Titan Sub Disaster | 12,000 Leagues Under the Sea | 1

0:00American scandal uses dramatizations that are based on true events. Some elements, including dialogue, might be invented, but everything is based on historical research.

0:20It's late on June 20, 2023, on board a Royal Canadian Air Force patrol plane high above the North Atlantic Ocean. An airman hunches over a monitor, listening intently to an acoustic feed through his headphones. Typically, he's tasked with tracking the movements of potentially hostile submarines, but today he has a different mission. A small civilian submersible with five people on board has gone missing on a dive to the wreck of the Titanic. Search teams from across the world have scrambled to help find it. The aircraft cabin is dim except for the blinking status lights and the soft glow of computer monitors.

0:59To search the murky waters of the Atlantic, the plane has deployed several sonobuies. These sensors sink to a certain depth, capture sounds, then transmit them back to the aircraft circling above. But it will take a skilled ear to pick out the sound of a small submersible against the ocean's background noise.

1:21The Canadian airman adjusts the dial. There's nothing on buoy two apart from the usual sounds of the deep sea. Bowie 5 is all acoustic clutter too. But when he shifts to another channel, a sharper noise cuts through. He lifts one earphone and glances across the cabin. Sir, you may want to hear this. The airman's superior rises from his seat by the navigation console. What do you got? I'm not sure yet. A noise, but it's repeating, rhythmic. He hands the officer a spare headset. Listening intently, the officer's eyes narrow. How long has that been coming through? I switched to buoy seven maybe 30 seconds ago.

1:59This is the first time I've heard it. Listen to this pacing. The two men wait as the sequence continues. The officer leans over the airman's shoulder, watching the waveform on the screen bounce in clean, distinct spikes. Well, that doesn't look like random turbulence. Exactly. It's too regular. You think it could be a signal? Someone banging? Well, it's loud relative to the ambient. If they're using something inside the hull like a hammer, you would get this kind of resonance. The officer removes the headset and exhales slowly. All right, what's the interval? It's difficult to say. We didn't catch anything on our last pass.

2:33But it'd be easy to miss. This could have been going on for hours. All right, let's consider our options. Could the Sono Buoy be drifting? Is there any possibility that this could be interference from ship traffic? There are no surface vessels close enough to give us that profile. It's coming from depth, too. Maybe 10 ,000 feet, give or take. Hard to know precisely, though. And you're sure it's not background noise? Sir, I've been hunting subs for nine years. I know what background noise is, and this isn't it. All right, I'll inform Halifax. They'll relay it up to change to the Americans. In the meantime, keep your headphones on.

3:06If the pattern changes, tell me immediately. Yes, sir. Because if this is what we think it is, then they're alive, and they're trying to call for help. The airman returns his full attention to his headphones, straining to pick out any other noise in the background. The rhythmic banging sound is the most promising sign yet that the crew of the missing submersible Titan may still be alive. But just finding the sub won't be enough. If it is trapped at the bottom of the ocean, there won't be long to rescue the five people on board, because the Titan's oxygen will run out in less than two days. The international search and rescue operation in the North Atlantic is in a race against time.

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5:03In April 1912, the British ocean liner Titanic sank on its maiden voyage to the United States. Around 1 ,500 people lost their lives in what was then the worst maritime disaster in history. And then for more than 70 years, the ship lay undisturbed at the bottom of the North Atlantic Ocean before its shattered remains were finally discovered in 1985. But in the decades that followed, only a few people got to visit the wreck. There weren't many submersibles capable of reaching it, and the cost of mounting any expedition was prohibitively high. That all changed in 2021. Stockton Rush and his company, OceanGate, began offering the public the opportunity to go where only scientists, explorers, and filmmakers had gone before.

5:49For$250 ,000, wealthy thrill-seekers could book a seat on the revolutionary Titan Submersible and see the sunken ship of dreams for themselves. Stockton Rush led the expeditions personally, but in June 2023, the exclusive adventure he offered customers was transformed into a desperate rescue operation. The search for the Titan would take place under the eyes of the international media, and in the end, Oceangate and Stockton Rush would become synonymous not with innovation or deep-sea adventure, but with hubris, reckless decision-making, and deadly disregard for safety. This is Episode 1, 12 ,000 Feet Under the Sea.

