How to Find the Titanic Sub Before It’s Too Late
Finding the 22-foot-long Titan submersible, which went missing on June 18, is a desperate race against time. The craft, powered by four electric thrusters that move it at a maximum speed of 3 knots, lost contact with its surface vessel, the Polar Prince, around 105 minutes into a dive. The Titan was headed for the wreckage of the Titanic, roughly 375 nautical miles from Newfoundland, Canada. If the sub is still intact, those aboard have only two days of air left.
Five people are crammed into the craft: Stockton Rush, president and founder of OceanGate, the submarine exploration company that operates the sub; pilot Paul Nargeolet; British billionaire Hamish Harding; and Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son Sulaiman. Because of Titan’s design, they can’t free themselves—they’re bolted into the craft from the outside. Rescuers therefore need to find them quickly, as even if they reach the surface they could still run out of oxygen.
“You know where you launched the submersible, you know the direction it would have been heading, and they had been tracking it for an hour and a half,” says Frank Owen, a former submarine officer and director of the Australian navy’s submarine escape and rescue project, who now works for sonar specialists Sonartech Atlas. But the hunt is still difficult—both because of the search area and the vagaries of the sea.
