A fleet of aircraft and specialized craft joins the frantic search for the missing tourist submarine in the North Atlantic with five people on board and running out of oxygen.
Among the devices used are submarine sensing aircraft, remote-controlled robots (ROB) and listening devices to help scan this part of the ocean in search of the submarine Titan, which was planning to visit the wreck of the British ocean liner Titanic.
Air searches at the start
At the start of the search on Sunday, US and Canadian military jets were sent to where the Polar Prince, the mothership that launched the Titan submarine hours earlier, was operating.
Several C-130 aircraft fly over the surface of the sea to try to make visual contact using radar. For their part, Canadian P-3 maritime patrol aircraft dropped sonar buoys to try to pick up sounds from the ocean surface. In addition, a Canadian P-8 submarine chaser joined the search effort.
It was the Canadian P-3s that detected the sound of the submarine on Tuesday, giving the first glimmer of hope that the people on the Titan might still be alive, the US Coast Guard said.
Boats in the area
Deep Energy, a boat that installs pipes on the seabed, rushed to the scene and dropped robots into the water. A Coast Guard photo shows the boat at sea and the deck littered with huge pieces of heavy equipment. Three other boats arrived at the location on Wednesday morning.
The Canadian Coast Guard contributed the Atlantic Merlin, which has an underwater robot, and the John Cabot, a boat with side-scan sonar capabilities to capture more detailed images.
The third is the Skandi Vinland, a multi-purpose vessel from Norwegian offshore service company DOF, which has launched two underwater robots.
More ships planned
The L’Atlante, a research vessel from France’s National Institute of Oceanic Sciences, will arrive at the site this Wednesday evening. This ship has a robot named Victor 6000, which has an umbilical cord five miles long and can reach a depth more than enough to reach the sinking spot of the Titanic on the sea floor, nearly four kilometers deep.
The US Coast Guard said four more boats are expected, including the Canadian military Glace Bay, which has a medical team and a hyperbaric chamber used to treat people involved in diving accidents.
Source: DN
