Submarine-hunter aircraft to join search for Titanic tourist submersible

US and Canadian aircraft and vessels were racing on Tuesday to locate a submersible missing on a commercial dive to the site of the Titanic, as fears grow for five people aboard with a limited oxygen supply.

The US Coast Guard’s Boston-based North East service said on Monday evening that a Royal Canadian Air Force aircraft able to detect underwater objects, a CP-140 Aurora, would join the search on Tuesday morning. That was to follow surface searches of the sea carried out by C-130 Hercules aircraft overnight.

Those inside the Titan submersible, 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.

Abdul Razak Dawood, a former Pakistani commerce minister and Shahzada Dawood’s uncle, told the Financial Times: “We could never have imagined even in our wildest dreams that something like this could have happened . . . We are praying and praying for their return.”

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.

The Canadian Aurora aircraft is intended for anti-submarine warfare, meaning it can detect underwater objects from the air.

Most of the aircraft and vessels initially deployed in the search are limited to conducting searches of the surface, in case the submersible has returned to the surface away from the vessel that launched it. They also have sonar equipment to detect any sounds from the craft.

The Titan launched on Sunday morning from the Polar Prince, a vessel that had carried it out to the dive site 900 nautical miles east of Cape Cod on the US coast.

The Polar Prince reported having lost contact with the Titan an hour and 45 minutes into the trip. The Titan had planned to travel down to the wreckage of the Titanic, which sank in April 1912 with the loss of about 1,500 lives.

John Mauger, commander of the US’s First Coast Guard District, based in Boston, told reporters on Monday evening that the Titan had a “sustainment” capability intended to provide oxygen for those on board for up to 96 hours. That would give the search a possibility of success until about Thursday morning local time.

“We’re making the best use of every moment of that time to locate the vessel,” Mauger said.

The commander said the search was complicated by the need to search both on the surface, in case the vessel had managed to surface but was not communicating, and in “the water column”.

The wreck of the Titanic lies at a depth of 3,800 metres, where water pressure is about 380 times that of the atmosphere at sea level.

“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 ensure we can locate the vessel and rescue the people on board,” the commander said.

According to OceanGate’s website, the submersible weighs 10.4 tonnes and is made of carbon fibre and titanium.

It claims the vessel is equipped with a real-time health monitoring system to monitor the effect of pressure on the hull, giving the crew enough time to return to the surface in the event of any problems. The Titan is the only crewed submersible in the world equipped with such a system, it said.

Shahzada and Suleman Dawood come from one of Pakistan’s best-known business families, which controls a large fertiliser manufacturer along with textile and energy businesses.

Their Karachi-based Engro Corporation, at which Shahzada is vice-chair, on Tuesday said that “there is limited information available . . . that we know” about their disappearance and that the company “remained in prayer for their swift and safe return”.

Nasir Ali Shah Bukhari, a friend of the family, said Shahzada Dawood was “very down to earth . . . if you met him, you couldn’t imagine his financial worth”. He had lived in the UK for several years with his wife Christine and two children, friends said.

Another family friend in Karachi said: “As time goes by and our hopes sink, we are praying for an impossible miracle to happen.”

Harding is chair of Action Aviation, a Dubai-based business aircraft broker. He has previously dived to the lowest depth of the Pacific Ocean’s Mariana Trench with ocean explorer Victor Vescovo and travelled into space on a commercial flight run by Blue Origin, the company established by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

Richard Garriott de Cayeux, president of The Explorers Club, a group to which Harding belonged, said Harding’s “excitement about this expedition was palpable” and added: “We all join in the fervent hope that the submersible is located as quickly as possible and the crew is safe.”