6:33It's 8.30 a.m. on June 18, 2023 in the North Atlantic Ocean, 325 miles southeast of Newfoundland. An engineer tries to keep his balance as the floating platform he's standing on pitches in the swell. A few hundred feet away, the support ship Polar Prince looks almost serene, but out here on this small platform, every wave feels like a new attempt to knock the engineer off his feet. Still, he has a job to do. He turns to the white, cylindrical hull of the Titan submersible that's resting on the platform. Its 22-foot-long body has a domed end cap at the bow and a tail fin on the stern. Every time the engineer approaches the vessel, he can't resist running his hand over its smooth surface.

7:16There's nothing in the world like it. Titan's innovative design and cutting-edge materials allow it to descend to depths that only a handful of subs can reach, but none of the others offer members of the public the chance to come along for the ride. After conducting his final checks of the stern, the engineer moves to Titan's front, where the domed end cap sits wide open. He pokes his head inside and tells the five men on board that it's time to close up the hatch. Four of the occupants smile back. There's the Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son Suleiman, who fidgets nervously with a Rubik's cube.

7:51There's the beaming British millionaire Hamish Harding and the gray-haired Titanic expert Paul-Henri Norgelet. He's going to be their guide on today's trip. The engineer shares a quick joke with all of them, but the fifth man inside, the sub's pilot, just glares and snaps at him to get on with it. The engineer's face flushes. He apologizes and quickly withdraws, hurrying to complete his work. The man who scolded him isn't just the sub's pilot. Stockton Rush is also the founder and CEO of OceanGate, the owner of the Titan submersible and the engineer's boss. With a final wish of good luck, the engineer swings the end cap into place and begins tightening the bolts that hold it there.

8:32Rush and the other four passengers are now sealed in, with no way of opening the hatch from the inside. With the end cap bolted shut, the engineer climbs into a boat and returns to the Polar Prince support ship. Then, at 9.04 a.m., the floating platform the Titan rests on, slips beneath the surface of the Atlantic. Ten minutes later, after divers and scuba gear complete their final checks, the submersible detaches from the platform, begins its slow descent to the bottom of the ocean. The Titan is an experimental craft. It's made fewer than 90 dives in total, and only 13 of those have reached the depth of the Titanic.

9:09The shipwreck is more than two miles beneath the surface, and reaching it typically takes a few hours. For the first 50 minutes of the descent, Titan is in regular contact with Ocean Gate's staff aboard the Polar Prince. Every 5 to 10 seconds, the submersible automatically checks in by sending an electronic ping that gives the sub's position. Stockton Rush also keeps in touch with the support ship manually, sending short, coded messages from his control console roughly every 15 minutes. But it's not always easy to communicate between the surface and the bottom of the ocean. At 9.53 a.m., the Titan appears to veer off course, heading away from the Titanic's coordinates.

9:50On board the Polar Prince, the support team sends a message asking Rush if he can still see the ship on his display, but he doesn't respond. For the next 13 minutes, Polar Prince sends the same message multiple times. Finally, Rush answers with a single letter K, a code requesting a communications check. The team on board the Polar Prince confirms that they've received this message, and a few moments later, they receive another message from the sub, informing them its communication system briefly went offline earlier, but everything's working again now. The support crew aboard the Polar Prince isn't too worried.

10:26They had suspected as much, and they soon receive another message from the Titan saying, All good here. All throughout this exchange, the submersible continues its descent into the deep. The automated pings continue to be erratic, though, giving contradictory positions that make it difficult to plot the Titan's exact location. But in one respect at least, all instruments agree. The Titan is closing in on the seafloor and its intended destination, the wreck of the Titanic. Aboard the Polar Prince, Ocean Gate's control room hums with electronics and soft chatter. Wendy Rush sits at a workstation, focusing on a glowing laptop screen.

11:05Wendy is Stockton Rush's wife, but she's also Ocean Gate's director of communications. She's responsible for tracking the submersible's progress and keeping in contact with it throughout the deep-sea dive.

11:20Another Ocean Gate staffer nurses a cup of coffee and glances over Wendy's shoulder at the sub's GPS tracker. So, Wendy, how we doing? All good now. The communication's been restored. We should get another message in a few minutes. The man takes a seat beside her. We're almost there, about 500 meters away. Wendy looks up as she hears an unfamiliar noise from what sounds like outside the control room. What was that bang? But only seconds later, Wendy's laptop beeps and her attention returns to the screen. She smiles. Message from Stockton. Drop two weights. It must be slowing down. Wendy picks up the walkie-talkie.

