cbs tour of titan

Reporter who rode Titanic submersible tells USA TODAY about 'less sophisticated' parts

A CBS reporter who last year rode the Titan submersible that vanished off the coast of Canada this week with five people inside told USA TODAY parts of the vessel seemed "less sophisticated" and described the safety features meant to avoid a crisis like the one it's currently facing.

"I was anticipating a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and I got it," CBS correspondent David Pogue told USA TODAY's "5 Things" podcast.

Pogue boarded submersible for a CBS report that aired in November alongside OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, who is among the five missing passengers on the voyage to tour the wreckage of the Titanic.

Pogue's account has drawn attention not just because it's a rare first-hand look at the experience of being in a submersible, but because of the snags it hit along the way. Pogue told USA TODAY on Tuesday afternoon that the Titan got "lost" for a few hours and couldn't find the wreckage of the Titanic during one of the dives on that trip, but unlike the current situation, it never lost all communication with crews on the surface.

His report also highlighted some of the "jerry-rigged" parts helping the vessel operate.

"There were parts of it that seemed to me to be less sophisticated than I was guessing. You drive it with a PlayStation video controller... some of the ballasts are old, rusty construction pipes," Pogue told USA TODAY. "There were certain things that looked like cut corners."

In a tweet of the report, Pogue linked to video of himself describing the submarine as having as much room as a minivan. Pogue said the vessel was the only five-person sub that could reach Titanic depths. 

Rush, CEO of the company that owns the submersible, argued against the description of the Titan as being "MacGyvery" in the CBS report.

Rush told Pogue that important components of the submersible such as the pressure vessel were solidly engineered alongside NASA, Boeing and the University of Washington. "Everything else can fail. Your thrusters can go, your lights can go, you're still going to be safe," Rush said.

The submersible has "about 40 hours of breathable air left," U.S. Coast Guard Capt. Jason Frederick said Tuesday afternoon. Frederick said rescue teams have searched 7,600 square miles of the Atlantic Ocean since Sunday without any results. The Titan had a 96-hour oxygen supply when it went to sea at about 6 a.m. Sunday, according to OceanGate Expeditions adviser David Concannon.

CBS correspondent David Pogue: 'This is adventure travel'

Pogue told USA TODAY that the people who pay to go down in the submersible are adventure-lovers. They also have to have the means to pay the $250,000 fee to take the trip.

"This is adventure travel. This is for adrenaline-seekers, people who live on the edge," he said.

Rush told Pogue during their ride last year that the trip on the Titan shouldn’t require a lot of skill on the passengers' part. 

“We only have one button and that’s it,” Rush said in the CBS report. “It should be like an elevator. 

Passengers assist with a variety of tasks on the submersible, according to OceanGate Expeditions' website, accessed through the  Internet Archive  by USA TODAY, including sonar operation, taking photos or videos and assisting the pilot with communications between the sub and the surface. 

Pogue says OceanGate CEO told him parts of the sub were 'very high-end'

Pogue publicly addressed concerns with the Titan's construction in his CBS report and with USA TODAY.

Despite the appearance of "cut corners," he told USA TODAY that OceanGate CEO Stockton reassured him "that the part that we care about, where the people are, the pressure capsule, is very high-end."

He replied to a Twitter user Tuesday saying there were “many red flags” that urged him to challenge Rush on the submersible’s construction and the safety of future passengers. Pogue had already been concerned about the vehicle prior to his experiences on it. 

“Yes, I was pretty terrified. I didn’t sleep the night before at all,” Pogue wrote on Twitter. 

He described in the CBS report a breakdown in communication that caused the submersible to get lost in an attempt to find the Titanic last summer. That trip down below was aborted before it could reach the wreckage, which he told USA TODAY was "par for the course" for every excursion.

“This submersible does not have any kind of beacon like that. On my expedition last summer, they did indeed get lost for about 5 hours, and adding such a beacon was discussed,” Pogue tweeted.  “They could still send short texts to the sub, but did not know where it was. It was quiet and very tense, and they shut off the ship’s internet to prevent us from tweeting.”

What you need to know about sub: Maps, graphics show last location, depth and design

Titan passengers signed safety waivers in case of bad outcome

Pogue described the safety waiver he had to sign to ride the Titan submarine, which included many clauses specifying ways passengers might be injured or killed. 

“An experimental submersible vessel that has not been approved or certified by any regulatory body ... could result in physical injury, disability, emotional trauma or death,” Pogue read off a form in his CBS report before saying, “where do I sign?”

He said Tuesday that because the submersible operates in international waters, it's not regulated or inspected by any governmental body. There are dangers involved every step of the way, he said.

"The waiver, basically it's eight paragraphs of ways that you could get permanently disabled or killed," he told USA TODAY.

Submersible had safety features in place

Pogue told USA TODAY members of the trip went through mandatory daily briefings and were even taught how to put on smoke masks and use fire extinguishers in case of a scenario where there was smoke on the craft.

He said the expedition has a "safety-conscious culture."

There were fail safes for emergencies, Pogue said, including one method that would allow the submersible to rise up to the surface on its own after several hours even if all the people on board somehow lost consciousness.

"Nobody ever said, 'here's what you do if we lose communication and are trapped under the sea,' because it just seems impossibly remote," he said.

Pogue said to his knowledge, over three years of doing these expeditions, a situation with a total communication failure like we're seeing now has never happened before.

Watch the full interview with David Pogue below:

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CBS Story On OceanGate’s Missing Titanic Sub Goes Viral After Reporter David Pogue Got Jitters Over Its “Jerry-Rigged” Design

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A six-month-old CBS report on OceanGate ’s Titanic tourism submarine is going viral on social media after reporter David Pogue raised safety concerns about the now-missing vessel.

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Pogue visited OceanGate’s operations last year and was submerged in the $1M submarine, named Titan , which vanished off the coast of Canada on Sunday. It was carrying a pilot and four passengers, including OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush.

RELATED: Quickie Titanic Sub Documentary Set On British TV Just Hours After Air Onboard The Craft Is Expected To Run Out

“It seems like this submersible has some elements of MacGyvery jerry-rigged-ness. You are putting construction pipes as ballast,” Pogue said to Rush in an interview.

“I don’t know if I would use that description,” Rush replied. He added that the OceanGate worked with Boeing and Nasa on the pressure vessel. “Everything else can fail. Your thrusters can go, your lights can go, you’re still going to be safe.”

Pogue said he was nervous before boarding and revealed some of the contents of the waiver form he was required to sign. This described the submarine as an “experimental submersible vessel that has not been approved or certified by any regulatory body and could result in physical injury, disability, emotional trauma or death.”

A clip of Pogue reading the waiver has been viewed 9M times on Twitter.

Y’all please watch this. It’s a CBS story that aired a while back about that submarine that is now missing. The creators of that missing submarine are DEEPLY unserious. pic.twitter.com/B6JriITyZj — Marie, MSN, APRN, FNP-C (@FnpMarieOH) June 19, 2023

On a test dive with Pogue inside, the submersible platform that lowers Titan into the water failed when its floats came loose. A later dive, with CBS cameras still following Titan, the submarine lost contact with its launch ship. “We were lost for two-and-a-half hours,” said a passenger, who paid $250,000 for a ticket. A third dive was successful and the submarine found the Titanic shipwreck.

Here’s the full CBS report:

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A former passenger details what it's like inside the missing Titan submersible

Mary Louise Kelly

Vincent Acovino

Tinbete Ermyas

This undated photo provided by OceanGate Expeditions in June 2021 shows the company's Titan submersible. AP hide caption

This undated photo provided by OceanGate Expeditions in June 2021 shows the company's Titan submersible.

The missing submersible that was on its way to view the wreckage from the Titanic relies on a number of "off-the-shelf parts" including a video game controller to steer it, but is also equipped with several mechanisms that can bring it back to the surface during an emergency, according to a former passenger.

CBS Sunday Morning correspondent David Pogue went on the OceanGate Titan in November for an assignment, and said it was like being in a "minivan without seats."

"There's a couple of computer screens and there is one round window at the end, about 21 inches across," he told NPR on Tuesday. "And when you're visiting the Titanic, you take turns looking out the porthole."

Missing Titanic sub search enters a critical phase as the Titan's oxygen supply drops

"There are two pilots, one of which is Stockton Rush, the sub's designer and the CEO, and he drives the sub with a game controller ... It has the right levers and buttons to go up, down, left, right and so on. And his argument is, it might look cheap and consumery, but it's a tried and true, very reliable component and it does exactly what we need."

"The main thing, though, is that the part we care about, that carbon fiber tube ... was designed in conjunction with NASA and the University of Washington, and was intended to be failsafe."

As of Tuesday evening, the international rescue effort to find the sub and the five people on board was ongoing.

In an interview with NPR's Mary Louise Kelly, Pogue details what it's like preparing to travel on the Titan, and the potential scenarios that its current riders might have encountered.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Interview highlights

On the preparation that went into his trip on the Titan

We got in-depth tours of the Titan itself inside and outside. We learned the parts of it. There really is no safety gear in there except for a fire extinguisher and fire masks, which we practiced putting on and taking off. That's pretty much it, because there's not much you can do if something goes wrong.

Deep sea rescues have a mixed track record. The Pisces III is one that succeeded

What you can do is rise to the surface. And there are seven different ways to return to the surface. Just redundancy after redundancy. They can drop sandbags, they can drop lead pipes, they can inflate a balloon, they can use the thrusters. They can even jettison the legs of the sub to lose weight. And some of these, by the way, work even if the power is out and even if everyone on board is passed out. So there's sort of a dead man's switch such that the hooks holding on to sandbags dissolve after a certain number of hours in the water, release the sandbags and bring you to the surface, even if you're unconscious.

On why the missing vessel has not yet been located

We really have no idea. I mean, the waves are six feet high. It's all whitecaps. The sub itself is white. I don't know how an airplane is going to expect to find it in hundreds of miles of rough seas. So for all we know, they are floating somewhere on the surface right now. And the tragedy of that is you're bolted in from the outside. There's 18 bolts that seal you inside. You can't get out without assistance from an external crew. So that would be the real nightmare scenario: they're alive and floating and unable to escape.

On the problems he ran into during his trip

My trip was not smooth. We made it 37 feet down and then they ran into a mechanical problem and we had to abort the dive. I was devastated, and crushed, and did not see it coming. But I have since learned that these dives rarely go to plan. With each of these expeditions that OceanGate makes, they spend five days over the [Titanic] shipwreck. And typically of those five days, they managed to get down only once or twice. And this season it's been zero.

Visiting the remains of the once-great Titanic has become a tourist drawcard in recent years. Topical Press Agency/Getty Images hide caption

On what compels someone to take a journey on the Titan — despite the dangers

These dives take place in international waters. So there is no governing body. And I will tell you that when we boarded the surface vessel, we signed waivers that would curl your toes. I mean, it was basically a list of eight paragraphs describing ways that you could be permanently disabled or killed.

So this is not a tourist company or an airline, you know, for the masses. This is for rich adrenaline junkie adventurers who thrive on the risk. It's a lifestyle that not all of us may be able to identify with. But for them, you know, the risk is the life.

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June 22, 2023 - Missing Titanic sub crew killed after 'catastrophic implosion'

By Helen Regan , Adam Renton, Rob Picheta , Aditi Sangal , Elise Hammond , Matt Meyer , Tori B. Powell and Maureen Chowdhury , CNN

Here's what we know about safety concerns surrounding the Titan submersible

From CNN staff

Industry leaders had raised a number of safety concerns about the Titan submersible before its disappearance.

Titan's operator, OceanGate Expeditions, has also faced a series of mechanical problems and inclement weather conditions that forced the cancellation or delays of trips in recent years, according to court records.

Here's what we know about those safety fears:

• Workers' unease: Court filings reveal two former OceanGate employees separately raised similar safety concerns about the thickness of the submersible’s hull. One former OceanGate worker told CNN the hull had only been built to 5 inches thick, when company engineers told him they had expected it to be 2 inches thicker.
• Experts' doubts: Industry leaders expressed unease five years ago about OceanGate's "experimental approach" to the Titan and its planned Titanic trip. The Manned Underwater Vehicles committee of  the Marine Technology Society  wrote to OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush in 2018 and specifically expressed concern over the company's compliance with a maritime risk assessment certification known as DNV-GL. "There are 10 submarines in the world that can go 12,000 ft and deeper," said Will Kohnen of the Marine Technology Society. "All of them are certified except the OceanGate submersible."   OceanGate did not respond to a request from CNN to comment on the letter, which was  obtained by CNN  and first reported by the New York Times.  
• Vessel not classed: The Titan is  not subject to government regulations  from independent groups that set safety standards because the  technology is so new  and hasn’t yet been reviewed, the tour operator has claimed. Most chartered vessels, whether oil tankers or commercial ships, are "classed" by independent groups that set safety standards. But the Titan is not classed, a 2019 blog post from the company said, adding that classing innovative designs often requires a multiyear approval process, which gets in the way of rapid innovation.
• Delays and mechanical problems: London-based travel firm Henry Cookson Adventures accused OceanGate of not having a “seaworthy vessel” when it entered an agreement in 2016 to take up to nine passengers to the Titanic in 2018. A civil suit filed in 2021, which was later dismissed, questioned whether delays to the trip were perhaps "because the submersible vessel was unable to be certified at the time for safe operations." A 2018 post on OceanGate’s website said  "delays caused by weather and lightning" prevented it from completing a series of test dives.
• Multiple delays: A Florida couple alleged in a lawsuit earlier this year that they were unable to get a refund after their planned Titanic expedition in 2018 with OceanGate was repeatedly postponed, CNN previously reported . 
• Hull rebuilt: Some expeditions were delayed after OceanGate was forced to rebuild the Titan’s hull because it showed “cyclic fatigue” and wouldn’t be able to travel deep enough to reach the Titanic’s wreckage,  according to a 2020 article  by GeekWire, which interviewed CEO Rush.
• Vessel lost: In another high-profile cancellation, OceanGate took CBS News’ David Pogue for a dive on its submersible last year, but called off the trip due to an equipment malfunction after descending just 37 feet, Pogue  said in the broadcast . In a later dive, the vessel lost contact with its ship and was unable to find the wreckage. “We were lost for 2-and-a-half-hours,” a passenger told CBS.
• Battery issue: A November court filing from an adviser to the company said in one dive, the sub encountered a battery issue and had to be “manually attached to its lifting platform,” which led to "sustained modest damage to its external components."
• OceanGate on safety: In a 2021 court filing, OceanGate’s legal representative touted the specs and a hull monitoring system that he called "an unparalleled safety feature." The filing lays out the Titan had undergone more than 50 test dives and detailed its 5-inch-thick carbon fiber and titanium hull. The filing says OceanGate’s vessel was the result of more than eight years of work, including “detailed engineering and development work under a company issued $5 million contract to the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Laboratory.”
• But those claims are disputed: The University of Washington said the laboratory never dealt with design, engineering or testing for Titan. The university said its collaboration with OceanGate "resulted in a steel-hulled vessel, named the Cyclops 1, that can travel to 500 meters depth, which is far shallower than the depths that OceanGate’s TITAN submersible traveled to." Separately, Boeing said they were not a partner on the Titan and they did not design or build the submersible, despite a  2021 press release  from OceanGate listing the company as a "partner." OceanGate told CNN it was unable to provide additional information about its relationship with Boeing.

Titan pilot Stockton Rush said in 2021 he's "broken some rules" to build the now-missing submersible

From CNN's Allison Morrow

Stockton Rush, the CEO of OceanGate and  one of five people on the submersible missing  in the North Atlantic, has cultivated a reputation as a kind of modern-day Jacques Cousteau — a nature lover, adventurer and visionary.

Rush, 61, has approached his dream of deep-sea exploration with child-like verve and an antipathy toward regulations — a pattern that has come into sharp relief since Sunday night, when his vessel, the Titan, went missing.

“At some point, safety just is pure waste,” Stockton  told journalist David Pogue in an interview last year. “I mean, if you just want to be safe, don’t get out of bed. Don’t get in your car. Don’t do anything.”

In another interview, Stockton boasted that he’d "broken some rules" in his career.

“I think it was General MacArthur who said you’re remembered for the rules you break,” Rush said in a video interview  with YouTuber Alan Estrada last year. “And I’ve broken some rules to make this. I think I’ve broken them with logic and good engineering behind me.”

Ocean exploration: Rush said he believes deeply that the sea, rather than the sky, offers humanity the best shot at survival when the Earth’s surface becomes uninhabitable.

“The future of mankind is underwater, it’s not on Mars,”  he told Estrada . “We will have a base underwater … If we trash this planet, the best life boat for mankind is underwater.”

In his eagerness to explore, Rush has often appeared skeptical, if not dismissive, of regulations that might slow innovation.

The commercial sub industry is “obscenely safe” he told Smithsonian Magazine  in 2019, “because they have all these regulations. But it also hasn’t innovated or grown — because they have all these regulations.”

