In December 2016, OceanGate announced that it had started construction on Cyclops II and that its cylindrical midsection would be made of carbon fibre. The idea, Rush explained in interviews, was that carbon fibre was a strong material that was significantly lighter than traditional metals.  It is typically used in the aerospace industry. "Carbon fibre is three times better than titanium on strength-to-buoyancy," he said. Cyclops II needed to fit as many passengers as possible. "You don't do the coolest thing you're ever going to do in your life by yourself," Rush told an audience at the GeekWire Summit last fall. "You take your wife, your son, your daughter, your best friend. You've got to have four people besides the pilot." Rush planned to have room for a Titanic guide and three passengers. The Cyclops II could fit that many occupants only if it had a cylindrical midsection. The size needed dictated the choice of materials.

Tourist dives to the wreck

Since its discovery on September 1, 1985, the Titanic has often been described as the Mount Everest of diving.  

Over a 14-year period starting in 1991, the two Russian Mir submersibles visited the Titanic wreck than any other vehicle. These expeditions included filming the ship for director James Cameron's movie "Titanic" in 1995.   Mir submersibles were also used for the first tourist dives to the Titanic, which began in 1998 and cost US$32,000 per customer at the time, equivalent to around US$69,000 today. A couple even married aboard one of the Mirs while it was just above the bow of the Titanic in 2001, having won their dive tickets in a competition.

On their final dives to the Titanic in 2005, the Mir submersibles filmed a live TV program from the wreck, relaying images via a fibre-optic tether to their support ship and then ashore by satellite. Cameron presented the show, Discovery Channel's "Last Mysteries of the Titanic", from inside Mir-2 as part of the first broadcast from such a depth.

In 2010, an ROV (Remotely Operated Vehicle) explored the wreck site, and for the ocean liner's centennial, a company called Deep Ocean Expeditions led a series of 12-day dives where groups of 20 tourists, paying $59,000 US, explored the famous watery grave. That was originally to be the last time tourists would ever visit the site – it turns out that was wrong.

In 2017, the original ticket price for a trip to the Titanic site was $105,129, the cost of a first-class ticket on the Titanic itself, adjusted for inflation. Those who could afford it had the opportunity to visit the wreck site, accompanied by a submersible pilot and an operations crew. Operations were planned to start the following year.

In a legal filing, the company reported that the submersible was "being developed and assembled in Washington, but would be owned by a Bahamian entity, will be registered in the Bahamas and will operate exclusively outside the territorial waters of the United States."

"Stockton strategically structured everything outside of U.S. jurisdiction. It was deliberate", one former OceanGate employee is quoted as saying.

It is illegal to take people as passengers aboard a privately owned submersible that is unclassed, so OceanGate made them a part of the crew as they upgraded from  'citizen scientists' to 'mission specialists' in 2021.

"People are so enthralled with Titanic," Rush told a BBC documentary crew last year. "I read an article that said there are three words in the English language that are known throughout the planet. And that's 'Coca-Cola,' 'God,' and 'Titanic.'"

Construction of Titan

OceanGate ordered the first titanium components for Cyclops II in December 2016 and awarded a contract to Spencer Composites in January 2017 to design and build the cylindrical carbon fibre hull. A deadline was given of only six weeks. In March 2018, Cyclops II was renamed Titan; Rush described it as "an amazing engineering feat" during its launch in 2018. Testing of Titan to its maximum intended depth of 4,000 m (13,800 ft) occurred in 2018 and 2019. Titan was the first crewed submersible that used a hull constructed of titanium and carbon fibre, as most other submersibles transporting passengers are designed with metal, carbon steel or titanium, not dual materials. The Russian Mir submersibles, for example, were constructed of titanium, and their walls were four inches thick. A $40 game controller operated the Titan and ran on Bluetooth technology rather than being hard-wired.

