Aircraft searching for Titanic submersible detects underwater noises

A Canadian aircraft has detected underwater noises during its search for a submersible with five people aboard that vanished while making a 3,800m descent to the Titanic wreck off the coast of Newfoundland.

“Canadian P-3 aircraft detected underwater noises in the search area,” the US Coast Guard wrote on Twitter. “As a result, ROV [remotely operated vehicle] operations were relocated in an attempt to explore the origin of the noises. Those ROV searches have yielded negative results but continue.”

With an estimated 30 hours of oxygen supply left inside the vessel, an international team of rescuers is racing against the clock to find the submersible and its passengers.

The vessel, called Titan, went missing on Sunday morning during a dive to view the wreckage of the Titanic. It lost contact with the Polar Prince, a ship that had carried it out to the dive site 900 nautical miles east of Cape Cod on the US coast.

US and Canadian aircraft and vessels are scouring an area of roughly 7,600 square miles, larger than the US state of Connecticut.

Passengers inside the Titan, which operates tourist trips to the Titanic wreck costing $250,000 a person, include Hamish Harding, a British entrepreneur, along with Shahzada Dawood, a Pakistani businessman, and his son Suleman, whom family friends said was just 19.

There has been no official confirmation of the names of all five people missing, but multiple reports said Paul-Henry Nargeolet, a French explorer, was on board along with Stockton Rush, the founder of OceanGate, the company that built the Titan and organised the trip.

Captain Jamie Frederick of the US Coast Guard said on Tuesday that a pipe-laying craft had arrived at the scene and begun a dive mission at the Titan’s last known location.