Five people aboard Titanic submersible killed after implosion, disaster foretold

Five people aboard Titanic submersible killed after implosion, disaster foretold

The Titanic-bound submersible that went missing on Sunday suffered a “catastrophic implosion,” killing all five people on board.

The US Coast Guard Rear Adm. John Mauger disclosed this on Thursday.

The US Navy detected sounds “consistent with an implosion” shortly after OceanGate’s Titan submersible lost contact, a navy official also said.

Hollywood film director James Cameron, who helmed the 1997 movie Titanic, told the BBC he saw the disaster coming and raised warning flag.

When he learned that the sub had lost both its navigation and communication at the same time, he said he immediately suspected a disaster.

“I felt in my bones what had happened. For the sub’s electronics to fail and its communication system to fail, and its tracking transponder to fail simultaneously – sub’s gone.”

The loss of the sub was confirmed after a huge search mission.

The official told CBS News their information about the “acoustic anomaly” had been used by the US Coast Guard to narrow the search area.

According to CNN, it was deemed to be “not definitive” and therefore the search and rescue mission continued.

Earlier on Thursday, Rear Adm Mauger of the Coast Guard confirmed that all five people aboard Titan had been killed following what was probably a “catastrophic implosion”, based on patterns of debris discovered.

However, he said no sounds had been detected during the search mission that were consistent with this.

“We’ve had sonar buoys in the water nearly continuously and have not detected any catastrophic events when those sonar buoys have been in the water.”

Tributes have poured in for the five people believed to have been instantly killed in the “catastrophic implosion” of the Titan submersible during its dive.

Paul Hankin, an undersea expert, said the first indication that the sub might have imploded came after a large debris field was found on Thursday.

“Essentially we found five different major pieces of debris that told us that it was the remains of the Titan,” he said.

Aboard the vessel was British billionaire businessman Hamish Harding, who had written on social media ahead of the dive that it was taking place because a “weather window” had opened up,

He said that because of the “worst winter in Newfoundland in 40 years” the mission was “likely to be the first and only manned mission to the Titanic in 2023”.

British father and son Shahzada and Suleman Dawood were also part of the crew. They were from one of Pakistan’s richest families.

OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush also died on Titan, alongside former French navy diver Paul-Henry Nargeolet.

The White House said the loved ones of the five men had endured a “harrowing ordeal” over the past week.