The US Coast Guard said Wednesday that rescuers using sonar to look for the missing Titanic submarine with five people on board detected “underwater noises” in the North Atlantic near where the craft vanished two days earlier.
“Canadian P-3 aircraft detected underwater noises in the search area. As a result, ROV (remotely operated vehicle) operations were relocated in an attempt to explore the origin of the noises,” the US Coast Guard’s First District said on its official Twitter page.
The ROV searches “have yielded negative results but continue,” the military branch said, adding that data from the Canadian aircraft had been shared with US Navy experts to inform future search plans.
The statement is the most optimistic evidence yet that the tourists who were en route to the Titanic disaster in a 21-foot (6.5-meter) minisub on Sunday may still be alive, as rescue workers race to reach them before their air supply runs out.
Underwater noises have been detected by rescuers in search of the missing Titanic Submarine.
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US and Canadian coast guard ships and planes are searching 7,600 square miles (20,000 square kilometres) of the ocean for the vessel, which was attempting to drop 400 miles off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada.
Rolling Stone magazine quoted an internal email sent to US Department of Homeland Security officials just before the Coast Guard tweet, which stated that a Canadian plane assisting in the search “heard banging sounds in the area every 30 minutes.”
Titan was carrying three paying passengers: British billionaire Hamish Harding, Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood, and his son Suleman.
Stockton Rush, CEO of OceanGate Expeditions, and French submarine operator Paul-Henri Nargeolet were also on board.
Both Harding and Nargeolet are members of The Explorers Club, an organization that promotes scientific excursions.
“There is cause for hope, based on data from the field — we understand that likely signs of life have been detected at the site,” The Explorers Club said in a statement.
