HAUNTING VOYAGE
Billionaire Larry Connor to visit Titanic wreck in 2-person sub to ‘prove trek can be done safely’ after Titan tragedy
The Titan tragedy sped up plans for the upcoming trip
A DEEP-pocketed businessman plans to visit the Titanic wreck site in a two-person submarine despite last year's implosion that killed five people.
Ohio billionaire and real-estate investor Larry Connor is planning to take a deep-sea submersible to the Titanic to prove the industry is safe after last June's implosion in an OceanGate sub that killed five, including company CEO Stockton Rush.
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Rush, billionaire explorer Hamish Harding, French Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet, British-Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood, and his 19-year-old son, Suleman, all died instantly when the Titan submarine they were in imploded under the extreme pressures of the Atlantic Ocean.
Connor said he and Patrick Lahey, co-founder of Triton Submarines, will both plunge more than 12,400 feet, or roughly 2.3 miles, to the same shipwreck site in a $20 million luxury two-person submersible.
“I want to show people worldwide that while the ocean is extremely powerful, it can be wonderful and enjoyable and really kind of life-changing if you go about it the right way,” Connor told the Wall Street Journal this week.
Dubbed the Triton 4000/2 Abyssal Explorer, Lahey, who designed the vessel, said the sub could carry out the voyage multiple times.
More on the Titanic
“Patrick has been thinking about and designing this for over a decade," Connor said.
"But we didn’t have the materials and technology.
"You couldn’t have built this sub five years ago.”
The goal, according to Connor, is to prove that the journey to levels of the sea that deep can be done without disaster.
Most read in The US Sun
Connor says he started planning the trip a few days after last year's implosion of the OceanGate Titan.
That's when he called Lahey and urged him to build a better sub.
Claustrophobic footage reveals inside OceanGate’s ‘improvised’ Titanic sub built from camping shop stock & Xbox controller
“[He said], you know, what we need to do is build a sub that can dive to [Titanic-level depths] repeatedly and safely and demonstrate to the world that you guys can do that, and that Titan was a contraption,’” Lahey said of his phone call with Connor.
Lahey was one of the many luxury-adventure industry leaders who criticized OceanGate before and after the disaster, accusing the company of questionable safety standards and calling Rush’s business standards “quite predatory.”
For example, the waiver that Titan passengers had to sign mentioned multiple times that passengers could die and described the vessel as "experimental" three times, despite ignoring many safety regulations.
Industry experts and an employee whistleblower had both come forward with fears about the safety of the vessel before 2023's implosion.
Part of the major concerns surrounding OceanGate was that the company opted not to have their vessels certified through credible safety groups such as the American Bureau of Shipping and Eurpoe's Det Norske Veritas.
Other industry leaders, like one former chief submersible pilot for OceanGate, said years before the incident in 2023 that he worried Rush would get himself and others killed in a "quest to boost his ego."
DOOMED MISSION
The Titan that imploded was part of an eight-day expedition based out of the Canadian province of Newfoundland and cost participants $250,000 each.
It takes roughly two hours to descend to the Titanic from the surface, but the Titan blew up about an hour and 45 minutes into that descent on June 18 of last year due to the oceanic pressure against the sub.
This would have been the third trip to the Titanic for OceanGate, with the other two being deemed "successful," despite customers saying they went through bad experiences on board.
Previous passengers described scary situations, failed trips, and generally feeling unsafe throughout past trips.
David Pogue said his trip on the submersible was canceled due to an equipment malfunction after the Titan reached just 37 feet deep.
Another person who made the trip with OceanGate, Arthur Loibl, told Business Insider he was "incredibly lucky" to survive his August 2021 trip, which included Rush and Nargeolet on board.
After starting five hours late due to electrical problems, during Loibl's exhibition, which cost him $110,000, their submersible went missing and lost communication with its mothership as it headed to the Titanic.
He says he had to hope for a miracle as they waited for rescue crews to find them while the oxygen on board started to dwindle.
"I was incredibly lucky back then," Loibl said. "It was a suicide mission!"
Connor didn’t specify when the voyage to the Titanic would take place but the news has already created a storm on social media.
Read More on The US Sun
"Of all the sh*t we need proven in the world...," wrote one user on X, formerly Twitter.
"What's the worst that can happen?" asked another.
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Titanic Submarine News
Everything you need to know about the missing submarine, which vanished near the Titanic on June 18, 2023.
- What happened to the OceanGate Submarine?
- When did it go missing?
- Who is Hamish Harding?
- How deep is the Titanic in the ocean?
- Could the passengers escape the submarine alive?
- Do submarines like this disappear often and has this happened before?
- Who took part in the rescue effort?
- Who is Paul-Henry Nargeolet and what is he known for?
- Who else was missing on the stricken vessel?
- When did the Titanic sink and have people explored the wreckage before?