Navy: Large salvage system won’t be used to retrieve Titan submersible

A U.S. Navy official said Sunday that a large salvage system will not be used to retrieve the Titan submersible that imploded on its journey to view the 1912 wreck of the Titanic.

The official told The Associated Press that the Navy will not use its Flyaway Deep Ocean Salvage System to recover the Titan because there were not large enough pieces from the submersible that the system could recover. The Coast Guard said last week that debris from the Titan was found about 1,600 feet from the Titanic, which lies more than two miles beneath the surface of the water.

“Efforts are focused on helping map the debris field in preparation for recovery efforts and to support investigative actions. Efforts to mobilize equipment such as the Flyaway Deep Ocean Salvage System have been discontinued,” the Navy official told The Associated Press.

According to the Navy, the Flyaway Deep Ocean Salvage System is a “portable, ship lift system designed to provide reliable deep ocean lifting capacity of up to 60,000 pounds for the recovery of large, bulky, and heavy sunken objects such as aircraft or small vessels.” The Titan submersible was 20,000 pounds, nine feet high, eight feet wide and 22 feet long.

The Transportation Safety Board of Canada also said Saturday that it will be starting a safety investigation into the incident.

The submersible went missing on June 18 after it lost communication less than two hours into its dive on Sunday. OceanGate, the company that owned the submersible, said last week that all five of the passengers the vessel was carrying were believed to be dead.

The Coast Guard said last week that the debris field found near the wreck of the Titanic was “consistent with catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber.” The Navy also detected the sound of an underwater implosion around the same time the Titan submersible went missing, the service confirmed last week. 

When asked about whether efforts will be made to recover the passengers of the Titan, Rear Adm. John Mauger, the First Coast Guard District commander, said it is an “incredibly unforgiving environment down there on the sea floor, and the debris is consistent with a catastrophic implosion of the vessel.”