Search teams in the Atlantic trying to locate the missing Titan submersible said they were still hearing underwater “noises” on Wednesday, but added that the sounds were “inconclusive” and not confirmation the crew was still alive.
A US Coast Guard captain, Jamie Frederick, told a lunchtime briefing “several flights” of Canadian P3 aircraft had heard the noises, reported by several media outlets as “banging”, on Tuesday and Wednesday, and that the focus of the search was relocated to that area.
“We need to have hope. But I can’t tell you what the noises are. What I can tell you is we’re searching where the noises are, and that’s all we can do at this point,” Frederick said, adding that recordings were being analyzed by navy subsurface acoustics experts.
The 22ft (6.7m) Titan and its five-person crew have been missing since Sunday, when contact was lost almost two hours into a dive to the wreck of the Titanic, 12,500ft below the surface, about 400 miles south of St John’s, Newfoundland.
A giant international search and rescue operation involving US military aircraft and vessels, the Royal Navy and private companies, has been under way since Sunday night. Aerial searches and underwater probes by remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) “have yielded negative results”, Frederick said.
If they are still alive, the Titan’s crew are down to their last few hours of air, with the vessel’s initial 96-hour supply of oxygen set to expire at about 5am ET (10am BST) on Thursday.
“This is a search and rescue mission 100%,” Frederick said. “We are smack dab in the middle of search and rescue, and we’ll continue to put every available asset that we have in an effort to find the Titan and crew members. The oxygen, that’s just one piece of data, but that’s not the only thing that’s important.”
Frederick would not be drawn on the chances of survival of a crew which includes the British explorer Hamish Harding, businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman, or discuss a possible end point to the operation.
“Sometimes you’re in a position where you have to make a tough decision, but we’re not there yet. If we continue to search, potentially we could be at that point. That’s a discussion that we will have with the families long before I’m going to discuss that in public.”
More vessels, including ROVs, were due to arrive on Wednesday to assist a “complex response effort” covering an area twice the size of Connecticut. Frederick said ever-changing weather conditions and sea currents were creating additional challenges.
Navy R Adm John Mauger, who is heading the search for the Titan, confirmed earlier that an aircraft detected noise in the water picked up by sonar buoys the day before, but said: “We don’t know the source of that noise.”
He told CBS News there were a lot of metal objects at the site of the Titanic wreck, which could be where the noise was coming from.
The discovery on Tuesday led search teams to relocate “in an attempt to explore the origin of the noises”, the coast guard said earlier.
The coast guard announcement came after US reports citing internal government memos said banging sounds at 30-minute intervals had been picked up by crews searching for the submersible, and after an explorers’ organisation said “we understand that likely signs of life” had been detected.
Search aircraft with underwater detection capabilities picked up a banging sound every 30 minutes for several hours, CNN and Rolling Stone reported, citing US government memos. The emails did not make clear when the sounds were picked up.
The sounds were still heard after four hours, reported CNN, adding that an update on Tuesday night suggested more sounds were heard, though not described as banging.
In a statement, the Explorers Club – which lists Harding on its board of trustees – thanked those behind the rescue effort, and said: “We have much greater confidence that … there is cause for hope, based on data from the field – we understand that likely signs of life have been detected at the site.”
Later, the New York-based club told the Guardian it was “waiting for updates from the coast guard” before commenting further.
Those onboard Titan for the tourist expedition are Harding, 58; Pakistani-born Dawood, 48, with his 19-year-old son, both British citizens; French explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet, 77; and Stockton Rush, founder of OceanGate Expeditions. Authorities have not confirmed the identity of any passenger.
The US navy sent a deep ocean salvage system called Fadoss that arrived in Newfoundland on Tuesday evening, a US spokesperson told CBC News in Canada. Three US air force C-17 aircraft were confirmed as having landed in Newfoundland carrying equipment headed for the search area, 370 nautical miles (685km) south-east.
The Fadoss system is designed to provide “reliable deep ocean lifting capacity of up to 60,000lbs (27,200kg) for the recovery of large, bulky, and heavy sunken objects such as aircraft or small vessels”. The Titan submersible weighs 10,432kg (23,000lbs).
The recovery system has previously been deployed alongside a US navy remotely operated vehicle called Curv-21, the Cable-controlled Undersea Recovery Vehicle, a 2.4-metre (8ft) craft that can operate as far down as 6km (20,000ft). However, it is unclear if it is being deployed for this search.
The Royal Canadian Navy ship HMCS Glace Bay was en route to provide a medical team and a six-person mobile hyperbaric recompression chamber. It was expected to be on scene by midday Thursday.
The Canadian coast guard Ship (CCGS) John Cabot was expected, the CCGS Ann Harvey was en route, and the CCGS Terry Fox was at the launch base in St John’s, Newfoundland. Magellan, a British firm that specializes in deep ocean investigations and recovery, said it was supporting the mission.
A French research ship carrying its own deep-sea diving robot vessel was being sent to the search area at the request of the US navy and was expected to arrive on Wednesday night.