British billionaire among five aboard missing submersible visiting Titanic wreck

Adventurer Hamish Harding, chairman of private plane firm Action Aviation, is understood to be aboard the missing submersible.

(Atlantic Productions) (PA Media)

A British billionaire is one of five people aboard a submersible tourist vessel which went missing during a voyage to the Titanic shipwreck.

Hamish Harding, chairman of private plane firm Action Aviation, is understood to be aboard the five-person OceanGate Expeditions vessel, which was reported overdue on Sunday evening about 435 miles south of St John’s, Newfoundland.

A major search and rescue operation, being led by the US Coast Guard and involving military aircraft, is under way.

In a press conference on Monday, Rear Admiral John W Mauger of the US Coast Guard, said they are doing “everything” they can to find the submersible, saying it has one pilot and four mission operators aboard.

He said they were conducting a search 900 miles east of Cape Cod in collaboration with the Canadian armed forces and commercial vessels in the area.

“It is a remote area and a challenge, but we are deploying all available assets to make sure we can locate the craft and rescue the people onboard,” he said.

He said the submersible has 96 hours of emergency capability, giving a window for rescuers to find the occupants alive, adding: “We anticipate that there’s somewhere between 70 to the full 96 hours at this point.”

The Canadian research vessel Polar Prince lost contact with the submersible during a dive, the US Coast Guard said.

A submersible needs a mother ship to launch and recover it, whereas a submarine has enough power to leave and return to port on its own.

On social media at the weekend, Mr Harding said he was “proud to finally announce” he would be aboard the mission to the wreck of the Titanic, the luxury ocean liner which hit an iceberg and sank in 1912, killing more than 1,500 people.

But Mr Harding added that due to the “worst winter in Newfoundland in 40 years, this mission is likely to be the first and only manned mission to the Titanic in 2023”.

He continued: “A weather window has just opened up and we are going to attempt a dive tomorrow.

“We started steaming from St Johns, Newfoundland, Canada yesterday and are planning to start dive operations around 4am tomorrow morning. Until then we have a lot of preparations and briefings to do.”

OceanGate Expeditions said its focus was on those aboard the vessel and their families.

“We are deeply thankful for the extensive assistance we have received from several government agencies and deep sea companies in our efforts to re-establish contact with the submersible,” the company said in a statement.

“We are working toward the safe return of the crew members.”

A court document filed by OceanGate in the US in April states that the submersible, named Titan, can dive to 13,120ft “with a comfortable safety margin”, Associated Press reported on Monday.

Titan weighs 20,000lb, is made of “titanium and filament wound carbon fibre” and has proven to “withstand the enormous pressures of the deep ocean”, OceanGate reportedly said.

The submersible was taking part in OceanGate’s third annual voyage to the monitor the decay of the ship’s wreckage, following expeditions in 2021 and 2022.

But in a tweet on Monday, CBS Sunday Morning correspondent David Pogue wrote: “You may remember that the @OceanGateExped sub to the #Titanic got lost for a few hours LAST summer, too, when I was aboard…”

In his broadcast from the time, he said: “There is no GPS under water so the surface ship is supposed to guide the sub to the shipwreck by sending text messages.

“But on this dive communication somehow broke down, the sub never found the wreck.”

Mr Harding holds three Guinness World Records, for longest duration and distance traversed at full ocean depth by a crewed vessel, and fastest circumnavigation via both Poles by aeroplane.

Two of these feats were achieved by Mr Harding and fellow explorer Victor Vescovo when they dived to the lowest depth of the Mariana Trench – the deepest part of the ocean – in a two-person submergence vehicle in March 2021.

They spent four hours and 15 minutes traversing the sea floor of the Challenger Deep, travelling 2.88 miles at that depth.

Challenger Deep is about 186 miles south west of Guam in the western Pacific Ocean and has a depth in its Eastern Pool of 35,860ft.

In July 2019, Mr Harding was part of a team that achieved the fastest circumnavigation of Earth via both geographic poles by plane with a time of 46 hours, 40 minutes and 22 seconds.

In June last year, he travelled to space as a tourist with fellow billionaire Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin company.