Shocking footage shows sub one year later

The footage was released by the US Coast Guard’s Marine Board of Investigation during a second week of hearings investigating the doomed OceanGate sub, which killed five people including its pilot Stockton Rush, on a journey to the Titanic last year.

The video, recorded in June last year, shows a remotely operated vehicle recovering part of the vessel, which was eventually transported to a secure facility for analysis. 

British explorer Hamish Harding, British-Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman, French deep-sea explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet, as well as OceanGate’s chief executive Stockton Rush, were on-board the submersible before it imploded. 

It comes a week after chilling footage was released last week showing part of the submersible on the ocean floor. 

The 15-second clip showed a close-up of wiring hanging out of the tail cone that formed part of the 6.7 metre vessel made from carbon fibre and titanium.

The US Coast Guard began a two-week hearing last Monday into the 2023 catastrophe, which will feature evidence as to what went wrong and whether physical or design failure contributed to the accident.

Speaking at the hearing on Monday, the co-founder of OceanGate said he hoped the incident doesn’t spell the end of under water exploration. 

“This can’t be the end of deep ocean exploration,” Guillermo Sohnlein, who helped found OceanGate with Stockton Rush before leaving the company in 2013, told a US Coast Guard panel. “This can’t be the end of deep-diving submersibles and I don’t believe that it will be.” 

Titan sub had to abort a dive days before fatal implosion

On Thursday, former OceanGate scientific director Steven Ross told the hearing the submersible had to abort a dive just days before the deadly incident due to a valve malfunction that left at least one passenger hanging upside down, and took “considerable time” to correct.

He said that when the privately-owned and operated submersible surfaced during that dive, it tilted so its bow was pointing upwards at a 45 degree angle.

Ross, who was inside along with four other passengers, explained that “there’s nothing to hold on to inside this submersible”. 

The pilot that day – Stockton Rush, who died in the implosion days later – “crashed into the rear bulkhead,” Dr Ross said.

“The rest of the passengers tumbled about. I ended up standing on the rear bulkhead,” he continued.

“One passenger was hanging upside down, and the other two managed to wedge themselves into the bow end cap.” 

He said no one was injured in the incident, but that inside the cramped and confined space “it was uncomfortable and unpleasant, and it took considerable time to correct the problem” – at least an hour, by his reckoning.

Rush, he said, was “upset” by the incident.

Rush and four passengers descended in the submersible on June 18, 2023, to observe the wreck of the Titanic.

But contact was lost less than two hours after their departure. A vast rescue operation was launched in hope that the passengers had simply lost power and were drifting helplessly in the ocean’s depths.

However, within days it became clear that the sub had been destroyed in a cataclysmic implosion.

Victims are presumed to have died instantly in the disaster, which occurred under the crushing pressure of the North Atlantic at a depth of nearly 4km.

The family of French submarine expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet, who was on-board the vessel, has taken OceanGate to court, claiming $50 million for negligence.

A debris field was found about 500 metres from the bow of the Titanic, which sits about 640km off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada.

The Titanic hit an iceberg and sank in 1912 during its maiden voyage from England to New York, with 2224 passengers and crew on board. More than 1500 people died. 

– With AFP