Titan sub rescue crew leader breaks down as he reveals the moment they found debris

The boss of the deep-water search and rescue team sent to locate the Titan submersible broke down as he revealed the moment they found debris from the doomed vessel on the ocean floor.

Edward Cassano, chief executive of Pelagic Research Services, said the company was called in by OceanGate to search for their missing submersible at 5.45pm on June 18 – the day it went missing.

The company was asked to use its deep-water remotely operated vehicle system, Odysseus 6K, to locate Titan and its five passengers who were on a voyage to the wreckage of the Titanic 12,500ft beneath the Atlantic’s surface.

Cassano, who said they ‘immediately began assembling a team’, became emotional on Friday as he addressed the crowd, telling them: ‘It’s a lot of emotions. People are tired.

‘We are very saddened we could not recover a viable sub, but beyond that the system performed.’ 

Once it became clear that it was a recovery mission rather than a rescue, he said the US Coast Guard immediately contacted the families of the Titan crew.

Pelagic was asked to use its deep-water remotely operated vehicle system, Odysseus 6K (pictured), and ‘immediately began assembling a team’ 

Cassano said once it became clear that it was a recovery mission rather than a rescue, the US Coast Guard immediately contacted the families of the Titan crew

Cassano confirmed that Deep Energy – which assisted in the search and rescue attempt – lost one of its remotely operated submersibles during the operation. 

The vehicle was ‘not capable of going deeper’ than 2,700m but in desperation was sent to the sea floor where it  suffered a mechanical issue and was lost. 

Cassano said the plan was ‘latch onto’ the Titan and lift it up as soon as possible if it was intact. It took 90 minutes for them to reach the sea floor. 

Titan lost communication with its mothership Polar Prince at 9.45am on June 18, about 90 minutes into the trip to visit the Titanic wreckage.

The US Navy later revealed it had found an ‘anomaly’ that was consistent with an implosion or explosion in the general vicinity of where the vessel was operating when communications were lost.

Titan imploded killing all five onboard including OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, who was piloting the vessel, British billionaire Hamish Harding, French explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet, and father and son Shahzada and Suleman Dawood. 

Canadian police are now considering whether ‘criminal, federal, or provincial laws’ were broken in the lead up to the Titan submersible disaster.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police will examine ‘the circumstances that led to the deaths’ of the five crew on board the sub and decide ‘whether or not a full investigation is warranted’.

Stockton Rush, the CEO of OceanGate, which launched, Titan, perished on board the submersible along with his four passengers, including PH Nargeolet (right)

Shahzada Dawood, 48, one of Pakistan’s richest men, along with his teenage son Suleman Dawood, 19, (together, left) died on the Titan along with British explorer Hamish Harding (right)

Titan lost communication with its mothership Polar Prince at 9.45am on June 18, about 90 minutes into the trip to visit the Titanic wreckage. 

Superintendent Kent Osmond, of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), said a team of investigators has been established with the ‘sole purpose’ of determining whether a criminal investigation would be warranted.

‘Such an investigation will proceed only if our examination of the circumstances indicate criminal, federal or provincial laws may possibly have been broken,’ he said.

‘Following the US Coast Guard’s announcement earlier this week that debris from the submersible was located and all five on board were presumed dead, we will now look at the circumstances that led to those deaths.

‘Our investigators are engaged and active in this matter as of this morning. Once a determination has been made as to whether or not a full investigation will be launched, we will provide an update at that time.’

Their investigation was ongoing on Friday, a day after it emerged human remains were found during the recovery mission and segments of the vessel were brought ashore. 

The debris field was found on Wednesday on the seafloor, 1,600 feet (500 meters) from the bow of the Titanic, which sits more than two miles (nearly four kilometers) below the ocean’s surface and 400 miles off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada. 

Odysseus 6K retrieved several identifiable parts of the sub which were lifted ashore, including the nose and a large panel which appears to be from its tail end.

Coast Guard officials said they discovered what they believed to be human remains in the debris, which will now be transported aboard a ship to a port in the United States where they will undergo testing and analysis.

