Category Archives: Titanic sub incident

Ohio real estate tycoon plans to take new submersible to Titanic wreck

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Larry Connor announces intention to prove safety of industry less than a year after five people killed in OceanGate implosion

A real estate tycoon from Dayton, Ohio, wants to visit the wreckage of the Titanic in the depths of the north Atlantic Ocean to prove that the personal submersible industry is safe, announcing his plans less than a year after a similar trip killed five people.

Larry Connor, 74, recently told the Wall Street Journal that he intends to team up with the deep-sea explorer Patrick Lahey to take a submersible to a depth of about 12,467ft (3,800m) to research and explore the Titanic’s remains as well as prove that proper engineering can make it possible to safely visit the wreckage site.

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Titanic salvage plan scrapped after Titan implosion killed mission head

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Paul-Henri Nargeolet was onboard the ill-fated submersible that was likely crushed by the ocean earlier this year, killing all five crew

The company that owns the salvage rights to the Titanic shipwreck has cancelled plans to retrieve more artefacts from the site because the leader of the upcoming expedition died in the Titan submersible implosion, according to documents filed in a US district court this week.

The decision could affect a looming court battle between the company and the US government, which has been trying to stop the 2024 mission. US attorneys have said the firm’s original plans to enter the ship’s hull would violate a federal law that treats the wreck as a gravesite.

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OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush created ‘mousetrap for billionaires’, says friend

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Karl Stanley says Rush ‘definitely knew it was going to end like this’ and that he had warned Rush the craft was dangerous

A one-time passenger of the submersible that imploded over the wreck of the Titanic last month, killing five, has reportedly said he believes OceanGate’s CEO, Stockton Rush, who died in the accident, knew that expeditions of the Titan craft would end in disaster but continued to create a “mousetrap for billionaires”.

Karl Stanley, who was interviewed by 60 Minutes Australia on Sunday, told the broadcast that he’d warned his friend that the carbon fiber and titanium craft was dangerous.

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James Cameron denies rumors he is working on film about Titan sub

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Titanic director and deep-sea expert tweets he is not in talks about OceanGate movie after report published in the Sun

James Cameron has debunked the rumors that he is working on a film about the recent implosion of the OceanGate submersible, an accident that took the lives of all five people on board, and called the claims “offensive”.

The director and noted deep-sea expert tweeted an impassioned note to followers on Saturday after the Sun published a report titled: “DIVE DEEP Titanic director James Cameron in talks with major streaming network to create drama series on doomed Titan sub.” The piece claimed that an “insider” told the publication that Cameron “is first choice for director” of a film about the events on the Titan submersible.

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OceanGate suspends operations after Titan submersible implosion

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Organization will no longer send individuals down to Titanic wreckage or elsewhere after five killed on sub

Nearly three weeks after its submersible vessel Titan imploded, killing all five people on board, OceanGate is suspending all exploration and commercial operations.

The organization posted on its website on Thursday that it would no longer be sending individuals down to the wreckage of the Titanic, or elsewhere.

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Presumed human remains recovered from within Titan wreckage, US Coast Guard says

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Pieces of mangled craft brought ashore in Newfoundland, Canada, after five killed on voyage to Titanic wreck

Presumed human remains have been recovered from within the wreckage of the Titan, the submersible that imploded on a voyage to the Titanic earlier this month, the US Coast Guard reported on Wednesday.

The Coast Guard will transport the evidence recovered from the north Atlantic to a US port where medical professionals will conduct a formal analysis of the remains, officials said.

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Disbelief and anger among Greek shipwreck victims’ relatives as millions spent on Titan rescue effort

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Disparity between rescue responses has sparked debate in Pakistan about double standards

Anees Majeed, who lost five relatives in the boat that sank off Greece on 14 June, watched in disbelief and growing anger as a frantic, multimillion-dollar rescue effort played out for five other men lost at sea last week.

Like thousands of others across Pakistan, Majeed, a law student from Pakistan-administered Kashmir, grieved at funeral prayers without a body to bury. At least 350 Pakistani citizens were on the overcrowded craft, the interior minister, Rana Sanaullah, confirmed on Friday.

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Why the Titan’s fate gripped us – even as all hope vanished

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Real stories of people in peril, the Titanic submersible trip to the Thai cave disaster, affirm a collective wish for human ingenuity and spirit to triumph

The discovery of wreckage from the Titan submersible last Thursday on the North Atlantic seabed close to the wreck of the Titanic brought to an end a five-day vigil of hope around the globe. The chances of rescuing the five occupants of the missing sub always appeared slight, but it was perhaps the very unlikeliness of that outcome that increased the appetite to see it realised.

