found by a remotely operated vehicle about 500 meters from the bow of the Titanic, in the depths of the North Atlantic.

“This is an incredibly unforgiving environment at the bottom of the sea, and the wreckage is consistent with a catastrophic implosion of the ship,” Rear Admiral John Mauger, commander of the First Coast Guard District, told reporters.

The drones will remain at the scene and continue to gather information, Mauger said. It will take time to determine a specific timeline of events in the “incredibly complex” case of the Titan failure, he added.

The Coast Guard official said the agency will eventually have more information about what went wrong and will provide an assessment of the emergency response.

What we know about the remains

Among the wreckage found, authorities say they have been able to classify parts of the submarine’s pressure chamber.

According to an official, there were 5 main pieces “that revealed to us that they were the remains of the Titan.” Both ends of the pressure hull were found in separate locations, he added.

The forward end of the pressure hull was discovered in a large debris field, which was the “first indication that there was a catastrophic event,” the official said. The aft end of the pressurized hull was found in a smaller wreckage site, he explained.

Mauger of the Coast Guard described this as an “incredibly complex operating environment at the bottom of the sea, more than 2 miles below the surface.”

“We believe that unfortunately they lost their lives”

For its part, the company OceanGate, which operated the submarine, said Thursday that it believes that the people on the Titan “unfortunately” lost their lives. “We now sadly believe that” our CEO Stockton Rush, Shahzada Dawood and her son Suleman Dawood, Hamish Harding and Paul-Henri Nargeolet, were lost,” the company said in a statement.

On board the submarine were British businessman Hamish Harding, French submariner Paul-Henri Nargeolet, Pakistani billionaire Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood, as well as Stockton Rush, CEO and founder of OceanGate.

“These men were true explorers who shared a distinctive spirit of adventure and a deep passion for learning about and protecting the world’s oceans,” the statement said. “Our hearts go out to these five souls and each member of their families during this tragic time. We regret the loss of his life,” the company added.

Rush, CEO of OceanGate, was an experienced pilot and diver. According to the company’s social media posts, Rush had previously piloted the Titan.

“I think it was General MacArthur who said you are remembered for the rules you break,” Rush said in a video interview with the Mexican youtuber Alan Estrada last year. “And I’ve broken some rules to do this. I think I’ve broken them with logic and good engineering behind it.”

Rush, who graduated from Princeton with an aerospace engineering degree in 1984, said he never really got over his childhood dream of wanting to be an astronaut, but his eyesight wasn’t good enough, according to one interview which he awarded to Smithsonian Magazine in 2019.

After college, he moved to Seattle to work for the McDonnell Douglas Corporation as a flight test engineer in the F-15 program. He earned an MBA from UC Berkeley in 1989, according to the company’s biography of him.

He nurtured his dream of traveling into space for years, imagining that he would join a commercial flight as a tourist. But in 2004, he told the Smithsonian, his dream changed after Richard Branson launched the first commercial plane into space.

“I had an epiphany that this was not what I wanted to do at all,” Rush told the magazine. “I didn’t want to go to space as a tourist. I wanted to be Captain Kirk on the Enterprise. I wanted to explore.”

How did the submarine disappear?

The submarine, which was on an expedition to view the wreckage of the Titanic at the bottom of the North Atlantic Ocean, disappeared on Sunday. The ship was heading for the famous wreck, off the coast of St John’s, Newfoundland, Canada, when she lost contact with her support ship.

The OceanGate expedition is based in Newfoundland, with participants first traveling 400 nautical miles to the wreck site, which is about 900 miles (1,450 kilometers) off the coast of Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

The submarine began its two-hour descent toward the wreck on Sunday morning. She lost contact with the Polar Prince, the support ship carrying the vessel to the site, 1 hour and 45 minutes later, authorities said.

Hamish Harding posted an image on social media of the Polar Prince, the vessel used to transport the submersible to the Titanic wreck site. (From Hamish Harding/Facebook)

The last communication between the ship and the Polar Prince occurred at 11:47 on Sunday. Without GPS underwater, the sub could only be guided by text messages from the surface ship.

In fact, “problems with computer control” were one reason Discovery Channel’s “Expedition Unknown” host Josh Gates and his team decided, after a Titan test dive in 2021, not to record. a segment on the ship, as “it became clear to us at that point that there were a lot of things that needed to be worked out with the sub,” he said.

