Missing Titanic tourist sub has about 40 hours of oxygen remaining, Coast Guard says

The submersible vessel carrying five people that vanished en route to the Titanic shipwreck has enough oxygen to sustain those aboard for only about 40 more hours, the U.S. Coast Guard said on Tuesday afternoon.

The 21-foot tourist vessel lost contact with its parent ship on Sunday morning — about an hour and 45 minutes into its nearly 13,000-foot plunge to the site of the Titanic. After two days of inconclusive searching, the U.S. and Canadian Coast Guards have launched a joint effort alongside commercial, research and private vessels and aircraft to locate and recover the submersible.

“While the U.S. Coast Guard has assumed the role of search-and-rescue mission coordinator, we do not have all of the necessary expertise and equipment required in a search of this nature,” Capt. Jamie Frederick said at a Coast Guard news conference in Boston on Tuesday. “The unified command brings that expertise and additional capability together to maximize effort in solving this very complex problem.”

The Defense Department sent additional equipment to St. Johns, Newfoundland, on Tuesday evening to assist with the search, according to deputy Pentagon press secretary Sabrina Singh.

“U. S. Transportation Command is supporting the search effort with (3) C-17 aircraft that are transporting commercial, rescue-related cargo and equipment from Buffalo, NY to St Johns, Newfoundland,” Singh said in a statement. “As of 4:30 pm eastern time today, all three aircraft have departed Buffalo, and the last aircraft is scheduled to land at St. John shortly.”

The submersible vessel, which is called Titan, is not equipped with a GPS, and instead relied on text message communication with its parent ship, the Canadian-owned expedition vessel MV Polar Prince. The Polar Prince requested Coast Guard assistance on Sunday after an initial search for the vessel, which went down in the North Atlantic approximately 900 miles east of Cape Cod, Mass., Frederick said.

If the vessel is located underwater, however, bringing it to the surface could pose a challenge — the Coast Guard does not currently have the equipment to lift the submarine back to the surface, and declined to comment on how far away the nearest naval asset capable of doing so might be.

Coordinated Coast Guard efforts are searching a combined 7,600 square miles — an area larger than the state of Connecticut — with the help of C130 aircraft searching by sight and radar and P3 aircraft dropping monitor sonar buoys. On Tuesday, Frederick said, the commercial pipe-laying vessel Deep Energy convened with the Polar Prince to begin a remotely operated dive at the last known location of the submarine. Other vehicles with ROV capabilities are also preparing to join in the search.

Families and associates of those on board have confirmed the identities of Titan’s five passengers: Hamish Harding, 58, a billionaire British explorer; Paul-Henri Nargeolet, 77, a French Titanic expert; British businessman Shahzana Dawood, 48, and his son, Suleman, 19; and Stockton Rush, 61, the founder and CEO of OceanGate Expeditions, the company the operates the Titanic tours. The Coast Guard has yet to release an official log of the passengers, although Coast Guard representatives confirmed on Tuesday that such a log exists.

“I’m hopeful they can get going, but there’s not a lot of time,” Terry Virts, a retired NASA astronaut and a friend of Harding’s said on CNN on Tuesday afternoon. “They haven’t found them, and then once they search they have to figure out if they’re stuck on the bottom, if they’re tangled in Titanic and how to actually get them up.”

OceanGate made successful dives to the Titanic in 2021 and 2022, according to the company’s website, and had planned to document the state of the wreck annually with high-definition photos and videos. A ticket to the Titanic on one of OceanGate’s submarines as a “citizen scientist” cost $250,000. OceanGate appears to be the only operating company currently offering civilian expeditions to the ship, which sank in 1912.

Kelly Garrity contributed to this report.