11:56Control the top side. Titan reports dropping two weights. Repeat, two weights. Confirm receiving. She turns back to the staffer. I was a little worried there for a moment. About that noise? Yeah, let's check the ping. She clicks on the screen. 10 ,978 feet, right on schedule. They should hit the seafloor in 10 or 15 minutes. Let's see how dropping the weight slows the descent. Wendy waits for the next automatic ping. They should arrive every few seconds, but there's nothing. The crew member pushes his chair a little closer and squints at the screen. We should have gotten another one by now, right?

12:30Wendy refreshes the tracking panel, but nothing changes. The last recorded point freezes on screen. Oh, come on. Have we lost tracking? Yeah, it could be a packet loss. Wendy shakes her head. Her fingers dance across the keyboard. I'll request another comms check. Hopefully it's just the same problem as last time. For the second time in this dive, communication between the Titan Submersible and its support ship has been severed. That's happened on several other expeditions as well. so no one on board the Polar Prince is panicking. And with both the automated pings and the manual messaging system down, Ocean Gate staff conclude that there must be some kind of power issue on the submersible, probably the same one that took communication offline earlier in the dive.

13:14They assume that Stockton Rush is busy booting up Titan's backup systems and that they'll hear from the sub soon. In the meantime, the Polar Prince continues to send messages to the submersible two or three times a minute. None receives any reply. The next two scheduled communication checks go unanswered as well. These are all written up in the official notes as lost communications. But when the 45-minute check-in arrives with no response from the Titan, the language in the log changes. The entry no longer reads lost communications, but lost sub. At this point, Ocean Gate's emergency procedures begin to activate, although there's still no outright alarm on the Polar Prince.

13:55Even if Titan has suffered some kind of mechanical or technical failure, the expectation is that Rush will simply have jettisoned the sub's remaining weights. Once those are released, the submersible's natural buoyancy should cause it to slowly ascend. When it eventually resurfaces, the polar prince can locate it, unbolt the hatch, and recover those inside. So Ocean Gate staff spread out across the deck of the polar prince, scanning the waves. They watch for hours, but there's no sign of the submersible's white hull. They begin to wonder whether perhaps Rush has pressed on, continuing the trip to the Titanic despite losing communications.

14:32If that's the case, it should still surface by 3 p.m., but that hour comes and goes, and the ocean around them remains empty. The next theory they consider is that the Titan has drifted in the underwater currents and resurfaced somewhere farther away from the support ship out of sight. So the Polar Prince begins a systematic search of the area, cutting through the waves in a tight grid pattern, while crew members peer through binoculars and study radar screens, searching for any trace of the missing submersible. But still there's no sighting. Hours have now passed since Titan was supposed to reappear.

15:07The submersible has never been out of contact for this long before, and the Ocean Gate staff aboard the Polar Prince realize they can no longer handle this situation alone. They need help. And soon, at a Coast Guard Rescue Coordination Center in Boston, Massachusetts, a phone starts ringing. This center is responsible for supervising the waters that stretch for 200 miles off New England. It's not the biggest area compared with some other American Coast Guard centers, but it's a busy lane for shipping traffic, and the phones are always ringing. Most of the time, it's cargo ships with engine trouble or a fishing boat in rough weather, but when the officer on duty picks up the phone this time, he quickly realizes this is not a routine call.

15:48The voice on the other end of the line identifies himself as David Ferguson, the captain of the Polar Prince. Over the next few minutes, the Coast Guard officer listens carefully as Ferguson explains the situation unfolding in the North Atlantic. Ferguson says that the Titan submersible was supposed to surface at the latest almost three hours ago, although they actually lost contact with the sub around five hours before that. Now, the Polar Prince wants help to search for it. The Coast Guard officer outlines the first steps. He offers to generate drift model calculations to predict where the Titan might have surfaced if it ascended without power.

16:24He can also review what Coast Guard resources are available to respond and aid in the search. Ferguson gratefully accepts, because at this point there is no ambiguity left. The Titan isn't just overdue, it's officially missing.

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18:40Within minutes of receiving the emergency call from the captain of the Polar Prince, the U.S. Coast Guard begins to deploy personnel and equipment. The first to reach the scene in the North Atlantic are the crew of a C-130 Hercules search and rescue plane. They assist the hunt for the ocean gates, missing submersible from the air. What the Coast Guard really needs, though, is personnel at sea level as well, but the Titanic wreck site is 900 miles off Cape Cod, and ships will take around two days to reach it from New England. There is a closer option, though. The Polar Prince is just over 300 miles from the coast of Newfoundland, so the Coast Guard liaises with its counterparts in Canada, who immediately send an icebreaker to support the search.

