Original subtitles

MAN: The location of the search

is approximately 900 miles east of Cape Cod,

in a water depth of 13,000ft.

MAN 2: 7,600 square miles,

an area larger than the state of Connecticut.

MAN 3: The search efforts have focused on both surface

and subsurface.

That operation is currently ongoing.

MAN 2: This is an incredibly complex search operation.

Sometimes, we don't find what we're looking for.

We offer our most heartfelt thoughts and prayers...

..for the five crew members,

their families and their loved ones.

An international search and rescue team

is scouring the ocean

for any sign of the missing submersible

on a voyage to the Titanic.

REPORTER: After 48 hours lost at the bottom of the ocean,

will the mini sub meet the same fate as the wreckage it was looking for?

NICOLA WALKER: It's a story that captivated the world

when five men dived to the wreck of the Titanic,

and go missing somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean.

The scale of the search to find them is unprecedented.

Canadian Coast Guard, French authorities.

You had American Coast Guard ships, aeroplanes.

It was frantic.

As the whole world watches, it's a race against time.

They only have so much life support on board,

and the oxygen is running out.

Air force audio recordings gave the world hope.

WOMAN: Unidentified banging noises that appeared to be manmade.

That's when the search really changed direction.

KNOCKING

But what is the truth of what happened to the Titan sub?

We've taken a completely new approach to the sub design,

and it's all run with this game controller and these touch screens.

Now, shocking new evidence and unseen footage

tell the story of its fateful last journey.

Who was to blame...

We all voiced concerns about what was happening

in terms of the engineering of Titan.

..and what went wrong?

We heard when the vessel actually imploded.

The tragedy of the event will never go away.

Lives that were lost.

Real people, families, friends, loved ones

will-will be affected for the rest of their lives.

April the 10th, 1912, the most famous ship ever built

set sail from Southampton to New York...

The Titanic.

Five days later,

it was two-and-a-half miles at the bottom of the ocean.

More than 1,500 people lost their lives

after the 269m-long ship struck an iceberg.

Now, more than a century on,

it's a story that has captured the imagination of millions.

Since the discovery of the wreck in 1985,

most who have dived down to it have been salvage hunters and scientists.

But it has been an obsession for explorers, too.

It's the Titanic.

People are fascinated by the Titanic.

People are just transfixed by this shipwreck and visiting it.

It's just this lure.

It's the most famous shipwreck in the world.

The allure of Titanic is the romance of the story,

added to the fact that it's so remotely positioned,

two miles at the bottom of the ocean.

So few people are able to see it.

In 2009, a company called OceanGate was founded.

Its aim - to take paying tourists to the Titanic

in a deep-sea submersible.

I think there was a market gap, market need, desire, passion...

..drive for opportunity to dive the wreck.

And OceanGate saw that opportunity. And I suspect that...

the lure and the excitement of the opportunity

probably masked the risk of what potentially lay in store.

That ship's lying at the bottom of the ocean,

not because of the nature of its steel

or the nature of its compartments but just because of bad seamanship.

The captain was warned there were icebergs ahead.

It was a moonless night,

and he ploughed ahead for whatever reason.

I think there was some greed, there was some glory in it.

And here we are again, and at the same place.

Newfoundland and Labrador... it's a small province.

It's Canada's youngest province.

There are only about 500,000 people here.

Being close to the Titanic expeditions

that go to the Titanic tend to leave from St John's.

So, we had heard about OceanGate in the years previous

and their plans to take a manned submersible down to the Titanic.

On Friday the 16th of June, 2023,

a ship called the Polar Prince sets out from St John's, Newfoundland.

Its destination - the site of the Titanic wreck,

400 miles southeast in the Atlantic Ocean.

Towing behind it is Titan,

a 6.7m-long deep water submersible.

One of my colleagues was hiking Signal Hill,

looking over the harbour,

and had taken some photos of the Polar Prince

going out through the harbour in St John's,

out onto the open ocean,

and you could see the submersible being towed behind it.

There are five people preparing to dive 2.5 miles down.

Hamish Harding, a British billionaire

who runs a Dubai-based private jet dealership.

Hamish was a very amiable guy, very nice guy,

fiercely intellectual, thought deeply about everything,

but saw excitement in almost everything around him.

Also on board is 48-year-old businessman Shahzada Dawood

from one of Pakistan's richest families -

and his son Suleman, who is just 19 years old.

Their guide is 77-year-old former French Navy commander,

Paul-Henri Nargeolet.

Paul-Henri Nargeolet was a larger-than-life character.

He was a very, very fun guy and extremely good at what he did,

which was diving submersibles, diving Titanic,

which he did 37 times.

Each of the deep-sea tourists

has paid nearly £200,000 to OceanGate for the trip.

The CEO of the company will be piloting Titan for the dive.

His name is Stockton Rush.

We had spoken with Stockton Rush

on the St John's Morning Show a few weeks prior,

and he had come on to just kind of set up the season.

I met Stockton Rush in 2016.

He did have a big personality.

He had the personality that you would attribute to an explorer.