Titan was the first privately owned vessel with a claimed maximum depth of 4,000 m (13,800 ft). The submersible was 22 feet long and weighed approximately 21,000 pounds (about the weight of a school bus). It featured one large viewing window (the largest on the market), which was made of acrylic and seven inches thick. "That's another thing where I broke the rules," Rush said to David Pogue, a CBS News journalist, who dived to the Titanic last summer with Rush. Rush admitted in the interview that he was MacGyvering off-the-shelf parts and also admitted that one part had been purchased from Camping World. When contact with the submersible could not be established for five hours last summer, the ship's internet was cut off to prevent people on the support ship from tweeting. OceanGate's explanation was "that this could be an emergency, and they needed all channels open. The passengers on board had no idea how to confirm whether or not that was true.

Safety Controversies

In the latter part of 2017, David Lochridge, OceanGate's director of marine operations, became increasingly concerned. OceanGate would soon commence manned sea trials for Cyclops II in the Bahamas, and he believed that there was a chance that they would result in catastrophe. The consequences for Lochridge could extend beyond OceanGate's business and the trauma of losing colleagues; as director of marine operations, Lochridge had a contract specifying that he was ultimately responsible for "ensuring the safety of all crew and clients."

On the workshop floor, he raised questions about potential flaws in the design and build processes, but his concerns were dismissed. OceanGate's position was that such matters were outside the scope of his responsibilities; he was "not hired to provide engineering services or to design or develop Cyclops II," the company later said in a court filing. Nevertheless, before the handover of the submersible to the operations team, Rush directed Lochridge to carry out an inspection because his job description required him to sign off on the submersible's readiness for deployment.

On January 18, 2018, Lochridge wrote an engineering report and attached photographs of the elements of the greatest concern. He said the Titan under development needed more testing when it reached "extreme depths". Lochridge found "a lack of non-destructive testing performed on the hull of the Titan," so he recommended to Rush that the Titan undergo 50 test dives, while Rush only wanted to do five. The principal concerns included the company's decision to rely on sound monitoring for cracking and popping noises made by the hull under pressure to detect flaws rather than a scan; glue coming away from the seams of ballast bags, and mounting bolts at risk of rupture; sealing faces with errant plunge holes, and O-ring grooves that deviated from standard design parameters. The exostructure and electrical pods used different metals, which could result in galvanic corrosion when exposed to seawater. Thruster cables posed "snagging hazards"; the iridium satellite beacon, to transmit the submersible's position after surfacing, was attached with zip ties. The flooring was highly flammable; the interior vinyl wrapping emitted "highly toxic gasses upon ignition."  Cyclops II's viewport had a depth rating of only thirteen hundred metres, approximately one-third of Titanic's depth, though it is possible that this had changed by the time passengers finally dived.  But, Lochridge's lawyer wrote, OceanGate had "refused to pay for the manufacturer to build a viewport that would meet the required depth."  It seemed as if Rush believed that acrylic's transparent quality would give him ample warning before failure. "You can see every surface," he said. "And if you've overstressed it, or you've even come close, it starts to get this crazing effect. ... and if that happened underwater ... you just stop and go to the surface." "You would have time to get back up?" Pogue asked. "Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's way more warning than you need."
To assess the carbon-fibre hull, Lochridge examined a small cross-section of material. He found that it had "very visible signs of delamination and porosity"—it seemed possible that, after repeated dives, it would come apart. He shone a light at the sample from behind and photographed beams streaming through splits in the midsection in a disturbing, irregular pattern. The only safe way to dive, Lochridge concluded, was first to carry out a full scan of the hull.

The next day, Lochridge sent his report to Rush, Tony Nissen, the company's director of engineering, and other members of the OceanGate leadership. "Verbal communication of the key items I have addressed in my attached document have been dismissed on several occasions, so I feel now I must make this report so there is an official record in place," he wrote. "Until suitable corrective actions are in place and closed out, Cyclops II (Titan) should not be manned during any upcoming trials."

