NEWS DIVING

Submarine with 5 people on board disappears

OceanGate Expeditions is one of the best known U.S. companies for this type of underwater expeditions. The one of the Titanic is not the only one and they have also made others such as the Goddard in 2010, Andrea Doria in 2019 or multiple U.S. warships.

Like OceanGate, there are more companies that currently offer the visit to the Titanic in a submarine, but in this case, we will focus on OceanGate Expeditions since it has been its submersible that has disappeared in one of these expeditions and it is also one of the most recognized in the sector.

As we can see on their website, in this case we are talking about the Titanic Expedition, which is an excursion made by the company to the site of the sinking of the Titanic.

They offer packages of approximately 10 days for 250,000 euros.

This is not the first time this expedition has been carried out, as they also did it in 2021 and 2022. And believe it or not, in the previous years they achieved their goal, and were able to visualize one of the most famous ships in the world. For this they had to perform several failed tests, but finally they succeeded, as we can see in the following video.

This 2023 expedition, which they have been promoting for several months, left this past Sunday with 5 crew members. The "captain" who was in charge of the control of the submarine and four clients who paid for these services, including the British billionaire Hamish Harding, astronaut who flew aboard the fifth manned mission to space of Blue Origin, NS-21 and a French Navy diver among others.

Only 2 hours after starting the expedition and descending under the sea, any contact with the spacecraft was lost and all alarms were raised. The study of the seabed is quite complicated and it is even more complicated to find something that is in exact coordinates so many meters below the ground, more than 3,500 meters below the sea.

However, being honest, the missions offered by OceanGate throughout these years have been quite satisfactory and at the same time, safe, since Titan (missing submersible) has been manufactured with the best technologies and developers and has quite good security mechanisms. Currently, this submersible has a life support of 96 hours so it is expected that in the next few hours they can find the whereabouts of these people because if not it will be quite difficult to find them alive.

Right now and since all communication with the Titan was lost, the Boston Coast Guard is helping with the search for the submarine.