The Coast Guard announced at a press conference on Thursday that debris from the submersible Titan was found on the seafloor near the Titanic, confirming the deaths of the five crew members onboard.
While searching an area of flat seabed approximately 1,600 feet from the bow of the Titanic, a remotely operated vehicle discovered “five major pieces of debris that told us it was the remains of the Titan,” said undersea expert Paul Hanken, including the front end of the pressure hull. “That was the first indication that it was a catastrophic event.”
Rescuers are racing against the clock to find a submersible that has gone missing near the Titanic wreckage with one of the world’s most knowledgeable deep-ocean search experts currently onboard. Paul-Henri Nargeolet, 77, was piloting the minivan-size submersible Titan on Sunday with four passengers aboard. It lost contact with the surface an hour and 45 minutes after its descent and has not been heard from since. At a press conference on Tuesday, a U.S. Coast Guard spokesman said the Titan had about 40 or 41 hours of oxygen left.
Dubbed “Mr. Titanic” by the media for his frequent dives to the wreck of the doomed liner, Nargeolet is a world-renowned underwater-search authority who helped locate a French aircraft that went missing in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean in 2009.
The wildfire smoke that turned Manhattan skies blood orange on Wednesday topped out at an air-quality index (AQI) of 352, the worst ever recorded in the city. The danger level was color-coded maroon, or “hazardous,” the most severe rating. The air looked and smelled apocalyptic, but how hazardous is “hazardous,” actually, for your health?
As it took off from Dillant-Hopkins Airport in Keene, New Hampshire, on the afternoon of March 3, the Bombardier Challenger 300 business jet provided an apt illustration of why private flying is so popular among those who can afford it. Dana Hyde, a 55-year-old Beltway lawyer who had served in the Obama White House, had flown up from Virginia the day before with her husband, Jonathan Chambers, and their son Elijah to visit colleges in New England.
The three passengers were able to spread out in a cabin that accommodates up to 16. The trip, which would have taken more than eight hours by car, would be less than an hour, with no hassles at airport security, waiting in line to board, or juggling their schedules to match the airline’s — they just told the pilots when they wanted to go, where they wanted to go, hopped on, and left. After a brief delay due to an aborted takeoff attempt, the plane lifted off from Keene at 3:36 p.m., according to publicly available location data. It was a good day for flying: Winds were calm, the temperature a seasonally mild 44 degrees. Given the jet’s cruising speed, the family could expect to be on the ground at Leesburg Executive Airport by 4:30 p.m. From there, it would be a 30-minute drive to their home just across the state line in the affluent riverside village of Cabin John, Maryland.
A two-day private jet trip like this costs about $25,000 to book from a charter company, but the family had the plane at its disposal because Chambers is a partner in Conexon, the consulting company that owns the plane. A onetime Republican staffer for the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, Chambers had joined the Federal Communications Commission in 2012 and assisted in rewriting the rules for how the government helps subsidize telephone and cable services in rural communities. In 2016, he left government service and co-founded Conexon to help cable companies take advantage of the rules he had written.
Hyde had an even more impressive résumé. Born to a single teenage mother, she grew up in rural eastern Oregon, then attended UCLA and got her law degree at Georgetown. From there, her star rose quickly. She worked as a White House special assistant during the Clinton administration, then served on the 9/11 Commission. After a spell at the State Department, she was picked by the Obama administration to head the Millennium Challenge Corporation, an independent agency set up during the Bush years to fight global poverty by funding projects in countries that follow free-market economic policies. Having come from modest means herself, “working to fight global poverty” was important to her, Hyde said at her Senate confirmation hearing, but so was efficiency. “I believe in data-driven, cost-effective policies. I want the American people to always get their money’s worth from anything their government does on their behalf,” she testified. Confirmed unanimously, she steered the agency and its billion-dollar budget from 2013 until 2017. She thereafter worked as a partner at a Jerusalem-based venture-capital firm and was co-chair of the Aspen Partnership for an Inclusive Economy.
A gentle breeze was blowing from the south as the plane rose from the 6,000-foot runway. It banked to the left as it climbed over the foothills of the White Mountains, then leveled its wings to follow the course of the Connecticut River southward. What happened next can be pieced together from a report released a month later by the National Transportation Safety Board.
It was not, as they say in the space-launch business, nominal. Four minutes into Thursday’s launch of the giant SpaceX Starship, the unmanned rocket blew up at an altitude of 18 miles. The 390-foot-high launch vehicle, the largest and most powerful anyone has ever attempted to launch into space, has long been a lynchpin of Elon Musk’s ambitions to someday colonize Mars, and its failure interrupted what had been a remarkable string of successes for SpaceX. Yet, as the fireball ballooned across the sky the mood on the ground was anything but somber, as the crowd that had gathered to watch erupted in whoops and cheers. “Congrats @SpaceX team on an exciting test launch of Starship!” Musk tweeted in the aftermath. “Learned a lot for next test launch in a few months.”
When news broke in 2014 that a Malaysia Airlines 777 had gone missing, no one imagined that, nine years later, we still wouldn’t know what became of flight MH370.