Rush was furious. He called a meeting that afternoon and recorded it on his phone. For the next two hours, the OceanGate leadership insisted that no hull testing was necessary—an acoustic monitoring system to detect fraying fibres would serve in its place. According to the company, the system would alert the pilot to the possibility of catastrophic failure "with enough time to arrest the descent and safely return to surface." But, in a court filing, Lochridge's lawyer wrote, "this type of acoustic analysis would only show when a component is about to fail—often milliseconds before an implosion—and would not detect any existing flaws prior to putting
pressure onto the hull." A former senior employee who was present at the meeting is quoted as saying, "We didn't even have a baseline. We didn't know what it would sound like if something went wrong."

Rush described the glue holding the submersible together like "peanut butter".

When Lochridge raised his concerns with Rush, he was told that he could not be the director of marine operations anymore, and so promptly fired him.

"I would consider myself pretty ballsy when it comes to doing things that are dangerous, but that sub is an accident waiting to happen," Lochridge wrote to Rob McCallum, Founding Partner of EYOS (Expeditions, Yachts, Operations, Specialists), two weeks later.   McCallum had previously led an expedition to the Titanic. "There's no way on earth you could have paid me to dive the thing." Of Rush, he added, "I don't want to be seen as a Tattle tale, but I'm so worried he kills himself and others in the quest to boost his ego."

McCallum also raised his concerns with Stockton Rush. Rush had asked McCallum to run his Titanic operation for him, but after visiting the workshop outside Seattle, he was disturbed by what he saw. "Everyone was drinking Kool-Aid and saying how cool they were with a Sony PlayStation," he said. "And he said at the time, 'Does Sony know that it's been used for this application? Because, you know, this is not what it was designed for.' And now you have the hand controller talking to a Wi-Fi unit, which is talking to a black box, which is talking to the sub's thrusters. There were multiple points of failure."

One day, McCallum climbed into the Cyclops II for a test dive at a marina. He met Lochridge, the chief pilot and a Scotsman who had spent three decades as a submersible pilot and engineer. But, during the harbor trial, the Cyclops II got stuck in shallow water. "It was hilarious because there were four very experienced operators in the sub, stuck at twenty or twenty-five feet, and we had to sit there for a few hours while they worked it out," McCallum recalled. He liked and trusted Lochridge. But, of the sub, he said, "This thing is a mutt."

Rush eventually decided not to attempt to have the Titanic-bound vehicle classed by a marine-certification agency such as DNV (Det Norske Veritas). He had no interest in welcoming into the project an external evaluator who would, as he saw it, "need to first be educated before being qualified to 'validate' any innovations."

That marked the end of McCallum's desire to be associated with the project. "The minute that I found out that he was not going to class the vehicle, that's when I said, 'I'm sorry, I just can't be involved", he stated. "I couldn't tell him anything about the Five Deeps project then. But I could say, 'Look, I am involved with other projects that are building classed subs'—of course, I was talking about the Limiting Factor — 'and I can tell you that the class society has been nothing but supportive. They are actually part of our innovation process. We're using the brainpower of their engineers to feed into our design." "Stockton didn't like that," McCallum continued. "He didn't like being told he was on the fringe."

As word got out that Rush planned to take tourists to the Titanic, McCallum recalled, "People would ring me, and say, 'We've always wanted to go to Titanic. What do you think?' And I would tell them, 'Never get in an unclassed sub. I wouldn't do it, and you shouldn't, either." Lochridge would later tell McCallum in private regarding the Titan, "it's a lemon".

McCallum tried to reason with Rush directly. "You are wanting to use a prototype un-classed technology in a very hostile place," he e-mailed. "As much as I appreciate entrepreneurship and innovation, you are potentially putting an entire industry at risk."

Rush replied four days later, saying that he had "grown tired of industry players who try to use a safety argument to stop innovation and new entrants from entering their small existing market." He understood that his approach "flies in the face of the submersible orthodoxy, but that is the nature of innovation," he wrote. "We have heard the baseless cries of 'you are going to kill someone' way too often. I take this as a serious personal insult."