In the era of 24-hour news, few events grab the public imagination quite as firmly as a real-time people-in-peril story. And it’s hard to imagine a more extreme or unpleasant peril than being trapped in deep sea in a craft the size of a minivan, as the oxygen supply runs out, and there is nothing to do but attempt to control your breathing in a situation that screams panic.

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James Cameron calls Titan submersible design ‘critically flawed’

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Film-maker who has dived to Titanic wreckage more than 30 times says it was ‘only a matter of time’ before tragedy occurred

Veteran deep-sea explorer and film-maker James Cameron said on Friday that the design of the Titan submersible was “critically flawed”, and it was “only a matter of time” before the tragedy occurred – as Canada’s transportation safety board said it was launching an investigation.

“People in the deep sea submergence engineering community warned the company that this could lead to catastrophic failure,” Cameron told ABC’s Good Morning America show on Friday morning, referring to the carbon fiber hull of the 22ft (6.7m) vessel.

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Titan tragedy: Canada launches investigation; CEO of sub company ‘dismissed safety fears’ – as it happened

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Canadian transport watchdog to launch safety investigation; Stockton Rush reportedly emailed deep-sea expert saying concerns were ‘baseless cries’

William Kohnen, chairman of the Manned Underwater Vehicles Committee, said the regulations for building submersible vessels were “written in blood”.

Kohnen’s organisation, based in Los Angeles in the US, raised safety concerns in 2018 about OceanGate’s development of Titan.

We’re only smart because we remember what we wrote and what we did wrong last time.

The rules are written in blood – it is in there because it caused trouble before, and to say: ‘Well I think we’re just going to ignore that and go on our own way,’ suggests there might be a bit of input of wisdom that this might not be the best decision.

It’s too early to tell, there’s data that’s going to have to be collected over the coming days, weeks and months, and I’m sure the team will work with whoever is conducting the investigations to cooperate and provide as much information as possible.

At that point, we’ll be in a better position to tell (what went wrong).

There are regulations in place but as you can imagine there aren’t many subs that go that deep, so the regulations are pretty sparse and many of them are antiquated and designed for specific instances.

It’s tricky to navigate those regulatory schemes.

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‘True explorers’: tributes paid to men killed in ‘catastrophic implosion’ of Titan sub

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Families, friends and colleagues remember Stockton Rush, Hamish Harding, Shahzada and Suleman Dawood and Paul-Henri Nargeolet

Tributes have been paid to the five people who are now believed to have been instantly killed in a “catastrophic implosion” of the Titan submersible during its dive to the Titanic.

On Thursday, after days of aerial and underwater searches, a robotic diving vehicle deployed from a Canadian ship discovered a debris field from the submersible Titan on the seabed 1,600 feet (488 metres) from the bow of the Titanic.

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Titanic sub crew believed to have died instantly in ‘catastrophic implosion’

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Debris field spotted by ROV scouring seabed ‘consistent with the catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber’, US Coast Guard says

Five crew members onboard the submersible Titan were probably killed instantly in a “catastrophic implosion” as it descended to the wreck of the Titanic two miles below the surface of the Atlantic ocean, US Coast Guard officials announced on Thursday.

A large debris field containing multiple sections of the vessel were spotted earlier in the day by a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) scouring the seabed near the Titanic wreck site 400 miles south of St John’s, Newfoundland, officials said at an afternoon press conference in Boston.

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US navy says it picked up ‘anomaly’ hours after sub began mission – as it happened

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This blog is now closed

A popular Mexican travel Youtuber, Alan Estrada has recalled his trip down to visit the wreck of the Titanic aboard the Titan submersible.

Estrada told the BBC that everyone who joined on the trip “were fully aware of the risks we were taking”.

But I never felt unsafe. I was fully aware of the risks and I knew that if something happened, if there was a failure in those depths and the submersible imploded, we probably wouldn’t even notice.

We continue to come together for our friends, their families and the ideals of The Explorers Club, and the cause of safe scientific exploration of extreme environments.

There is good cause for hope, and we are making it more hopeful.

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Titan submersible: missing man, 19, is a student at university in Glasgow

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Suleman Dawood, who joined voyage with his billionaire father Shahzada, had just finished his first year

Suleman Dawood, one of the five men missing on the submersible dive to visit the Titanic, is a student at a university in Glasgow.

The University of Strathclyde confirmed that Dawood, 19, was one of its students with Strathclyde business school, and had just completed his first year.

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Titanic sub: rescuers intensify search as fears grow over Titan’s remaining oxygen supply

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Equipment including deep sea vehicles heading to site as theoretical limit of oxygen supply inside Titan submersible nears

The search for a submersible that went missing during a dive to the wreck of Titanic has entered its fourth day, amid concerns the oxygen supply sustaining its five passengers is running dangerously low.

