The OceanGate Titan submersible that went missing on Sunday as per US Coast Guard Rear Adm. John Mauger imploded. The company said that all five passengers onboard are believed to be dead.
Coast Guard officials said during a press conference on Thursday that they have notified the families of the crew of the Titan.
Also read: How much did OceanGate Titan submersible hunt mission cost and will USA, Canada, France pay for it?
“We now believe that our CEO Stockton Rush, Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood, Hamish Harding, and Paul-Henri Nargeolet, have sadly been lost,” OceanGate said in a statement.
As per Rear Adm. John Mauger, the debris found on the sea floor ‘was consistent with the catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber’. The Coast Guard added that it was found roughly 1,600 feet (488 meters) from the Titanic wreckage site.
Also read: Can Titan Five’s bodies be recovered from OceanGate submersible after it imploded?
Several social media users are now wondering if the submersible had a black box.
“If the Titan submersible wasn’t equipped with a rescue beacon, then I highly doubt they built it with some sort of black box. I mean, they used a friggin video game controller to control it. Most likely not, huh. :-(,” a Twitter user said.
What is a black box?
A black box is an electronic recording device, generally placed in planes, which facilitates investigation after accidents.
Ryan Ramsey, former submarine captain in Britain’s Royal Navy, said that the submersible might not have a black box.
“This is not going to be dissimilar to an aircraft crashing. There is no black box, so you are not going to be able to track the last movements of the vessel itself. But as many pieces of the vessel as they can do, to get those back up to the surface, and from them they should be able to analyse the break structure, any fractures that have happened and maybe piece together what actually happened in those last moments,” he said.