In response, McCallum listed a number of specific concerns from his "humble perch" as an expedition leader. "In your race to Titanic you are mirroring that famous catch cry 'she is unsinkable," McCallum wrote. The correspondence ended soon afterwards; Rush asked McCallum to work for him—then threatened him with a lawsuit, in an effort to silence him when he declined. Arrogance and hubris had set in in Rush's mind.

"You can't cut corners in the deep," McCallum had told Rush. "It's not about being a disruptor. It's about the laws of physics." Complaints were filed with the U.S. government by McCallum, Patrick Lahey CEO of Triton Submarines, and other experts, but it appears those concerns were not followed up.

In the spring of 2018, more than three dozen industry experts sent a letter to OceanGate expressing their "unanimous concern" about its upcoming Titanic expedition—for which it had already sold places. Among the signatories were Lahey, McCallum, Don Walsh, a renowned oceanographer, and a Coast Guard senior inspector. There was a great deal of concern regarding people's safety. However, the sea trials failed due to problems with the launch and recovery system, so OceanGate shelved plans to visit the Titanic wreck that summer.

OceanGate continued to sell tickets, but it did not dive to the wreck for another three years. Soon after Lochridge departed, a college newspaper quoted a recent graduate as saying that he and his classmates had started working on the Titan's electrical systems as interns while they were still in school. "The whole electrical system," he said. "That was our design, we implemented it, and it works."

In the 2019 Smithsonian Magazine feature, Rush stated: "We're going to colonize the ocean long before we colonize space." While the Titanic expedition was to begin that year, it was delayed after the company failed to secure proper permits for its contracted research support vessel.

Karl Stanley, a submersible expert, was aboard the Titan in the Bahamas in April 2019. He felt something was wrong with the vessel when loud noises were heard. The day after his trip, Stanley emailed Stockton Rush, sounding the alarm on suspected defects. "What we heard, in my opinion ... sounded like a flaw/defect in one area being acted on by the tremendous pressures and being crushed/damaged," Stanley wrote in the email. "From the intensity of the sounds, the fact that they never totally stopped at depth, and the fact that there were sounds at about 300 feet that indicated a relaxing of stored energy would indicate that there is an area of the hull that is breaking down/ getting spongy," Stanley continued.

Stanley also asked Rush whether he would consider taking people to see the Titanic without knowing the origins of the clatters. "A useful thought exercise here would be to imagine the removal of the variables of the investors, the eager mission scientists, your team hungry for success, the press releases already announcing this summer's dive schedule," Stanley wrote.

OceanGate claimed that Titan had "the first pressure vessel of its kind in the world." But there's a reason that Triton and other manufacturers don't use carbon fibre in their hulls. Under compression, it's a capricious material.

The following year, Titan's hull was rebuilt after it was discovered to show signs of "cyclic fatigue", meaning it would not be safe at 13,000 feet.

In the spring of 2021, OceanGate was finally diving down to the Titanic. The days of insinuating that Titan was not safe had ended. Now Rush portrayed the submersible as existing at the very fringe of what was physically possible. Clients signed waivers and were informed that the submersible was experimental and unclassed. In the waiver form, the word "death" was mentioned a total of eight times. But the framing was that this was how pioneering exploration is done.

Veteran documentary camera operator Brian Weed was working for the Discovery Channel's Expedition Unknown TV show when he and his colleague had the opportunity in May 2021 to take a test dive on the Titan sub with Rush at the helm of the mission.

The dive to a shipwreck in Washington state's Puget Sound was supposed to be a "precursor" to one later that summer to the famed shipwreck site of the Titanic in the depths of the North Atlantic, where the crew planned to film a special episode.

However, Weed said, "Things did not go as planned on our test dive," ultimately leading him to bow out of the project over safety concerns.