Read more about Stockton Rush here.

Search for the missing submersible is entering a critical fifth day. Here's what you need to know

The search for the missing Titan submersible is now in a critical stage, as rescue teams race overnight to locate the vessel before oxygen supplies run out.

The submersible begins each trip with 96 hours of life support and has been missing since Sunday, setting up Thursday morning as a key target for finding the vessel and those on board.

On Wednesday, the US Coast Guard widened the search area and rerouted some of its equipment to try to pinpoint banging sounds heard during the aerial search in the remote North Atlantic area. Though it didn't yield any results, the sonar devices from the Canadian P-3 aircraft are being analyzed by the US Navy, officials said Wednesday.

Meanwhile, a fleet of ships and specialized equipment has been deployed, including a US Navy deep ocean salvage system and Canadian Coast Guard ship John Cabot , which has "side scanning sonar capabilities."

Here's the latest:

• How the sub went missing:  The vessel, operated by OceanGate Expeditions, began its two-hour descent to the wreck of the Titanic on Sunday morning. (See how deep the wreckage is here. ) It lost contact with the Polar Prince, the support ship that transported the craft to the location in the North Atlantic, 1 hour and 45 minutes into its descent, officials said. Search operations began later that day. It’s still not clear what happened to the submersible, why it lost contact, and how close it was to the Titanic when it went missing.
• What we know about the noises : Banging noises were identified by Canadian aircraft on Tuesday and Wednesday morning. Remotely operated vehicle (ROV) equipment was relocated to where the noises were detected, according to Capt. Jamie Frederick, the response coordinator for the First Coast Guard District. But searches in the area "yielded negative results," he said. Data from the plane that identified the noises was sent to the US Navy, but has so far been inconclusive," Frederick said, adding that the Coast Guard does not know what the sounds were.
• What it could be like onboard: Officials believe the five people on board have "limited rations" of food and water. Ret. Navy Capt. David Marquet, a former submarine captain, told CNN the near-freezing water at that depth is probably making the situation very uncomfortable. "There's frost on the inside of the parts of the submarine. They're all huddled together trying to conserve their body heat. They're running low on oxygen and they're exhaling carbon dioxide," he said.
• The Polar Prince: The support vessel that brought the submersible to the dive site will remain in the ocean until the search is complete , the operator said Wednesday. Horizon Maritime Services said the Polar Prince's role is to support the Coast Guard and that searchers are "very aware of the time sensitivity around this mission." There is a crew of 17 people on the vessel, said Sean Leet, the company's co-founder and chairman.
• Specialized equipment: If search crews locate the missing submersible deep in the ocean, authorities will then face a highly complex recovery mission. A US Navy salvage system arrived in St. John’s, Newfoundland, on Wednesday, a Navy official said. The Flyaway Deep Ocean Salvage System (FADOSS) is capable of retrieving objects or vessels off the bottom of the ocean floor up to a depth of 20,000 feet, but needs first to be welded to a ship which could take a full day, the official said.
• More safety concerns: An industry leader said OceanGate Expeditions strayed from industry norms by declining a voluntary, rigorous safety review of Titan. “There are 10 submarines in the world that can go 12,000 feet and deeper,” said Will Kohnen of the Marine Technology Society. “All of them are certified except the Oceangate submersible.”   Court filings also reveal OceanGate years ago was confronted with  safety concerns about the vessel.  Records also show the company faced a series of mechanical problems and inclement weather conditions that forced the cancellation or delays of trips in recent years.
• 2021 claims disputed: The University of Washington reiterated Wednesday that they were not involved in the design, engineering or testing of the Titan submersible, despite assertions that they were, according to a 2021 court filing by OceanGate. CNN reached out to OceanGate for comment. Separately, Boeing also released a statement saying they were not a partner on the Titan and they did not design or build the submersible, despite a  2021 press release  from OceanGate listing the company as a "partner." OceanGate told CNN it was unable to provide additional information about its relationship with Boeing.

US Coast Guard provides new search pattern graphic

The United States Coast Guard provided  a new graphic  Wednesday night showing the updated search pattern for the Titan submersible.

The USCG also said the following assets are on their way to the site to assist in the search:

• Canadian CGS Ann Harvey 
• Canadian CGS Terry Fox 
• Motor Vessel Horizon Arctic (ROV) 
• French Research Vessel L’Atalante (ROV) 
• His Majesty's Canadian Ship Glace Bay (mobile decompression chamber and medical personnel) 
• Air National Guard C-130  
• ROV from Magellan

This is who's on board the missing submersible

Authorities said the Titan submersible was carrying five people when its mothership lost contact with it on Sunday, about 1 hour and 45 minutes into its descent to explore the Titanic wreckage. 

Here's what we know about the people on board:

Paul-Henri Nargeolet , a French diver with decades of experience exploring the Titanic, is on the vessel, according to his family.

Nargeolet serves as the director of underwater research at RMS Titanic Inc., the company that has exclusive rights to salvage artifacts from the ship. According to his biography on the company's website, Nargeolet completed 35 dives to the wreck and supervised the recovery of 5,000 artifacts. He spent 22 years in the French Navy, where he rose to the rank of commander, the website says. 

British billionaire explorer  Hamish Harding  is on the submersible, his company Action Aviation said in a social media statement.

Harding made headlines in 2019 for being part of a flight crew that broke the world record for the fastest circumnavigation of the globe via both poles. In 2020, he became one of the first people to dive to Challenger Deep in the Pacific Ocean, widely believed to be the deepest point in the world's oceans. Last year, he paid an undisclosed sum of money for one of the seats on Blue Origin's space flight. 

The family of  Shahzada Dawood  and his son,  Suleman Dawood , said the two are on board. A family statement said the duo had taken the "journey to visit the remnants of the Titanic in the Atlantic Ocean."

The Dawoods are a prominent Pakistani business family. Dawood Hercules Corporation, their business, is among the largest corporations in the country, with a portfolio spanning energy, petrochemicals, fertilizers, IT, food and agriculture.

OceanGate CEO and founder  Stockton Rush  is among the five onboard, according to a source with knowledge of the mission plan.

The company did not immediately respond to CNN's request for comment about Rush being aboard. According to the company's social media posts, he has previously piloted "Titan," the missing vessel.

What the explorers aboard the missing submersible would expect on their trip

The missing submersible's trip to the wreckage of the Titanic was the final expedition of five such tours scheduled for this year, an archived version of the operator's website said.

OceanGate Expeditions said each eight-day trip is a "unique travel experience" that also helps the scientific community as "every dive also has a scientific objective," according to an archived version of the itinerary seen by CNN, which is no longer accessible on their website.

Here's an overview of the itinerary:

• Day 1:  Divers arrive at St. John's, Newfoundland, meet the expedition crew and board the ship that will take them to the Titanic wreck site. The  Polar Prince  was the support ship that transported the crew for this current mission.
• Day 2:  The ship continues out to the dive site in the North Atlantic Ocean. The expedition leader will go over safety information and dive logistics. The science team and content experts will also help divers prepare what they may discover on the dive.
• Day 3-7:  Diving begins depending on the sea conditions. Final dive checks take place before crew members board the five-person Titan submersible. Those not diving the first day "will be incorporated into other areas of dive ops — like driving the dingy, assisting the Expedition Manager, collecting media," the website said. For those onboard the Titan, the descent takes about two hours and crew members will assist the pilot "with coms and tracking, take notes for the science team about what you see outside of the viewport, watch a movie or eat lunch," it said. "Soon you will arrive at depth, and after some navigating across the seafloor and debris field, finally see what you’ve been waiting for: the RMS Titanic." An onboard content expert will point out key features of the wreck and animal life while exploring the wreck, it said. "Enjoy hours of exploring the wreck and debris field before making the two-hour ascent to the surface," the website said.
• Day 8:  The ship makes the 380-mile journey back to St. Johns.

Five more expeditions were planned for 2024, according to the archived version of the itinerary.

What's the difference between a submersible and a submarine?

A submersible, such as the missing Titan vessel, is a type of watercraft — but it has some key differences from the better-known submarine.

Unlike submarines, a submersible needs a mother ship to launch it. The Titan's support ship was the Polar Prince, a former Canadian Coast Guard icebreaking ship, according to the ship's co-owner Horizon Maritime.

A submarine can also stay underwater much longer, while submersibles have much fewer power reserves, according to OceanGate, the company operating the Titan expedition, in a webpage seen by CNN that is no longer available.

The Titan has 96 hours of life support capacity, and its dives down to the Titanic wreckage usually last 10 to 11 hours, according to the site — compared to submarines that can stay underwater for months.

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Take video tour of missing OceanGate Titan submersible

Search area for titan is twice size of connecticut in waters 2.5 miles deep.

Mary Claire Patton , Digital Journalist

The missing OceanGate submersible Titan has still not been found after it became lost on an expedition to see the infamous Titanic shipwreck at the bottom of the North Atlantic earlier this week.

Video of the interior and exterior of the submersible can be viewed in the media player at the top of this article, along with a slideshow of photos that show more angles of the watercraft.

“CBS Sunday Morning” correspondent David Pogue went on the OceanGate Titan last fall and said being in the vessel was like being in a “minivan without seats,” NPR reported.

“There’s a couple of computer screens and there is one round window at the end, about 21 inches across,” Pogue told NPR Tuesday. “And when you’re visiting the Titanic, you take turns looking out the porthole.”

Pogue said the Titan has no real safety gear beyond a fire extinguisher and fire masks but mentioned that there are many safety mechanisms in place in case something goes wrong.

He said the operators of the sub can drop sandbags and lead pipes, inflate a balloon and use thrusters as a means to get back to the surface.

“And some of these, by the way, work even if the power is out and even if everyone on board is passed out. So there’s sort of a dead man’s switch such that the hooks holding on to sandbags dissolve after a certain number of hours in the water, release the sandbags and bring you to the surface, even if you’re unconscious,” Pogue told NPR.

A Canadian surveillance vessel has detected underwater noises in the area where the submersible is believed to be but there’s no way to know if the noises are coming from the Titan.

Captain Jamie Frederick of the First Coast Guard District said the search area for Titan is twice the size of Connecticut in waters 2 1/2 miles deep.

Pogue noted in his interview with NPR that the submersible is white, so even if it is at the surface, whitecaps and rough seas over a search area hundreds of miles wide will make it hard to find.

“For all we know, they are floating somewhere on the surface right now. And the tragedy of that is you’re bolted in from the outside. There’s 18 bolts that seal you inside. You can’t get out without assistance from an external crew. So that would be the real nightmare scenario: they’re alive and floating and unable to escape,” Pogue said.

Stockton Rush, the CEO of OceanGate Expeditions, is currently on the submersible and pilots Titan using a gaming controller.

@caseycross0 This is the sub that 5 people are lost in the ocean somewhere in on their way to view titanic. #titanic #titan #lostsubmarine #250k #ocean #deepsea #searchforlostsubmarine #submarine ♬ original sound - Casey Cross

The New York Times has identified the following people as passengers who are currently on the Titan:

• Stockton Rush - Founder and CEO of OceanGate Expeditions, which operates the submersible.
• Hamish Harding - Explorer and British businessman who owns Action Aviation.
• Paul-Henri Nargeolet - French maritime expert who has been on more than 35 dives to the Titanic wreck site. He is the director of underwater research for RMS Titanic, Inc ., which owns the salvage rights to the Titanic.
• Shahzada Dawood - British-Pakistani businessman. He is vice chairman of the Engro Corporation.
• Suleman Dawood - The teenage son of Shahzada Dawood.

Copyright 2023 by KSAT - All rights reserved.

Recommended Videos

What it was like inside the Titanic submersible: ‘As much room as a minivan’

Sunday’s trip by the submersible vessel in which all five passengers onboard died was one of a number of expeditions that OceanGate, the company operating the vessel, had sent to the Titanic wreck site with paying guests.

The trips to the wreckage took eight days, and passengers had little room to maneuver aboard the Titan . Here is what we know about the submersible’s past voyages to see the remains of the famous ship.

Eight days at sea — and a 2.4-mile descent

The expeditions to the Titanic wreckage cost $250,000 and were open to passengers age 17 and older, according to OceanGate. The Titan was 22 feet long and weighed 23,000 pounds, according to the company’s website .

Passengers set sail from St. John’s, on the eastern tip of Canada’s Newfoundland island, and traveled aboard a larger vessel for two days until they reached the site of the wreck. At that point, they entered the submersible in groups to go down to see the wreckage at a depth of 12,500 feet, or about 2.4 miles. Unlike a submarine, a submersible must be supported by a surface vessel, platform, shore team or sometimes a larger submarine.

Descents to the Titanic wreck depended on weather but could have begun as early as the third day of the expedition, OceanGate said.

“Once the submersible is launched you will begin to see alienlike life forms whizz by the viewport as you sink deeper and deeper into the ocean,” OceanGate said on its website before the Titan was lost. “The descent takes approximately two hours but it feels like the blink of an eye.”

According to the company’s itinerary, groups could spend hours exploring the wreckage and surrounding debris before beginning the two-hour return trip.

Bolted from the outside, steered by a video game controller

Footage from previous expeditions shared by the company shows the Titan’s tubelike interior, equipped with a large viewport to allow passengers to see the wreckage.

The video recording shows a toilet on the submersible that the company’s website said was separated from the rest of the capsule by a privacy curtain when in use. “We do recommend that you restrict your diet before and during the dive to reduce the likelihood that you will need to use the facilities,” it said.

According to CBS News correspondent David Pogue , who traveled on the Titan last year, the submersible had “about as much room as a minivan.” Passengers had to take their shoes off before entering, he said. Then the crew used 17 bolts to seal the hatch from the outside: “There’s no other way out.”

Who is Hamish Harding, tycoon and adventurer on the missing Titanic sub?

Pogue told the BBC after news of the Titan’s disappearance that many of the components on the submersible appeared to be makeshift or purchased off the shelf.

“For example, you steer this sub with a game controller, an Xbox game controller,” he said. “Some of the ballast is abandoned construction pipes that are sitting on shelves on the side of the thing, and the way you detach the ballast is you get everybody on board to lean to one side of the sub and they roll off.”

What to know about the missing submersible

Pogue recalled that chief executive and founder Stockton Rush reassured him that NASA and the University of Washington were involved in the capsule’s design, adding: “It’s rock solid.”

It’s not clear whether the same controller and ballast were used in Sunday’s expedition. However, OceanGate has said that off-the-shelf components “helped to streamline the construction, and makes it simple to operate and replace parts in the field.”

The submersible was equipped with a 96-hour supply of oxygen when it descended, said David Concannon, an adviser to OceanGate, according to the Associated Press .

Coast Guard Rear Adm. John Mauger said Thursday that the vessel suffered a catastrophic loss of pressure that imploded it, killing everyone inside.

What would have happened in an emergency?

Pogue said that during one attempted descent to the wreck last year, communication between the larger surface ship and the submersible briefly broke down, meaning his group could not locate the wreck, he said. “We were lost for 2½ hours.”

OceanGate said earlier this month that it was relying on technology from Starlink, SpaceX’s satellite internet service, to ensure communications during this year’s expedition.

According to OceanGate’s website, the submersible was fitted with a health monitoring system, which enabled the pilot to analyze the effects of changing pressure and assess the vessel’s structural integrity.

‘Astonishing’ 3D scans reveal Titanic shipwreck in extraordinary new detail

Missing Titanic submersible

The latest: After an extensive search, the Coast Guard found debris fields that have been indentified as the Titan submersible. OceanGate, the tour company, has said all 5 passengers are believed dead.

The Titan: The voyage to see the Titanic wreckage is eight days long, costs $250,000 and is open to passengers age 17 and older. The Titan is 22 feet long, weighs 23,000 pounds and “has about as much room as a minivan,” according to CBS correspondent David Pogue. Here’s what we know about the missing submersible .

The search: The daunting mission covers the ocean’s surface and the vast depths beneath. The search poses unique challenges that are further complicated by the depths involved. This map shows the scale of the search near the Titanic wreckage .

The passengers: Hamish Harding , an aviation businessman, aircraft pilot and seasoned adventurer, posted on Instagram that he was joining the expedition and said retired French navy commander Paul-Henri Nargeolet was also onboard. British Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood, 48, and his son, Suleman, 19, were also on the expedition, their family confirmed. The CEO of OceanGate , the submersible expedition company, was also on the vessel. Here’s what we know about the five missing passengers.

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Everything you needed to know about OceanGate's Titan submersible was discussed in a 2022 CBS news piece

The vessel that went missing with five people aboard posed regulatory and safety concerns.

The US Coast Guard is currently leading an operation to rescue the five people aboard a submersible that has went missing on June 18 during a trip to explore the ruins of the Titanic .