By 4am, the Polar Prince is at the site of the Titanic,

but the conditions at sea are too dangerous to dive.

We had a lot of heavy fog,

and so I think the fog that morning had delayed them a little bit.

You're possibly getting anxious because of the delay, frustrated.

You just want to get into that submersible

and get on with the dive.

According to OceanGate's crew waiver,

Titan has made fewer than 90 dives,

but only 13 to a depth as far down as Titanic.

Several others encountered delays,

including one documented by a film crew in 2022.

Candid footage captured Stockton Rush briefing passengers.

We want everyone going into this fully informed.

This is an experimental sub.

This is a dangerous environment.

Very few people have been down there,

and so we wanna make sure that you're going in with an open eye

and you understand what's going on.

If you don't wanna do it, at any time, feel free to say,

"Hey, I wanna take a pass." We can work something out.

June 18th, 2023, just before 8am,

the passengers are happy to make the dive.

They've all signed a waiver

that mentions death four times on the first page.

They board Titan.

Once locked in... they cannot get out.

Being bolted into a submarine is a huge safety issue.

That alone, frankly, would scare the bejesus out of me.

Once you sit in that submersible, all the electrics have been done.

All the topside crew have done the preparation

and checks and double checks and gone through their checklists

again and again, you're committed.

Then the hatch is shut,

and then the realisation dawns.

"This is happening, and it's a bit late to turn back now."

NICOLA WALKER: In the middle of the Atlantic Ocean,

five men are about to take the trip of a lifetime.

They are bolted inside the unregulated experimental

deep-sea submersible, Titan,

and they're preparing to dive to the wreck of the Titanic.

It's just such a unique experience.

Such a once-in-a-lifetime venture.

Great adventures come with great risks,

but sometimes, you have to take those risks.

Titanic is 2.5 miles down.

It's a dangerous environment.

At that depth, pressure increases dramatically.

The enormous weight of the Atlantic Ocean above

crushing down onto the submersible.

Down there, you're talking 350

or 400 atmospheres pressure outside

versus one atmosphere pressure inside.

If you even got a pinprick hole in the submersible,

the pressure of the water coming through that hole

would be like a laser that would cut a man in half.

So why would anyone take such extraordinary risks?

Those who've been there say it's life-changing.

Touch down on the sea bed.

It's like a lunar landscape. Just colourless sand.

And then suddenly, within a metre of my face,

the other side of the porthole was the bow rail of Titanic.

Just breathtaking.

Stockton Rush claims Titan has been to the Titanic

on ten previous dives.

It captured these haunting pictures from the deep.

Arthur Loibl is one of only a handful of Titan passengers

to see Titanic first-hand.

After two or three hours now,

we reached the place where the Titanic is.

What we saw of the Titanic, one of the first was the famous bow.

That was amazing.

Everybody was happy.

The mood was very good in the ship,

although Stockton Rush was very happy.

PH was our guide. He was telling us everything about the Titanic.

Every window, what happened, who was his cabin.

Here was the captain's toilet. Here was the captain's bathroom.

He gave us really a feeling we are at the Titanic, 1912,

and walking around the railways and everything.

It was amazing, what he was telling us.

The portholes are just haunting

when you imagine what went on behind those portholes.

The rust that is coming off the wreck

run down the portholes like tears.

It was a once-in-a-lifetime trip.

So few people ever get the chance to do that.

The OceanGate expedition starts to descend to Titanic at 8am.

Titan will explore the wreck for two hours

before resurfacing at 3pm Eastern Time.

It will take around about two hours

to descend from the sea surface down to around 4,000m.

You're so sort of excited about the prospect.

You're not really thinking about the claustrophobia.

You're certainly not thinking about the likelihood

of anything going wrong at that point.

There are various environmental zones

that you will pass through on your way down

to a depth of about 4,000m.

The first zone is what we call the Photic Zone.

Everything becomes very blue.

Extraordinary beautiful colours you experience as the water changes,

and you have the change of different temperatures,

currents, eddies.

You then start to see some sea life.

Then you enter into what we call the Twilight Zone,

which is a depth of around 200m to 1,000m depth.

It gets dark.

It gets pitch black after probably about the first hour and a bit.

The pilot turns off the lights, and you are in pitch black.

Can't even see each other.

Maybe the odd red light on some of the controls.

It's very still. It's very dark.

It's incredibly quiet. It is very peaceful.

DIK BARTON: It's extremely quiet, and it's very, very eerie.

The next stage of the journey

is the moment the Titanic comes into view...

..but not for the Titan.

At 9:45am on 18th of June,

suddenly, communication with Titan is lost.

Those aboard the Polar Prince would have been checking everything

that they could to re-establish communication.

The speculation at that time was, "Why? What happened?"

The frustration of the topside crew would have been extraordinary.

"Something is clearly very wrong. How are we going to resolve this?"

I'm not sure that they would immediately assume

something disastrous had happened.

They would want to rule out all sorts of other causes.

There's an expectation as a deep-sea researcher

that anything you put over the side of the boat into the ocean

can fail in some way, and often,

electrical systems will fail.

