The Chief Executive Officer of OceanGate, the company that launched the Titan submersible trip to Titanic's wreckage said, "What could go wrong?" weeks before the sub imploded in June 2023, a new documentary has revealed.
The statement was made by Stockton Rush in an interview with Canada's St John's Radio on February 9, 2023, about his upcoming voyage, as per the audio that surfaced on Channel 5 documentary, "Minute by Minute: The Titan Sub Disaster". He said this while explaining how he managed to squeeze four more people inside the small submersible so they could see the Titanic wreckage more than 12,000 feet below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean. Mr Rush added, "For many it's haunting. When I'm down there driving the sub, it's a different experience for me... I don't get to absorb it until I get to the surface."
He also said that the reason he had decided to undertake the voyage in June was because the surrounding waters of the Titanic wreck were at their "calmest" at that time. "So with the Polar Prince (the vessel that carried the submarine out to sea), that ice capability we thought, let's move the mission a little earlier this year. We specifically designed the submersible for this mission," the CEO said.
Further, Mr Rush talked about the beauty of marine life and stunning underwater views. In addition, he bragged about the Titan's capabilities and gave the listeners his word that it would withstand the tremendous underwater pressure of the Atlantic. "The key element with any sub, submersible or submarine, is the pressure vessel: what you're in. Make sure that thing doesn't collapse. So we spent a lot of time with NASA and Boeing and everybody else to make sure that doesn't collapse," he added.
Mr Rush faced criticism for reportedly ignoring serious safety concerns about the expedition to the Titanic. In 2021, he said he was "bending the rules" when constructing the Titanic tourist submersible. In 2022, he dismissed concerns about a loud bang on a previous dive on the sub. He said it was "not a soothing sound" and "almost every deep-sea sub makes a noise at some point."
Meanwhile, about an hour and 45 minutes after the sub launched, the submersible's command ship- the Polar Prince, lost contact with the vessel about 1,450 kilometres east of Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
Experts recovered presumed human remains from what was left of the Titan sub after almost five days. Mangled debris recovered from the small submersible was offloaded in eastern Canada, which brought to an end a difficult search-and-recovery operation. A debris field was also found on the seafloor, 1,600 feet from the bow of the Titanic, which sits more than two miles below the ocean's surface and 400 miles off the coast of Newfoundland.
British explorer Hamish Harding, French submarine expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet, Pakistani-British tycoon Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman and Stockton Rush, died in the tragic accident. OceanGate has since then stopped these expeditions.