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The company behind the expedition, OceanGate, made its first trip to the Titanic wreck in 2021 and then again in 2022. The company went back this summer as part of plans to “continue to return annually to further document the Titanic and its rate of decay,” its website says .

The b rainchild of CEO Stockton Rush, the Titan submersible—a watercraft that, unlike a submarine which is autonomous, needs a mother ship to launch it—is made of five-inch-thick carbon fiber, capped on each end by a dome of titanium, one of which has a clear window. It is launched from and it returns to its support vessel— the Polar Prince, in this case.

CBS journalist David Pogue highlighted some of the Titan’s oddities as part of a news story he did in 2022 when he joined an expedition to the Titanic wreck . These included elements that seemed   “improvised from off-the-shelf parts,” and the game controller that operated the craft.

CBS reporter David Pogue questioned the Titan submersible in 2022

Communications breakdown.

There’s no GPS underwater, so the surface ship is supposed to guide the sub to the shipwreck by sending text messages. During the 2022 dive CBS reported in, communications broke down and the sub lost contact for 2.5 hours—and it never found the Titanic wreck, Pogue said.

And Pogue isn’t the only one with such a story. Mike Reiss, a TV comedy writer who worked on The Simpsons and took the trip last year, said communication was lost on all three dives he was part of last year, including one to the Titanic.

Regulatory red flag

To join the expedition, Pogue had to sign a document stating the following: “This experimental vessel has not been approved or certified by any regulatory body, and could result in physical injury, emotional trauma, or death.”

OceanGate’s website claims expeditions will be conducted respectfully and in accordance with National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Guidelines for Research Exploration and Salvage of RMS Titanic, and comply with UNESCO guidelines for the preservation of underwater world heritage sites. But nowhere does it share evidence of vetting and obtaining regulatory approval on the vessel itself.

No escape plan

There are at least seven different functions that allow the sub to resurface, so it was “really concerning” that it hadn’t yet, Pogue told the BBC . If the sub became trapped or there was a leak— both possibilities —“there’s no backup, there’s no escape pod.”

Quotable: CEO Stockton Rush touts Titan’s safety

“The pressure vessel is not MacGyver at all, because that’s where we worked with Boeing and NASA and the University of Washington. Everything else can fail, your thrusters can go, your lights can go. You’re still going to be safe.”— CEO Stockton Rush to CBS last November

The missing Titan submersible, by the digits

5: People the truck-sized sub can accommodate, comprising 1 pilot and 4 crew. A Pakistani businessman and his son are aboard the submersible. So is Hamish Harding , a British billionaire and explorer. The other two passengers are believed to be Paul Henry Nargeolet, a former French navy commander, deep diver, and a submersible pilot, and OceanGate chief Stockton Rush

$250,000: Cost of a seat on the submersible

8 days: How long the complete journey lasts

4,000 meters (13,123 feet): Maximum depth the submersible reaches to view the Titanic, which sits at 3,800 feet

2,000 feet: The maximum depth of the underwater vehicle the US Navy uses for rescuing people from submarines

900 miles: How far the area of focus for the rescue operation is from the US east coast (430 miles away from Newfoundland in Canada)

20,000 feet: The depth CURV-21 , which the Navy uses to salvage objects from the sea floor, can reach but it only has a lift capacity of...

...4,000 pounds: That’s way less than the 20,000 pound Titan submersible

70 and 96 hours: How long the oxygen supply on the vessel is thought to be able to last

50:   Test dives the Titan had undergone, including to the equivalent depth of the Titanic, in deep waters off the Bahamas, as per OceanGate

1 hour and 45 minutes : How far into its dive Sunday (May 18) the submersible lose contact with its support vessle, the Polar Prince, according to the Boston Coast Guard, which is leading the search operation

17: Number of bolts with which the crew closes the hatch from the outside. “There’s no other way out,” CBS’s Pogue had reported

$19.8 million: How much funding OceanGate has raised in two rounds since it was founded in 2009, according to C run chbase

Person of interest: Hamish Harding

Harding, who posted about the expedition on Instagram , is an avid aviator and explorer.

The British billionaire and owner of Action Aviation was one of the first people to travel the Challenger Deep in the Pacific, the deepest known point on Earth. He also holds the Guinness world record for the fastest circumnavigation of the Earth via the North and South Poles by an aircraft at 46 hours, 40 minutes, and 22 seconds.

After taking part in a human space flight by Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, Harding also ranks among a handful of space tourists in the world.

Rabbit hole: Seeing parts of the Titanic outside the ocean

The Titanic , which hit an iceberg and sank during its maiden voyage from Britain to New York in 1912, has stoked curiosity for years, serving as the backdrop for the namesake blockbuster movie and various books. The wreckage was only discovered years later, in 1985 .

There are alternatives to diving underwater for those curious about the Titanic’s history and wreck . D ozens of Titanic museums   across the UK and the USA display various remnants of the tragedy that claimed over 1,500 lives. These include not only original parts and life-size replicas of the ship, but also recovered personal belongings like baby shoes and a box camera, as well as audio-visual testimonies from some of the 700-odd survivors.

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🎖️ The discovery of the Titanic wreck was a front for a secret US military mission

🚢 The sinking of the Titanic left a titanic impact on the language we use today

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Missing Submersible Vessel Disappears During Dive to the Titanic Wreck Site

Five people were in the submersible, which lost contact with a surface vessel on Sunday morning, the Coast Guard said. A search and rescue mission is underway in the North Atlantic.

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Follow our live coverage of the missing submersible.

Jenny Gross ,  Emma Bubola and Jesus Jiménez

The search area is 900 miles off the U.S. coast.

A submersible craft carrying five people in the area of the Titanic wreck in the North Atlantic has been missing since Sunday, setting off a search and rescue operation by the U.S. Coast Guard.

The Coast Guard confirmed Monday that it was searching for the vessel after the Canadian research ship MV Polar Prince lost contact with a submersible during a dive about 900 miles east of Cape Cod, Mass., on Sunday morning.

“It is a remote area and it is a challenge to conduct a search in that remote area, but we are deploying all available assets to make sure that we can locate the craft and rescue the people on board,” said Rear Admiral John Mauger of the U.S. Coast Guard.

The submersible disappeared in a portion of the ocean with a depth of roughly 13,000 feet. Admiral Mauger said the occupants would theoretically have between 70 to 96 hours of air as of late Monday afternoon.

The submersible is operated by OceanGate Expeditions, a company that offers tours of shipwrecks and underwater canyons. “Our entire focus is on the crew members in the submersible and their families,” a statement on its website said. “We are deeply thankful for the extensive assistance we have received from several government agencies and deep sea companies in our efforts to reestablish contact with the submersible.”

Hamish Harding, the chairman of the aviation company Action Aviation, is among those aboard the missing submersible, according to Mark Butler, the company’s managing director.

In an Instagram post, Mr. Harding indicated that another member of the submersible team was Paul Henry Nargeolet, a French expert on the Titanic. On his Facebook page on Saturday, Mr. Harding wrote that a dive had been planned for Sunday: “A weather window has just opened up,” he wrote.

Here’s what to know about the search operation:

Stockton Rush, the chief executive of OceanGate, has compared its project to the booming space tourism industry. Its customers pay $250,000 to travel to the Titanic’s wreckage on the seabed, more than two miles below the ocean’s surface.

Admiral Mauger said aircraft from the United States and Canada were searching for the submersible, and sonar buoys had been deployed to help search under the surface. The Coast Guard was also coordinating with commercial vessels in the area to aid the search operation.

OceanGate chartered a vessel, the MV Polar Prince, to serve as the ship on the surface near the dive site. The company’s website outlines an eight-day itinerary for the trip out of St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada.

The Titanic sank in the early hours of April 15, 1912, on its maiden voyage from England to New York after hitting an iceberg, killing more than 1,500 people. The wreckage was found in 1985, broken into two main sections, about 400 miles off Newfoundland, in eastern Canada. Read The Times’s coverage of the sinking.

John Ismay, a Pentagon reporter, served as a deep-sea diving and salvage officer in the U.S. Navy.

Why are undersea rescues so difficult?

Numerous complications could hinder the effort to rescue the five people aboard the deep-diving submersible Titan, which failed to return from a dive on Sunday to the wreck of the Titanic on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean.

For any search and rescue operation at sea, weather conditions, the lack of light at night, the state of the sea and water temperature can all play roles in whether stricken mariners can be found and rescued. For a rescue beneath the waves, the factors involved in a successful rescue are even more numerous and difficult.

The first and most important problem to solve is simply finding the Titan.

Many underwater vehicles are fitted with an acoustic device, often called a pinger, which emits sounds that can be detected underwater by rescuers. Whether Titan has one is unclear.

The submersible reportedly lost contact with its support ship an hour and 45 minutes into what is normally a two-and-a-half-hour dive to the bottom, where the Titanic lies.

There could be a problem with Titan’s communication equipment, or with the ballast system that controls its descent and ascent by flooding tanks with water to dive and pumping water out with air to come back toward the surface.

An additional possible hazard for the vessel would be becoming fouled — hung up on a piece of wreckage that could keep it from being able to return to the surface.

If the submersible is found on the bottom, the extreme depths involved limit the possible means for rescue.

Human divers wearing specialized equipment and breathing helium-rich air mixtures can safely reach depths of just a few hundred feet below the surface before having to spend long amounts of time decompressing on the way back up. A couple hundred feet deeper, light from the sun can no longer penetrate the water, and dark reigns.

The Titanic lies in about 14,000 feet of water in the North Atlantic, a depth that humans can reach only while inside specialized submersibles that keep their occupants warm, dry and supplied with breathable air.

The only likely rescue would come from an uncrewed vehicle — essentially an underwater drone. The U.S. Navy has one submarine rescue vehicle , although it can reportedly reach depths of just 2,000 feet. For recovering objects off the sea floor in deeper water, the Navy relies on what it calls remote-operated vehicles, such as the one it used to salvage a crashed F-35 Joint Strike Fighter in about 12,400 feet in the South China Sea in early 2022. That vehicle, called CURV-21 , can reach depths of 20,000 feet.

Getting the right kind of equipment — such as a remote vehicle like the CURV-21 — to the site takes time, starting with getting it to a ship capable of delivering it to the site.

The Titanic’s wreck lies approximately 370 miles south of Newfoundland, and the kinds of ships that can carry a vehicle like the Navy’s deepest-diving robot normally move no faster than about 20 miles per hour.

According to OceanGate’s website, the Titan can keep its five occupants alive for approximately 96 hours. In many submersibles, the air inside is recycled — carbon dioxide is removed and oxygen is added — but on a long enough timeline, the vessel will lose the ability to scrub enough carbon dioxide, and the air inside will no longer sustain life.

If the Titan’s batteries run down and are no longer able to run heaters that keep the occupants warm in the freezing deep, the people inside can become hypothermic and the situation eventually becomes unsurvivable. Should the submersible’s pressure hull fail, the end for those inside would be certain and quick.

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OceanGate Expeditions was created to explore deep waters.

OceanGate Expeditions, the owner of the missing submersible, is a privately owned company headquartered in Everett, Wash., that, since its founding in 2009, has focused on increasing access to deep-ocean exploration.

The company has made headlines in recent years for organizing expeditions for paying tourists to travel in submersibles to shipwrecks, including the Titanic, and to underwater canyons. According to the company’s website , OceanGate also provides crewed submersibles for commercial projects and scientific research.

“Our team of qualified pilots, expedition leaders, mission professionals and client-service staff ensure accountability throughout the entire mission and expedition process with a focus on safety, proactive communication and client satisfaction,” the website reads .

OceanGate was founded by Stockton Rush, an aerospace engineer and pilot, who currently serves as its chief executive officer.

At just 19 years old, in 1981, Mr. Rush became the youngest jet transport rated pilot in the world, and obtained a degree in aerospace engineering from Princeton University three years later, according to the OceanGate website. He later earned an M.B.A. from the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1989.

OceanGate currently owns and operates three five-person submersibles.

The first submersible acquired by OceanGate, Antipodes, could travel to a depth of 1,000 feet.

In 2012, the company acquired another submersible, and rebuilt it into Cyclops 1, a vessel that could travel to a depth of up to 1,640 feet. It served as a prototype for the newest submersible, the Titan. That vessel, made of carbon fiber and titanium, is engineered to reach depths of more than 13,000 feet, or more than two miles. The Titan, which has been used to explore the Titanic’s wreckage, is now missing .

OceanGate has provided tours of the Titanic since 2021, in which guests have paid up to $250,000 to travel to the wreckage, which lies about 12,500 feet below the ocean’s surface.

Last year, Mr. Rush described the business to CBS News as “very unusual,” providing “a new type of travel.”

The company first planned a voyage to the Titanic in 2018, according to the technology news site GeekWire , but the Titan sustained damage to its electronics from lightning. Then, in 2019, the voyage was postponed again because of a problem with complying with Canadian maritime law limitations on foreign flag vessels, according to GeekWire .

Before the first successful trip to the Titanic in 2021, the Titan was “rebuilt,” according to GeekWire , after tests showed signs of “cyclic fatigue” that reduced the hull’s depth rating to 3,000 meters.

In 2020, OceanGate announced that it was working with NASA ’s Marshall Space Flight Center to assure that the submersible was strong enough to survive in the ocean’s depths.

According to the company’s website, OceanGate has successfully completed more than 14 expeditions and more than 200 dives in the Pacific, Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico.

OceanGate’s board members include Mr. Rush, along with a physician and astronaut, a software consultant, a retired U.S. Coast Guard, and a C.E.O. of an investment advisory firm.

In addition to OceanGate, Mr. Rush is also a co-founder and member of the board of trustees of OceanGate Foundation , a nonprofit organization founded in 2012 which aims to “fuel underwater discoveries in nautical archaeology, marine sciences and subsea technology” through public outreach and financial support.

The nonprofit’s website features OceanGate’s Titanic expedition, along with other global exploration expeditions.

OceanGate is based on the backside of a marina facility in Everett, Wash., tucked between several boat maintenance companies, where some workers were washing, inspecting and relocating yachts on Monday. No sign or logo marks its location, and the windows at the OceanGate doors were covered on Monday, one with a Titanic expedition logo. The entrance door was locked, and nobody responded to knocking. A nearby marina worker said OceanGate employees packed up and left for the Titanic expedition several weeks ago.

Andrea Kannapell

An Instagram post from Hamish Harding, who was aboard the submersible that went missing on Sunday, indicated that another member of the submersible team was Paul Henry Nargeolet, a French expert on the Titanic.

Emma Bubola ,  Salman Masood and Victoria Kim

Here is who was on the missing submersible.

Five people were on board the Titan submersible when it lost contact with its support ship during a dive to the Titanic wreckage site in the North Atlantic on Sunday. On Thursday, the U.S. Coast Guard and the company that operated the submersible, OceanGate Expeditions, said that all five people on board were believed to be dead.

Here are the passengers who were aboard the craft.

Stockton Rush

Stockton Rush was the founder and chief executive of OceanGate Expeditions, the company that operated the submersible. He was piloting the vessel.

In an interview that aired on CBS in November, Mr. Rush said he grew up wanting to be an astronaut and, after earning an aerospace engineering degree from Princeton in 1984, a fighter pilot.

“I had this epiphany that I didn’t want — it wasn’t about going to space,” Mr. Rush said. “It was about exploring. It was about finding new life-forms. I wanted to be sort of the Captain Kirk. I didn’t want to be the passenger in the back. And I realized that the ocean is the universe.” He founded OceanGate, a private company that is based in Everett, Wash., near Seattle, in 2009.

Read his obituary here .

Hamish Harding

Hamish Harding , a British businessman and explorer, holds several Guinness World Records, including one for the longest time spent traversing the deepest part of the ocean on a single dive. He wrote on his Facebook page on Saturday that he was proud to announce that he had joined OceanGate’s mission “on the sub going down to the Titanic.”

Mr. Harding, 58, was the chairman of Action Aviation, a sales and air operations company based in Dubai. He had previously flown to space on a mission by Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin rocket company.

Mr. Harding also took part in an effort to reintroduce cheetahs to India, and holds a world record for the fastest circumnavigation of Earth via both the geographic poles by plane.

Paul-Henri Nargeolet

Paul-Henri Nargeolet , a French maritime expert, had been on more than 35 dives to the Titanic wreck site.

Mr. Nargeolet was the director of underwater research for RMS Titanic, Inc. , an American company that owns the salvage rights to the famous wreck and displays many of the artifacts in Titanic exhibitions. The company conducted eight research and recovery expeditions between 1987 and 2010, according to its website.

Shahzada Dawood and Suleman Dawood

The British-Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood , 48, and his son, Suleman, 19, were members of one of Pakistan’s wealthiest families.

Mr. Dawood had a background in textiles and fertilizer manufacturing. His son was a business student at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, a spokesman for the school confirmed in a statement on Thursday.

Mr. Dawood and his son had “embarked on a journey to visit the remnants of the Titanic” when contact with the vessel was lost, the statement said, asking for privacy for the family.