That's the most likely thing -

they've had some kind of power failure.

Maybe they're taking time to get their back-up system operational.

Once they do, they'll be OK.

This wasn't totally out of the ordinary.

We know that in past missions,

they had lost communications as well.

They knew that communicating with the submersible

at that depth was difficult.

Those in the know have speculated about Titan's actions at this point.

Film-maker and deep-sea explorer James Cameron

made this shocking revelation in an interview with ABC News.

It's our belief, we understand from inside the community,

that they had dropped their ascent weights

and they were coming up, trying to manage an emergency.

I have heard some talk about the possibility

that they knew that something was wrong,

that perhaps their detection system had alerted to some kind of failure

in the hull and that they were attempting to resurface.

If that's true, that will have been very distressful,

particularly for the passengers.

The focus of both Stockton and PH

would have been trying to gain some control of the submersible,

trying to recover some height

and getting the vessel stable and back to surface.

And that had been their total utter focus.

The fear that that would generate, I can't even comprehend.

The last little while, I think,

would have been absolutely torturous.

Meanwhile, the US Navy's enemy submarine detection systems

pick something up deep in the ocean.

Navy had heard a noise on the day the Titan lost communications.

The US Navy at the time would have said,

"Yeah, I think we've recognised something

"that is vaguely what we would expect

"from something like Titan having some sort of incident.

"We've got to analyse it. We've got to make sure."

Back on the surface,

there is an anxious wait for those aboard the Polar Prince...

which includes some family members of the Titan's crew.

You can imagine, you're 685km out on the Atlantic Ocean,

lose communications with the submersible,

the panic that would have set in

on board the Polar Prince at the time.

The person that I identified most strongly with

through all of this was Christine Dawood,

who's the mother of Suleman Dawood,

who was on the support vessel, the Polar Prince,

when she heard that all communication had broken down.

She had given up her place in the submersible

so that her son could have the experience

of going down and seeing the Titanic.

And suddenly, this. And you imagine this hellish nightmare scenario.

Time ticks by.

Five hours later, 3pm,

the Titan failed to come back to the surface

as it was scheduled to.

Bearing in mind that they'd lost contact,

you would think alarm bells were ringing

when there was still no sign of Titan at the surface

when it was meant to be there.

Worse still, the submersible only contains limited life support,

and it's been slowly running out since the hatch was bolted shut.

They were equipped with about 96 hours of oxygen

on board the Titan,

and at that point, the clock had been ticking for some time.

It would have been absolutely freezing.

It would have been dark.

They would have been running out of oxygen.

So we knew the situation that these people were in

wasn't gonna be good.

At 5:25pm Eastern Time,

the crew of the Polar Prince alerts authorities...

nearly eight hours after losing communication with the Titan.

There was a gap of eight hours

before the mothership contacted shore authorities

to let them know that there was an issue and a problem.

Emergency services, like the Coast Guard,

they would want every hour, every minute

to be able to come up with a plan in order to effect a rescue.

But finally, a rescue mission is about to begin.

It was a rescue operation.

As far as we knew, it was missing.

And could it be found in time before the oxygen ran out?

We knew then that this was going to be

a massive, massive, massive search effort.

It was going to be a monumental effort,

and the people down in that submersible

would fully be aware of that and fear the worst.

You don't give in until the very last moment.

Never, ever give in. It's a sports thing.

It's an expedition thing. You just never give in.

If there's 1% chance that people could be rescued,

you go for it.

You've got to put your resources into doing and try and rescue them.

NICOLA WALKER: 400 miles off the coast of Canada,

five men were on what should have been the trip of a lifetime -

diving to the wreck of the Titanic.

But communication has now been lost for eight hours,

and their oxygen is thought to be running out.

Knowing the dangers, I was fearful it was not gonna end well

because I can't imagine the terror that they would be going through

at the bottom of the ocean.

At 5:25pm, the first distress call goes out.

The Canadian Air Force answers.

I'm Major Dawn MacAuley,

and I'm a search and rescue helicopter pilot.

I can proudly say I've been part of the Royal Canadian Air Force

for 18 years.

We were the first point of contact from the Polar Prince.

I was listening in to the call,

and I feel like my face probably was a little bit in shock,

you know, kind of in like a, "Whoa, this is a...

"This is intense, right?"

The Canadian Air Force is being called in

to carry out surface searches -

flying over the ocean to spot any sign of Titan.

They will deploy a specialist aircraft -

the CP-140 Aurora.

The CP-140 Aurora is the long-range patroller.

They are the main asset for Canada's air force

when it comes to intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.

And they have a sensor suite

that's conducive to anti-submarine warfare.

So, essentially, use those capabilities

to find a commercial sub, in this case.

They're a sub hunter.

It's a huge task, and time is slipping away.

It's a scary, scary situation to put yourself into and to imagine.

You know, some people would prefer not to imagine it,

but I think from a compassionate search and rescue perspective,

it's important for us to put ourselves in that situation.

And you're hopeful -

you want to bring those people back to their families.

