A time-sensitive, international effort to locate a submersible that went missing while touring the Titanic’s wreckage was joined by a plane built, in part, to hunt submarines.
Canada deployed CP-140 Aurora aircraft to assist in the search for the tourist submersible, called Titan, which has been missing since Sunday morning, when all contact with the vessel was lost in a remote part of the northeast Atlantic Ocean.
Lt. Cmdr. Hickey, a Canadian military public affairs officer at the Joint Rescue Coordination Centre (JRCC), said that there is a continuous Aurora presence above the search area, with multiple aircraft swapping out when one needs to refuel. The JRCC said earlier on Tuesday that the Aurora “will provide continuous on scene support with additional aircrews and assets” and offers “surface search and sub-surface acoustic detection capabilities.”
The US Coast Guard noted earlier on Tuesday that a CP-140 Aurora, which it has misidentified as a P-3 Orion, had arrived in the area to carry out sonar searches and was dropping sonar buoys in search of the submersible, just as it would if it were hunting a submarine.
The Aurora, a Lockheed Martin product, is a long-range patrol aircraft that’s used for a variety of missions, including anti-submarine warfare, maritime intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, search and rescue, strike coordination, and operations management, according to the Canadian government. It’s similar to the P-3 Orion, which was used by the US Navy for decades until it was succeeded by the sophisticated P-8 Poseidon.
Rear Adm. John Mauger, commander of the Boston-based First Coast Guard District, initially told reporters on Monday that a Canadian P-8 Poseidon aircraft had joined the search for the missing Titan submersible.
Hickey, however, told Insider that this was a mistake. Canada does not have one in its inventory yet — though it wants to obtain several Poseidon aircraft to replace the aging fleet of Auroras.
Coast Guard officials said the search for the Titan is being conducted around 900 miles off the coast of Cape Cod and down to a depth of around 13,000 feet — that of the Titanic’s wreckage. It was not immediately clear how deep, or close to the Titanic the Titan was when it went missing.
In addition to the Canadian Aurora aircraft, Mauger said the Coast Guard deployed a C-130 aircraft to conduct a visual and radar search of the scene. He said the search has been “a challenge,” but the US is “deploying all available assets” to locate the Titan and rescue the five passengers trapped on board.
Sabrina Singh, the Pentagon’s deputy spokesperson, said on Tuesday that the US military was assisting in the search operations, adding that Washington will have committed three C-130 aircraft to search and rescue flights by the end of the day. She noted that the Navy has been in touch with the Coast Guard and is working to provide “personnel, such as subject matter experts, and assets, as quickly as possible.”
A unified command is currently coordinating operations with the Coast Guard, Navy, Canada, and the company that owns the submersible.
The 21-foot-long Titan, operated by OceanGate Expeditions, left Sunday morning on an eight-day mission to see the Titanic’s wreckage about 400 miles off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada. But less than two hours into its journey, the Titan lost communication with the Canadian Polar Prince research ship.
This sparked a massive rescue effort to locate the Titan, which had about 40 hours of breathing air left as of Tuesday afternoon. The Coast Guard said in an earlier update on Tuesday that two research vessels — the Polar Prince and Deep Energy — were continuing to look for the submersible on the surface. The total search area, according to the most recent Coast Guard update, is about 7,600 square miles, which is bigger than the state of Connecticut.
Video: Inside look at the missing Titanic tourist submersible