Mr. Dawood was also on the board of trustees for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute. The organization said on its website that he was a resident of Britain, and a father of two children.

April Rubin

‘Digital twin’ of the Titanic shows the shipwreck in extraordinary detail.

An ambitious digital imaging project has produced what researchers describe as a “digital twin” of the R.M.S. Titanic, showing the wreckage of the doomed ocean liner with a level of detail that has never been captured before.

The project, undertaken by Magellan Ltd., a deepwater seabed mapping company, yielded more than 16 terabytes of data, 715,000 still images and a high-resolution video. The visuals were captured over the course of a six-week expedition in the summer of 2022, nearly 2.4 miles below the surface of the North Atlantic, Atlantic Productions, which is working on a documentary about the project, said in a news release.

The researchers used two submersibles, named Romeo and Juliet, to map “every millimeter” of the wreckage as well as the entire three-mile debris field. Creating the model, which shows the ship lying on the ocean floor and the area around it, took about eight months, said Anthony Geffen, the chief executive and creative director of Atlantic Productions.

Jesus Jiménez

A Coast Guard admiral says rescue crews are ‘making the best use of every moment.’

By air and sea, rescue crews on Monday were racing to find five people in a submersible that went missing on Sunday just hours into a dive about 900 miles east of Cape Cod, Mass., officials said.

At a news conference in Boston on Monday afternoon, Rear Adm. John Mauger of the U.S. Coast Guard said that rescue crews were searching in a “remote area” in water roughly 13,000 feet deep, and that they were up against the clock to find those on board the vessel.

Admiral Mauger said that Coast Guard officials understood from OceanGate Expeditions, the operator of the submersible, which offers tours of shipwrecks and underwater canyons, that the vessel was designed to have 96 hours of “emergency capability.” He did not provide specifics about what that capability meant for those on board, though it was believed to indicate that they would have breathable air for four days.

“We’re using that time, making the best use of every moment of that time,” he said.

The five people on board the submersible were not identified at the news conference “out of respect for the families,” Admiral Mauger said, noting that one person on board was a pilot, or operator, and that the other four were “mission specialists.” He did not share what role the specialists served on the vessel, referring that question to the operator of the submersible.

The United States deployed two C-130 aircraft, with another aircraft expected to join the search later on Monday from the New York National Guard, and Canada has sent a C-130 and a P-8 submarine search aircraft, Admiral Mauger said.

“On the surface we have the commercial operator that’s been on site, and we’re bringing additional surface assets into play,” he said, adding that they will provide some “subsurface” search ability.

Admiral Mauger said that rescue teams had also deployed sonar buoys on the surface of the waters to try to locate the submersible, which had sent out its last reported communication about an hour and 45 minutes into its dive. Exactly when that was on Sunday morning was unclear.

In an interview with Fox News earlier on Monday, Admiral Mauger said that the Coast Guard did not have the right equipment in the search area to do a “comprehensive sonar survey of the bottom.”

“Right now, we’re really just focused on trying to locate the vessel again by saturating the air with aerial assets,” he said.

Christine Chung

To the bottom of the sea and the ends of the earth, high-risk travel is booming.

Plunging to the depths of the ocean in a submersible to explore the remains of the Titanic is just one of many extreme excursions on offer for travelers willing to pay a hefty price tag — and accept a substantial dose of peril.

There’s also swimming with great white sharks in Mexico, sailing by an active volcano in New Zealand and rocketing to space . These types of singular and dangerous adventures are becoming increasingly popular with deep-pocketed leisure travelers in search of novel experiences, several travel experts said.

“There are a lot of incredibly well-traveled folks out there who constantly push the boundaries of their travels to chase thrills and claim bragging rights,” said Peter Anderson, managing director of Knightsbridge Circle , a luxury concierge service with offices in London, New York and Dubai. “They’re so accustomed to what they consider to be typical vacations that they begin to seek out more unique experiences, many of which involve a degree of risk.”

Mr. Anderson said he had recently planned a trip for a client to visit the pyramids in South Sudan, the site of one of the world’s biggest refugee crises, which has a “Do Not Travel” advisory from the U.S. State Department. The planning process, he said, involved consultations with security experts on how to best mitigate potential dangers.

Another client wanted to voyage to the geographic South Pole — the southernmost point on Earth — which required chartering an icebreaker, a large vessel that can pass through ice-covered waters, and two helicopters for sightseeing. The trip, which cost about $100,000 per person, required a week of various health screenings and weather preparedness training.

Physically demanding expeditions to some of the world’s most remote destinations are a growing business for the luxury travel company Abercrombie & Kent , said Geoffrey Kent, its founder. He said the company uses expert guides to eliminate as much risk as possible.

“These are thrilling adventures for top-tier clients who have done pretty much everything,” Mr. Kent said in a statement, adding that the challenges left guests “with a sense of accomplishment.”

Perhaps the priciest ticket, and biggest possible risk, is space travel, which has been dominated by a trio of billionaire-led rocket companies: Blue Origin , owned by Jeff Bezos, whose passengers have included the “Star Trek” television star William Shatner; Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic , where tickets for a suborbital spaceflight start at $450,000; and Elon Musk’s SpaceX , which in 2022 launched an all-civilian spaceflight, with no trained astronauts on board.

A spokesman for the U.S. Coast Guard, speaking to reporters, said that the last reported communication from the submersible was about an hour and 45 minutes into its dive.

The spokesman said that the sea conditions in the search area right now are “fairly normal,” with three to six foot waves, with low visibility and fog.

Mauger said that the United States has deployed two C130 aircraft, with an additional on the way from the New York National Guard, and that the Canadians have sent a C130 and a P8 submarine search aircraft. “On the surface we have the commercial operator that’s been on site, and we’re bringing additional surface assets into play,” he said, adding that they will provide some “subsurface” search ability.

Mauger said that one submersible pilot was on board. “And there were four mission specialists, is the term that the operator uses,” he said. “You’ll have to ask the operator what that means.”

Jesus Jimenez

Mauger said it is believed the vessel was designed to sustain an emergency for 96 hours and estimated that the people inside would theoretically have between 70 to 96 hours of air. “We’re using that time making the best use of every moment of that time,” Mauger said.

Mauger said the location of the search is approximately 900 miles east of Cape Cod, Mass., in a water depth of roughly 13,000 feet. “It is a remote area and is a challenge to conduct a search in that remote area, but we are deploying all available assets to make sure that we can locate the craft and rescue the people on board.”

Mauger said that the search is being conducted both under the water, with sonar buoys and sonar on the expedition ship, and over the water, in case the submersible surfaced and lost communications, with the help of aircraft and surface vessels. He said the Coast Guard was coordinating both with the Canadian authorities and commercial vessels in the area for help.

Mauger said the Coast Guard was notified on Sunday afternoon by the operator of the submersible that it was “overdue” and that it had five people on board.

Rear Admiral John Mauger of the U.S. Coast Guard said at a news conference that “we are doing everything we can do” to find the submersible and rescue the five people inside. United States and Canadian aircraft are being used in the search, he said. Mauger said that the Coast Guard has put sonar buoys in the water to try to locate the submersible.

We’re standing by for Rear Admiral John Mauger of the U.S. Coast Guard to provide updates on the missing submersible at a news conference in Boston.

Ben Shpigel

The Titan is equipped with only a few days’ worth of life support.

The Titan , the vessel that went missing in the area of the Titanic wreck in the North Atlantic on Monday, is classified as a submersible, not a submarine, because it does not function as an autonomous craft, instead relying on a support platform to deploy and return.

According to the website for the tourism company operating the Titan, OceanGate Expeditions of Everett, Wash., the missing vessel is a submersible capable of taking five people — one pilot and four crew members — to depths of 4,000 meters, or more than 13,100 feet — for “site survey and inspection, research and data collection, film and media production, and deep sea testing of hardware and software.”

Made of titanium and carbon fiber, it weighs about 21,000 pounds and is listed as measuring 22 feet by 9.2 feet by 8.3 feet, with 96 hours of “life support” for five people.

The Titan, one of three types of crewed submersibles operated by OceanGate, is equipped with a platform similar to the dry dock of a ship that launches and recovers the vessel, the website said.

“The platform is used to launch and recover manned submersibles by flooding its flotation tanks with water for a controlled descent to a depths of 9.1 meters (30 feet) to avoid any surface turbulence,” according to the website.

“Once submerged, the platform uses a patented motion-dampening flotation system to remain coupled to the surface yet still provide a stable underwater platform from which our manned submersibles lift off of and return to after each dive,” the site continues. “At the conclusion of each dive, the sub lands on the submerged platform and the entire system is brought to the surface in approximately two minutes by filling the ballast tanks with air.”

OceanGate calls the Titan the only crewed submersible in the world that can take five people as deep as 4,000 meters — or more than 13,100 feet — enabling it to reach almost 50 percent of the world’s oceans. Unlike other submersibles, the Titan, the website said, employs a system that can analyze how pressure changes affect the vessel as it dives deeper, providing “early warning detection for the pilot with enough time to arrest the descent and safely return to surface.”

The Titan began deep-sea ventures related to the Titanic in 2021. According to the tech news site GeekWire , the vessel was “rebuilt” after OceanGate determined through testing that the vessel could not withstand the pressure of a 4,000-meter dive.

In a Fox News interview, Rear Admiral John Mauger of the U.S. Coast Guard said that the agency did not have the right equipment in the search area to do a “comprehensive sonar survey of the bottom.” He said,“Right now, we’re really just focused on trying to locate the vessel again by saturating the air with aerial assets, by tasking surface assets in the area, and then using the underwater sonar.”

Mauger said that one of the aircraft being used in the search could detect underwater noises.“But it is a large area of water, and it’s complicated by local weather conditions as well,” he said.

The U.S. Coast Guard said in statement that it was searching for five people after the Canadian research vessel MV Polar Prince lost contact with a submersible during a dive about 900 miles east of Cape Cod, Mass., on Sunday morning. The Coast Guard scheduled a news conference for 4:30 p.m. Eastern time.

Jenny Gross

The Marine Institute at the Memorial University of Newfoundland, which partnered with OceanGate on the trip, said in a statement that it became aware on Monday morning that OceanGate had lost contact with its Titan submersible. One Marine Institute student who was on a summer employment contract with OceanGate was safe, the statement said. “We have no further information on the status of the submersible or personnel,” the statement said.

Emma Bubola

Rory Golden, an Irish diver who has previously visited the Titanic wreckage and is part of the OceanGate expedition, said in a Facebook post on Monday that a “major search and rescue operation” was underway. The focus on board the ship is “our friends,” he wrote. Communications were being limited to preserve bandwidth to coordinate operations, he added. (Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this update misstated Rory Golden’s nationality. He is Irish, not Scottish.)

Hamish Harding, the chairman of a Dubai-based sales and air operations company, Action Aviation, is among those aboard the missing submersible, according to Mark Butler, the company’s managing director. Harding, who holds several Guinness World Records, including for the longest time spent traversing the deepest part of the ocean on a single dive, wrote on his Facebook page on Saturday that a dive had been planned for Sunday: “A weather window has just opened up,” he wrote.

Tourists have been going to the Titanic site for decades, by robot or submersible.

For decades after the Titanic sank, searchers scanned the dark waters of the North Atlantic for the ship’s final resting place.

Since the wreck was found, in 1985, it has drawn hundreds of filmmakers, salvagers, explorers and tourists, using robots and submersibles.

First there was the team that took undersea robots to depths of more than 12,000 feet, verifying that the broken hulk it found at the bottom was in fact the Titanic. Then came many others, including James Cameron, the director who reinvigorated interest in the ship with his 1997 film, “ Titanic .”

The ship had long garnered intense interest among researchers and treasure hunters captivated by the tragic history of the wreck: the horror of the accident, the supposed hubris of the ship’s builders, the enormous wealth of many and the poverty of others on the luxury liner juxtaposed with the cold facts of the iceberg and the sea.

But Mr. Cameron’s hit imbued the wreck with a new story of romance and tragedy, renewing interest far beyond those with an interest in famous accidents at sea.

By the early 2000s, scientists were warning that visitors were a threat to the wreck, saying that gaping holes had opened up in the decks, walls had crumpled, and that rusticles — icicle-shaped structures of rust — were spreading all over the ship.

Tourists were paying up to $36,000 per dive by submersible. Salvage crews hunted for artifacts to bring back up, over the objections of preservationists who said the wreck should be honored as the graveyard for more than 1,500 people. Wreckage from a submersible accident was found on one of the Titanic’s decks. Researchers said the site was littered with beer and soda bottles and the remains of salvage efforts, including weights, chains and cargo nets.

Mr. Cameron, who has repeatedly visited the wreck, was among those calling for care around the site. In 2003, he took 3D cameras there for his 2003 documentary, “ Ghosts of the Abyss .”

OceanGate Expeditions, the private company operating the submersible that went missing on Monday, was founded in 2009. By the time it began offering tours to paying customers, researchers said that the Titanic had little scientific value compared to other sites.

But cultural interest in the Titanic remains extraordinarily high: OceanGate charges $250,000 for a submersible tour of the wreck, and the disaster continues to command a fascination online, sometimes at the expense of facts .

A spokeswoman for Canada's Coast Guard said that a military aircraft and a Coast Guard ship had been deployed to help search for the missing submersible. The ship, Kopit Hopson 1752, was off eastern Newfoundland, and headed for the search area.

Dana Rubinstein

John Lockwood, a longtime OceanGate board member, has been in the company’s submersibles, though not the Titan, the one that he said takes people to the Titanic. He said the submersibles have a viewing port and external cameras. “But it’s not like going down in a submarine at a very shallow depth, where there are multiple viewing ports,” he said.

Amanda Holpuch

The tour’s operator charges $250,000 for trips to the sunken wreckage.

OceanGate Expeditions, the operator of the submersible that disappeared during a voyage to the wreckage of the Titanic, has led previous tourist trips to the site at a cost of $250,000 per person.

Stockton Rush, the president of OceanGate, told The New York Times last summer that private exploration was needed to continue feeding public fascination with the wreck site.

“No public entity is going to fund going back to the Titanic,” Mr. Rush said. “There are other sites that are newer and probably of greater scientific value.”

OceanGate takes paying tourists in submersibles to underwater canyons and shipwrecks, including the Titanic. Last year, it shared a one-minute clip of video obtained during one of its trips to the wreck site, which was discovered in 1985, less than 400 miles off Newfoundland.

The dives last about eight hours, including the estimated 2.5 hours each way it takes to descend and ascend. Scientists and historians provide context on the trip and some conduct research at the site, which has become a reef that is home to many organisms. The team also documents the wreckage with high-definition cameras to monitor its decay and capture it in detail.

Mr. Rush said that the high quality of the footage allowed researchers to get an even closer look at the site without having to go underwater. He compared the OceanGate trips to space tourism, saying the commercial voyages were the first step to expanding the use of the submersibles for industrial activities, such as inspecting and maintaining underwater oil rigs.

“For those who think it’s expensive, it’s a fraction of the cost of going to space and it’s very expensive for us to get these ships and go out there,” Mr. Rush said. “And the folks who don’t like anybody making money sort of miss the fact that that’s the only way anything gets done in this world is if there is profit or military need.”

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated the day that the expedition’s research vessel lost contact with the submersible. It was Sunday, not Monday.

How we handle corrections

Trevor Munroe, a Canadian Coast Guard spokesman, said his country is involved in the rescue mission, but the U.S. Coast Guard is leading it from Boston. “It’s technically in their waters,” he said.

The news of the missing submersible recalls an OceanGate trip last year that was the subject of a CBS story . During the trip, the CBS correspondent David Pogue reported that “communication somehow broke down”and that the submersible was briefly lost for a couple of hours.

You may remember that the @OceanGateExped sub to the #Titanic got lost for a few hours LAST summer, too, when I was aboard…Here’s the relevant part of that story. https://t.co/7FhcMs0oeH pic.twitter.com/ClaNg5nzj8 — David Pogue (@Pogue) June 19, 2023

The New York Times

Here’s how The New York Times covered the sinking of the Titanic in 1912.

The Titanic was en route to New York on its maiden voyage when it struck an iceberg and sank on April 15, 1912. The sinking was front-page news around the world, including in The New York Times. Here is a portion of The Times’s coverage, as it was written that day. The digital version of the paper from that day can be viewed here .

The admission that the Titanic, the biggest steamship in the world, had been sunk by an iceberg and had gone to the bottom of the Atlantic, probably carrying more than 1,400 of her passengers and crew with her, was made at the White Star Line offices, 9 Broadway, at 8:20 o’clock last night.

Then P.A.S. Franklin, Vice President and General Manager of the International Mercantile Marine, conceded that probably only those passengers who were picked up by the Cunarder Carpathia had been saved. Advices received early this morning tended to increase the number of survivers by 200.

