The 2.5-hour journey back to the surface afterward was quite the ordeal, Guillen said. Guillen then turned to the pilot, a former MiG pilot, who said in a low-pitched Russian accent, “No problem.” “Because you’re down there and it’s pitch-black - unless the pilot has a spotlight on it, it’s pitch-black - and so you’re only going by your senses,” Guillen said, adding he began to have “a floating feeling.” But in the next moment, Guillen described suddenly feeling a sense of buoyancy after the pilot had maneuvered his way out. And I remember very clearly, in fact, that this voice came into my head - and I’ll never forget it for the rest of my life - it said, ‘This is how it’s going to end for you,'” he said.īefore, there had been straining in the submersible’s engine. But I realized at that point that this was going to be the end. Bullets were flying all over the place, but I had managed to survive all that. I almost got shot during the live shot I was doing. “I remember at one point thinking to myself, ‘You know, for ABC News, I’ve traveled all over the world.’ I think of the North Pole, the South Pole I covered the Persian Gulf War. Terrified he was going to die, he thought of his wife, Laurel, and possibly never seeing her again. “It’s not like, you know, they can come and pull you out of some mudslide,” he said.Īnd then he came to the realization that there was no way out, he said. While there was another submersible in the region, Guillen knew that the likelihood of that vessel being able to pull them out was very low, especially given the hostile environment: pitch-black darkness and pressure that could kill a human instantly. Immediately after the crash, his scientific mind went into overdrive to try to find a solution - a way out. Guillen said they could see that the pilot was “at the edge of his seat” and kept quiet for the better part of an hour so as not to distract him. The entire crew immediately knew the kind of peril they were in and fell silent. Guillen was in shock and disbelief as he lay on his stomach in the claustrophobic submersible, witnessing through the porthole giant rusted pieces of the Titanic fall on their vessel. “At first, we sensed the collision,” Guillen said. As Guillen admired the contrast between the shiny brass propeller and the gray, crumbling ruins surrounding it, the submersible got caught in a high-speed underwater current and slammed right into the propeller blades, he said. The submersible started the tour at the bow of the ship, making its way to the stern, toward the propeller that had broken into two pieces when the ship sank in April 1912. In September 2000, Michael Guillen, a trained physicist and then-science editor for ABC News, was invited on an expedition run by a group of Russians to be the first journalist in history to make the journey to report at the wreckage site in the North Atlantic Ocean.ĭespite Guillen’s deep fear of water, he felt he could not turn down the monumental assignment, he told ABC News on Tuesday.Īfter setting sail from Halifax, Nova Scotia, the crew traveled about 2.5 miles to the sunken ship - about a 2.5-hour expedition - when “something happened,” Guillen said. A former ABC News science editor knows them all too well after a voyage to the wreckage more than 20 years ago went awry. (NEW YORK) - As the search for the missing Titanic tour submersible and its five passengers continues, the dangers of venturing 13,000 feet down to the ocean floor to see the wreckage of the infamous sunken ship are coming to light.
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