Strange noises were made that briefly gave rescue teams hope of saving the Titan's crew and passengers.
The Titan was destroyed just hours after diving into the Titanic wreck on June 18, claiming the lives of OceanGate Expeditions CEO Stockton Rush, father and son Shahzada and Sulaiman Daoud, Hamish Harding, and Paul-Henri Nargiolet.
During a frantic and futile multi-day search for survivors, the US Coast Guard revealed that its sonar devices detected eavesdropping noises coming from the vast search area in the North Atlantic Ocean.
The Royal Canadian Air Force, which led the search and rescue operation, has released audio of the rhythmic clicking sounds to the makers of a new documentary Minute by Minute: The Titan Submarine Disaster.
Documentary, Which will be shown on Channel 5 in the UK on March 6 and 7, and shows rescuers hearing for the first time the noises that sound at regular 30-minute intervals.
Titanic submarine: what happened?
“The symmetry between those strikes is very extraordinary,” says former Navy submarine captain Ryan Ramsey in the documentary.
“It's rhythmic, as if someone is making this sound, and the fact that it's repeated is really extraordinary.”
OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush later came under scrutiny for lax safety standards on Titan
(Ocean Gate)
The taps were first discovered at around 11.30pm on 20 June. As multinational search and rescue teams descended on the Titanic wreck, speculation mounted that the sounds might have been caused by tapping on the Titanic's walls to alert them.
US Coast Guard officials said the sounds were “inconclusive” and tried to temper expectations that they were a sign of life.
Hopes of finding survivors ended on June 28, when the US Coast Guard revealed that “presumptive human remains” had been recovered from the seabed near the wreck.
A banging sound was made that briefly gave hope that survivors of the submarine Titan had been found
(Titan submarine disaster – minute by minute)
It was later determined that the submarine's carbon-fiber hull had exploded less than two hours after it left the support ship Polar Prince.
Stockton Rush, the OceanGate CEO who died aboard the Titan, was later found to have ignored safety warnings from industry experts, passengers and former employees.
Weeks after the disaster, it emerged that a former director of OceanGate's marine operations had warned in 2018 that shortcuts in the company's design could ultimately lead to deadly consequences.
In his wrongful termination suit, David Lochridge alleged that he identified numerous problems during the quality inspection process and was “met with hostility and denial of access” to necessary documents.
“Internet practitioner. Social media maven. Certified zombieaholic. Lifelong communicator.”