The admission followed a day in which the White Star Line officials had been optimistic in the extreme. At no time was the admission made that every one aboard the huge steamer was not safe. The ship itself, it was confidently asserted, was unsinkable, and inquirers were informed that she would reach port, under her own steam probably, but surely with the help of the Allan liner Virginian, which was reported to be towing her.

As the day passed, however, with no new authentic reports from the Titanic or any of the ships were known to have responded to her wireless call for help, it became apparent that authentic news of the disaster probably could come only from the Titanic’s sister ship, the Olympic.

The wireless range of the Olympic is 500 miles. That of the Carpathia, the Parisian, and the Virginian is much less, and as they neared the position of the Titanic they drew further and further out of shore range. From the Titanic’s position at the time of the disaster it is doubtful if any of the ships except the Olympic could establish communication with shore.

Miawpukek Horizon Maritime Services, of St. John’s, Canada, said it was supporting OceanGate Expeditions, a client. “We are working closely with authorities on the search and rescue effort,” they said in a statement.

Search Day 4: Titan submersible debris found, all onboard presumed dead

Coverage on this live blog has ended. Please click here for the latest updates.

All five people aboard the Titan submersible are believed to be dead, and debris discovered in the search area was consistent with a "catastrophic implosion," the U.S. Coast Guard said.

The debris was found off the bow of the sunken Titanic, officials said.

The search for the Titan, which went missing Sunday after it e mbark ed on a mission to survey the wreckage of the Titanic , had been focused on an area where Canadian aircraft detected "underwater noises" Tuesday and again yesterday.

U.S. Coast Guard officials had estimated the five passengers could run out of air just before 7:10 a.m. ET today, and the location of the missing vessel had remained a mystery even as the search intensified.

What to know about the search for the Titan

• The debris found at the seafloor was "consistent with a catastrophic implosion of the vessel," the Coast Guard said.
• The Coast Guard said today that a "debris field" had been found in the search area.
• The submersible disappeared Sunday during a mission to survey the wreckage of the Titanic, which is 900 nautical miles east of Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
• A sound consistent with an implosion was heard Sunday, shortly after the submersible lost communications, the a senior U.S. Navy official said. The sound was not definitive, the official said.
• Those on board have been identified as Stockton Rush, the CEO of OceanGate Expeditions, the company behind the mission; British billionaire Hamish Harding, the owner of Action Aviation; French dive expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet; and prominent Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son, Suleman.

White House offers condolences to families of Titan victims

The Associated Press

The White House offered its condolences to the families mourning the five people killed aboard the Titan submersible.

U.S. Coast Guard officials announced their deaths Thursday following the vessel’s catastrophic implosion in the North Atlantic.

“Our hearts go out to the families and loved ones of those who lost their lives on the Titan,” the White House said in a statement. “They have been through a harrowing ordeal over the past few days, and we are keeping them in our thoughts and prayers.”

The statement also thanked the searchers, including the Coast Guard, involved in the international effort to find the submersible.

“This has been a testament to the skill and professionalism that the men and women who serve our nation continue to demonstrate every single day,” the statement said.

David Pogue on the misinformation and misunderstandings swirling around the Titanic sub

Kat Tenbarge

Tech journalist and “CBS Sunday Morning” correspondent David Pogue, who observed an OceanGate Expeditions Titanic shipwreck trip last year, the last before the Titan disappeared this week, said a “massive amount of misinformation” has circulated online this week.

In an interview, Pogue, whose  coverage  of the submersible last year has attracted renewed interest in light of the disaster, also responded to attacks on his reporting over the past two days.

Critics on Twitter have suggested that Pogue and other journalists undersold how dangerous the submersible was or even that he conspired to shield the company from accountability. 

Pogue countered that the safety issues were the “centerpiece” of his OceanGate coverage. “There is a fundamental lack of understanding of the deep-sea diving industry process,” he said. 

Read the full story here.

Paul-Henri Nargeolet 'knew the risks that were possible with this expedition,' stepson says

Tim Stelloh

Paul-Henri Nargeolet, a French diver and Navy veteran who died aboard the Titan, was “fearless” and understood the potential danger of traveling to the Titanic's wreckage, his stepson said in an interview.

"Anyone who gets into those submersibles knows the risks that could happen," stepson John Paschall said, adding: "Going into this, he knew the risks that were possible with this expedition."

Paschall described Nargeolet, who had led several expeditions to the sunken passenger ship and supervised the recovery of at least 5,000 artifacts, as “the world expert on the Titanic.”

The ocean, Paschall said, was Nargeolet’s “home away from home. He was just so comfortable out there and in any ocean and any lake or whatever it was. The water was just so connected to him.”

“And that especially goes for the Titanic,” Paschall said. “He put so much of his life into that ship.”

Paschall also recalled Nargeolet as a “really incredible stepfather” — someone who was respectful, loving and funny. 

While Nargeolet knew the risks of traveling in a submersible, Paschall said, he wanted to know more about how the company that operated the boat, OceanGate, had maintained the vessel and whether it had kept passengers properly informed.

“Were all the safety procedures followed as closely as possible?” Paschall said. “Was everyone aware of everything that was going on? Was there anything that was missed during any kind of inspection?”

19-year-old Titan passenger was ‘terrified’ before trip, his aunt says

Daniel Arkin

In the days before the Titan vessel  went into the ocean  off Newfoundland, Canada, the 19-year-old university student accompanying his father on the expedition expressed hesitation about going, his aunt said in an interview Thursday.

Azmeh Dawood — the older sister of Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood — said her nephew, Suleman, informed a relative that he “wasn’t very up for it” and felt “terrified” about the trip to explore the wreckage of the Titanic.

But he ended up going aboard  OceanGate’s 22-foot submersible  because the trip fell over Father’s Day weekend and he was eager to please his dad, who was passionate about the lore of the Titanic, Azmeh Dawood said.

'We will miss him today and every day,' Paul-Henri Nargeolet's family say

Phil Helsel

The family of French dive expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet say they will remember him for the rest of their lives after he and four other people died in the Titan submersible accident.

Nargeolet was an “extraordinary father and husband,” the family said.

"He is a man who will be remembered as one of the greatest deep-sea explorers in modern history. When you think of the Titanic and all we know about the ship today, you will think of Paul-Henri Nargeolet and his legendary work," they said in a statement.

The statement added: "But what we will remember him most for is his big heart, his incredible sense of humor and how much he loved his family. We will miss him today and every day for the rest of our lives."

Nargeolet led several expeditions to the Titanic wreckage site, completing at least 35 dives in submersibles and supervising the recovery of at least 5,000 artifacts, including the recovery of the "big piece" — a 20-ton section of the Titanic’s hull — according to Experiential Media Group, where he was the director of underwater research.

The family thanked everyone involved in the dayslong rescue effort and extended condolences to the families of the others who died.

Hamish Harding remembered as an inspiration

The family of British billionaire Hamish Harding and his company are “united in grief” with the families of four other people all dead in the Titan submersible incident, Action Aviation said in a statement.

“Hamish Harding was a loving husband to his wife and a dedicated father to his two sons, whom he loved deeply. To his team in Action Aviation, he was a guide, an inspiration, a support, and a Living Legend,” the company said.

Harding, a former pilot and explorer, was inducted as a Living Legend of Aviation last year, Action Aviation said.

Family of father and son killed in submersible ask for prayers

Antonio Planas

The family of the father and son who died in the Titan submersible are asking for prayers and said they found strength in rescue efforts.

Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son, Suleman, were among the five people killed on the submersible that imploded.

“It is with profound grief that we announce the passing of Shahzada and Suleman Dawood," the family said in a statement released by the Dawood Foundation. "Our beloved sons were aboard OceanGate’s Titan submersible that perished underwater. Please continue to keep the departed souls and our family in your prayers during this difficult period of mourning.”

The family said they were grateful to the people involved in the rescue efforts, saying that "their untiring efforts were a source of strength for us during this time."

"We are also indebted to our friends, family, colleagues, and well-wishers from all over the world who have stood by us during our hour of need," the statement said. "The immense love and support we receive continues to help us to endure this unimaginable loss.”

The Dawood family also offered condolences to the families of the other people aboard the Titan.

Acoustic 'anomaly' consistent with implosion had been detected, Navy official confirms

Mosheh Gains

Courtney Kube

A U.S. Navy analysis of acoustic data “detected an anomaly consistent with an implosion or explosion” near the Titan around the time it lost communications, a senior Navy official said.

The sound consistent with an implosion was heard Sunday, shortly after the submersible lost communications, the official said.

The sound was not definitive, the official said, and it was immediately shared with commanders, who decided to continue searching.

“This information was considered with the compilation of additional acoustic data provided by other partners and the decision was made to continue our mission as a search and rescue and make every effort to save the lives on board,” the Navy official said.

The Wall Street Journal first reported that the sound had been detected.

'Titanic' director James Cameron sees similarities between sunken ship and submersible

“Titanic” director James Cameron said he was astonished by the similarities between the ship that sank in 1912 and the Titan submersible that imploded with five people aboard.

“I’m struck by the similarity of the Titanic disaster itself, where the captain was repeatedly warned about ice ahead of his ship, and yet, he steamed at full speed into an ice field on a moonless night. And many people died as a result,” Cameron said in an interview with ABC News.

“For a very similar tragedy, where warning signs went unheeded, to take place at the same exact site, with all the diving that’s going on all around the world … it’s just astonishing,” he added. “It’s really quite surreal.”

Cameron said submersible diving is a “mature art” and noted many people in the deep submergence engineering community wrote letters to OceanGate Expeditions, the company behind the mission, pleading that what the company was doing was “too experimental to carry passengers.”

The movie director said one of the passengers aboard the Titan, French dive expert Paul Henry Nargeolet, whom he called “PH,” was a friend he had known for 25 years. He said Nargeolet’s death “is almost impossible for me to process.”

Cameron said he's made 33 dives to the Titanic wreckage site and calculated he's “spent more time on the ship than the captain did back in the day.”

Cameron’s 1997 film starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet is among the highest-grossing movies of all time, raking in more than $2 billion.

Ocean depth will make recovering bodies from Titanic submersible difficult

'i hope this discovery provides some solace': coast guard's mauger.

Marlene Lenthang

The desperate search for the missing Titan has ended in tragedy after debris from the submersible was found and its five occupants were presumed dead. 

“On behalf of the United States Coast Guard and the entire unified command, I offer my deepest condolences to the families," Rear Adm. John Mauger of the Coast Guard said this afternoon. "I can only imagine what this has been like for them and I hope that this discovery provides some solace, during this difficult time."

He said the unified command has been in contact with Britain and France, as the nations had citizens aboard the vessel. 

5 major pieces of debris led to identification of Titan, officials say

Undersea expert Paul Hanken said five major different pieces of debris told authorities that it was the remains of the Titan. 

“The initial thing we found was the nose cone, which was outside the pressure hull. We then found a large debris field, within that large debris field we found the front end bell of the pressure hull. That was the first indication that there was a catastrophic event,” he said. 

A second, smaller debris field was also found, which included the other end of the pressure hull, “which basically comprised the totality of that pressure vessel,” Hanken said.

Teams on site will continue to map the debris field on the ocean floor. 

Sonar buoys in search did not detect any implosion sounds

It's not clear exactly when the Titan imploded, but Coast Guard officials said that sonar buoys dispatched "did not hear any signs of catastrophic failure."

"This was a catastrophic implosion of the vessel which would have generated a significant broadband sound down there that the sonar buoys would have picked up," Rear Adm. John Mauger of the Coast Guard said at a news conference today.

Sonar buoys had detected noises in the water Tuesday and yesterday that were being assessed for patterns, but he said today "there doesn't appear to be any connection between the noises and the location [of the debris] on the sea floor."

Debris is consistent with a 'catastrophic implosion' of sub

The debris found at the sea floor was "consistent with a catastrophic implosion of the vessel," Rear Adm. John Mauger of the Coast Guard said.

When asked if it's possible the vessel collided with the Titanic, he said it was found off the bow of the Titanic.

Carl Hartsfield with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution said the debris data is consistent with an implosion in the water column.

" It's in an area where there's not any debris of the Titanic, it is a smooth bottom. To my knowledge ... there's no Titanic wreckage in that area and again 200 plus meters from the bow, and consistent with the location of last communication for an implosion in the water column," he said.

Dawood's older sister feels like she's been 'caught in a really bad film'

The older sister of Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood feels "absolutely heartbroken" that her brother and her 19-year-old nephew were aboard the Titan vessel.

"I feel very bad that the whole world has had to go through so much trauma, so much suspense," Azmeh Dawood said in a phone interview this afternoon, speaking from the home in Amsterdam she shares with her husband.

"I feel like I’ve been caught in a really bad film, with a countdown, but you didn’t know what you’re counting down to," she said, fighting back tears. "I personally have found it kind of difficult to breathe thinking of them."

Azmeh claimed that her nephew did not want to go on the submarine but agreed to take part in the expedition because it was important to his father, a lifelong Titanic obsessive. Suleman "wasn't very up for it" and "terrified," she claimed, explaining that the 19-year-old expressed his concerns to another family member.

"If you gave me a million dollars, I would not have gotten into the Titan," she said.

Tail cone of Titan found 1,600 feet from bow of the Titanic floor, Coast Guard says

“This morning, an ROV from the vessel Horizon Arctic discovered the tail cone of the Titan submersible approximately 1,600 feet from the bow of the Titanic on the sea floor," Rear Adm. John Mauger, said this afternoon.

Afterward, the ROV found additional debris and it was found to be consistent with the "the catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber," he said.

The families of the five crew members on board were notified afterward.

OceanGate says those aboard sub have 'sadly been lost'

OceanGate issued a statement moments ago on the status of the sub:

"We now believe that our CEO Stockton Rush, Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood, Hamish Harding, and Paul-Henri Nargeolet, have sadly been lost.

"These men were true explorers who shared a distinct spirit of adventure, and a deep passion for exploring and protecting the world’s oceans. Our hearts are with these five souls and every member of their families during this tragic time. We grieve the loss of life and joy they brought to everyone they knew.

"This is an extremely sad time for our dedicated employees who are exhausted and grieving deeply over this loss. The entire OceanGate family is deeply grateful for the countless men and women from multiple organizations of the international community who expedited wide-ranging resources and have worked so very hard on this mission.

"We appreciate their commitment to finding these five explorers, and their days and nights of tireless work in support of our crew and their families. This is a very sad time for the entire explorer community, and for each of the family members of those lost at sea. We respectfully ask that the privacy of these families be respected during this most painful time."

Rush 'got unlucky,' friends say

Elizabeth Chuck

Rush, the OceanGate executive who is on board the missing Titan submersible with four other people, is an intelligent explorer who is adept at managing risk, according to longtime friends.

Rush is "one of the most risk-averse people I know,” said Guillermo Söhnlein, who co-founded OceanGate.

Söhnlein said he last spoke with Rush about two weeks before the Titan’s expedition, its third to the Titanic site. Rush did not express any worries about the upcoming voyage.

“If anything, it’s the other way around,” Söhnlein said. “Any explorer will always tell you that on every expedition, on every mission, on every dive, something always goes wrong. You have to anticipate that something is going to go wrong. And the more guides you conduct, the more missions you conduct, the more expeditions you do, the more you start limiting those things.”

Another friend, oceanographer Gregory Stone, said Rush was upfront about the dangers of his missions.

“He wasn’t selling tickets like it was Disneyland. He was telling people exactly what it was — it was a dangerous thing,” Stone said. “He had taken every precaution possible, and he got unlucky. Something happened.”

Pakistani businessman is not a 'risk-taker,' friend says

Dawood, the Pakistani businessman aboard the Titan, is a "quiet and unassuming" person and not a "daredevil" by nature, according to one of his friends.

"I think he would want his legacy and his memory to be one where ... he wouldn't want to be seen as some daredevil, risk-taking explorer," said Bill Diamond, the chief executive of the SETI Institute, a California-based organization that searches for signs of extraterrestrial life. (Dawood is on the group's board of trustees.)

"I think he would want to be remembered as a humble businessman, curious about the world and fascinated by the opportunity to take this excursion and be on this expedition," said Diamond, who spoke to NBC News via Zoom.

Diamond said he believed Dawood would never do anything that would jeopardize the life of his 19-year-old son, Suleman, who is also aboard the Titan.

"I'm sure he would not have brought his son along if he thought this was something seriously dangerous," Diamond said. "I think he knew the risks, at the same time I think he felt that the technology was tried and tested and safe enough."

Coast Guard says 'debris field' found in Titan search area

The Coast Guard said in a tweet at 11:48 a.m. ET that a remotely operated vehicle discovered a "debris field" in the Titan vessel search area.

"Experts within the unified command are evaluating the information," the agency said.

Officials are planning to hold a news briefing at 3 p.m. ET.

Search is a 'needle in a haystack,' expert says

While remaining realistic about the chances of finding the Titan on the vast ocean floor, scientists are still offering a glimmer of hope.

