Friend of British billionaire lost during tourist trip to Titanic thinks crew is trapped in submarine

A friend of the British billionaire who goes missing on a trip to dive the Titanic has said she fears his submarine may become stuck on the sea floor.

Jannicke Mikkelsen, a Norwegian explorer, said she knew 58-year-old Hamish Harding would be “calm” during the crisis.

He is one of five people aboard a submarine that began its descent at 4 a.m. Sunday to the Titanic’s resting place, nearly 4,000 feet below the surface.

The round trip – for which participants pay $ 250,000 – usually takes eight hours. But contact with the mothership was lost an hour and 45 minutes into the journey, before reaching the wreckage, and rescuers are now in a race against time to try to recover the submarine and its crew.

“My biggest fear is knowing they’re trapped, without being able to get help,” Mikkelsen said.

“No one can reach him at the bottom.”

Mikkelsen, a cameraman who specializes in extreme environments, said she was deeply concerned that the crew missed their takeoff window — their expected time to surface.

On Monday afternoon, US Coast Guard Rear Admiral John Mauger said the submarine has 96 hours of emergency oxygen on board, based on information received from the ship’s operator.

“My fear is that they didn’t make it to their last climbing window,” Mikkelsen told Chris Cuomo on NewsNation.

‘They didn’t. We’re starting to make worst case scenarios.’

G. Michael Harris, a Titanic expedition leader, said he knew some of those on board and the outlook was bleak.

He told Fox News’ Jesse Watters that there was oxygen on board and CO2 scrubbers, but in the end there was no magic solution.

“I just don’t feel good about it,” he said.

“When we deploy, it’s usually a two-and-a-half hour drive to the wreck site itself.

‘We descend 3,980 meters. We turn down, a corkscrew action, about three degrees per second to land right in front of the Titanic’s bow.

“Once we’re down, we’ll begin our searches for the grid and our decay and everything that happens to the Titanic.”

Harris said the worst case scenario would be a hull implosion around 10,000 feet.

“I don’t see anything that could happen at the moment. If you’re talking about 6,000 pounds per square inch, it’s a dangerous environment.

“More people have been in space than at this depth of the ocean.”

He said you have to ‘do everything perfectly by the book’, and that ‘didn’t look good’.

Mikkelsen said Harding acted as a mentor to her and was well aware of the risks he was taking.

“Hamish is an explorer at heart and this is one of the things he wanted to explore on his checklist,” she said.

“Hamish knows the risks before he starts.

“I know Hamish will be calm, they will work together through their checklist of options.”

The mother ship, MV Polar Prince, departed Newfoundland on Saturday for the site above the Titanic wreckage, 370 miles away.

The submarine launched in the early hours of Sunday.

On board were French Navy veteran PH Nargeolet Harding; and CEO of OceanGate, Stockton Rush. The other two occupants have not been named.

The submarine – it is not a submarine, because it is not independent and depends on a mother ship – lost contact with the mother ship an hour and 45 minutes after its descent.

It takes two and a half hours to descend to the wreck.

Analysts think it could have lost power, or sunk and perhaps got stuck on the wreck. Some initially suggested it may have surfaced and floated without power, but that seems increasingly distant.

As of Monday afternoon, there were still 96 hours of air on the submarine and the US Coast Guard said they are in a race against time.

There are no US Coast Guard rescue submarines that can reach the depths of the Titanic.

Harding holds the Guinness World Record for the longest time spent at the bottom of the sea.

The London-born adventurer set it down in 2021, after diving to the deepest place on Earth, the Mariana Trench, and traveling through it for four hours and 15 minutes.

It was one of three Guinness world records he has set.

He laid down another for the longest distance, three miles, covered at the bottom of the ocean.

His first was set in 2019, for the fastest circumnavigation of the Earth via the North and South Poles in a Gulfstream 650ER business jet – with Mikkelsen filming the adventure.

Last year he went into space.

The father-of-two — who is friends with astronaut Buzz Aldrin — recently said, “As a kid, I read the Guinness World Records book regularly. I always wondered how to get into it. I didn’t think I could.

“And I didn’t want to do something stupid like set a record for the number of ping pong balls bouncing in a day or something.”

As the frantic search for the Titanic submarine went on Monday, family members asked for prayers for Harding when his latest adventure went awry.

The aviator, businessman and explorer poses no threat to dangerous expeditions.

He told an interviewer in 2021 how his submarine, Challenger Deep, had suffered a damaged thruster on its journey to the “truly spectacular” Mariana Trench, which lies seven miles below the surface of the Pacific Ocean.

“The submarine has many safety features, including a four-day reserve of oxygen, water and emergency rations,” he said.

“The only problem is there’s no other submarine that can go there to save you. It will take three years to build another one.

“So having four days of stock doesn’t really matter.

“If something goes wrong, you won’t come back.”

Harding, who runs an aviation company in Dubai, also has the honor of taking the oldest man – lunar landing astronaut Aldrin, at age 86 – and the youngest, his 12-year-old son, to the South Pole.

“Buzz is an old friend of mine,” he said.

“We had always talked about going to the South Pole together and we finally did that in 2016.”

Harding, an only child, was born in Hammersmith, London, in 1964, and holds degrees in science and chemical engineering from Cambridge University.

Last year, Harding was one of six astronauts to go to space on Blue Origin’s fifth manned spaceflight aboard the New Shepard rocket.

And for his next trip, two months before he went into space, to the North Pole, he said: ‘People, especially as they get older, tend to give up on their dreams. When I think of something unusual, I just try to find ways to make it happen.”