Race Against the Clock As Search Continues for Titanic Submarine

‘Contact was lost one hour 45 minutes into the Titan’s trip, suggesting the crew may have been close to, or at, the bottom,’ said Frank Owen OAM, a retired Royal Australian Navy official and submarine escape and rescue project director. ‘The Titan has a maximum speed of three knots, but would be slower the deeper it goes.’

From the wreckage over a century old, there is a huge amount of debris laying on the sea floor making for a highly dangerous environment. In the case of emergency, the drop weights which help the Titan to descend can be released creating enough buoyancy to take it to the surface.

While it is still deemed too early to say what happened to the Titan, experts have suggested several likely scenarios, including a failure in the craft’s communications systems, becoming tangled in wreckage of the Titanic, to a power failure. Another scenario is that there has been a leak in the pressure hull, in which case the prognosis is not good, said Alistair Greig, a professor of marine engineering at University College London.