Rob Larter, a marine geophysicist with the British Antarctic Survey, said in London today that it’s incredibly difficult to find an object the size of the Titan in a totally dark environment. He says it’s not going to be found with active sonar from a surface ship, but rather with a towed or autonomous vehicle that’s near the seafloor. Even those vehicles can see just a matter of meters.

“I’ve been involved in searches for hydrothermal vent sites,” he said. “We’ve had the vehicles just a few tens of meters away and missed them and then come back and find them. So it really is, you know, literally it’s just a needle in a haystack situation unless you’ve got a pretty precise location”

Jamie Pringle, an expert in forensic geosciences at Keele University in the United Kingdom, says the first 24 hours are critical in these kinds of rescue operations and that time period has long passed.

“So there’s always a chance. It’s never zero. But I think obviously the longer the time elapses, the lower the chance of success,” he said.

Larter called it a “desperate situation” buy says you try to stay optimistic as long as possible.

“It’s kind of unimaginable if people are alive, trapped in a submersible with oxygen supplies running down,” he said.

Chance of finding survivors 'close to zero,' retired Navy captain says

Corky Siemaszko

With the trapped Titan passengers likely out of oxygen, David Marquet, a retired Navy captain, said today "the probability is perilously close to zero that we will be able to recover them alive."

The Titan had 96 hours worth of oxygen, he told NBC News' Tom Costello.

"Things generally work up to the design spec, but they don’t somehow magically last beyond the design spec," Marquet said, referring to the oxygen estimates.

Dawood's friend says his death would be 'a tremendous loss for the world'

Ammad Adam met Shahzada Dawood at a United Nations conference in February 2020. Dawood gave a speech about empowering women and girls in Pakistan, and Adam was impressed by his remarks. The two kept in touch over the last three years, striking up a friendship via Facebook.

Adam, 34, is now "praying for a miracle" and hoping that Dawood and the four other passengers aboard the Titan will be found alive.

"I can tell you that Shahzada was a real great gentleman, a fine gentleman," he said. "I know everyone says, 'Oh, such and such is a good person,' but he's actually a genuinely kind-hearted person and you could see that in his actions."

Adam said Dawood dedicated much of his adult life to charitable activity, including donating to Covid relief funds in the early days of the pandemic.

"I hope for a miracle from God," Adam said, "because his death would be a tremendous loss for the world. He tries to help people who need help, and we need more people like that."

Teen trapped in missing sub is U.K. business school student

Henry Austin

The youngest of the five people aboard the missing submersible had just completed his first year at the Strathclyde Business School in the Scottish city of Glasgow.

The University of Strathclyde said in a statement that it was “deeply concerned” about Suleman Dawood, 19, “his father and the others involved in this incident.”

“Our thoughts are with their families and loved ones and we continue to hope for a positive outcome,” the statement added.

Weather at site is 'pretty good' for search, marine forecaster says

Julianne McShane

Weather at the scene of the search consists of winds blowing at 14 mph with gusts up to 19 mph, according to a tweet from the Coast Guard , which added that there are 4 to 5 foot swells in the water and the air temperature is about 50 degrees Fahrenheit.

Chris Parker, president and chief forecaster at Marine Weather Center , described those conditions as "pretty good," adding that they are mild to moderate for the area, which he said normally experiences higher waves and stronger winds of 30 to 40 knots on the Beaufort Wind Scale .

"An average 30-foot sailboat would be happy in those conditions unless they're going into the wind," he told NBC News of the conditions today.

"Those conditions should not be at all problematic" for the search, he added.

'A lot of the systems worked, but a lot of them really didn’t,' says Discovery Channel host who tested out the Titan

Josh Gates, the host of Discovery Channel’s "Expedition Unknown," told CNN's Anderson Cooper on Wednesday that he tested out the Titan for a possible segment for his show in 2021 and that "a lot of the systems worked, but a lot of them really didn’t" at the time.

"In the course of going out on Titan and diving down inside of it, it just became clear to us at that time that there was a lot that still needed to be worked out with the sub," he said on "Anderson Cooper 360."

"Ultimately, I just felt by the end of that trip that I just couldn’t get comfortable with Titan at that time. I felt that it needed time to go out and do missions and kind of get into a groove before we were going to go and film with it," Gates added.

Gates said the Titan offers a more comfortable fit inside compared to other submersibles due to the carbon fiber i t is partially made out of , allowing it to be larger than other subs that can only fit two to three people.

"On the one hand you have this incredibly innovative, novel design; on the other hand there are a lot of unknowns," he said of the Titan, adding that it has been “very surreal” and “haunting” to watch the search for the missing submersible.

OceanGate CEO has personal connection to famous Titanic victims

Rush, who developed and piloted the missing sub, had a ''pressing need'' to document the Titanic’s watery graveyard — but he had a personal connection to the wreck, as well.

His wife, Wendy Rush, is a great-great-granddaughter of two of the Titanic’s best-known victims, Isidor and Ida Straus. 

Isidor Straus was the co-owner of the Macy’s department store. His wife, Ida, refused to be separated from him when the Titanic started sinking, giving up her own seat on a lifeboat to stay with him on board. Survivors recount seeing them arm in arm on the ship’s deck as it went down. 

Their fate aboard the Titanic was portrayed in James Cameron’s movie, in which an elderly couple choose to spend their last moments in bed together as water comes rushing onboard. Theirs has been remembered as a '' love story for the ages .''

According to the Straus Historical Society, Wendy Rush is the daughter of Dr. Richard Weil III, who is the son of Richard Weil Jr., a former president of Macy’s New York. Weil Jr. is the son of Minnie Straus, Isidor and Ida’s daughter. 

Wendy Rush, née Weil, married Rush in 1986, according to a New York Times wedding announcement . 

A tale of two disasters: Missing sub captivates the world days after deadly migrant shipwreck

Chantal Da Silva

As  rescuers raced to find  the five people who  vanished after launching a mission  to survey the Titanic, another disaster at sea that’s feared to have  left hundreds of people dead  has been swept from the spotlight.

Last week’s sinking of a fishing boat crowded with migrants trying to get from Libya to Italy sparked arrests, violent protests and questions about authorities’ failure to act or find a long-term solution to the issue. But many human rights advocates are frustrated that the world seems to have already moved on and that the resources and media attention being dedicated to the Titan rescue efforts far outweigh those for the sunken migrant ship.

“It’s a horrifying and disgusting contrast,” Judith Sunderland, associate director for Human Rights Watch’s Europe and Central Asia division, said in a telephone interview, reflecting on the apparent disparities in resources and media attention on the two crises.

“The willingness to allow certain people to die while every effort is made to save others ... it’s a, you know, really dark reflection on humanity,” she said.

Senior British submariner helps with search

Alexander Smith

The British government said today it has dispatched one of its senior submariners, Lt. Cmdr. Richard Kantharia, to assist with the rescue mission.

Kantharia was already embedded in the U.S. Atlantic submarine fleet and joined the rescue effort Tuesday, a spokesperson for No. 10 Downing St. said by email.

Britain is also providing a Boeing C-17 Globemaster aircraft to transport equipment involved with the search.

Dawood family says 'sole focus' is on rescue of father and son

Sabrina Dawood, the sister of Shahzada Dawood, 48, one of the five people on board the Titan along with his 19-year-old son, Suleman, told Sky News in a Facebook message yesterday that "the Dawood family’s sole focus is the rescue of our beloved Shahzada and Suleman Dawood."

"We trust that the family will be granted privacy as we deal with this crisis," she said.

She added the family is also "deeply grateful" for news organizations' "constant coverage" of the missing submersible, but that they "are unable to address any questions or comments at the moment."

Searchers will need to 'get very, very lucky' to find sub, expert says

Simon Boxall, who teaches oceanography at England's University of Southampton, laid out in stark terms the daunting task facing those trying to find the cylindrical vessel. "The only way they are going to succeed is to get very, very lucky," he told NBC News by telephone early today.

On land, he explained, officials would have an array of tools at their disposal, from GPS and infrared tech to old-fashioned binoculars. "Underwater, that all goes out of the window," said Boxall, who believes given the extensive search by air that it's unlikely the craft is still bobbing around on the surface.

One way to scour the seabed is to send a robotic submersible down there with a light and a camera. That would be like going to an area twice the size of Connecticut "with a flashlight and just having a look around for something this small — it’s a big, big task,” he said.

Officials are also relying on sonar: bouncing sound off the seabed to create an image of what's down there, a painstaking task that Boxall likened to painting the Golden Gate Bridge "with a child's paintbrush."

If it lost power, the submersible likely drifted down to the seabed, traveling up to 15 miles on strong, deep-ocean currents that take water all the way to Antarctica, he said. Compounding that, this area is "very bumpy" and there is "this great big thing called the Titanic, which sank in the area, scattering all kinds of things far and wide."

Magellan ROV to assist in today's search efforts

The Magellan “working class” remotely operated vehicle, or ROV, will assist in the day’s search , Rear Adm. John W. Mauger of the Coast Guard said on NBC’s “TODAY” show.

A working class ROV has a manipulator arm that can attach to a hull point and potentially lift it off the surface, Explorers Club President Richard Garriott previously told NBC New York in an interview.

The Explorers Club, a society dedicated to scientific exploration and field study that two Titan passengers — Harding and Nargeolet — are part of, previously criticized the Coast Guard for not permitting the use of the Magellan ROV earlier.

Responding to the criticism, Mauger said: “We really had to start from scratch and bring all the capability that was available to bear on this problem,” adding that officials “made decisions to prioritize” what was closest to the site.

Coast Guard will 'continue with the search and rescue efforts'

Rear Adm. John W. Mauger said on the "TODAY" show that the Coast Guard is "going to continue with the search and rescue efforts" throughout the day despite fears of the oxygen supply on the vessel running out.

"We use all available data and information to prosecute those searches but we continue to find particularly in complex cases that peoples' will to live really needs to be accounted for as well," he said.

Mauger added that "teams were working really hard through the night" and that medical personnel were also moving into the site today.

Two more ROVs deployed

The Horizon Arctic, a Canadian-flagged ship, which is helping with the search and rescue mission, has deployed its remotely operated vehicle, or ROV, which is now on the seabed, the Coast Guard said on Twitter .

Meanwhile, the French government-backed vessel L'Atalante is about to deploy its own ROV, Victor 6000, into the ocean, the Coast Guard said .

Coast Guard's estimated time for oxygen running out reached

It's now 7:08 a.m. ET, the time that the Coast Guard estimated the oxygen on the missing submersible could run out.

The exact situation onboard the vessel, which had 96 hours of oxygen when it set off, according to its specs and Coast Guard officials, is not known.

Experts have pointed out that there are a number of variables that could impact the consumption of oxygen onboard.

"There are so many variables," Simon Boxall, who teaches oceanography at England’s University of Southampton, told NBC News. “We have no idea how long they will actually last in terms of oxygen — all that we know is that it’s imminent.”

Social media users tracking marine traffic in search area via satellite

As the search for the submersible stretched into today, some social media users said they were following the effort and tracking marine traffic in the area via satellite.

"Never in my life would I have thought I’d be awake at 2:50am watching ships, on satellite, looking for billionaires stranded in a sub, AT the Titanic in 2023 but here I am refreshing Twitter again," one user tweeted , writing that the person was using the app MarineTraffic .

"I’ve been checking periodically all night," one user responded just after 4:30 a.m. ET.

"Haven’t been able to tear myself away from the computer for days now," another wrote .

The MarineTraffic app announced yesterday it was “making all positional data, including satellite positions, available for free for the Polar Prince in the ongoing search & rescue mission.”

Impossible to know exactly how much oxygen left in sub, expert says

The Coast Guard predicts the oxygen supply on the submersible will run out at around 7:08 a.m. ET today. But it doesn't quite work like that, according to Simon Boxall, who teaches oceanography at England's University of Southampton.

"There are so many variables," Boxall told NBC News. "We have no idea how long they will actually last in terms of oxygen — all that we know is that it's imminent." One of the main factors governing the rate of oxygen consumption is the physical state of those on board. If their bodies start to shut down due to hypothermia, Boxall said, it would mean "they're using a lot less oxygen" — albeit presenting a new danger for the crew.

Although the Coast Guard has presented this timeline, officials know about these variables, according to Boxall. "It's not like" at 7.08 a.m. the rescuers will "pack up their bags and say, 'Right, we'll do a recovery operation, but we're taking the urgency off," he said. "They will still see this as being very urgent for next couple of days."

2 new vessels arrive on scene, conducting search patterns

Two new vessels have arrived on the scene and are conducting search patterns in the bid to find the Titan, a Coast Guard spokesperson said this morning.

The Canadian CGS Ann Harvey and the Motor Vessel Horizon Arctic, a remotely operated vehicle, or ROV, arrived to aid in the bid to find the missing submersible, Petty Officer Ryan Noel said.

The Coast Guard had previously said the two vessels were en route to the search site.

Noel said rescuers were also in the process of trying to get “one of the newer ROVs onsite down there." He could not confirm which ROV that was, but said the Coast Guard would be providing updates as more information became available.

Search patterns show more sea scanned in bid to find the Titan

The Coast Guard released a new image yesterday showing search patterns so far as efforts expanded in the race to find the missing sub.

It also released search patterns Tuesday, with the difference depicted below.

Searchers had covered an area twice the size of Connecticut on the surface, and the search underwater is about 2 ½ miles deep, officials said yesterday.

Ex-senior naval officer has 'no optimism' about underwater noises

The search and rescue mission was given fresh hope after a Canadian aircraft detected "underwater noises" on Tuesday and yesterday. But Chris Parry, a former rear admiral in the British Royal Navy, says he isn't greatly encouraged.

"I've got no optimism about that at all," Parry told NBC News. "Put your head in the water, you’re going to hear a lot of mechanical noises, particularly in the vicinity of a disintegrating wreck like the Titanic."

He called the optimism "clutching at straws."

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 this morning.

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

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

French deep sea robot arrives to join search

Due to join the hunt today 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 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 this morning, with officials fearing the oxygen supply on the vessel could soon run out.

Coast Guard officials estimated that the Titan, which had a 96-hour oxygen supply, could run out of air just before 7:10 a.m. ET, 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 yesterday.

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What I Learned on a Titanic Sub Expedition

Unraveling the enigma of stockton rush — and understanding the titan tragedy..

This article was featured in One Great Story , New York ’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly.

Last summer, for a CBS News Sunday Morning story, I joined OceanGate for a dive on its Titan submersible. I never saw the Titanic . We were only 37 feet below the waves when mission control aborted our dive.

At the time, I thought the reason was pretty dumb: Two capsule-shaped black floats, poorly tied to the sub’s launching platform, had come loose. The floats weren’t part of the sub. They’d have no effect on the dive itself. Who cared about the stupid platform? Let’s GO!

Now, of course, it all looks different. Now, I’m sick to my stomach. Now, I feel like I won at Russian roulette. Three dives later, the Titan imploded and killed the five people onboard.

Latest News

Titanic submarine.

• Titanic  Submarine Debris Brought Ashore

You can think about our dive’s cancellation in two ways (well, I can). One take: You should never have gotten on that thing. Bad knots should have been a red flag. The other: They’d rather cancel a dive, even for something small, than risk lives. That’s a safety culture.

And right there, in microcosm, is the debate I’ve had with myself for the past year. Stockton Rush, who died in the implosion, was OceanGate’s CEO and the Titan ’s designer. Was he a bold innovator, the Elon Musk of submersibles, advancing 50-year-old ideas with modern technologies? Or was he a con man who cut corners to save money at the cost of his customers’ lives?

This is a journal of the events of that expedition and the evolution of my thinking. It’s also my chance to introduce some new information into the conversation — details that have been missing from the thousands of hours of Titan news coverage so far.

. June 13, 2022

“The company OceanGate is offering us three berths aboard their mission to the Titanic July 9–17, departing from St. John’s, Newfoundland, on the 9th. They’re also offering us two spots aboard their submersible on a dive down to the Titanic .”

You can go your whole life without getting an email like that. It came from one of my Sunday Morning producers. Stockton Rush, it seemed, was a fan of the show. There wasn’t much nuance in my response: “LET ME AT IT!!!”

OceanGate had been in business for 14 years. Rush was an aerospace-engineering major at Princeton. (He was also a direct descendant of both Benjamin Rush and Richard Stockton, signers of the Declaration of Independence.) He flew his own airplane. He built it in the ’90s from fiberglass, which was then considered a radical new material. He had bought and refurbished a submersible, then designed and built a second one that he used to take customers on shipwreck dives in the Bahamas. Titan was his third submersible, built for Titanic depths: 2.4 miles down, where the water pressure is 6,000 pounds per square inch.

Each expedition to the Titanic is a nine-day adventure: two sailing days to reach the site, five days over the wreck — five chances to attempt dives — and two days back. They do this whole cycle five times each summer. We’d be on the fourth one of 2022.

