Audio that captures the fatal Titan sub’s last minutes before it imploded has been made public.
On June 18, 2023, OceanGate’s Titan submersible set out on its first planned dive of the year. It was going to the remains of the Titanic with five crew members on board.
The ship lost touch with its mothership, the Polar Prince, around 320 nautical miles (590 km) south-southeast of Newfoundland as it was going down. It then didn’t come back up when it was supposed to, which led to a huge search effort to find the sub in case it had come back up somewhere else.
There were visitors Hamish Harding, Shahzada Dawood, his son Suleman Dawood, crew member and Titanic specialist Paul-Henri Nargeolet, and Stockton Rush, the creator of OceanGate and the pilot of the sub.
Sadly, it was announced on June 22, 2023, that the submersible had imploded, killing all five individuals on board right away.
Now, both Netflix and the BBC are showing films about the scary events that led up to the accident and how it ended.
In the BBC’s upcoming movie about the U.S. Coast Guard’s inquiry, viewers will see a heartbreaking scene: Wendy Rush, Stockton’s wife, is shown following the sub’s dive live from the Polar Prince when a loud blast is heard at 3,300 meters. The Times says she wonders, “What was that bang?”
The USCG later said that the sounds was the sound of the Titan collapsing, and they compared it to a “door slamming.”
Titan sent a regular communication saying it had dropped two weights immediately before the implosion. However, the message didn’t reach the surface until after the boom because data transmission speeds were slower.
The recording is a key part of the documentary, which follows the events that led up to one of the most shocking deep-sea disasters in recent history.
Netflix’s Titan: The OceanGate Disaster, which comes out on Wednesday (June 11), will look at the years building up to the implosion. It will include creepy audio of carbon fibers popping just before the sub was crushed by ocean pressure.
Mark Monroe, the director of Icarus and The Cove, was interested in the subject in part because of how coldly the public reacted.
He was particularly interested in the role that was played by David Lochridge, a former OceanGate pilot and director of marine operations. He was fired in 2018 for raising safety concerns. “He was the most significant person who created this company… It was he who stated, “He’s the reason I’m here,” according to The Independent. Lochridge stated that Rush was consumed by his fame and self-esteem.
He was reminded of the moment when Rush caused passengers on an OceanGate sub at risk due to being too close to the Andrea Doria shipwreck in one memorable moment. Lochridge had to assume the control to prevent the dive at the final.
Lochridge stated, “The dynamic changed,” and after that, he wasn’t allowed to go to meetings or talk to anyone. Later, he was allowed to look into Titan and identified major safety problems, which he brought up before being let go.
Tony Nissen, OceanGate’s former engineering director, criticizes the choice to retain the sub in Newfoundland, where temperatures are below freezing, instead of sending it back to Washington for examination. He warned, “If water gets in there and you leave it out in the cold, it breaks [carbon] fibers.”
Stockton Rush went to Princeton and had big ideas about a new era of deep-sea tourism. He turned down traditional safety rules and refused to let independent regulators “class” Titan, saying they didn’t grasp his new ideas.
Rush told the newspaper, “We’re doing weird stuff here, and I’m definitely out of the mold.” “There’s no doubt. “I’m doing things that are totally out of the ordinary.”
During Titan’s first deep-ocean test, he stopped the dive at 3,938 meters because he heard scary cracking. “Close enough,” he said under his breath. He said he had succeeded when he got back to the surface: “I could have easily gone to four [thousand meters], but for what?”
Monroe says that Rush’s approach is like Facebook’s former motto, “Move fast and break things.” He also says, “There is an ambition in our culture led by a lot of Silicon Valley types that you can do things differently…” You have the power to transform the world. You don’t have to follow the rules. There are rules of physics, rules of engineering, and rules of nature, and I like to believe that they all apply to us. He said, “And so I don’t know how safe it is to move fast and break things when other people’s lives are at stake.”
On June 11, Netflix will show Titan: The OceanGate Disaster.