More deep-sea search equipment joins hunt for Missing submarine: Titan
Flight tracking shows a Royal Air Force C-17 transport aircraft has now left Lossiemouth in the north of Scotland carrying equipment to help with the search for the missing Titan submersible.
The aircraft is understood to be carrying cabling to St John’s in Newfoundland, Canada, the airport nearest to the site of the Titanic wreck.
The chances of finding something on the sea floor at depth – using a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) – depend on how tightly the search area can be defined, marine geophysicist Dr Rob Larter has said.
“We’ve all seen the reports of the sounds that have been detected,” he told press briefing earlier this morning. “But the fact that the search area is still so large would seem to indicate that nobody [has] confidently been able to locate where those sounds are coming from.”
Each of the floating sonobuoys should be able to give a bearing, so depending on the number and location of buoys in relation to the location of the sound source, that could provide what submarine search and rescue expert Frank Owen described as “a cross-fix” on the sound.
“That should be possible,” he told me. “But [if it’s Titan] they’re banging on a carbon fibre hull, not a steel hull. “That’s like banging a log, instead of banging a bell – it’s less loud and more muffled, so it’s not a crisp, clear noise. That may not propagate through the water anywhere near as well.”