The pilot of the Titan submersible said he took claims that he was putting lives at risk by offering expeditions to the Titanic wreck on his experimental vessel as “a serious personal insult”.
Stockton Rush, the founder and CEO of OceanGate, Titan’s operator, was repeatedly urged to get the submersible certified amid fears he was potentially putting himself and his customers at risk.
The 61-year-old and four others on board – British explorer Hamish Harding, 58, British-Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood, 48, his 19-year-old son Suleman and veteran French diver Paul-Henri Nargeolet, 77 – were all confirmed dead on Thursday.
The US Coast Guard said Titan had suffered a “catastrophic implosion”.
An intensive, days-long search for the submersible has raised questions over the safety of deep-sea commercial vessels, which the US Coast Guard said was “going to be a future focus of review”.
It comes as it emerged that safety concerns over OceanGate’s expeditions dated back as far as 2018.
Rob McCallum, a deep-sea exploration specialist, told the BBC he repeatedly wrote to Mr Rush, urging his company to get official approval for its tourist excursions.
In one furious exchange, Mr Rush replied: “We have heard the baseless cries of ‘you are going to kill someone’ way too often. I take this as a serious personal insult.”
Mr McCallum said he ended his correspondence with the company in 2018, when OceanGate threatened legal action.
“Until a sub is classed, tested and proven it should not be used for commercial deep dive operations,” he wrote in one email seen by the BBC.
Mr Rush replied that he was “tired of industry players who try to use a safety argument to stop innovation”.
Meanwhile, US officials have defended focusing their search for Titan at the water’s surface for days, despite hearing an implosion deep in the water shortly after it went missing.
Fragments of the craft were found on the ocean floor on Thursday in the search, which included assistance from Canadian, British and French vessels.
It has now emerged the US Navy began listening for Titan almost as soon as the submersible lost contact with its mothership on Sunday.
The navy discovered that its secret underwater monitoring system, designed to detect foreign adversaries’ submarines, had recorded a suspected implosion shortly after Titan’s disappearance around an hour and 45 minutes into its descent to the Titanic wreck.
The implosion was detected near the debris field discovered on Thursday and the findings were passed to the Coast Guard, which was heading the search, on Sunday.
The information was also likely to have been shared with the Royal Navy on the first day of the search, experts told The Telegraph.
Steffan Watkins, an aircraft and naval research consultant, told The Telegraph that the US Navy, Royal Canadian Navy and the Royal Navy all monitored sensor arrays from the system.
“All three governments would likely have known on day one there wasn’t going to be a rescue,” he said.
It raises questions over what relatives of the five people on board Titan were told early on in the search, and why rescuers did not deploy underwater robots to the ocean floor sooner.
The Coast Guard initially focused its efforts on searching the water’s surface for signs of Titan. It was not until Tuesday that the first dive with remotely-operated vehicles (ROVs) began.
A spokesperson for the Coast Guard said: “The first search assets that arrived on scene were air assets from the US Coast Guard and US Air National Guard, which were able to reach the scene faster than other assets. The Unified Command made every effort to mobilise all available surface and subsurface search assets as soon as possible.”
Navy officials defended the search and rescue effort, telling the New York Times it would have been “irresponsible” to immediately assume the five men were dead.
While the “outlook appeared grim”, the rescue effort was ordered on Sunday since there was no visual evidence of a catastrophic failure, the newspaper reported.
James Cameron, who directed the Oscar-winning 1997 film Titanic, said the last few days had “felt like a prolonged and nightmarish charade”.
“I knew that sub was sitting exactly underneath its last known depth and position. That’s exactly where they found it,” he told the BBC.
Cameron added that many in the deep submergence engineering community had been “deeply concerned” about the tourist excursions offered by OceanGate, saying: “One of the saddest aspects of this is how preventable it really was.”
https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMibGh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LnRlbGVncmFwaC5jby51ay93b3JsZC1uZXdzLzIwMjMvMDYvMjMvdGl0YW4tc3ViLXBpbG90LWNsYWltcy1wdXR0aW5nLWxpdmVzLXJpc2stcGVyc29uYWwtaW5zdWx0L9IBAA?oc=5
2023-06-23 19:00:00Z
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