And that's what's driving you. That's what's motivating you.

But searching from the air has its limitations.

Our search and rescue expertise kind of stops at the surface.

It's not part of our mandate.

We have nothing written in manuals to search underwater.

If Titan is at the bottom of the ocean,

the only way to reach it is with another deep-sea submersible.

But there are only ten in the world capable of diving to those depths...

and the closest one is nearly 2,000 miles away.

My name is Jesse Doren.

I'm the ROV manager here at Pelagic Research Services.

I manage the subsea equipment that we have.

On Sunday, June 18th,

I got a call from one of my colleagues

that started the whole thing rolling here.

He told me he was working with OceanGate,

and they had a manned submersible in the water

that they'd lost contact with.

And they were approaching the time when

the submersible should have returned to the surface automatically

in an aborted mission-type scenario.

Our capability is to go down to 6,000 metres,

so we were well suited to get down to the depths where Titanic lies

and affect a search and rescue if needed.

This is the Odysseus 6,000-metre vehicle.

This is a remotely-operated vehicle.

The vehicle itself, the Odysseus 6K,

is equipped with a variety of cameras

looking at a variety of directions

to give the pilot a sense of place and space.

But before you can see something visually,

we can also see something through acoustics,

and we bring a sonar down.

This vehicle is rated to go to 6,000 metres,

and that means everything on the vehicle

can withstand that kind of pressure.

We were called immediately after the Coast Guard was contacted.

It was the opportunity... to rescue the crew of Titan.

And now our plan was...

go to sea floor, locate Titan,

start bringing Titan to the surface.

But the planning process, typically,

to go on an operation like this...

takes weeks or months. We had days.

We were hyperfocused on rescue from the moment we got the call,

and that's when our clock started.

But, really, the clock that we were under

was, of course, when the hatch was closed on Titan.

If they are at the bottom of the ocean,

the Titan crew face an agonising wait while rescue teams mobilise.

And the next morning,

the news reaches the mainland for the first time.

People were starting to come in at around 9am

when we got a phone call to the newsroom.

A reporter had asked us if we knew anything about a submersible

that had gone missing off the coast of Saint John's,

and immediately, we knew that this had to be Titan.

The story is about to explode internationally.

It was absolutely wild

to see the world's media descend on Saint John's.

A deep-sea submersible used to take people

to view the wreck of the Titanic has gone missing.

Trapped in a tiny submarine far beneath the ocean's surface

with time and oxygen running out.

There was a global media feeding frenzy.

There was something in this story to appeal to everybody.

Didn't matter where you lived anywhere in the world.

The tourist sub that's vanished

thousands of metres below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean.

SPEAKS IN URDU

Dieses Boot, die Titan, gelten die funf Abenteuer als verschollen.

It was one of those things that just grabbed everybody's attention,

and we all became obsessed with,

"Is there a chance they're gonna get out alive?"

For the Coast Guard and the Navy, it is a race against the clock.

Oxygen levels inside it are dropping.

It was an international story

that was breaking and developing quickly

right in our backyard.

The Coast Guard headquarters is, like, right down the street

from The Globe offices.

This particular story stood out

from really all the other stories I've covered.

Such a compelling story on so many different levels.

You have a experimental submersible

with tourists going down to visit the wreck.

You had the time component, you know,

that 96-hour window, and everybody was counting down.

The world was watching.

Everywhere was reporting on it.

There was a massive interest in the whole rescue operation.

That something's missing whilst diving down there

immediately makes it of interest to the public.

You throw in, "Oh, it's tourists going down there,"

and then it's turned into,

"Oh, it's billionaire tourists going down there."

It was absolutely guaranteed, really,

to be at the forefront of all of the news.

Now, the price for this trip is extremely high-end -

£195,000 per person.

That was one of the things

that caught a lot of people's interest early on,

was when they saw the price tag.

$250,000 per person is enormous,

and it's something that's out of reach for 99.9% of people.

That turned heads.

As the story began to unfold,

more and more information came in about the resources available

to try and find the submersible

and then to recover the submersible if it was still down there.

The search might have been the only thing

more frantic than the news coverage.

On Monday morning,

the Canadian Air Force launches the CP-140 Aurora.

We were actually the first crew to go out on that Monday morning.

The crew was 13 people for that particular mission.

My role in that was the communicator,

to speak from the aircraft to our tasking authority

to let them know how the mission was progressing.

I'm at the ops desk in a room just like this one.

A lot of what we do is we're making phone calls to task the aircraft,

to coordinate what the tasking is, where they wanna be,

making sure that everybody's kind of on the same page.

We actually flew for about 11 hours on our sortie.

That is time to get to the scene of action.

And then six, six-and-a-half hours actually conducting our search,

and then, obviously, we have to come home.

When we were coming home,

there was another aeroplane that had been made ready, had a crew.

They were briefed, and they came out to replace us.

We're given a search area to start with and saying,

"This is where we believe the object to be."

Over time, because of ocean currents and the winds,

that area will get bigger and bigger and bigger.

