The heartbreaking final text message of the British billionaire Hamish Harding, who is trapped inside the missing Titanic submersible, has been revealed.
The sub, named Titan, was carrying 5 people down to the bottom of the Ocean to see the Titanic’s shipwreck in real life. It vanished on Sunday morning after losing contact with its mothership MV Polar Prince roughly 1 hour and 45 minutes into the vessel’s 2 hour descent.
On board the sub is Stockton Rush, the CEO of OceanGate Expeditions, the company who own the vessel and conduct the tourist trips. Alongside him is the British billionaire Hamish Harding, British-based Pakistani millionaire Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son Sulaiman. The fifth person on board is Paul-Henry Nargeolet, a French submersible pilot who is considered one of the world’s leading experts on the Titanic.
Since the underwater vessel lost contact on Sunday, the search effort has hugely ramped up after authorities estimated that there are roughly thirty hours of breathable air left.
As of Tuesday afternoon, a combination of US and Canadian forces and private vessels had searched a 7,600 square mile area, equating to the size of the US state of Connecticut.
However, the latest update has given authorities more hope, as the Canadian P-3 aircraft have 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. Those ROV searches have yielded negative results but continue,” the coast guard tweeted.
It has additionally been reported that a second aircraft, a P-8, with underwater detection abilities detected “banging sounds.”
Two of the people on board are members of the scientific society The Explorers Club, who have shared a hopeful message in the wake of the news.
“There is cause for hope, that based on data from the field, we understand that likely signs of life have been detected at the site,” the president of the organisation shared.
Chris Brown, a friend of Harding, said the reports of banging has “got them written all over it,” and that it was “just the sort of thing I would have expected Hamish to come up with.”
“If you made a continuous noise, that’s not going to get picked up, but doing it every 30 minutes, that suggests humans,” he said, per BBC News.
“I’m sure they’re all conserving oxygen and energy, because it’s cold and dark down there.”
Another one of Harding’s friends has spoken out in the wake of the sub’s disappearance, and he revealed the final message that the billionaire sent before he went missing.
“Hey, we’re headed out tomorrow, it looks good, the weather’s been bad so they’ve been waiting for this,” Harding text his friend, the former Nasa astronaut Colonel Terry Virts.
He told Good Morning Britain, via LBC: “We don’t really talk about risks, it’s known. He understood the risks for sure, there’s no doubt about that.
“The last text I got was, ‘Hey, we’re headed out tomorrow, it looks good, the weather’s been bad so they’ve been waiting for this’.
“He went down to the deepest part of the ocean, set a few world records… at the Mariana Trench [deepest part of the ocean] and we talked quite a bit about the risks and the different things that they were going to be able to do. So he was very excited about it.”