Equipment from the US, Canada, UK and France is heading to the scene of the search, about 400 miles (640km) south of St John’s, Newfoundland, joining an international coalition of rescue teams that is sweeping a vast expanse of the north Atlantic for the Titan after it went missing on Sunday, nearly two hours into its dive.

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Missing Titan sub likely intact but out of power, says expert who designed deepest-diving submersible

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Engineer Ron Allum says missing tourist sub unlikely to have suffered a ‘catastrophic implosion’ but partial flooding could be preventing it from resurfacing

The missing Titan submersible is unlikely to have suffered a catastrophic failure of its pressure hull, according to a deep-sea engineer who designed the vessel that film-maker James Cameron used to reach Earth’s deepest point.

Ron Allum, an Australian deep-sea engineer and explorer, co-designed the Deepsea Challenger submersible that Cameron used in 2012 to reach the deepest-known point of Earth’s seabed in the Mariana Trench.

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Thursday briefing: The latest in the hunt for the missing Titan sub

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In today’s newsletter: As the search intensifies, we look at the key developments – and controversy – around the lost submersible

Good morning. If it is still intact – and the five men inside are still alive – the missing Titan submersible is now down to its very last few hours of usable oxygen.

Since Sunday, when the tiny carbon fibre and titanium vessel first lost contact with its mothership somewhere close to the wreck of the Titanic, a frantic search has been under way, in the hopes that – somehow – a rescue from the cold extreme depths of the north Atlantic might be possible.

Mortgages | More than a million households across Britain are expected to lose at least 20% of their disposable incomes thanks to the surge in mortgage costs, the UK’s leading economics thinktank, the IFS, has warned. Labour has said if it were in power it would force banks to support borrowers, including letting them move on to interest-only mortgages and extending their repayment period.

Transport | The TransPennine Express train services are “worse rather than better” since transferring to the state-owned operator of last resort, according to the rail minister, Huw Merriman.

LGBTQ+ rights | Conservative MPs and peers are mainstreaming hostility to drag events, which are increasingly being targeted by extremist groups as part of a wider anti-LGBTQ+ narrative, a report says.

Politics | Labour will appoint a diversity tsar in the hope of encouraging more women, ethnic minorities and those from a working-class background to stand for office across all political levels and parties.

UK news | Police searching for Sophie Lambert, a 22-year-old woman who went missing from her home in Harrogate last Friday evening, have found a body in the River Nidd.

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Titanic sub: ‘We have to remain hopeful’, says US Coast Guard, as vessel thought to have less than 20 hours of oxygen left – live

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Rescue team says every noise being tracked and analysed; ‘every possible effort’ being made to bring missing crew home, says Polar Prince co-owner

An oceanographer has told the BBC the underwater noises give hope that those on board are still alive.

“There are plenty of sound sources in the ocean, but it does give hope,” Simon Boxall, a senior lecturer in oceanography at the University of Southampton, told the World Service.

A Canadian military surveillance aircraft detected underwater noises as a massive search continued on Wednesday in a remote part of the North Atlantic for a submersible that vanished while taking five people down to the wreck of the Titanic.

A statement from the US Coast Guard did not elaborate on what rescuers believed the noises could be, though it offered a glimmer of hope for those lost abroad the Titan as estimates suggest as little as a day’s worth of oxygen could be left if the vessel is still functioning.

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Titanic sub search team still hearing underwater noises, says US Coast Guard

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Sounds are ‘inconclusive’, says US Coast Guard captain, but focus of search relocated to that area

Search teams in the Atlantic trying to locate the missing Titan submersible said they were still hearing underwater “noises” on Wednesday, but added that the sounds were “inconclusive” and not confirmation the crew was still alive.

A US Coast Guard captain, Jamie Frederick, told a lunchtime briefing “several flights” of Canadian P3 aircraft had heard the noises, reported by several media outlets as “banging”, on Tuesday and Wednesday, and that the focus of the search was relocated to that area.

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Billionaires and the Titanic: the allure of extreme expeditions

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The more adventurous of the world’s wealthiest take trips to the edge of space and Antarctica in their stride

The disappearance of the submersible en route to the wreck of the Titanic has highlighted the businesses that offer extreme expeditions – and their clienteles.

Among the five people on the missing Titan submersible are two billionaires – Hamish Harding, a 58-year-old businessman who made his fortune selling private jets and holds three Guinness world records for previous extremetrips, and the British-based Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood, 48, who is onboard with his 19-year-old son Suleman.

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