My producer, a cameraman, and I booked flights. St. John’s is a quaint fishing town with its own weird time zone, 1.5 hours ahead of New York. It’s the easternmost point of land in North America, so that’s where we’d start.

. Sunday, July 10, 2022

It’s our first shoot day with Stockton Rush. We meet on the vast back deck of the Horizon Arctic, a 300-foot vessel built for towing offshore oil rigs. Rush has chartered it for the summer to carry his crew, his customers, and his submersible.

Nobody’s allowed on the back deck without a hard hat, goggles, a safety vest, and steel-toed shoes. We’re repeatedly warned that the ship is a dangerous environment — heavy doors, stray ropes, slippery decks — not designed for civilians. Rush looks as you’d expect the descendant of multiple Declaration signers to look: blue eyes, confident, charming, chiseled. And chatty.

The Titan itself sits on the back lip of the Horizon Arctic ’s deck. It spends most of its life bolted to an enormous silver metal platform, five feet tall and about 20 feet square. Titan is a shiny white capsule, 22 feet long. Its primary section is a cylinder of five-inch-thick carbon fiber, capped on each end by a domed titanium endcap. It’s the first submersible ever built of carbon fiber instead of a titanium alloy.

I interview Rush standing near the capsule. The following exchange is from footage of the CBS segment:

RUSH: Carbon fiber is a great material. It’s better than titanium. It’s better than a lot of other materials. But you can have a catastrophic failure where you can have imperfections in the structure. And so you really have to watch how you make it. POGUE: Well, if one little crack could send you to your death, why did you use it? You don’t need it to be lightweight. RUSH: Yes, you do. Carbon fiber is three times better than titanium on strength-to-buoyancy. All of a sudden, my pressure vessel is lighter than the water it displaces. So it’s one of the best materials to make a sub out of. POGUE: Has anyone else said, “Look what Rush did. Maybe we should make ours out of carbon fiber?” RUSH: No. I don’t think there are a lot of people chasing me on this one, unfortunately. But they will eventually.

I push him on this question. Doesn’t Rush know that carbon fiber has terrible compressive strength? That under enough pressure, it shatters like glass?

“So the key on that one is we have an acoustic monitoring system. Carbon fiber makes noise. It makes noise, and it crackles,” he says. “We have eight acoustic sensors in there, and they’re listening for this. And you get a huge amount of warning. We’ve destroyed several structures [in testing], and you get a lotta warning. I mean, 1,500 meters of warning.”

He describes the tests he ran on this early-alert system, which has gotten very little attention in the news reports. “It’ll start, you’ll go, ‘Oh, this isn’t happy’ — and then you’ll keep doin’ it, and then it explodes or implodes. We do it at the University of Washington. It shakes the whole building when you destroy the thing.”

We climb into the Titan to film a little tour. “Take your shoes off. That’s customary,” Rush says. Most submersible interiors look like submarine cockpits from the ’60s: banks of dials and switches. But the Titan ’s interior is modern and featureless. No chairs, no benches, no cockpit. The floor is a black rubber mat Rush bought from a welding-supply company.

“We only have one button, that’s it,” he says, pushing it for power on the back wall. “This is to other submersibles what the iPhone was to the BlackBerry.” It’s not really just one button, though; two PCs hide behind a panel on the back wall. A pair of touchscreens give readings of depth, oxygen, battery, and so on, and let Rush control the lights and release ballast.

This is when he pulls out the Logitech video-game controller, intended for use with an Xbox or PlayStation: wireless, cheap, and Chinese. “We run the whole thing with this game controller,” Rush says. (This clip from our TV story has racked up 20 million views on TikTok.)

“One of our earlier subs, we developed a controller and it was $10,000, and it was big and bulky. But this thing is made for a 16-year-old to throw it around, and we keep a couple of spares. And so the neat thing is it’s Bluetooth; I can hand it to anyone.”

It still seems like an odd choice, I suggest.

“I like messing with people’s heads,” he says.

The sub has about the space of a minivan. You can’t stand up, but it’s not cramped. The two grab handles on the ceiling feel like the ones in subway cars, except they’re glass and they light up. “I got these from Camping World,” Rush says, grinning.

These handle-lights aren’t attached to the carbon fiber. The sub is lined with a big insert, a perforated metal sleeve, that fits snugly against the carbon fiber, like a rolled-up poster in a mailing tube. “The thing with carbon fiber is you can’t cut holes in it. It doesn’t like that,” Rush says. “Nothing touches the carbon fiber.”

He’s got lights behind the mesh, so the lighting glows through. It looks very cool.

But … welding mat? Camping World? Game controller? I’m supposed to dive in this thing tomorrow.

We have another exchange, also captured in the CBS footage, that feels particularly important in retrospect:

POGUE: It seems like a lot of the way you made this is by taking off-the-shelf parts and sort of MacGyvering them together. RUSH: Yeah. Pretty much. POGUE: Does that not raise anybody’s eyebrows in the industry? RUSH: Oh yeah! Oh yeah. Yeah, no, I’m definitely an outlier. There’s been more intrigue into that than I can go into. There were a lot of rules out there that didn’t make engineering sense to me. They made sense at the time, in the ’60s and ’70s. But, you know, there’s a limit. You know, at some point, safety just is pure waste. I mean, if you just want to be safe, don’t get out of bed, don’t get in your car, don’t do anything. At some point, you’re gonna take some risk, and it really is a risk-reward question. I said, “I think I can do this just as safely by breaking the rules.”

I wonder if he’s trying to play at swashbuckling for our cameras. I mean, he loves tossing out provocative lines.

But inside, I’m not actually worried about safety. For one thing, Rush points out that only the accessories are off-the-shelf parts. “The pressure vessel is not MacGyvered at all because that’s where we work with Boeing and NASA and the University of Washington,” he says. “Once the pressure vessel is — you’re certain it’s not gonna collapse on everybody, everything else can fail. Your thrusters can go, your lights can go. All these things can fail. You’re still gonna be safe.” (Much later, Boeing would say it wasn’t involved with Titan , the University of Washington would say it worked only on Rush’s earlier sub, and NASA would say it consulted on Titan but didn’t actually build it.)

The design redundancies also reassure me. The Titan has two CO2 scrubbing systems, plus emergency oxygen under the floor. It has seven ways to rise to the surface, including air bladders. Some still work if the electronics go out; some work if the hydraulics fail. One works even if everyone aboard is unconscious: It releases sandbags from hooks that dissolve in seawater after 16 hours.

I’m also witnessing what appears to be a serious culture of safety. There are endless checklists, sub inspections, twice-daily mandatory briefings, and a three-strikes rule: If they find three things amiss — even tiny things like low battery power in a flashlight or a missing nut on the platform — they cancel the dive.

At dinner, I hang out with Paul-Henri Nargeolet, the famous French Titanic expert. He has visited the wreckage on 37 dives with five different subs. OceanGate now employs him to accompany the passengers on the dives to narrate what they’re seeing.

He observed the testing and construction of the Titan and is completely satisfied with its design. “I will say, in the world of the submarine, there was a rule: no carbon fiber,” he says in his French accent, laughing. “But he was working with Boeing, with big company. And when you see the way they were doing the cylinder — it’s not in a garage, you know, with glue and stuff like that. It’s very well done.”

Has there ever been a moment when he worried about the Titan ’s safety?

“No. When I saw what it is, I say, ‘Okay. I have no problem to dive in this sub.’”

Rush says that the Titan has already made 20 uneventful dives to Titanic depths, which also calms me. And above all, Rush himself pilots most of them. Why would he drive the Titan if he has any concerns about its integrity?

There is a weirdness to the whole operation, for sure. A press person has instructed me never to call the customers, in my reporting, “passengers,” “customers,” or “tourists.” They’re to be called “mission specialists.” Whatever you call them, they’re paying $250,000 a ticket.

I also know stuff goes wrong in the North Atlantic. In 2021, Mexican YouTuber Alan Estrada filmed the return of the Titan dive before his own. When the sub rose to the surface, the OceanGate crew couldn’t get it back onto the ship. Its occupants spent 27 hours inside before they could be rescued.

I’m slowly realizing the Titan doesn’t actually make it to the Titanic very often. On each of the nine OceanGate expeditions so far, Titan reached the shipwreck twice, once, or not at all. Indeed, Rush explains, that’s why only six paying customers are onboard, enough for two dives; he has learned he can get only two or three good dive days a week. Tomorrow, day one, will be our CBS dive. After that, the selection of “mission specialists” for each dive depends exclusively on Rush’s mysterious internal logic.

But after dinner, we get our own little bad-news bulletin. The waves will be six feet tomorrow. Too rough to launch the platform — and the next two days are expected to be bad weather too. Tomorrow was our only shot. No Titanic for us.

I crash hard. Seeing the Titanic was the whole point of this exhausting trip, wasn’t it? For me and for Sunday Morning ?

Rush offers to take us instead to a cool spot on the Grand Banks 80 miles away, one of the richest fishing areas in the world. We might see shark breeding grounds, massive underwater cliffs, or species that nobody’s ever seen before.

I don’t sleep at all. The ship rocks a lot, I have a lot to process, and maybe some lizard-brain survival mechanism is screaming.

. Monday, July 11, 2022

Shortly after we arrived on the Horizon Arctic , the entire assemblage of OceanGate staff and paying passengers met for the first of many twice-daily briefings. The six clients made their fortunes in various ways: There’s an Indian mining-company owner, a hedge-fund manager and his 20-something son, the owner of a construction firm, an AI pioneer who has sold ten companies, and a software engineer.

The staff hands out waivers. They read:

RELEASE OF LIABILITY  This operation will be conducted inside an experimental submersible vessel that has not been approved or certified by any regulatory body, and may be constructed of materials that have not been widely used in human-occupied submersibles.  Travel in and around the vessel could result in physical injury, disability, emotional trauma, or death.    The support vessel could expose me to property damage, injury, disability, or death. Assisting in the operation of the sub could lead to property injury, disability, or death.

“Where do I sign?” I joke on-camera. Honestly, I didn’t think much of it. I assumed it was the usual boilerplate CYA stuff you sign before you go skiing, rafting, or trampoline jumping.

My actual worry on the morning of our dive is that I’ll starve. The dive is supposed to be 10 to 12 hours long, and the sub’s “bathroom” consists of a pee bottle and some Ziploc bags. (There’s a black drape for privacy, and Rush says he cranks up the music while you’re behind it.) That’s why you’re supposed to eat a “low-residue diet” (basically the BRAT diet) the day before your dive. The prep materials instructed us not to bring any food onboard.

As it turns out, the prep materials were wrong. They give you a sandwich and a bottle of water as you board the sub, which we do at 4 a.m. Our dive includes Rush, another passenger associated with the company, marine biologist Steve Ross, CBS producer Anthony Laudato, and me.

The crew closes the hatch and seals us in with the 17 bolts — from the outside. The departure process runs like a rocket launch with countdowns, checklists, and station checks: “Navigation is go for launch,” “Comms is go for launch,” and so on.

Motorboats are supposed to drag the launch platform off the ship’s deck down a huge bright-orange ramp into the water. The crew will sink the platform and then unclip the sub. The whole idea is to begin propulsion 35 feet below the surface, where the water is calm.

“There’s nothing dumber than doing anything on the surface of the water,” Rush says. “It’s that transition where the problems happen: It’s when you get that sub out of the water, and now it’s not in the water, it’s hanging on a pendulum. That’s the dangerous part.”

Five minutes before we actually move into the sea, we experience what the crew loves to call a “stopski”: a mandatory five-minute halt in the countdown. The point is to quash any procedural momentum that might plow over some team member’s nagging concern. Every station is supposed to take a breath and check their systems one more time.

By the time OceanGate’s motorboats start dragging our launch platform down the ramp, we’ve been in the Titan for hours, five people building up body heat. It’s 94 degrees Fahrenheit in there. We’ve shed the layers and extra socks we’d been told we would need for the bottom of the sea, where the water is below the freezing point.

But now, at last, we’re bobbing on the waves. Two OceanGate motorboats zoom around, detaching us from the tow ropes and preparing to let the air out of the platform. After another hour, we are underwater. All rocking stops, and the only sound comes from the computer fans. The single plexiglass porthole, seven inches thick and about 18 inches across, shows us aqua water and rising white bubbles. Scuba divers arrive to unclip our sub from the submerged platform, so we can go see some shark breeding grounds.

That’s when Rush speaks up. “They’re bringing us back up. Something happened.” He calls expedition manager Kyle Bingham, in the control center on the bridge of the ship, on the radio.

“Topside, Titan …” says Rush.

“Go ahead,” answers Bingham.

“So we’re scrubbing?” asks Rush.

“Yeah, that’s the consensus up here,” says Bingham.

“Copy that,” says Rush.

“It’s not an exact science,” Rush tells us, clearly unhappy with having this voyage scrapped because of a couple of untied floaties. “Everything down to knot tying!”

And that was it. After all the sleepless nights, travel, planning, research, and telling everyone I knew about this adventure, we managed to get only 37 feet beneath the ocean surface.

. Wednesday, July 13, 2022

Another day of bad weather. Actually, gorgeous weather — sunshine, blue skies — but seas too rough to launch the sub, just like the day before. Man, I’d hate to be one of the $250,000 customers at this point. We’re on day three of the five possible dive days, and they’ve gone nowhere.

Rush tells us we won’t be bored as we wait for better weather. He says maybe we’ll drag chum outside the motorboats just to see what sharks we can attract, or have a motorboat tug-of-war, or fish for mahi-mahi, or shoot the Horizon Arctic ’s massive fire hoses way up into the air, just for fun.

None of that happens. We kill the time in other ways, though. We watch a pod of whales spouting their way to wherever they’re going. We make a scavenger hunt around the ship. We decorate 16-ounce Styrofoam cups that Rush will put into a laundry bag outside the Titan on the next dive. At Titanic depth, the pressure will compress them down into “THIS CUP HAS BEEN TO THE TITANIC” souvenirs, one-quarter their original size.

I’m still trying to figure out how buttoned-down this operation is. Every night at the 7 p.m. briefing, Bingham projects a spreadsheet listing things that need fixing, recharging, or replacing before the next dive. He assigns each one to a crew member to make sure it gets done.

I ask Nargeolet later: Is this much maintenance typical on Titanic subs? “Absolutely typical. If people say they do something different, they are lying,” he says. “Every sub is a prototype, okay? It’s not like a car. You use the key and you go, because millions of car are built before. And as a prototype, you have a lot of stuff unknown.”

But what about the Mir s, the pair of Russian submersibles James Cameron used to visit the Titanic for his movie? “Of course! I know the Mir very well,” Nargeolet says. “They have a lot of problem too.” At this point, I’ve endured this concern-and-reassurance cycle so many times I’ve got it memorized.

. Thursday, July 14, 2022

The weather and the waves have finally broken our way. Three millionaires are going down to see the Titanic . Good thing, too — this is our second-to-last day above the wreck.

It takes them a little over two hours to descend 2.4 miles. Regular radio waves don’t travel through water, so the sub and control room communicate using very short, coded text messages sent by acoustic pulses through the water column.

There’s no GPS underwater either, and that’s where the problems begin. Up in the ship’s control room, on a screen, we can see the locations of both the Titan and the two halves of the Titanic . Wendy Rush, Stockton’s wife, runs the show. (As it happens, she’s the great-great-granddaughter of Isidor and Ida Straus, who went down on the Titanic .) She sends text messages to Stockton, who is piloting the Titan , guiding him to the wreck.

“It’s like a game of Battleship ,” Stockton had told me. “You’re like, ‘Go to square B-4.’” But on this dive, the directions don’t make any sense. In the sub, Rush has no idea where he is. “They say we’re northwest of the wreck, but the grid position they’re giving us is not correct,” he says in frustration. (We hear all this later when we retrieve our GoPros from the sub.)

“Doesn’t make any sense,” he mutters an hour later. “We’re 100 meters off the bow, now we’re 570 meters off? They have no idea where we are!”

Phil Brooks, then OceanGate’s director of engineering, points out just how blind you are at that ink-black depth. “When you turn on your lights, you can see maybe three meters in front of you,” he told me later. “You’re driving around in pitch darkness. You can be five meters away from the wreck and not know it.”

On this dive, Brooks says, “We were concerned that our primary navigation tracking system was incorrect, so we started to cross-check it with the ship’s GPS system” — and the two signals disagreed with each other.

The ship’s bridge is tense and quiet. The onboard Wi-Fi goes out. I wonder, Is OceanGate trying to prevent us from tweeting bad news? When I ask an OceanGate rep about the Wi-Fi, he tells me it’s just a precaution. If this turns out to be a real emergency, they can’t risk clogged bandwidth.

The Titan passengers have spotted an old Titanic boiler in the debris field, but that’s it. After four hours on the seafloor, Stockton gets the message from Wendy that it’s time to come back up.