19:23The Coast Guard is working on the same assumption as Ocean Gate, that the Titan has lost communication and returned to the surface somewhere. But even if that's true, Stockton Rush and the other four men on board are still in danger. There's no way to open the sub's hatch from the inside. So even on the surface, the occupants will suffocate if they're not found in time. Ocean Gate informs the Coast Guard that the sub carries enough oxygen to last roughly 96 hours. By the time night falls on June 18, 2023, Titan has been sealed for around 12 hours. That gives the Coast Guard another 84 hours or three and a half days to locate the sub and open its hatch.

20:03The clock is ticking. There's little that rescuers can do at night. So at first light the following morning, a Coast Guard aircraft takes off to resume the search. But the Coast Guard pilots aren't the only ones rising early. Rumors begin rippling through newsrooms around the world that there's a major story breaking in the North Atlantic. As the details are confirmed, reporters rush to be the first on the scene. And with the Titans' disappearance now public knowledge, Rear Admiral John Mauger, commander of the Boston Coast Guard, holds a press briefing. He announces that the U.S. Navy has deployed three aircraft to scour the ocean.

20:41The Canadian Air Force has agreed to support the search effort, too, putting another Hercules in the air. But there's still no sign of the Titan on the surface, and that leads the Coast Guard to consider another possibility, that the submersible is stuck on the seabed. If that's the case, then the rescue mission has just grown vastly more complicated, and they're going to need expert help. More than a thousand miles away, in East Aurora, New York, one such expert gathers a team of engineers in a small conference room. Ed Cassano is the CEO of Pelagic Research Services, a company that operates remotely controlled submersibles.

21:16The atmosphere in the meeting room is tense. The engineers have been glued to their phones all day following the news of Titan's disappearance. Deep-sea exploration is a small, tightly-knit industry, and many of Pelagic's employees know their counterparts at Ocean Gate. But unlike Ocean Gate, Pelagic only operates unmanned, remotely-controlled submersibles, so the thought of losing a crew at such an extreme depth is almost unimaginable. Cassano claps his hands and calls the room to order, Then he confirms what's being reported on the news is true. He just received the call outlining the gravity of the situation and asking Pelagic for help.

21:55Pelagic's flagship vessel is the Odysseus 6K, a cube-shaped submersible that can dive down to 20 ,000 feet, far deeper than Titan's last known depth. So if Titan is stranded somewhere, Odysseus is exactly the craft to find it. Normally, it's researchers and surveyors who hire Odysseus to carry out deep-sea monitoring using its array of cameras and sensors. The sub has been deployed all over the world, but luckily for Ocean Gate, it is currently at Pelagic's facility in the lab next door. Under normal conditions, preparing and packing Odysseus for deployment takes two weeks. Pelagic's engineers have standing instructions to work slowly and methodically with equipment this specialized.

22:37Any mistake could cost millions. But if they're going to rescue the Titan before its oxygen runs out, And Cassano needs his team to hurry. He and his engineers quickly draw up a plan. They prioritize the most important tasks and skip anything they can. But geography still poses a major obstacle. Pelagic's headquarters are in upstate New York, more than 300 miles inland. There's no time to transport Odysseus to a port by road. But Cassano has another idea. He makes a call to a contact with the U.S. Air Force. and soon there are three C-17 Globemasters waiting on the tarmac at the nearest major airport.

23:14But Pelagic isn't the only company summoned to help the Titan. There's another remotely operated submersible capable of reaching the depth the missing sub is thought to be at, and this one is already in the Atlantic Ocean. Just like Odysseus, the Victor 6000 is usually hired by scientific researchers and surveyors. And when Oceangate's staff reach out to Victor's owners, they learn that it's currently aboard the French research vessel La Talente. After he's made aware of the situation, the captain of that ship immediately sets course for the Titanic wreck site. But getting there will still take 48 hours.

23:50Oceangate is running out of time. And while the deep-sea submersibles are mobilized, the surface search continues. More ships arrive to sweep the area as well as aircraft, including a long-range patrol plane operated by the Royal Canadian Air Force. And during one flight on June 20th, an airman on board monitoring a sonobui hears a banging noise. The sound is clear and regular, and it's coming from about the depth where the Titan was last detected. After two days without any sign of the submersible, this noise suddenly raises hopes that the passengers are still alive. The banging sound might be the crew desperately trying to signal for help.