As well as searching the expanding surface area,

Captain Thomas and his crew are also listening under the water

by using state-of-the-art equipment.

Sonobuoys that were dropped from the aircraft

basically listen to noise in the water.

Sound in the water travels further and faster than it does in the air.

So using those facilities from the sonobuoys,

we will put them into the water to see what is unusual.

Things that perhaps shouldn't normally be there in the water,

then we will try and figure out where the source of that noise is.

We would then report that to the Boston Coast Guard

because they were the main people

who were driving and coordinating the search activities.

We just wanted to give them everything we had to help out

cos I think we recognised the scale of the situation.

By late afternoon,

the world heard from the man in charge of the search effort.

The location of the search

is approximately 900 miles east of Cape Cod

in a water depth of roughly 13,000ft.

We are deploying all available assets

to make sure that we can locate the craft

and rescue the people on board.

We've coordinated

with the Canadian Coast Guard and Canadian Armed Forces

to deploy additional assets to the scene.

It seemed like there was, like, this collective hope.

For as long as the Coast Guard

said it was a search and rescue mission...

..there was that hope.

You had Canadian Coast Guard.

You had American Coast Guard.

You had any equipment that might have been helpful

anywhere on the eastern seaboard of the United States.

Were we focused on rescue? The answer is absolutely.

And not only were we focused on rescue,

the entire international response was focused on rescue.

With the world now watching

and an international search effort getting underway

both above and below the sea,

there is a belief Titan will be found in time.

We had the time in which the oxygen ran out

on the board in our ops room, so we were very, very aware

of when this search... was going to end.

NICOLA WALKER: Titan has been missing for more than 24 hours.

At least five planes

and a Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker are searching for it,

with more ships on the way.

What we're really focused on is locating the vessel,

which could either be in the surface or subsurface.

And so we're bringing in technical expertise to understand

the dynamics of underwater search

and underwater rescue operations.

One of the first phone calls that I made

was to a man named Mi'sel Joe,

who owns the Polar Prince,

so I knew that he would be in the know.

And so I spoke with him, and he said,

"The fog is really thick out there.

"They're hoping that they surfaced and we just can't find them.

"There's some hope that they did make it to the surface

"but they're just out of sight, they're lost somewhere in the fog."

If Titan did resurface, a rescue is still not straightforward.

The surface search is more than 7,500 square miles,

an area roughly the size of Wales.

And with comms lost,

the crew would have no way of letting anyone know where they are.

One of the most worrying things about Titan

was it was secured by these 15 very heavy bolts,

so even if you got to the surface, you couldn't actually get out of it.

So there was a chance that you could run out of air

even though you're on the surface.

My concern was that you'd have people freezing to death

because of the conditions.

You're not insulated, and you're suffocating at the surface.

They would have no way to get out. They would be trapped in there.

Immediately, your brain goes to a very claustrophobic place.

If you picture yourself in a tube-shaped vessel

the size of a minivan,

cramped together with four other people in the dark water,

the situation is like the stuff of nightmares.

It's not just confinement to contend with.

Temperatures that deep down can dip to 2.5C.

It would have likely have started to get very, very cold.

I'm told they had some kind of heating system,

but they probably would have had to shut that down

if they needed to conserve energy.

There would have been condensation. It would have been very dark.

That's all part of what made this story so interesting

and so captivating for people.

It's one part...

adventure and one part... horror.

If Titan is on the sea floor,

their hopes may rest with one specialist team.

And they are racing against time to reach Titan

before the oxygen runs out -

but they are 2,000 miles away

and need help getting there.

We were at the airport 0400, and the loading began.

The Air Force was sending heavy-lift aircraft

to the Buffalo International Airport,

and that was a result of, actually, OceanGate contacting the Air Force.

The kit is about 30 tons of equipment.

Three Air Force C-17s gave us a ride.

We would not have been there in time if it wasn't for them.

We had to get there as fast as possible

because there were people in trouble

and their oxygen resources are limited, and we knew that.

That was definitely in the back of our mind all the time,

the minutes ticking by, and,

you know, we were doing everything we could

to make the next step go as smoothly as possible.

With the assistance of the US Air Force,

the Odysseus crew are now on the way,

but it will still take them a day and a half

to reach the Titan dive site.

As time wears on, hope is beginning to fade.

Titan has now been missing for more than 60 hours.

In Newfoundland and Labrador, we cover...

a fair amount of nautical disasters,

and we know that when contact is lost that far out,

it usually doesn't end well.

On top of the sea, people don't survive,

but down below, in frigid, deep, dark water,

your odds of survival...

..are even slimmer.

But then... an extraordinary development.

Late in day two,

CNN reports that the Canadians have heard banging noises

at 30-minute intervals from under the ocean,

and that changed everything.

This is the sound that was heard.

MUFFLED BANGING

RAPID BANGING

RYAN RAMSEY: Sounds like it could be somebody knocking.

The symmetry between those knockings is very unusual.

There's clearly an echo.

Um... But that distinctive bum-bum, bum-bum...

BANGING SOUNDS REPEAT

It's rhythmic. It was like somebody is making that sound.

