Ali Kefford

For tourists aboard the Sindbad, the final moments of their planned jaunt below the waves will have been a hellish, adrenaline-fueled lunge for survival. Six Russian tourists, including two children, died yesterday when the submarine abruptly capsized in seas one kilometre off the coast of the Egyptian city of Hurghada at around 10 a.m. Sea water is said to have begun pouring in through open hatches as passengers boarded the boat at a floating platform on the edge of a Red Sea coral reef. It then appears that she plunged to the seabed at a depth of around 20m. Those on board will have had to swim out of the hatches of the stricken submarine. Doing this at this depth would be hugely testing for highly trained sailors, let alone terrified families with small children.

On Monday morning at 5 a.m. the superyacht Bayesian sank off the coast of Sicily, leaving one man dead and six people missing. Among the unaccounted for are the British tech tycoon Mike Lynch, who had been enjoying a celebratory cruise after a US jury acquitted him of fraud charges in June, and his 18-year-old daughter, Hannah. Fifteen people, including a baby, were rescued from the ship, after being found crammed into a nearby lifeboat. The incident would have played out in a handful of horrific minutes. How did the 56 meter Bayesian come to sink? Each of the current theories suggest the incident would have played out in a handful of horrific minutes.

When the news broke that the Titan submersible was missing, naval experts immediately recognised that the chances of saving the lives of those on board were, realistically, tantamount to non-existent.  With rare agreement, they swiftly concluded that the kindest outcome for the five passengers would be that the submersible had imploded.  Hard-hearted as this may sound, their deaths were vastly preferable to the terrifying demise of gradually suffocating in a cold, inky darkness Ruptured parts of Titan’s titanium end caps found yesterday, mere metres from Titanic’s wreck, show that the vehicle did suffer from an abrupt, catastrophic hull collapse.  It may be that those on board were aware of a problem.

The thought of laying eyes on the wreck of Titanic has tantalised the world since the ship’s rediscovery in 1985. Now the five people aboard the submersible Titan, currently lost in the Atlantic, will almost undoubtedly end up paying the ultimate price for their desire to see the sunken liner on the ocean floor.   Superpowers spend billions, largely in vain, to track each others’ nuclear deterrent submarines through far shallower waters Having joined nuclear submarines at sea myself, I feel physically sick thinking about what is probably playing out aboard OceanGate Expeditions’ stricken vehicle. Realistically there is the slenderest of chances that the five people onboard will be rescued before their oxygen runs out.