"That whole dive made me very uncomfortable with the idea of going down to Titanic depths in that submersible," Weed said, adding that it just didn't "feel safe."

During the dive, the thruster system malfunctioned, the computers needed recalibrating, and there were nonstop communications issues with the team at the surface, according to Weed.

Weed said his first "red flag" about the experience came shortly after he, Expedition Unknown host Josh Gates, and Rush were deadbolted into the sub.

Weed questioned Rush about what would happen if the sub had to make an ascent in an emergency situation suddenly and was nowhere near its mothership.

"[Rush] says, 'Well there's four or five days of oxygen on board, and I said, 'What if they don't find you?' And he said, 'Well, you're dead anyway,'" Weed recalled.
Weed said he found Rush's response to his question "bizarre." "It seemed to almost be a nihilistic attitude toward life or death out in the middle of the ocean," Weed said.

Rush's apparent "cavalier attitude" towards what Weed considered to be "basic safety" made him feel "uneasy" from the start, he said.

Problems occurred on the test dive even before the sub made it off the launch pad, and the launch "proved to be a pretty clunky procedure," Weed said.
"I'm hearing banging, cracking, and clanking from the outside," said Weed, explaining that Rush was "trying to communicate with the team on the outside" and that there was an apparent issue with the platform.

"We were thinking if this isn't going well, you know, we're supposed to go on a dive to Titanic within the next couple of months. It feels like we're not ready to go," Weed said.

Rush assured them "everything would be done and smooth" by the time they were ready to go on the Titanic expedition, according to Weed.

After getting the green light to go finally, "We do our systems check, and we attempt to start manoeuvring out with our thrusters, and that's pretty much when everything started to go wrong," said Weed.  Quickly, at least one thruster failed, and there was a "major malfunction" with the whole thruster system, he said.

"We sort of became sitting ducks in water without the ability to go anywhere," said Weed, explaining that the sub never got below 100 feet in the water.

The sub spent more than two hours in the water "going nowhere" before Rush "had to sheepishly confess we had to abort the dive because there was no way for the vessel to get down to the target," said Weed.

"The whole time I'm in the water locked in this [submersible] and thinking this is supposed to go to the Titanic in two months," said Weed. "We can't get below 100 feet, and this is supposed to go 12,000 feet under the ocean."

During the ordeal, Weed said that Rush seemed "flustered" and "nervous" but always had "an excuse or a reason for whatever was going on."

"He made it seem like everything was a minor issue, although in my mind an aborted dive means that's not a minor issue," said Weed.

Weed called Rush "very convincing," "charismatic," "smart," and someone you "want to trust," but he didn't trust him.

"He's a great salesman. He's committed. He fully believes in what he's doing. And he fully believes in his innovation and his technology and what he is capable of creating," Weed said of Rush.

"But when I met him, I didn't trust him," he said.

"Stockton believes so much in his own creation and innovation that he wasn't willing to even consider that he might be wrong about something," said Weed.

Weed, who spent three days with Rush, said Rush "was blinded by his own hubris, for lack of a better word — blinded by his own confidence."

His attitude "to me was this works until it doesn't."

"It showed me a side of Stockton that meant I am 100% all in on this, and this is a hill, for a lack of a better phrase, I am willing to die on," said Weed.

Weed said his decision to pull out of the project was "solidified" after his production company hired a consultant with the US Navy to evaluate the Titan sub weeks later.
Overall, the consultant had a "positive" report, said Weed, but there were concerns about the carbon-fibre hull of the Titan.

An expert said that photos of the Titan sub wreckage suggest that the most likely explanation for the vessel's implosion was that the hull collapsed under the immense pressure of the ocean.

After reading the report, Weed said he thought "going down on this submersible is playing Russian roulette because there's no way to know when it's going to give out."

About a month later, the entire production for the Expedition Unknown episode was canceled "due to the same concerns over safety and unknowns," said Weed.