And the fact that it's repeated is really unusual.

You can't discount it, you can't discredit it,

so you have to keep that... that opportunity of potential hope alive.

If the sounds are man-made,

many think they are coming from the crew on board Titan.

Cos if they're banging, they must be alive,

and if they're alive, there's a chance you can save them.

For the families on the support vessel the Polar Prince,

obviously, the news of the banging was,

or at least appeared to be, exactly what they were praying for,

what they were looking for, what they were hoping for.

DULL THUDS

"If we make it obvious it's human by making it rhythmic,

"then waiting and pausing, then more rhythmic banging,"

I just thought that's the typical sort of thing

that Hamish would have come up with.

That's signs of life, so the worst hasn't happened.

There's a hope here now that we've just got to find them.

Could the sounds mean a rescue is possible?

When we had identified some possible banging noises

that appeared to be man-made,

that's when the search really changed directions.

Bringing industry and bringing militaries

and bringing countries together to try and save these people.

Rescue teams now have a focus.

They're racing to the source of the banging.

But Titan's estimated oxygen is running dangerously low,

and the clock is ticking.

The sun is coming up. It's a new day of searching.

But the sun rising is an indication that time is slipping away.

The ticking clock

and the fact that four days of oxygen became three days,

became two days, became 12 hours, became six hours...

..it brought an urgency to it

which elevated it far beyond a normal news story.

Finally, deep-sea experts from Pelagic Research

arrive at the Titan dive site.

Early in the morning of the 22nd...

um, we got on site, you know, right around daybreak.

You know, we certainly knew the window was closing.

The entire group of responders that were on scene -

Air Force pilots, Canadian Coast Guard folks,

industry folks from multiples of ships.

I went out to the stern there and looked around.

I'm like, "Oh, yeah, this is... There's something going on here.

"There's a lot of ships here."

You don't usually see that all in one spot.

Upon arrival on site,

we had about 45 minutes to an hour to actually get everything set up.

Ed and Jesse's submersible Odysseus is one of only a few in the world

that can reach the depths of the Titanic.

We're expert in this area. This is what we do.

I mean, there's no question that everybody was on adrenaline.

Everybody was working tirelessly.

I was very much sleep-deprived and running on adrenaline.

I got up with the guys who were there

in order to get the vehicle launched the first time and into the water.

At 4:09am, Odysseus is in the water -

but there's still a long way to go.

Of course, we're focused on getting to seafloor.

That focus was something that drove us

to actually descend faster than we normally descend.

We normally descend at 25 metres a minute.

We were descending at 35 metres a minute.

We had to get there as fast as possible

because there were people in trouble

and their oxygen resources are limited, and we knew that.

We were always thinking about them.

I mean, inherently, in every breath that we took,

it was thinking of those breaths.

It will take Odysseus two hours

to dive the 3,800m to the sea bed.

All the while, Titan's oxygen supply slowly dwindles.

An hour into the rescue attempt, Odysseus has reached 2,000m.

Thirty minutes later, it passes 3,000m.

Finally, at 6:15am, Odysseus is on the sea floor.

Titan's oxygen supply is now down to less than two hours.

And then...

..disaster.

We actually ran into an issue.

We started moving, and some of our thrusters stopped working.

And this is the toughest radio call I think I've probably ever made,

which was, "Guys, we have a vehicle issue.

"We're not gonna be effective."

After coming so far,

Ed and his team seem to have fallen at the final hurdle

and begin to resurface.

For the crew on board Titan,

their would-be rescuers are now not coming.

But then, an hour later...

..hope.

Now, my team started to recover the vehicle,

and a couple hundred metres off the sea floor,

they turned the system off and turned it back on,

and we regained full functionality.

We're back in business, we're heading to sea floor.

But the delay has eaten into the remaining time...

and almost as soon as Odysseus reaches the sea floor again

and restarts its search...

I remember I was on the radio, um, NPR, that morning,

just after 8am Eastern Time.

"Ryan, we've been on this story since Monday.

"How much oxygen could be left there?"

"It could be gone. It could be gone.

"Based on the estimates that were given to us on Tuesday

"by the American Coast Guard,

"it would have expired about ten minutes ago."

That moment was kind of, you know, you could feel it in your chest.

The moment estimated oxygen ran out

could be the tragic end of this story,

but for many, until Titan is found,

they will hold on to a sense of hope, however small.

CHRIS BROWN: Do you wanna know?

Do you want to know that it's looking really bad?

Probably not... because you're still clinging to that hope.

You start to think... Well, people like Hamish

would immediately be thinking, "Well, we need to preserve oxygen,

"so let's breathe slower. Let's try and calm everything down."

We started hearing from some experts

about how if the water was cold -

and it would be at that depth -

you know, they likely would have gone into hypothermia,

which would help them preserve the oxygen, breathe less.

Maybe there's still a chance.

Now, you spoke to experts who said, "Well, maybe this could happen,

"and maybe the oxygen could last a little bit longer.

"And maybe that was a sound that we heard, and maybe we can find them.

