Manas Dasgupta
NEW DELHI, June 23: The 19-year old Suleman Dawood, the son of Pakistani billionaire businessman Shahzada Dawood, was a reluctant passenger on the Titan submersible but had to accompany his “Titanic-obsessed” father in its deep-sea exploration to see the wreckage of the ship that sunk in the Atlantic in 1912 after it hit an iceberg during its maiden voyage.
“Suleman was terrified of the daring expedition but he joined the expedition because it was important to his Titanic-obsessed father,” his aunt Azmeh, the elder sister of Shahzada, said after the new broke about the death of all the five aboard Titan in a “catastrophic implosion.”
The US Coast Guard said on Friday that the debris of the submersible Titan was found some 488 metres from the bow of the Titanic. It emerged that as multiple ships scoured the North Atlantic this week for the missing submersible headed to the Titanic wreck site, the US Navy had already detected an implosion on Sunday at the site where the vessel lost communications.
The information, which was not definitive, was immediately shared with the US Coast Guard, and a decision was made to continue the mission as a search and rescue to “make every effort to save the lives on board,” a senior navy official said.
The Coast Guard said the five crew members of the Titan submersible died from a “catastrophic implosion” of their vessel after examining debris found underwater by a remotely operated vehicle 488 metres from the bow of the Titanic. “We immediately notified the families,” Rear Admiral John Mauger said at a briefing in Boston. “On behalf of the US Coast Guard and the entire unified command, I offer my deepest condolences.”
The nose cone of the ship was discovered Thursday morning by an ROV from the vessel Horizon Arctic. Other pieces of debris, including portions of the ship’s pressure hull, were found soon after, the Coast Guard said. The unified command doesn’t have an estimate for when search operations on the sea floor will end, Mauger said. He added that the team would continue collecting information to attempt to determine the cause of the implosion.
The saga of the missing craft known as the Titan sparked global fascination as an international fleet of ships and aircraft desperately surveyed some 20,000 square kilometre area in the North Atlantic. Rescuers raced around the clock, concerned that the Titan’s estimated 96-hour oxygen supply was dwindling after it lost contact with the Canadian research vessel Polar Prince on June 18.
The US Coast Guard earlier in the week said unidentified sounds were detected during the search, but those noises weren’t linked to the missing craft. An elite US Navy acoustic detection system picked up the sound of a blast from near the debris site only hours after the submersible had deployed, media reports quoting some US defence official said.
Besides Shahzada Dawood, 48, and Suleman Dawood, 19, the father and son duo, on board the Titan were Hamish Harding, 58, of the UK, founder of investment firm Action Group and an avid adventurer; French maritime expert Paul-Henry Nargeolet, 77; and Stockton Rush, 61, chief executive officer of Everett, Washington-based OceanGate Inc., which ran the expedition. All of them died in the “catastrophic implosion.”
“These men were true explorers who shared a distinct spirit of adventure, and a deep passion for exploring and protecting the world’s oceans,” OceanGate said in a statement. “Our hearts are with these five souls and every member of their families during this tragic time. We grieve the loss of life and joy they brought to everyone they knew.”
The Titan, a 6.7-meter-long craft made of carbon fibre and titanium, was designed to carry a pilot and four crew to a maximum depth of 4,000 meters. According to OceanGate’s website, an on-board system was able to track the health of the crew and provide “early warning detection for the pilot with enough time to arrest the descent and safely return to surface.”
But no messages were received after the Polar Prince lost all communications with the Titan on June 18, about 1 hour and 45 minutes after it began diving toward the Titanic, which sank in 1912 on its first trans-Atlantic voyage.
OceanGate says it offers 10-day expeditions to the Titanic site, providing “qualified explorers” the opportunity to join as mission specialists. Their fees underwrite the training and participation of the science team exploring the ship Titanic. OceanGate also ran expeditions to explore the wreck in 2021 and 2022, according to its website.
The former business partner of Titanic submersible pilot Stockton Rush on Friday refuted the accusations that OceanGate Expeditions ignored safety warnings and claimed the company put safety first, Guillermo Soehnlein said. He had co-founded with Rush their deep-sea exploration company OceanGate before leaving the company in 2013. The “Titanic” movie director James Cameron had accused OceanGate Expeditions of ignoring safety warnings, after Rush and four other people were lost in the catastrophic implosion while descending to the shipwreck. Soehnlein said he was not involved in the design of the Titan submersible, but denied his old friend was reckless.
“He was extremely committed to safety.” “He was also extremely diligent about managing risks, and was very keenly aware of the dangers of operating in a deep ocean environment. So that’s one of the main reasons I agreed to go into business with him in 2009,” Soehnlein said.
Soehnlein noted that Cameron himself had conducted many submersible descents, including more than 30 to the Titanic site in the North Atlantic, and to the Earth’s deepest point in the Pacific Mariana Trench. “I think he was asked about a similar risk and he said, ‘look, if something happens at that depth, it will be catastrophic in a matter of microseconds. To the point where the implosion happens at almost supersonic speeds and you’d basically be dead before your brain could even process that anything was wrong.”
Soehnlein stressed, however, that it was too soon to say what happened to the Titan, and that it was “tricky to navigate” to formulate global regulations for submersibles designed to go ultra-deep. But deep-sea exploration should continue despite the tragedy, he said.
“Just like with space exploration, the best way to preserve the memories and the legacies of these five explorers is to conduct an investigation, find out what went wrong, take lessons learned and then move forward,” he said.