OceanGate doesn’t give refunds. But if you don’t see the Titanic , you’re offered a do-over the following summer. It’s free if mechanical problems were at fault, half-price if it was bad weather.

Indian industrialist Shrenik Baldota is on Titan today. He says just going down is cool: “It went from blue to dark blue and then it was pitch-dark. And from 800 meters to 1,500, we could see as if you were in a spaceship and the stars were going by — we had illuminous creatures going down. It was beautiful. Magical.”

Still, he didn’t see the Titanic . “We didn’t find the bow,” he says. “We were lost.”

. Friday, July 15, 2022

It’s our last day above the wreck — the expedition’s last chance to reach the Titanic . Nargeolet is aboard Titan as the expert, pilot Scott Griffith mans the game controller, and three more mission specialists climb into the sub.

This time, everything goes right. Up in the control room, I witness their perfect descent, perfect comms, perfect guidance. They approach the wreck with lights on. The famous bow emerges, looming, out of the blackness. “Bow’s directly in front of us,” Griffith says.

“Slow down, slow down! We are in front of the anchor!” Nargeolet says.

“That’s incredible, though. Just darkness, darkness, darkness, and then all of a sudden, it comes straight out! Oh my God. Do you guys see it?” says the hedge-fund manager’s son.

The sub’s external lights are having trouble. They occasionally blink off. But these men’s minds are clearly blown.

“The grand staircase is just here, where it’s black,” says Nargeolet.

“That’s where Jack and Rose first saw each other,” someone jokes.

A few hours later, they’re back on the ship. The entire cast and crew of our expedition greets them. Someone pops open a bottle of bubbly apple juice to celebrate. (The Horizon Arctic is an alcohol-free zone.) Everyone is giddy. Grown men hug each other with all their strength. Later, they’ll say their lives changed when they saw the Titanic .

When they show us the video they shot, I can see why: The Titanic is slowly falling apart, but it’s still immense, majestic, and shockingly colorful up close.

Maybe all the little things that break down are just part of doing business in the unpredictable North Atlantic. Maybe the off-the-shelf accessories actually do the job.

Maybe Stockton Rush isn’t so crazy after all.

November 27, 2022

Our ten-minute CBS Sunday Morning story airs. It’s as fair as I could make it: It documents those MacGyvered, off-the-shelf components, the loose buoys, our aborted dive, and the sub getting lost on the seafloor. But it also shows the triumphant final dive, complete with stunning video of the Titanic in all its 4K glory.

OceanGate is very unhappy with the story. Of course, nobody suspects the Titan will last only three more dives.

. Thursday, June 22, 2023

They’ve just found the debris of the Titan .

Everyone’s suddenly a carbon-fiber expert. But if you really want to know what happened, I think Alfred McLaren, a retired Navy sub captain who has spent a cumulative 5.75 years of his life underwater, has the most plausible explanation.

It wasn’t the carbon fiber itself. It was the three dissimilar materials: carbon fiber, titanium, and plexiglass. “They have different coefficients of expansion and compression,” he tells me in another CBS interview. “You make repeated cycles in depth, of course you’re gonna work that seal loose.”

The media spent a week counting down the number of oxygen hours the passengers had left. The public went nuts on Twitter, furious that the sub didn’t have an underwater-location beacon, a tether, or a second, accompanying sub. None of it would have mattered; the men have been dead all week. The sub imploded instantly before it even reached the seafloor.

And if the multi-material design actually was the problem, then none of the OceanGate safety protocols mattered either. None of the redundant life-support systems mattered. Even Rush’s beloved acoustic-monitoring system didn’t matter.

I should not have been reassured by the Titan ’s 20 successful dives to the seafloor. I should have been terrified. Each dive brought the sub closer to destruction.

Anyone could see that Rush relished playing the maverick genius; more than once, he compared his role as industry disrupter to Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. He seems to have exaggerated the role of Boeing and others and minimized the frequency of Titan ’s breakdowns. Now that we know the sub was doomed, we can find a hundred things that should have been done differently.

But I don’t think Rush was a con man. He genuinely believed in his design — enough to trust it with his own life many times over. And for every James Cameron who’s now saying “I saw it coming,” there’s a Nargeolet or a Brooks who knew the sub inside and out and considered it safe.

Looking back, I wonder if Rush’s fiberglass-plane experience taught him the wrong lesson. The critics carped about his use of composites at the time, but now every airplane uses them. Maybe his takeaway was that when experts say you’re wrong about a new material, they’re just calcified thinkers.

“When you’re trying something outside the box, people inside the box think you’re nuts,” he said. “Inside the box, everything’s scary.”

The problem, as we now know, is that in the case of the Titan, the people inside the box had it right all along. For innovators like Rush, sometimes the real trick is knowing when to listen.

• post mortem
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NFL schedule 2024: Chiefs will host Ravens to kick off season in rematch of AFC title game

The ravens will be the chiefs' opponent in the kickoff game.

The  Kansas City Chiefs host the NFL Kickoff Game by virtue of being the Super Bowl champion. The team Kansas City beat on the road in the AFC Championship Game to get to Super Bowl LVIII will be the opponent.

The NFL announced Monday the Chiefs will host the Baltimore Ravens in the NFL Kickoff Game on Thursday, Sept. 5 at 8:20 p.m. ET. The game will be broadcast on NBC. 

This showdown will be a rematch of the 2024 AFC title game, which Kansas City beat Baltimore on the road, 17-10. This game was Patrick Mahomes' second consecutive road playoff victory, beating a Ravens team that had the best record in the regular season and the league MVP in Lamar Jackson. 

Here's a quick tale of the tape on the quarterback matchup:

Patrick Mahomes

Mahomes is off to the greatest start for a quarterback ever. He already has three Super Bowls at the age of 28 and three Super Bowl MVPs. He's on that exclusive list of winning two NFL MVPs and three Super Bowl MVPs (Tom Brady, Joe Montana are the others) -- yet Mahomes isn't even 30 yet (Brady reached this feat at  33 and Montana at 34).

Going down the list of postseason accomplishments, Mahomes is already among the all-time greats at quarterback. His 15 postseason victories trail only Brady (31) and Joe Montana (16), largely considered the two greatest quarterbacks in NFL history. Brady and Montana are also the other two quarterbacks with three Super Bowl MVPs (Brady has five and Montana has three).

Mahomes is the first player to win two NFL MVP awards and three Super Bowl MVPs before the age of 30. He's just the second player amongst the "big four" American sports leagues ( MLB , NFL,  NBA ,  NHL ) to have three championship MVP awards before turning 29 (Magic Johnson is the other) and the first player in NFL history to have three Super Bowl MVPs in a five-season span. 

The regular season stats will get there, but winning three championships and having two NFL MVPs at the age of 28 has merit. In six seasons, Mahomes has two MVPs, three Super Bowl MVPs, one Offensive Player of the Year, led the league in touchdown passes twice, and passing yards per game twice. 

Lamar Jackson

Jackson is the youngest quarterback to win the NFL MVP award twice, capturing his second MVP during the 2023 season. He completed 67.2% of his passes for 3,678 yards for 24 touchdowns and seven interceptions and a 102.7 passer rating in the 2023 season. Jackson also had 821 rushing yards and five touchdowns, leading the league with 5.5 yards per carry. 

Jackson finished with over 3,000 passing yards and 800 rushing yards for the second time in his career, the only player in NFL history to reach those numbers in a season twice. 

Jackson improved to 58-19 as a starting quarterback this season, as his .753 win percentage is third-best for a quarterback in NFL history (only  Patrick Mahomes  and Tom Brady have a higher win percentage). Hs 5,258 rushing yards are fourth-most by a quarterback in NFL history, while his 13 100-yard rushing games and 61.8 rushing yards per game are the best for a quarterback in league history. 

Jackson recorded his third season with over 800 yards rushing season in 2023, breaking a tie with Michael Vick (two) for the most such seasons by a quarterback in NFL history. He is the only quarterback since the 1970 merger to reach 700 rushing yards in five consecutive seasons (2019-23) and is the only quarterback since the 1970 merger to reach 600 rushing yards in each of the first six years of a career (2018-23). No other quarterback in NFL history has more than four such seasons in a career.

Jackson is one of four quarterbacks since the 1970 merger with multiple seasons posting at least 25 passing touchdowns and five rushing touchdowns in a career, joining Josh Allen (four),  Deshaun Watson  (two) and Steve Young (two). He has four career games with at least five touchdown passes, the third most such games by a player in his first six seasons in NFL history. Only Patrick Mahomes (six games) and Dan Marino (five) have more.

The verdict

The NFL couldn't have asked for a bigger matchup to kick off the season, carrying off the momentum from a record-setting Super Bowl in terms of viewership. Mahomes vs. Jackson will be must-see TV, as they lead to of the  best teams in the NFL.

The path to a three-peat for the Chiefs starts with their biggest competition in the AFC. This matchup will be huge for playoff implications. 

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Titanic: Visiting the most famous shipwreck in the world

By David Pogue

November 27, 2022 / 10:14 AM EST / CBS News

Editor's note: The U.S. Coast Guard launched a search and rescue operation after OceanGate's submersible and crew of 5 lost contact on Sunday, June 18. Read the latest on that here . Our earlier story is below.

Maybe you've heard the story of the Titanic. I think there was a movie about it? For the most part, the only people who've ever seen the Titanic since the night of April 15, 1912, when it sunk beneath the North Atlantic, have been scientists. Until now.

Stockton Rush is CEO of OceanGate, a company that offers dives to the Titanic in a one-of-a-kind, carbon-fiber submersible, for $250,000 per person. "It's a very unusual business," he said. "It's its own category. It's a new type of travel."

Correspondent David Pogue asked, "Who are the typical clientele for these missions?" 

"We have clients that are Titanic enthusiasts, which we refer to as Titaniacs," Rush replied. "We've had people who have mortgaged their home to come and do the trip. And we have people who don't think twice about a trip of this cost. We had one gentleman who had won the lottery."

And this summer, Rush invited "CBS Sunday Morning" to come along.

We departed from St. Johns, Newfoundland, Canada, the easternmost tip of North America, about 400 miles from the Titanic site, aboard a chartered oil-rig servicing ship. During our two-day journey into the North Atlantic, we got to know our fellow adventurers. They included everyone from Indian industry mogul Shrenik Baldota ("They call me the wild monk," he said, "because I look like a monk, I'm very calm, but I have these extreme interests that I do"), to bank executive Renata Rojas ("I'm trying to fulfill a dream; I've been wanting to go to Titanic and see with my own eyes since before they found it").

Rojas has been saving up to see the Titanic for 30 years. "Dreams don't have a price," she said. "Some people want a Ferrari. Some people buy a house. I wanted to go to Titanic."

But the star of the show is the Titan: Stockton Rush's custom-built submersible, made of five-inch-thick carbon fiber, capped on each end by a dome of titanium.

If all went well, I would be spending about 12 hours sealed inside on a dive to the Titanic. Not gonna lie; I was a little nervous, especially given the paperwork, which read, "This experimental vessel has not been approved or certified by any regulatory body, and could result in physical injury, emotional trauma, or death." Where do I sign?

This is not your grandfather's submersible; inside, the sub has about as much room as a minivan. It has one button. "That's it," said Rush. "It should be like an elevator, you know? It shouldn't take a lot of skill."

The Titan is the only five-person sub in the world that can reach Titanic's depth, 2.4 miles below the sea. It's also the only one with a toilet (sort of).

And yet, I couldn't help noticing how many pieces of this sub seemed improvised, with off-the-shelf components. Piloting the craft is run with a video game controller.

Pogue said, "It seems like this submersible has some elements of MacGyver jerry-riggedness. I mean, you're putting construction pipes as ballast."

"I don't know if I'd use that description of it," Rush said. "But, there are certain things that you want to be buttoned down. The pressure vessel is not MacGyver at all, because that's where we worked with Boeing and NASA and the University of Washington. Everything else can fail, your thrusters can go, your lights can go. You're still going to be safe."

But when expedition manager Kyle Bingham studied the forecast for our Titanic dive, he concluded the waves would be too big to launch the sub. Our Titanic adventure would have to wait. But Stockton Rush offered our CBS crew a consolation dive to the Continental Shelf, 80 miles way. Apparently, there's a lot of sheer cliffs underwater to see, shark breeding grounds. They say it's really cool!

The crew closes the hatch, from the outside, with 17 bolts. There's no other way out.

Here's how the launch is supposed to go: The sub is attached to a huge floating platform. Motorboats drag it down the big orange ramp into the sea. The platform submerges to about 30 feet, where the water is much calmer than on the surface. Divers detach the sub from the platform … and away you go!

Our dive in the OceanGate submersible had made it down only 37 feet when floats came off the platform. And that wasn't supposed to happen. The mission was scrubbed.

I was crushed. My diving adventures were over.

Renata Rojas said, "Every expedition has its challenges, all of them. I have not been in one expedition where things haven't had to be adjusted, adapted, changed or cancelled at the end of the day. You're at the mercy of the weather."

Rojas speaks from painful experience. Over the years, she's been booked on three Titanic expeditions. All three were canceled. "You just cry a lot," she said, "and just keep the dream alive, because it's something that I have to do."

Our expedition had to wait out two more days of rough seas.

Fortunately, there's a lot to do in the North Atlantic, from dancing to channeling your inner Leonardo DiCaprio. ("I'm the king of the surface vessel!") There's sea life, ship tours, and atmospheric effects, like a sundog.

You can also hang out with scientists. Researchers like deep-sea biologist Steve Ross and ocean archaeologist Rod Mather join every expedition. In effect, the passengers are funding their science.

I asked, "How scientific is this this expedition?"

"I don't do show science," Ross said. "Our job is to do real and important and valid work."

"While you're down there, will you look for this giant heart-shaped diamond on a chain?"

"I think that's not there," Mather replied.

On our sixth day at sea, the weather cleared. The dive was a go!

Titan reported arriving "on bottom," sitting at 3,742 meters. But that was the last of the good news.

There's no GPS underwater, so the surface ship is supposed to guide the sub to the shipwreck by sending text messages. Rush recalled, "I said, 'Do you know where we are?' '100 meters to the bow, then 470 to the bow. If you are lost, so are we!'"

But on this dive, communications somehow broke down. The sub never found the wreck. 

"We were lost," said Shrenik Baldota. "We were lost for two-and-a-half hours." 

Rush said he'll offer those passengers a free do-over next year. And that's just one cost of doing this business.

I asked, "Are you making money on this operation?"

"Ahhh, no. So, not yet," he replied. "People might say, 'Hey, that's a lot of money, $250,000.' But we went through over a million dollars of gas."

It was our last day at sea. There was one last chance to reach the Titanic. And this time good weather and good fortune were aligned. An anchor was spotted.

"Oh my God. There's the bow, guys! Do you guys see it?"

And there it was. The famous bow, emerging from the darkness.

The ship's wheel pedestal, and memorial plaques from old expeditions. 

The bollards that once secured the ship in port. 

And the davits that lowered the lifeboats.

The hole where a huge smokestack once stood.

And the skylight over the radio room that sent out distress signals.

Now, Titanic tourism has its detractors. But these expeditions don't disturb the wreck or retrieve artifacts, and Stockton Rush said that they're valuable to history: "At some point, there will be no Titanic. It will be eaten by the bacteria. It will be an artificial reef that doesn't look like the Titanic."

Renata Rojas would agree. After 30 years of trying, she finally got to see the most famous shipwreck in the world.

Stockton Rush plans to return to the wreck next summer. Until then, the Titanic will once again be alone.

      For more info:

        Story produced by Anthony Laudato. Editor: Joseph Frandino. 

      See also: 

• Titanic: A tragedy very much alive ("Sunday Morning")
• The Titanic is vanishing. An expedition will monitor the ship's decay "before it all disappears"
• Cameron on Titanic: "Death in slow motion" ("CBS This Morning")

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2024 NFL Draft first-round rookie contract tracker: Jets' Olu Fashanu, Giants' Malik Nabers sign deals

A rundown of the rookie contracts for the first-round picks of the 2024 class.

With the 2024 NFL Draft  in the rearview mirror and rookie minicamps underway, it's time for the newest members of the NFL family to get paid. All 257 draft picks and their agents now turn their attention to their respective front offices and prepare to sign their first NFL contracts.

Thanks to the CBA, rookie contracts are more tied to the player's slotted draft position, and there isn't too much to be negotiated. But, there are still talks that need to take place before pen is put to paper. Each contract comes with a fully-guaranteed fifth-year team option, and the value of that fifth-year option will vary based on position, playing time and Pro Bowl selections. 

Former Clemson cornerback and newest Raven Nate Wiggins was the first first-rounder to sign his rookie deal, but plenty have followed. Below, we will break down the details of every first-round pick's rookie deal once they are reported.

*Values projected via Spotrac

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