"And maybe they will, you know,

"somehow manage to get back to the surface."

Because until all hope is gone, there's always a tiny slice of it.

And so the search continues.

There was potential hope, so we made the decision to keep searching.

You can't look at one stop as the end of the game.

It's the confidence that you'll find a way.

What we were all hoping for was a chance at rescuing the crew.

But what will they find?

Everyone's kind of holding their breath at that point

for what's going to come next.

NICOLA WALKER: After four frantic days of searching,

hope is fading fast

that the Titan submersible crew will be saved.

They went missing 96 hours ago,

and it's thought oxygen on board has just run out.

But no-one is giving up yet.

We created a direction to steer...

..in the line that pointed us over to the last known position.

We were still moving as fast as we possibly could.

Was it motivating? Of course.

But we were already motivated, in a sense.

And that motivation really never stops until, you know...

until, unfortunately, we found debris.

At 8:17am, Odysseus makes a shocking discovery.

We were finding small debris.

You're looking around, and you're finding things

that shouldn't just be sitting on the seafloor.

And you're like, "This is kind of suspect,

"and this is kind of suspect, and this is kind of suspect."

It seemed apparent...

and obvious that we were on a piece of debris.

It was dramatic, of course...

but then the discussion became, "OK. Well, I mean, what now?"

Soon after, the announcement is made that debris has been found...

..but it's not clear if it's from Titan.

11:48am, the US Coast Guard

declared that they had found a wreckage field

close to the Titanic.

And so, at that point,

they're not giving any more information than that.

The Coast Guard isn't releasing details,

but speculation is rife.

Debris has been found on the sea bed

close to the wreckage of the Titanic.

The discovery was made by a remotely operated vehicle

within the search zone.

There's no way you're gonna have bits of debris

unless something terrible has happened,

something terrible and violent has happened.

When the debris was found, that...

..you know, the answer...

..we kind of... you kind of knew that, uh, it wasn't good.

There has been an update,

some breaking news in the last couple of hours.

It's a developing story

about that debris found on the ocean floor.

I remember being told in my ear that, you know,

we've had confirmation that there's gonna be a press conference.

We're gonna remain on air tonight

for a press conference from the US Coast Guard.

This morning, an ROV,

a remote operated vehicle from the vessel Horizon Arctic,

discovered the tailcoat of the Titan submersible

approximately 1,600ft from the bow

of the Titanic on the sea floor.

It's the end that you feared would happen,

that you sort of knew would happen, but...

there is nothing that prepares you for that actual moment when you say,

"Those five people on board, they are sadly no longer with us."

This is a incredibly unforgiving environment

down there on the seafloor,

and the debris is consistent

with a catastrophic, er, implosion.

The pressure at nearly 4,000m

proved too much for the Titan to withstand.

If you have a flaw, it'll find it.

The pressure will find that flaw.

If there is a catastrophic failure,

it can cause the entire structure to collapse.

Everyone on board is dead.

The first thoughts was just sadness for the loss of lives.

In particular for my friend Hamish.

Feeling of sorrow for his wife and children.

Dik Barton is on live television when the news breaks.

This is, er... you know, desperately sad news

to... to... to all the people around the world

praying that this wasn't gonna be.

And we always prepared for that, this country. Erm...

She told me he was dead on live national TV.

When you're asked, "So, how does it feel...

"..to lose a very good friend?" on national television, live...

..that was quite sobering.

You're telling a man that a friend of his is dead.

That's not broadcasting, is it?

That's probably one of the most kind of intimate conversations

you could ever have with a human being.

Christine Dawood, the wife of Shahzada and mother of Suleman,

gives a harrowing interview about her loss.

I think I lost hope...

..when we passed the 96 hours mark.

That's when I lost hope, and that's when...

when I even then sent a message to my family onshore.

I said, "I'm preparing...

"..for the worst."

And I really, really miss them.

I actually knew Stockton Rush,

and it wasn't just a bunch of strangers.

It was like, "Holy crap, I shook his hand."

It was a gut punch.

On the 28th of June,

Ed and his team returned to shore aboard the Horizon Arctic.

The boat comes in...

off-loads the last pieces of Titan that they were able to find.

You've got the nose cone,

the titanium nose cone that's still perfectly intact.

It was also really surprising to see how intact pieces were.

You could very clearly see the porthole.

The glass was no longer in it.

It's unmistakeable. It's Titan.

These phantom pieces of Titan that they're going to try

and piece back together to figure out what went wrong.

So, what caused this tragedy?

And when did Titan implode?

After the news was confirmed,

details of a strange noise the US Navy detected

on Sunday the 18th of June are revealed.

It was reported that the Navy had heard a noise

which was similar to an implosion or explosion.

That information came out many days later.

And we now know... In fact, it is certain

that the Americans were able to detect the implosion of Titan

as it went down to Titanic.

Now, for some reason, they didn't choose to reveal that

until it was known that nobody had survived on Titan.

Everybody wanted them to be found and survive.

But the reality was totally different -

that an implosion had happened

and all the five passengers on board had perished.