When Weed saw the headlines on June 18 that the Titan had gone missing, he felt "sick to my stomach."

"I've never regretted making that choice" to not go back on the Titan, said Weed.

In 2022 a BBC documentary crew joined the expedition. Rush stayed on the Horizon Arctic (the support vessel) while Scott Griffith, OceanGate's director of logistics and quality assurance, piloted a scientist and three other passengers down.  During the launch, a diver in the water noticed and reported to the surface vessel that something with a thruster seemed off. Nevertheless, the mission continued.

More than two hours passed; after Titan touched down in the silt, Griffith fired the thrusters and realized something was wrong."I don't know what's going on," he said. As he fiddled with the controller, a passenger looked out the viewport. 

"Am I spinning?" Griffith asked. "Yes."
"I am?"
"Looks like it," another passenger said.
"Oh, my God," Griffith muttered. One of the thrusters had been installed in the wrong direction. "The only thing I can do is a three-sixty," he said.

They were in the debris field, three hundred meters from the bow. One of the clients said that she had delayed buying a car, getting married, and having kids, all "because I wanted to go to Titanic," but they couldn't make their way over to the wreck. Griffith relayed the situation to the ship. Rush's solution was to "remap the controller."

Rush couldn't recall where the buttons were, and it seemed there was no spare controller on the ship. Someone found an image of a PlayStation 3 controller from the Internet, and Rush worked out a new button routine. "Yeah—left and right might be forward and back. Huh. I don't know," he said. "It might work."
"Right is forward," Griffith read off his screen, two and a half miles below. "Uh—I'm going to have to write this down."
"Right is forward," Rush said. "Great! Live with it."

Shipwrecks are notoriously difficult and dangerous to dive. Rusted cables drape the Titanic, moving with the currents; a broken crow's nest dangles over the deck. While other parts of the wreck are jagged. So, it is very easy for a submersible to get caught on something. Griffith piloted the submersible over to the wreck while teaching himself in real time to operate a Bluetooth controller whose buttons suddenly had different functions than those for which he had trained.

If you're not breaking things, you're not innovating," Rush said at the GeekWire Summit in fall 2022. "If you're operating within a known environment, as most submersible manufacturers do— they don't break things. To me, the more stuff you've broken, the more innovative you've been."

When the Titan went missing last summer for five hours before it suddenly resurfaced, adding a safety beacon was discussed. However, it was never followed up on.

There are parallels between the Apollo 13 spacecraft that was lost in space in April 1970 before it returned to earth, and the Titan submersible. A trip to the bottom of the deep ocean shares some important characteristics with a trip to space. The vehicle is small and must provide protection, air, and supplies for the crew in an extremely hostile environment that is very hard to reach.

"Carbon fibre makes noise," Rush told Pogue. "It crackles. The first time you pressurize it, if you think about it—of those million fibres, a couple of 'em are sorta weak. They shouldn't have made the team." He spoke of signs of hull breakage as if it were perfectly routine. "The first time we took it to full pressure, it made a bunch of noise. The second time, it made very little noise." "At some point, safety is just pure waste, said Rush."

Fibres do not regenerate between dives. Nevertheless, it didn't seem to concern Rush. "It's a huge amount of pressure from the point where we'd say, 'Oh, the hull's not happy,' to when it implodes," he noted. "You just have to stop your descent."

It's not certain that Rush could always stop his descent. Once, as he piloted passengers to the wreck, a malfunction prevented Rush from dropping weights. Passengers calmly discussed sleeping on the bottom of the ocean, thirty-eight hundred meters down; after twenty-four hours, a drop-weight mechanism would dissolve in the seawater, allowing the submersible to surface.
Eventually, Rush managed to release the weights manually, using a hydraulic pump. "This is why you want your pilot to be an engineer," a passenger said, smiling, as another 'mission specialist' filmed her.

