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

Debris from the imploded Titan submersible was recovered from the ocean floor last week

Titan submersible wreckage brought ashore after fatal implosion

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

A small message in the top-left corner of OceanGate’s website reads: “OceanGate has suspended all exploration and commercial operations.”

The announcement comes a full two weeks after the submersible imploded while carrying five people, sparking an international search, rescue and recovery operation.

OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, French diver Paul-Henri Nargeolet, British billionaire Hamish Harding, Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his teenage son Suleman Dawood all died in the implosion.

The company has come under scrutiny in the weeks following the tragic accident as former employees, former passengers and experts in the industry have criticised OceanGate for embarking on a potentially dangerous trip in the questionably designed submersible.

OceanGate’s decision to cease operations comes just after the company’s former finance director claimed she quit after CEO Stockton Rush asked her to captain the Titan once he fired the craft’s original chief pilot David Lochridge.

Key points

• Titanic sub victim’s wife reveals how crew spent their final moments
• US Coast Guard recovers ‘presumed human remains’ from sea floor near Titanic sub debris
• Hamish Harding’s friend reveals race to get ROV to site of doomed sub
• Why we are obsessed with the missing Titan submarine, according to experts

[5 July 2023 22:10 · Andrea Blanco]

What photos of the Titanic sub debris tell us about its implosion

Images of the wreckage recovered from the Titan submersible at the bottom of the North Atlantic appear to confirm the theory that the vessel suffered a massive implosion under the pressure of the ocean.

Earlier this week, the US Coast Guard brought the debris left by the sub on the ocean floor onto dry land.

Jonas Mureika, a professor of physics at Loyola Marymount University, tells The Independent that calling the implosion “catastrophic” is referring to the intensity and speed of what took place.

“The pressure at that depth (3.8 km) is incredibly high, about 400 times atmospheric pressure. That’s 6,000 pounds per square inch acting on the submarine – atmospheric pressure is roughly 15 pounds per square inch,” he noted in an email.

The Independent reports:

[5 July 2023 23:00 · Andrea Blanco]

Was it an explosion or implosion and how would that have affected the passengers?

“Knowing where the accident occurred, the assumption of an implosion makes sense,” Dr Joerg Reinhold, a professor at the Department of Physics at Florida International University, told The Independent.

“Both an implosion and an explosion need some form of stored energy. In typical explosive materials, the stored energy is chemical and is released through a chemical reaction. In the case of a submerged pressure vessel, the stored energy is mechanical – it is released when the surrounding water fills the space of the vessel.”

“If there is a catastrophic failure of the hull, this energy is first released in an implosion,” he notes. “Eventually, this will be followed by an outgoing shockwave – otherwise, listening devices would not be able to pick up the sound of the event.”

He went on to say that “implosions or explosions in water should behave differently than those in air. Air is a compressible fluid while water is an incompressible fluid. I expect the stored mechanical energy to be vastly bigger than any other source of energy on the submersible”.

“Even if the breach of the vessel would have been triggered by an internal source of energy, the final result will be an implosion,” Dr Reinhold said.

Jonas Mureika, a professor of physics at Loyola Marymount University, tells The Independent that calling the implosion “catastrophic” is referring to the intensity and speed of what took place.

Dr Mureika added that “an explosion results when there is a sudden release of energy that results in a powerful outward pressure wave. Implosions, on the other hand, are due to an inward pressure differential. This was most certainly an implosion”.

“That being said, when the air inside the submarine was rapidly compressed, it most likely ignited and created an explosion – like a piston in a car engine – but this wouldn’t compare in magnitude to the implosive force,” he says.

“As for the passengers, because of the time interval for this to occur, as well as the magnitude of the pressure, it’s very likely they didn’t even know what hit them. It’s also doubtful they had time to process what was happening unless the implosion was preceded by something like a leak,” Dr Mureika adds.

[6 July 2023 00:00 · Andrea Blanco]

Titanic sub debris and human remains have been recovered. But we still don’t have answers to these 9 questions

The desperate search for the missing Titanic submersible came to a tragic end when debris was discovered deep in the ocean. But, we still don’t know many crucial aspects of the doomed voyage.

The Independent’s Rachel Sharp, Io Dodds, Bevan Hurley and Andrea Blanco report:

[6 July 2023 01:00 · Joe Sommerlad]

OceanGate’s ex-finance director claims she quit after being asked to captain doomed vessel

OceanGate Expeditions’ former finance director has claimed she quit the company after CEO Stockton Rush asked her to captain the doomed Titan submersible after firing the craft’s original chief pilot David Lochridge.

The employee, who spoke to The New Yorker on condition of anonymity, said: “It freaked me out that he would want me to be head pilot, since my background is in accounting, I could not work for Stockton. I did not trust him.”

She added that several of the engineers working for the company were in their late teens and early 20s and were at one point being paid $15 an hour.

[6 July 2023 01:00 · Andrea Blanco]

OceanGate employee feared CEO could ‘kill himself and others in quest to boost his ego’ with Titanic sub

“I’m so worried he kills himself and others in the quest to boost his ego,” a former OceanGate employee wrote in a 2018 email obtained by The New Yorker.

The Independent reports:

[6 July 2023 02:00 · Ariana Baio]

Head of key Titanic sub recovery team dodges question about OceanGate

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.

[6 July 2023 03:00 · Andrea Blanco]

Friend of late OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush warned Titan needed more testing after 2019 dive

A friend of late OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush warned him against taking customers aboard the company’s Titan submersible four years before it tragically imploded in the depths of the Atlantic Ocean.

Karl Stanley, the owner of a diving expedition company in Honduras and a close friend of Mr Rush, went on a tour aboard the Titan off the coast of the Bahamas in 2019, The New York Times first reported. In emails obtained by Insider of an alleged exchange between the two deep-sea enthusiasts, Mr Stanley told Mr Rush that he had heard a large cracking sound while on the 12,000-foot-deep dive.

“I think that hull has a defect near that flange, that will only get worse. The only question in my mind is will it fail catastrophically or not,” Mr Stanley wrote in a premonitory email, years before the Titan’s catastrophic implosion that killed all five of its passengers.

[6 July 2023 04:00 · Andrea Blanco]

Titan sub victims spent last moments listening to music and watching sea

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.

[6 July 2023 05:00 · Andrea Blanco]

Why did the Titanic sub implode?

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:

[6 July 2023 06:00 · Andrea Blanco]

WATCH: Search and rescue company boss visibly emotional describing Titan search