On June 18, 2023, four men and a teenager climbed into the Titan submersible, a mini submarine, to descend thousands of feet through the dark waters of the North Atlantic until they reached the wreck of the Titanic off the coast of Newfoundland.
As history now knows, none of them returned. Instead, one hour and 45 minutes into the dive, the Titan lost contact with its support ship, the Polar Prince, and vanished.
For four long days the world held its breath until the US Coast Guard finally confirmed that all aboard had perished following a catastrophic implosion of the sub.
The victims included Stockton Rush, the captain and chief executive officer of OceanGate, the American company which owned the Titan.
There were three Britons on board as passengers – Hamish Harding, 58, Shahzada Dawood, 48, and his 19-year-old son, Suleman – and 77-year-old Frenchman, Paul-Henri Nargeolet. All died instantly.
If for their families the loss of the Titan was an undoubted tragedy, a new BBC investigation has reached a still more troubling conclusion: that the disaster was devastatingly predictable, ‘the biggest scandal in deep sea exploration’ and potentially a major crime.
With unprecedented access to the US Coast Guard’s forensic investigation – which has examined all 88 Titan dives – plus exclusive footage from inside the submersible, a documentary team from BBC2 has pieced together the reckless history of Rush’s expeditions and the disgraceful risks he took.
The Titan was neither officially registered nor certified. There had been a catalogue of technical and safety failures on board. Key protocols were ignored before the fatal dive.
There were three Britons on board as passengers – Hamish Harding, 58, Shahzada Dawood (left), 48, and his 19-year-old son, Suleman (right) – and 77-year-old Frenchman, Paul-Henri Nargeolet. All died instantly on the Titan submersible
Perhaps most extraordinarily of all, investigators conclude that the Titan’s fragile carbon fibre hull was badly damaged by the time it started its final descent.
A craft controlled with nothing more sophisticated than the controller from a videogame console, the Titan was little more than a ‘death tube’.
Here for the first time, episode by episode – and dive by questionable dive – The Mail on Sunday reveals the full shocking picture of how often the submersible showed clear signs it was unsafe, going back to its inception six years before the tragedy, and why human life should never have been allowed on board.
Dive 39 The Bahamas
In 2017 Rush constructed his first Titan submersible, using carbon fibre for the hull rather than the steel or titanium that would have been standard. Carbon fibre, he claimed, had a three-times better strength to buoyancy ratio than titanium.
The following February, Rush began shallow test dives in a few metres of water in Everett Marina in Washington state, where OceanGate was based. Three months later he transported the vessel to the Bahamas and deeper water.
On June 26, 2018, he reached 4,000 metres – or two and a half miles below the surface – the depth of the Titanic. For these tests, the vessel was unmanned.
Titan’s first manned dive, with just Rush aboard as pilot, took place the following December. This was Dive 39 and it reached a depth of 3,939 metres, or 13,000ft.
Although he emerged unscathed, there had been an alarming series of loud explosions during the dive, which Rush made light of.
When, later, he was interviewed by Discovery Channel presenter Josh Gates, Rush played a recording of that dive, including the bangs.
‘I’ll play you what it sounded like when the carbon fibre was collapsing around you and you don’t have much time left,’ he bragged.
Gates was unimpressed. ‘It wasn’t just a red flag for me,’ he tells the BBC documentary, Implosion: The Titanic Sub Disaster. ‘It was like a flare had gone up.’
The Titan was neither officially registered nor certified. There had been a catalogue of technical and safety failures on board. Key protocols were ignored before the fatal dive. Above shows the Titan submersible beginning a descent
Dive 47 The Bahamas
Apparently undeterred by the near-miss of Dive 39, Rush took passengers aboard for the first time on April 17, 2019, again in the Bahamas.
Along for the ride was Karl Stanley, a submersible pilot at the Roatan Institute of Deepsea Exploration, who had known Rush for years and was excited about the adventure.
But after hearing a noise like a gunshot, he was terrified.
There was also a problem with the batteries on the dive and Stanley was alarmed to see the lights on the exterior powering down.
‘The supposed goal of the trip was to test it to the exact depth of the Titanic,’ Stanley recalls. ‘We got 96 per cent of the way there or something. We’re getting closer to it, but we’re not touching it.
‘The cracking sounds were continuing. So, at some point, collectively, we came to a decision of, “Well, that’s good enough, let’s call it a day.” I’m sure we were within a few percentage points of implosion.
‘I was [so] very much concerned that I kept sending him emails for over a year, and I didn’t even know a fraction of what we know now. There’s no doubt in my mind that his primary motivations were more ego-driven than financially driven.
‘[Rush’s] family was really about the closest that you could get to royalty in the US.’
Rush is descended from two signatories to the Declaration of Independence and was married to Wendy Weil, great-great-granddaughter of congressman Isidor Straus, co-owner of Macy’s department store, who, with his wife Ida, died aboard the Titanic in 1912.
Stanley is convinced Rush knew his submersible would eventually implode. ‘There’s no possible way that Stockton didn’t know how this was going to end,’ he continues. ‘It was just a matter of, “Is it going to fail with me in it or with other people?” It was obvious that it was going to fail in some way.
‘When people are spending $250,000 [£185,000] [to go] in a death tube controlled by a game controller that wasn’t tested, by a guy that’s telling you how he wants to be remembered for breaking rules – it’s a message to the super-wealthy, the oligarchy, that your money can’t buy everything.’
