Canadian aircraft detects undersea sounds during search for missing submersible

Latest updates:

• U.S. coast guard says Canadian aircraft detected underwater noises in search area.
• U.S. coast guard says extensive searches have turned up nothing.
• More equipment lands in St. John's to aid in search.

Search teams detected underwater sounds while scanning the North Atlantic for a tourist submersible that vanished with five people aboard during a deep-sea voyage to the century-old wreck of the Titanic, the U.S. coast guard said early Wednesday.

The detection of the sounds by Canadian aircraft was reported by the coast guard as the clock ticked down to the last 24 hours of the craft's presumed oxygen supply.

Robotic undersea search operations were diverted to the area but there was still no tangible sign of the missing vessel, the coast guard said on Twitter.

"The ROV searches have yielded negative results but continue," the coast guard said, adding, that data from the Canadian CP-140 Aurora aircraft was shared with U.S. navy experts for "further analysis which will be considered in future search plans."

OceanGate Expeditions — the company behind the missing submersible — has been leading the efforts under the water, where it has conducted numerous successful missions in the past. That's happening as the company's CEO, Stockton Rush, is one of five people missing in the ocean.

The aircraft ended up detecting underwater noises in the search area on Tuesday, after which "ROV (remotely operated vehicle) operations were relocated in an attempt to explore the origin of the noises," according to the coast guard tweets.

The coast guard did not detail the nature or extent of the sounds.

The Explorers Club — which counts Titan passengers Hamish Harding and Paul-Henri Nargeolet among its members — called the update a good sign.

"There is cause for hope based on data from the field. We understand that likely signs of life have been detected at the site," the group wrote in a post on social media on Tuesday night.

American arrival draws crowd in St. John's

Locals lined up at the fence outside St. John's International Airport on Tuesday evening to watch as a trio of American C17 aircraft landed and began offloading equipment and personnel. They were met by a long line of local transport trucks.

Later in the night, a handful of spectators watched as crews unloaded crates from the trucks onto a pair of waiting Canadian Coast Guard ships, and the offshore supply vessel Horizon Arctic. The ships are now en route to the Titanic wreckage site, about 685 kilometres southeast of Newfoundland.

"It's kind of eerie," said onlooker Jonathan Hancock. "To be here in the fog and the rain and the cold and be thinking about the people out there and if they're still alive. It's pretty sobering for sure."

Harold Janes was also watching — with a personal interest.

"I have a daughter operating the crane," he said. "She was called down to go to work to put the equipment on the boat to try and rescue the people in the submarine."

Janes said his daughter also put the Titan in the water last weekend, before it embarked on the expedition that's become global news.

One of the pieces of equipment expected to have arrived in St. John's on Tuesday is a flyaway deep ocean salvage system, belonging to the U.S. navy. A spokesperson from the navy described it as a "motion-compensated lift system designed to provide reliable deep ocean lifting capacity for the recovery of large, bulky and heavy undersea objects such as aircraft or small vessels."

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