Recovering the Titan 12,500 feet underwater was dangerous, complex, emotional

Cassano speaks during a press conference on Pelagic's role in the search and recovery operations for the OceanGate Titan submersible, in East Aurora, New York, on June 30, 2023. Experts have recovered presumed human remains from what is left of the Titan sub that imploded during a dive to the Titanic wreck, with the death of five people, the US Coast Guard said June 28, 2023. — AFP

EAST AURORA, New York: When Edward Cassano and his colleagues arrived in the remote stretch of ocean where the Titan submersible had gone missing, they quickly learned that they would have to do what other deep-sea experts had already tried unsuccessfully: to find the lost sub in some of the most forbidding depths of the North Atlantic.

They set to work deploying their own remotely operated vehicle, the Odysseus, from a ship with a giant “umbilical cord,” then lowered the behemoth to the ocean floor, a process that took about an hour and a half, Cassano said Friday at a news conference held at the suburban Buffalo headquarters of his company, Pelagic Research Services.