Titanic sub implosion: OceanGate CEO’s chilling words about Titan revealed as company shutters after disaster

OceanGate Expeditions, the company that launched the doomed Titan submersible trip to the wreckage of the Titanic earlier this summer, has ceased operations.

Five people, including the company’s CEO, Stockton Rush, died when the carbon-fibre submersible imploded due to the extreme pressures of the deep ocean.

A small message in the top-left corner of OceanGate’s in red explains that the company has ceased its operations.

“OceanGate has suspended all exploration and commercial operations,” the message says.

Graig Graziosi reports:

Passengers on board the sunk Titan submersible likely spent their final moments listening to music in darkness and watching sea creatures in the deep, it has been revealed.

All five onboard the Titanic tourist submarine were confirmed dead on 22 June after the vessel suffered a “catastrophic explosion”.

The tail cone of the submersible was found around 1,600ft from the bow of the Titanic wreck following a frantic five-day search operation in the North Atlantic Ocean.

Father and son Shahzada Dawood, 48, and Suleman Dawood, 19, were among the victims.

Christine Dawood, wife of Shahzada and mother of Suleman, has told of the preparations carried out by Stockton Rush, the pilot of the vessel and founder and CEO of OceaGate, the company that ran the voyage.

“It was like a well-oiled operation - you could see they had done this before many times,” Ms Dawood, said of a briefing given to the passengers, in an interview with The New York Times.

In the days after OceanGate chief executive Stockton Rush and his four-paying crew members went missing on their dive to the wreck of the Titanic, experts had several theories as to their fate.

On 26 June, those worst fears were confirmed when the US Coast Guard announced that it had found pieces of the Titan submersible scattered across the ocean floor about 1,600 feet from the bow of the ill-fated ocean liner.

But what exactly caused the Titan to implode? While we don’t yet know the truth of what happened, we do know enough to have some idea of what might have sealed the sub’s fate.

The Independent’s Io Dodds reports.

OceanGate Expeditions released a promo video boasting about its “very safe” submersible two months before the vessel catastrophically imploded in the depths of the Atlantic while on a dive to the wreck of the Titanic.

The company’s CEO Stockton Rush, British billionaire explorer Hamish Harding, renowned French diver Paul-Henri Nargeolet and Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son Suleman were killed in the ill-fated expedition after the sub lost contact with its mothership on 18 June.

In the aftermath of the tragedy, past passengers who previously went on the 12,000-foot dive aboard the Titan have shared several concerns they had with OceanGate’s safety measures. However, a promotional video posted 10 weeks before the implosion on OceanGate’s YouTube channel advertised the $250,000-a-ticket trip as extremely safe.

OceanGate Expeditions CEO Stockton Rush dismissed concerns about a “really loud bang” during a previous dive on the doomed Titan submersible.

Rush was filmed speaking to passengers for an episode of BBC’s The Travel Show in 2022 when he mentioned that a crew member had heard a troubling sound come from the sub while it was on the ocean surface.

He said the noise was “not a soothing sound” but downplayed the danger, adding that “almost every deep-sea sub makes a noise at some point.”

It’s unclear what caused the noise, but former OceanGate employees and industry experts have said they repeatedly raised concerns about the Titan’s construction since it imploded on a dive to the Titanic wreckage, killing Rush and four others on board.

The sub’s “experimental” carbon-fibre hull wasn’t suitable for extreme depths in deep-sea exploration, and glue had leaked from the seams of ballast bags, whistleblowers said.

A physicist has called for an end to all the tourist voyages to the Titanic wreckage after four days of frantic search for the Titan submersible ended and experts said all five people on board died in an implosion.

Michael Guillen, a former Harvard University physics instructor who himself had a near-death experience near the Titanic wreckage, said the ocean is a “merciless beast” and the Titanic’s wreckage is a “sacred ground” where all activities should cease.

“Certainly, we need to stop, pause all trips to the Titanic, I believe, and figure out, you know, what kind of restrictions should we place,” he said in an interview with GB News.

“This is not a joyride. This is a serious business. The ocean is a merciless beast, really. It’s ready to swallow you up.”

Mr Guillen went into the depths of the Atlantic aboard a Russian scientific research vessel in 2000 when he was a correspondent with the ABC network.

Since the Titan submersible imploded, killing five people aboard, the subject of extreme tourism has been highly debated online and by professionals.

But when the CEO of Pelagic Research Services, the company that helped oversee the recovery mission of the submersible, was asked what his thoughts were on the trips OceanGate took to the Titanic, he claimed he did not have a strong opinion.

“I don’t necessarily have an opinion on that, it’s a strong investigation going on right now,” Edward Cassano said in a press conference last week.

Mr Cassano helped lead the team of people from Pelagic Research Services who used their remotely operated vehicle (ROV) to find the debris from the submersible last week.