The US Navy couldn't be completely sure what it had heard,

but the suspected sound of an implosion was detected

around the time Titan lost communications.

In a strange way, I was actually a little bit relieved.

It meant that this will have happened very quickly

on the descent.

It meant that there wasn't days and days of psychological torment

for these people as they slowly asphyxiated.

In a way, it's kind of a relief that, you know,

there wouldn't have been any suffering.

It would have been instantaneous for the poor souls in there.

If Titan imploded so soon after starting its dive,

what were the banging noises that had offered so much hope?

BANGING

Titanic is this huge wreck.

It's decayed. It's been there 100 years.

There's all sorts of metal banging around.

It could have been a ship in the area. It could have been anything.

What you do during a rescue is you bang

and you follow a set process so people know

that it's a submarine that's in distress or on the bottom.

But the reality is that that didn't happen.

As the truth about Titan's fate begins to surface,

questions start to be asked about who is to blame.

And was it an accident waiting to happen?

Everybody in that vessel got in there of their own volition,

in whatever guise and whatever level of understanding.

They all knew the risks.

But something happened... which could have been avoided.

All sorts of things started to come out.

Fingers started to be pointed.

So the narrative had already changed from one of hope and one of search

to one of "search for the guilty".

NICOLA WALKER: Five men are dead.

They perished on board the Titan submersible

while descending to the wreck of the Titanic

in the North Atlantic Ocean.

And the man responsible, Stockton Rush,

was warned that the outcome could be disastrous.

I knew Stockton really well,

and a lot of people had serious concerns

as it became more obvious of what OceanGate was planning.

In 2018, my idea was, "What if we draft a letter?"

That letter was meant to say, "Look, you're part of the brotherhood.

"It looks like you're going rogue.

"We're worried, and we're all telling you be careful

"because the risks here are very high,

"and it could be from benign to catastrophic."

So, Stockton pretty well called me right away and said,

"Hey, Will, what is this?"

And I said, "Well, we mean it. We have some serious concerns."

So, to that, Stockton said, "Well, I'm way ahead of you guys.

"This is innovation. We got to break the rules.

"That's what I'm doing, and you guys are too slow,

"too late, too far behind, too expensive.

"It takes too long. It will never make progress.

"And I'm here to open the ocean to the entire world."

We left the phone call on agreeing to disagree,

while he was fairly upset, at that point.

When you look back at that letter that they wrote,

it's... it's kind of chilling

to see the warnings that they put on paper...

before any of this happened.

Fifteen months after Stockton Rush

blatantly ignored the warning of his colleagues and the Titan imploded,

a public hearing into the tragedy

is set to finally answer what went wrong.

Damning evidence came from

the former OceanGate operations director David Lochridge.

We all voiced concerns about what was happening,

in terms of the engineering of Titan.

Cost-cutting, erm...

bad engineering decisions. I'd say that's the two main things.

The desire to get to the Titanic as quickly as they could,

to start making profit.

A lot of steps along the way were missed.

Voicing these concerns cost David Lochridge his job.

In 2018, Stockton Rush fired him.

David Lochridge was in charge of the safety of the design

and the assembly of the submersible.

By the time he issued his report

outlining all the deficiencies in the construction and the parts,

he was asked to leave the company, and...

got treated pretty badly.

It wasn't just cost-cutting that came to light at the inquiry.

It was also revealed that the Titan malfunctioned

just days before the fatal Titanic dive in June 2023.

OceanGate's former scientific director

spoke about the incident during the hearing.

There's nothing to hold onto inside the submersible, really.

It's a fairly smooth tube.

The pilot crashed into the rear bulkhead.

The rest of the passengers tumbled about.

Revelations about the materials used

and construction of the Titan submersible

also came to light.

The cause of the incident of the demise of Titan was basically

the carbon fibre parted from the titanium hemisphere.

It's very clear systemic failure of mechanical bonding.

I think the conclusion was,

well, beyond instantaneous, incredibly quick.

And now the truth can be told about what happened on that fateful trip,

two and a half miles underwater.

The descent process is pretty routine.

It wasn't until an hour into the descent

things start clearly going wrong.

Because there was no apparent communication

that was consistent with what you'd expect for that kind of profile.

Ninety minutes in, we heard a crump.

Which was when the vessel actually imploded.

Very distinctive and very clearly,

sadly, the demise of the Titan.

So, if the noise was clearly heard, why did the search continue?

Film director and Titanic expert James Cameron

told 60 Minutes Australia that those in the community

knew the search was over before it began.

The entire world, you know, waiting with bated breath,

talking about 96 hours of oxygen. We all knew they were dead.

BANGING

We heard these noises, which...

I think was more of a hope that it was some sign of life,

or something attributable to a positive outcome.

In the rescue industry, you never give up

until it's concluded and confirmed

that there is no sign of life, or the mission is over.

OceanGate has ceased operations.

The ripples from this deep-sea tragedy

are likely to continue for many years.

The findings, once they are compiled and issued,

will be significant

regarding maritime activities for submersibles.

The tragedy of the event will never go away.