It once looked like closure was imminent. Soon after the plane vanished from radar screens, scientists at the UK-based satellite communications company Inmarsat announced they had found recorded signals automatically transmitted from the plane. By using some complicated mathematics, they were able to work out where the plane must have gone into the remote southern Indian Ocean.
They turned over their findings to the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB), which was entrusted with the search because the flight’s presumed end point was within Australia’s marine jurisdiction.
All that remained was for ships to scan the seabed and collect the wreckage. Yet when the seabed was scanned in the area the scientists had calculated, the plane wasn’t there. Still optimistic, officials expanded the search area. But it wasn’t there either. Finally, they threw in the towel.
Then, to everyone’s surprise, a previously unknown private company came along and continued the search on their own dime. Still no plane. In the end, an area the size of Great Britain was scanned but the plane was nowhere to be found.
In the years that followed, the world mostly forgot about MH370. But not everyone. For the family members of the disappeared, the nightmare has never ended. They remain stuck in a shadowland, unable to grieve or to hope, as several of them compellingly describe in the recent Netflix documentary MH370: The Plane That Disappeared, which I was a part of.
But it’s not just the family members for whom we need to solve this jumbo-sized mystery. The flying public need to know they can get on a plane and not vanish. We can’t close the books on MH370. We must begin again, from square one, and persevere until we find the answer. If science can find a Higgs boson, it can find a 70m-long airplane.
The question is where to start, and the answer comes down to the issue of why the search has failed so far. Did the official investigation just get unlucky? Or did they make a big mistake?
Alongside the tarmac at the Pontoise Aerodrome on the outskirts of Paris stands a sleekly modern building the size of a coffee shop with floor-to-ceiling windows. This is the Re.Invent Air Mobility test bed: Europe’s first flying-taxi airport, or vertiport. To mark its inauguration in November, a shiny white electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft with an armature of 18 whizzing rotors lifted up, flew around under the guidance of its test pilot and then touched down again. With a little luck, a network of sites like this will anchor the world’s first commercial flying-taxi service, shuttling passengers between Paris’s international airports and the venues of the 2024 Summer Olympic Games.
Or maybe a lot of luck. The Volocopter Volocity 2X flown at the ceremony in November is certified to fly only on an experimental basis. The entire vertiport plan relies on the aircraft achieving full certification, which would make it the first eVTOL to be certified to carry passengers anywhere in the world. “It’s on the ambitious side of what is possible,” says Duncan Walker, co-founder and chief executive officer of Skyports, the UK-based company that’s developing the project with Groupe ADP, the operator of Paris’s international airports.
A lot of people who watched the Netflix documentary “MH370: The Plane That Disappeared” have written me with questions. I asked my friend Sarah Wynter, star of the hit show “24,” to discuss some of the ones that have gotten asked the most. This is a new format for me; in the past I’ve mostly explained my ideas through writing, but I thought that people who came to my work via video might prefer that medium. I’m grateful to Sarah for helping me out with her considerably more advanced televisual chops.
Nine years ago, MH370 took off into a clear, moonlit night and flew into the unknown. Somewhere over the South China Sea, 40 minutes into the red-eye flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, it disappeared from radar screens. None of the 239 passengers and crew were ever seen again. The conventional thinking is that the pilot had decided to commit mass murder-suicide by crashing into a remote corner of the southern Indian Ocean. But significant aspects of the case remained unexplained, including the plane’s ultimate resting place, and search officials have long since given up trying to determine what happened. Officially, MH370 is a cold case.
The urgency of solving the mystery remains, though. It’s disturbing enough that a state-of-the-art airliner can disappear so completely off the face of the earth; it’s even more troubling that the authorities, armed with hundreds of millions of dollars to conduct a search and self-proclaimed near certainty about where it must have gone, could fail to locate the 200-foot-long aircraft.
I’ve been following the case obsessively from the beginning, appearing on CNN to talk about it and writing about it in this magazine. I dove deep into the evidence for a 2019 book, and then spent several years working with the producers of a three-part Netflix documentary series, which debuts this week. My hope is that, while the passage of time has lessened the public’s interest in the case, it has also dispelled the fog of wild claims, giving us space to consider the evidence with greater clarity. Far from being a dead end, MH370 still offers multiple leads worth investigating. It’s important that we follow them. Continue reading New York: MH370 Is a Cold Case. But It Can Still Be Solved.
Nine years ago, a Malaysian airliner carrying 239 passengers and crew vanished from air traffic control screens over the South China Sea. Search officials were never able to locate the plane or those aboard. For the family members of the disappeared, it was a tragedy all the more painful for remaining unexplained; for investigators, it was a riddle unlike any they had ever encountered.
But the disappearance of MH370 is just the start of the story. Because in the years that have followed, another dimension of the mystery has opened up. It’s become evident that the scant clues available in the case have somehow led investigators astray. It isn’t just that we don’t know where the plane is. We don’t know why we don’t know. Continue reading Tudum: Nearly a Decade Later, Why Looking for MH370 Still Matters