Timeline

Saturday June 17

Hamish Harding, the British billionaire who had been down to the Mariana Trench and occupied a seat last year on the Blue Origin mission to space, posted on Facebook: "I am proud to finally announce that I joined OceanGate Expeditions for their RMS TITANIC Mission as a mission specialist on the sub going down to the Titanic," he wrote around 5:35 p.m. ET.

"Due to the worst winter in Newfoundland in 40 years, this mission is likely to be the first and only manned mission to the Titanic in 2023. A weather window has just opened up and we are going to attempt a dive tomorrow."

Sunday June 18

The Titan crew planned to dive at 4 a.m. However, it did not begin until 8 a.m. Stockton Rush, Hamish Harding, along with three other people, British Pakistini businessman Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son Suleman Dawood.

Suleman's mother Christine Dawood was originally supposed to join her husband on the dive, but it was cancelled due to the Covid pandemic. She stepped back, as Suleman wanted to go. Mrs. Dawood said Suleman loved the Rubik's Cube so much that he carried it with him everywhere, dazzling onlookers by solving the complex puzzle in 12 seconds. "He said, 'I'm going to solve the Rubik's Cube 3,700 metres below sea at the Titanic'."  The family including their daughter, had boarded the Polar Prince. Mrs Dawood said they hugged and made jokes in the moments before her husband and son boarded the Titan submersible."

Paul-Henry Nargeolet, a diver, Titanic Researcher and Explorer acted as the guide, while Rush piloted the sub.

The Polar Prince lost communication with the Titan at 9:45. All comms and tracking were offline. By losing contact, the Titan became effectively stranded with no way of knowing its own position.

The sub failed to resurface by the predetermined 3 p.m. deadline. The U.S. Coast Guard was alerted by OceanGate that the Titan was missing, at 5:45 – 10 hours after the sub submerged. As well, the Canadian Coast Guard was alerted that the Titan is missing at 9:13 p.m.

Monday June 19

An extensive search and rescue effort was underway by early Monday, as US and Canadian officials scrambled to locate the sub with only about 70 to 96 hours of oxygen left.

The search zeroed in on the area about 900 nautical miles off the Coast of Cape Cod, the Coast Guard said. The search area spanned thousands of miles — twice the size of Connecticut.

Commercial vessels were also asked to help with the search.

"Our entire focus is on the crewmembers in the submersible and their families," OceanGate Expeditions wrote in a statement at the time.
"We are exploring and mobilizing all options to bring the crew back safely."

Tuesday June 20

As the search effort continued, speculation mounted that the sub could be stuck somewhere in Titanic's looming, century-old crevices.

Throughout the day on Tuesday, a Canadian P-3 aircraft equipped with sonobuoys reportedly detected "banging" in 30-minute intervals near where the sub was lost, internal emails later revealed. Those noises were later found to be unrelated and in fact, may have come from the wreck itself.

"It's like watching Apollo 13 unfold under water." said Arthur Trembanis, professor of marine science and policy at the University of Delaware.

Wednesday, June 21

The US Coast Guard, US Navy, Canadian Coast Guard, and OceanGate Expeditions coordinated a unified command to lead the search.

Around 2 a.m. ET, the US Coast Guard also confirmed the Canadian aircraft had detected underwater banging the previous day.

As the crew members' remaining oxygen quickly dwindled, more vessels, including the French research ship L'Atalante, arrived to help with the search.

The L'Atalante, which had been pledged to the rescue effort by French officials earlier in the week, is equipped with the Nautile, one of the world's only manned deep-sea vehicles capable of reaching the Titanic's depths.

L'Atalante was also expected to deploy the Victor 6000, a remote-controlled robot capable of reaching a depth of 20,000 feet — almost double the Titanic's own position on the floor of the North Atlantic.

As the vessel's 96 hours of oxygen dwindled, officials insisted that the search remained a rescue mission – not a recovery operation.
"This is a search-and-rescue mission, 100%," Coast Guard First District Capt. Jamie Frederick told reporters Wednesday.
"We'll continue to put every available asset that we have in an effort to find the Titan and the crew members."

