To pay for missions like flight operations the military taps into “appropriated funds which are already budgeted for,” Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder, a Pentagon spokesman, said this week. “So those are hours that already have been paid for.”
There’s a corollary to another high-profile event in February, when the Pentagon dispatched fighter jets to intercept, escort and finally gun down a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon that breached US airspace and flew across the country. Three Sidewinder missiles, the weapon used to down the balloon and other benign aerial debris observed in following days, is a similar cost to what’s believed to have been spent thus far searching for the Titan.
The estimate Cancian generated is based on total expenditure, he said, including fuel, maintenance and the personnel believed to be involved. He called it a conservative figure, based on what’s been publicly disclosed about the assets involved and the amount of time they were likely at work.
While the Titan search operation is funded by money already in the federal budget, the U.S. military will assume some unexpected costs, Cancian said ,because personnel and equipment were used in an unforeseen way that can spur, for instance, additional expense or maintenance and parts.
“You’re diverting activities from what was planned to do something else,” he said.
Mikki Hastings, president of the National Association for Search and Rescue, said the total cost picture is unclear because the operation has not yet ended.
The Titan submersible in 2021.Credit: AP
“It is still ongoing, so we will likely not hear any [official] totals for a while,” Hastings said.
OceanGate, the company that owned the Titan, will not be responsible for reimbursing the government, said Paul Zukunft, who led the Coast Guard from 2014 to 2018. “It’s no different,” he said, “than if a private citizen goes out, and his boat sinks. We go out and recover him. We don’t stick them with the bill after the fact.”
To date, much of the known costs to the U.S. government derive from flight operations. Three C-17 cargo planes delivered equipment from Buffalo, to staging ports in Newfoundland, officials said. Those flights cost an estimated $US491,000 round trip. At least one other C-17 departed Germany for England on its way to deliver a remote operated vehicle, but it is unclear if it reached its destination in Canada, officials said.
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The Coast Guard and New York Air National Guard, which contributed aircraft for search operations over the Atlantic, would generate about $US399,000 in costs flying the HC-130 search-and-rescue aircraft, Cancian said, estimating flying hours and missions from media reports.
The Coast Guard dispatched one of its cutters, the Sycamore, this week, but it was still on its way to the search site Thursday when the Titan’s fate was revealed. The Coast Guard does not disclose a cost per steaming day, Cancian said, but he estimated it to be $US100,000 based on adjusted known data about a similar Navy ship. It is unclear how many days the Sycamore was underway.
As of Friday, it was still unknown if the Navy would launch a deep-sea salvage effort. It dispatched a specialised winch capable of recovering small vessels and aircraft from the seabed. The Navy has not disclosed how much such operations cost. In 2021 the Navy retrieved a helicopter off the coast of Okinawa from depths greater than three and a half miles. The process took a day once salvage specialists arrived with the same winch system.
Canadian officials, who may end up owning more of the total expense for this week’s search, have declined to speculate on the costs of the operation.
“I don’t have information about the cost, but from my perspective, that is irrelevant,” Joyce Murray, Canada’s minister of fisheries, oceans and the Canadian Coast Guard, told reporters Thursday. “What matters is that we have a chance to find this submersible and bring people to the surface.”
“There is nothing too much,” Murray said. “We just need to do what we can. These are human beings, these are human lives and we need to do what we can to save them.”
Washington Post