Titanic tourist sub was lost for a few hours last year during trip

The submarine that vanished during a tourist trip to the wreckage of the Titanic had gotten lost for about two and a half hours during a similar trip last year.

The OceanGate Expeditions’ five-man Titan submarine was featured in a CBS Sunday Morning segment late last year, with correspondent David Pogue following a trip to the shipwreck site about 370 miles off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada.

Reacting to the news that Titan and its crew had gone missing Monday morning, Pogue tweeted that he was on board the same sub when he was filming his story last summer.

“You may remember that the @OceanGateExped sub to the #Titanic got lost for a few hours LAST summer, too, when I was aboard,” Pogue said.

During the segment, Pogue narrated that the submarine had lost communication with the ship guiding its movement underwater, ruining the trip some tourists paid $250,000 to join.

“There’s no GPS underwater, so the surface ship is supposed to guide the sub to the ship wreck by sending text messages,” Pogue said in the story. “But on this dive, communications somehow broke down. The sub never found the wreck.”

Despite the hiccup, the company was able to later launch a successful dive, with the crew taking in the site of the world’s most infamous shipwreck.

Monday’s disappearance occurred about one hour and 45 minutes into Titan’s dive, the US Coast Guard said in a tweet. The research vessel Polar Prince had lost contact with Titan at that time.

OceanGate says that while the entire trip to the wreckage site takes eight days, the dive itself can last up to 10 hours.

The company noted that because of its location in the middle of the Atlantic, they rely on Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites for its communications at sea. 

World-renowned explorer Hamish Harding was confirmed to be among those inside the sub when it disappeared, with the 58-year-old British millionaire boasting about the opportunity to see the Titanic in the days leading up to the voyage.

“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,” Harding wrote on Instagram alongside a picture of himself signing a banner celebrating the expedition.

Harding also said that among those joining him on the mission was veteran Frenchy Navy diver P.H. Nargeolet, who has led previous expeditions to the Titanic. It remains unclear if Nargeolet is among those missing.

OceanGate posted on Twitter last week that only one expedition to the Titanic was ongoing due to weather in Newfoundland, with two more planned for June 2024.

Harding’s post prior to his disappearance echoed that the submarine had a short window of opportunity to visit the Titanic amid the poor weather.