Titanic Freaks Doomed At Bottom Of The Atlantic...

 

By EDUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ

McALLEN, Texas | Five adventurous souls now at the bottom of the North Atlantic aboard a small submersible are losing oxygen and likely hope. Aboard the Titan (see photo above), they departed Sunday on a sort of quickie drop to get a glimpse of the remains of the doomed RMS Titanic.

Something happened, and navigation was impossible.

The odds of all five making it back to the surface alive are dwindling this morning. An overnight report on the urgency of a rescue noted that the small vessel had roughly 40 hours of oxygen left. That was what they had last night; it's a lot less now.

Rescue operations are underway, only experts note that even if they find the Titan, well, no vessel has ever been brought back to the surface from a depth of 12,000-feet successfully. The Titan is not equipped for ship-to-ship transfers, not that there is another deep-sailing vessel to do that at present.

There is no way for the crews from the US and Canada to rescue the five men by transferring them to another submarine.

This means the only real chance that they could be saved is for a sophisticated remotely operated vehicle, or ROV, to travel the 12,500ft under water and hook a cable onto the tiny submersible before reeling it up to the surface where the craft's hatch could be drilled open.

No one is optimistic.

Passengers reportedly paid a hefty $250,000 apiece for a chance to go deep onboard the 22-foot-long minisub and see what's left of the fabled passenger ship that reportedly hit an iceberg and sank as it made passage from England to New York in April, 1912.

We're asking: Is there really that much to see of decaying Titanic?

And, yeah, why bother? Next time, catch a movie of the disaster. There are loads of them out there, on Netflix included. In black & white and in technicolor, yes.

To die for a however-novel thrill is to, well, die, and dying for pleasure is sick...

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