Thursday June 22

The Titan is believed to have run out of emergency oxygen around 7:08 a.m.

Less than two hours later, the US Coast Guard announced that a remote-operated vehicle had reached the ocean floor as the frantic search became increasingly desperate.

"The Canadian vessel Horizon Arctic has deployed an ROV that has reached the sea floor and began its search for the missing sub," the agency said.

The Coast Guard also confirmed that L'Atalante was set to deploy its ROV shortly.

Also on Thursday morning, deep-sea specialist firm Magellan announced that its own ROV was en route to the search.

Just a few hours later, debris was found not far from the Titanic wreck site. It was determined soon after that the debris was a rear cover and spoiler from the submersible, located 1,600 feet from the bow. The U.S. Coast Guard in a statement, said: "The debris was "consistent with catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber" in the submersible, meaning the Titan imploded. An implosion is the reversal of an explosion. The force of the implosion would have been so violent that everyone on board would have died before the water touched their bodies. Being that it was so violent, the precise cause of the disaster may never be known.

The Horizon Arctic was on the scene. The ship sent an ROV to search the ocean floor near the wreck for pieces of the submersible.

The U.S. Navy confirmed late Thursday its acoustic sensors detected "an anomaly consistent with an implosion" in the deep area of the ocean where the doomed submersible was operating Sunday, several hours before it was reported missing. This information was not shared with the public until after the wreckage was found, and all five people were presumed dead.

Six days later, on June 28, presumed human remains were discovered in the wreckage which had been recovered and brought ashore to St. Johns by the Horizon Arctic. The U.S. Coast Guard transported the remains to a U.S. port where medical professionals will conduct a formal analysis of the remains, officials said.

Reportedly, the sub was approaching 3500 metres when the ascent weights were dropped, meaning the dive was aborted. Then it lost comms and tracking before an implosion was heard. The implosion would have happened within a millisecond. In the 70 years that deep sea diving has been around, never has an implosion happened to a submersible... until June 18. The Titan only reached the Titanic 13 out 90 dives, which is a mere 14 per cent success rate.

The National Transportation Safety Board has said the Coast Guard has declared the loss of the Titan submersible to be a "major marine casualty" and the Coast Guard will lead the investigation. The U.S. Coast Guard will work closely with the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, the Transportation Safety Board of Canada, the French Marine Casualties Investigation Board and the United Kingdom Marine Accident Investigation Branch.

OceanGate has since suspended all exploration and commercial operations; upon news of the fate of the Titan, their website has been shuttered save for a single page acknowledging the suspension of operations and their Everett office is closed, and it has scrubbed all of its social media.

May the five victims of the Titan submersible tragedy rest in peace.

We, the members of the Titanic community, are grieving the loss of Paul-Henry Nargeolet, a man who was a dear friend to many of us and who was considered a legend in the community for his extensive and unparalleled knowledge of the ship, thereby being nicknamed Mr Titanic.

PH, 77 years of age, was instrumental in recovering the 'Big Piece' in August 1998. He was the director of underwater research for RMS Titanic Inc., the company that owns the salvage rights to the wreck. Eighty per cent of the artefacts in the company's collection were recovered by or recovered under the supervision of Paul-Henry Nargeolet and his dedicated team. He knew his way around the wreck site, like the back of his hand. Nargeolet had been to the Titanic a total of 37 times, more than anyone else.

PH inspired generations of ocean lovers, divers and explorers over the world. He was a kind, gentle soul who had a devilish smile and loved to play pranks. "PH was a giant of a man, and an inspiration in and of himself". To listen to him tell a story was to be in the story itself," remarked Jessica Sanders, President of RMS Titanic Inc., at a memorial service for Nargeolet, held on July 19, 2023. Nargeolet was honoured by James Cameron and others for heeding the explorer's call.