Karl Stanley, a submersible pilot at the Roatan Institute of Deepsea Exploration, who had known Rush for years, said he was convinced Rush knew his submersible would eventually implode. Pictured, remains of the Titan submersible
Dive 53 North Atlantic
Ignoring Stanley’s concerns, Rush attempted two more shallow dives in the Titan before discovering a crack in the hull. In a process known as delamination, the layers of carbon fibre were separating.
The hull was taken to the deep-water pressure chamber in Maryland where it failed tests.
Rush then built a second carbon-fibre hull. But, with shocking dishonesty, he did not reset the test dive number to zero, meaning that what he called Dive 53 – implying a long and successful record – was really only Dive 4.
It was only after a trip in the submersible on May 8, 2021, that TV presenter Josh Gates discovered he’d been on this second Titan, a vessel only tested three times in shallow waters.
On this occasion the lighting didn’t work, the software crashed and the dive was abandoned before they reached the Titanic.
‘We were in the sub for hours with Stockton, and the dive was interesting in that nothing really worked,’ he explains.
‘No light. The sub didn’t really do anything it was asked to do. Then there was an issue with the software – the system crashed at one point. It was non-functional – that’s a good way to put it. So eventually it was decided we had to scrub the dive and bring it back to the surface.’
Gates then scrapped the Discovery Channel film he’d been making about the Titan.
‘I suddenly realised what it would mean if I made this kind of promotional documentary about Stockton and OceanGate, that maybe inspired other people to go and take a ride in this sub, and then something happened to it,’ he tells the BBC.
‘So I made the really difficult decision to call up the president of the network and to fall on my sword and say, “I know that this is something that was a big deal for you to sign off on, I appreciate the opportunity, but we shouldn’t do this. This is a mistake, something bad is going to happen here.”
‘If you want to be an explorer, an inventor and innovator that’s awesome. But when you start inviting the public, when you bring a kid into this thing you’ve invented, you have a responsibility at that point to be totally forthright about what it is that you’re offering.’
Dive 61 North Atlantic
Titan’s first ‘successful’ expedition to visit the wreck of the Titanic took place on June 30, 2021, but the dive was aborted at a depth of just seven metres or 23ft.
Then, horrifyingly, when the Titan resurfaced, the dome on the front blew off. Rush and his team had miscalculated – they had reckoned they needed only four bolts to fix it to the hull instead of a possible 18.
As businessman Alfred Hagen, who paid around $200,000 to join the dive, recalls: ‘There were only four bolts in it, and they just sheared. They exploded like bullets. Suddenly the people inside were looking out at the ocean… obviously a horrifying moment.
‘The thought with the four bolts was simply that once you went to depth, you didn’t need anything to hold [the dome on] – the pressure was so intense that you couldn’t prise it off.
‘Stockton wanted to appropriate any pictures or videos of the occurrence.’ Which is to say that Rush seized any recordings of the episode.‘There was a dedicated effort to hush that up.’
OceanGate CEO and co-founder Stockton Rush once said: ‘The company’s registered in the Bahamas and they don’t do punitive damages, so don’t even bother suing me, according to Antonella Wilby, an expert in remotely operated underwater vehicles
Dive 80 North Atlantic
Despite the vast risks being taken, OceanGate and the Titan reached the wreckage of the Titanic six times in 2021.
The following summer, Rush was back in the North Atlantic for a second season of dives.
Antonella Wilby, an expert in remotely operated underwater vehicles, joined Titan’s support ship as a crew member midway through the season. She was horrified by her boss’s gung-ho attitude.
‘From the moment I stepped on to the ship, I never forgot it,’ she says.
‘I had to sign the liability waiver. Stockton was there and, to a room full of people, some of them who had paid him lots of money to be there, he says, “The company’s registered in the Bahamas and they don’t do punitive damages, so don’t even bother suing me.”
‘That’s a verbatim quote – I wrote it down right after this meeting because I was shocked.’
It was while Titan was making Dive 80 on July 15, 2022, that – from the safety of the support ship – Wilby heard yet another loud bang. Within days, she had left her job.
‘You don’t need to be a composites expert to think, “OK, maybe we need to step back and stop the operation until we figure out what this actually means,” ’ she says.
‘But as with anything with OceanGate, the response was to just go, “Oh, OK.” And then just keep going.’
The US Coast Guard’s Lieutenant Commander Katie Williams, who has been studying the data from Dive 80, concurs: ‘When they heard this loud bang, there should have been [an immediate instruction]: “All stop.
Do not continue. Investigate further to make sure that that carbon fibre hull was still safe for people to operate in.”
‘The data reveals that the loud noise was in fact the carbon fibre delaminating,’ she tells the documentary.
‘Titan’s hull was beginning to break apart. There has been a fundamental change in the material of your carbon fibre, and it [is] no longer structurally sound.
‘Delamination at Dive 80 was the beginning of the end. And everyone that stepped on board the Titan after Dive 80 was risking their life.’
The US Coast Guard is scheduled to release the Marine Board of Investigation’s report into the Titan disaster during Dive 88 later this year.
While there have been no criminal charges filed to date, chairman Jason Neubauer tells the programme: ‘Really, what we have here is not an accident. It’s a potential crime.’
OceanGate said that it is fully co-operating with the official investigations and that it would be inappropriate to comment before the conclusions were issued.
The company offered its deepest condolences to the families of those who died.
lmplosion: The Titanic Sub Disaster airs on BBC2 and iPlayer at 9pm on Tuesday.
