Desperate push to find missing Titanic sub before oxygen supply runs out

The Titanic brought them together, and a tiny vessel could doom them

The five-person crew rescuers are racing to find went missing after departing on a mission Sunday morning from the Polar Prince, a Canadian research vessel, to survey the Titanic firsthand.

The passengers are now at the center of a much higher-stakes race against the clock — a frantic international search-and-rescue effort that must succeed before the 22-foot vessel runs out of oxygen Thursday morning.

The passengers are Rush, who lives in Seattle and served as the vessel’s pilot; Hamish Harding, a British tycoon who lives in the United Arab Emirates; Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman, scions of a Pakistani business dynasty; and the French mariner and Titanic expert Paul Henry “P.H.” Nargeolet, who has been nicknamed “Mr. Titanic.” 

The men are likely bound together forever, no matter what happens next.

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French deep sea robot arrives to join search

Due to join the hunt Thursday was Victor 6000, an undersea robot dispatched by the French government that has the rare ability to dive deeper than the Titanic wreck.

The French research vessel L’Atalante, which is carrying the robot, has now arrived in the same area as other ships involved in the search as of 4 a.m. ET., according to the tracking website Marine Traffic.

Victor 6000 is so named because it can dive to 6,000 meters — some 20,000 feet. That puts the Titanic, 12,500 feet down, easily within its range.

It’s familiar territory for Ifremer, the state-run French ocean research institute that operates the robot and was part of the team that first located the Titanic wreck in 1985. The institute dispatched the the remotely operated vehicle, or ROV, this week at the request of the U.S. Navy.

It isn’t able to lift the missing submersible own its own, but it could hook up the 10-ton carbon-fiber and titanium tube to another ship capable of bringing it to the surface, Olivier Lefort, the head of naval operations at Ifremer, told Reuters. “This is the logic of seafarers. Our attitude was: We are close, we have to go,” he said.

Desperate search for sub as oxygen supply dwindles

The search for the missing submersible grew more frantic Thursday morning, with officials fearing the oxygen supply on the vessel could soon run out.

U.S. Coast Guard officials estimated that Titan, which had a 96-hour oxygen supply, could run out of air just before 7:10 a.m. ET on Thursday, but the exact situation onboard the vessel, including potential efforts to conserve oxygen, is not clear.

The search for the sub, which went missing Sunday after embarking on a mission to explore the Titanic, has been focused on an area where Canadian aircraft detected “underwater noises” Tuesday, and again on Wednesday.