Cassano became emotional on Friday as he addressed the crowd, telling them: ‘It’s a lot of emotions. People are tired.’ 

The debris field was found on Wednesday on the seafloor, 1,600 feet (500 meters) from the bow of the Titanic, which sits more than two miles (nearly four kilometers) below the ocean’s surface and 400 miles off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada 

The titanium front-end of Titan, where its viewing port was located, was clearly identifiable among the sections which were recovered

Officials on Wednesday said the remains were ‘carefully removed within the wreckage’ that was recovered earlier in the day.

‘I am grateful for the coordinated international and interagency support to recover and preserve this vital evidence at extreme offshore distances and depths,’ Marine Board of Investigation Capt. Jason Neubauer said in a statement.

‘The evidence will provide investigators from several international jurisdictions with critical insights into the cause of this tragedy,’ he added.

But Neubauer noted there is a ‘substantial amount of work’ still to be done to understand what happened to the Titan sub and to ‘help ensure a similar tragedy does not occur again.’

The discoveries surprised experts who suspected Titan was completely destroyed when it suffered a ‘catastrophic implosion’.

Earlier on Wednesday a coroner told DailyMail.com she believed the remains of those onboard would likely never be recovered.

The MBI will continue its evidence collection and witness interviews to inform a public hearing about the incident, and Pelagic Research Services — whose remote operating vehicle discovered the debris fields — said its team is ‘still on mission’.

‘They have been working around the clock now for 10 days, through the physical and mental challenges of this operation, and are anxious to finish the mission and return to their loved ones,’ the company said in a statement. 

The titanium parts retrieved are likely to have suffered less damage in the implosion, compared with the weaker carbon fiber elements 

The salvaged remains of Titan were lifted to shore by a huge crane on Wednesday morning

News of the missing ship spurred a multinational search-and-rescue operation, which ended when officials announced the sub likely imploded, killing all those onboard instantly.

For years prior to the implosion, experts had warned that Rush’s self-designed submersible was not capable of safely reaching the Titanic wreckage on the ocean floor. 

They said its carbon fiber hull, which housed the five crew, was its ‘Achilles heel’ because the material is not considered suitable for dives at the depths reached by the vessel. 

Titanic director James Cameron, a renowned deep sea explorer and submersibles expert, said previously that the hull was likely broken into ‘very small pieces’ in the incident.

‘If I had to put money down on what the finding [of the investigation] will be, the Achilles heel of the sub was the composite cylinder that was the main hull that the people were inside,’ he said.

‘There were two titanium end caps on each end. They are relatively intact on the sea floor. But that carbon fiber composite cylinder is now just in very small pieces. It’s all rammed into one of the hemispheres. It’s pretty clear that’s what failed.’

Carbon fiber is prone to delamination, the process whereby a material fractures into layers while put under pressure.

It is thought the craft’s titanium components better withstood the disaster, while the weaker carbon fiber parts – including the hull – are more likely to have been crushed into tiny pieces.

The parts lifted from the ocean appear to align with Cameron’s observations, including that the larger piece was the vessel’s titanium shell. Investigators will now work to confirm what each piece is.

Titan’s carbon fiber hull and its acrylic viewport were subject to several warnings and James Cameron singled them out as ‘potential failure points’ on the vessel

But, despite these incessant warnings from naval experts, OceanGate had assured the public for year that its Titan submersible was safe. 

The company had boasted in promotional material about Titan’s ‘Real Time Hull Health Monitoring’, which constantly checked the integrity of the vessel throughout the dive.

The system used acoustic sensors and strain gauges to ‘analyze the effects of changing pressure on the vessel as the submersible dives deeper, and accurately assess the integrity of the structure’.

But legal filings reveal a former director of marine operations ‘expressed concern that this was problematic because this type of acoustic analysis would only show when a component is about to fail—often milliseconds before an implosion—and would not detect any existing flaws prior to putting pressure onto the hull.’