“A lot of the systems were working, but some weren’t. We had problems with the thrusters, computer control and things like that. All in all, it was a tricky dive,” Gates told ‘s Anderson Cooper on Wednesday.

“We were inside Titan for two or three hours, and there were a lot of things that weren’t really ready,” he said, adding that he couldn’t get comfortable with Titan at the time.

Search operations to find the submarine began on the same Sunday. It’s still unclear what happened to the submarine, why she lost contact, and how close she was to the Titanic when she disappeared.

How was the submarine?

According to OceanGate, Titan was a 23,000-pound (10,432 kg) submersible made of carbon fiber and titanium.

As a safety feature, the sub uses a “proprietary real-time hull health monitoring (RTM) system” that analyzes the pressure on the vessel and the integrity of the structure, the company claims. Any problems detected would trigger an “early warning” for the pilot, to allow “sufficient time to… return safely to the surface.”

Unlike a traditional submarine, this type of submarine has limited power reserves, so it needs a support ship that can launch and recover it, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Intensive international search and rescue efforts

The search to find the submarine involved multiple efforts, including international vessels. A remotely operated vehicle was searching for the submarine at the bottom of the sea, the US Coast Guard Northeast District tweeted Thursday morning. An ROV from a French ship was also deployed, and the Magellan team, the team that mapped the Titanic wreck site last year, was on its way to help.

In addition, the planes were currently scanning a search area roughly twice the size of Connecticut and up to 4 kilometers deep, Capt. Jamie Frederick, Coast Guard First District response coordinator, said Wednesday. Medical personnel specializing in dive medicine and a hyperbaric recompression chamber arrived at the scene on Thursday, according to a spokesman for the Halifax Joint Rescue Coordination Center of the Canadian Armed Forces.

The noises of blows detected underwater this Tuesday and Wednesday in the huge search area gave hope that there were survivors, although their origin was not clear. The underwater sounds detected by sonar devices on Tuesday first occurred every 30 minutes and were heard again four hours later, according to an internal US government update memo on the search.

Naval experts were analyzing the recordings of the sounds to determine their origin. “I can’t tell you what the noises are,” Frederick said. “We need a miracle,” David Gallo, an oceanographer and marine search expert, told on Wednesday before the wreckage was found.

The number of assets in the search operation was expected to double in the next day or two, Frederick said Wednesday. A Canadian Coast Guard ship with sonar capabilities, the John Cabot, arrived on Wednesday, and the US Navy dispatched a hoisting system that can pull heavy objects 6,000 meters down to help recover the submersible.

“The Coast Guard has done a great job of putting the right tools with the right equipment in the right place. So the chances are as good as they could be,” Gallo, senior advisor for strategic initiatives at RMS Titanic Inc., told this Thursday morning.

“It’s difficult because the oceans are very dark, you can only use sound to get images, and you have to be very close to the object to see it,” he added.

OceanGate Rejected Titan Submarine Safety Review, Industry Leader Says

The disappearance of the Titan and the international race to find it put its operator, OceanGate, under the magnifying glass.

At least two former OceanGate employees raised concerns about the safety of the ship’s hull years ago, including the thickness of the material used and the testing procedures, has learned.

OceanGate Expeditions deviated from industry norms by refusing a rigorous voluntary review of the ship’s safety, according to an industry official. Will Kohnen of the Marine Technology Society told on Wednesday that if the company had conducted a certification review, “some of it could have been avoided.”

The company also had to deal with a series of mechanical problems and inclement weather that forced the cancellation or delay of trips in recent years, according to court documents. The canceled excursions led to a couple of lawsuits in which high-paying customers tried to recover the cost of trips they claimed they didn’t take. The lawsuits allege that the company exaggerated its ability to reach the wreckage of the Titanic.

OceanGate did not respond to the lawsuits in court and could not be reached for comment.

Some expeditions were delayed after OceanGate was forced to rebuild the Titan’s hull because it was showing “cyclical fatigue” and would not be able to travel deep enough to reach the Titanic’s wreckage, according to a 2020 article by GeekWire, which interviewed the CEO of the company.

With reporting from Rob Frehse, Oren Liebermann, Laura Ly, Kristina Sgueglia, Greg Wallace, Paul P. Murphy, Curt Devine and Isabelle Chapman, all from .