A chilling video posted on social media shows the moment the doomed Titan submersible began its journey to the Titanic. 22-year-old videographer Abbi Jackson, employed by OceanGate onboard the mothership, Polar Prince, shared the video on TikTok, unaware of the tragedy about to take place.
The video is captioned, “Watching a submarine go down to the Titanic.” It pans away from the ship’s deck and shows the submersible on the surface of the ocean.
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The submersible began its journey on Sunday morning, June 18. About one hour and 45 minutes into its descent, the vessel lost contact with the Polar Prince, the support ship that transported it to the site. The Titan reportedly sends a ping to the Polar Prince every 15 minutes. The last ping was received while the vessel floated above the Titanic wreckage at about 3 pm local time.
The five passengers aboard the Titan submersible have been identified as OceanGate Expeditions CEO Stockton Rush, British billionaire Hamish Harding, French diver Paul Henry Nargeolet, and Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son, Suleman.
Recently, sonar picked up banging sounds from underneath the water. A memo obtained by CNN said it was unclear exactly when the banging was heard on Tuesday, June 20, and for how long. More sounds were later heard, but they were not described as “banging.”
“Additional acoustic feedback was heard and will assist in vectoring surface assets and also indicating continued hope of survivors,” an update reads. It has also been reported that a white rectangular object was spotted in the water by a Canadian P3 aircraft.
OceanGate says that the Titan is a 23,000-pound submersible made of carbon fibre and titanium. The vessel uses a “proprietary real-time hull health monitoring (RTM) system,” and any time an issue is detected, an “early warning” would be sent to the pilot, to leave “enough time to safely return to the surface.”
