The boss of the doomed Titan submarine flew to London to personally reassure a British-Pakistani billionaire and his son that the vessel was safe, it has emerged.
Three months before the voyage, OceanGate Expeditions CEO Stockton Rush and his wife met with Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son Suleman to brief them on their upcoming journey to the bottom of the Atlantic.
The billionaire’s grieving wife Christine Dawood claims that while Mr Rush spoke to the family about the submersible’s design and safety, the technical aspects of the trip still remained unclear.
‘That engineering side, we just had no idea,’ Mrs Dawood told The New York Times. ‘I mean, you sit in a plane without knowing how the engine works.’
Mr Rush reportedly believed going to the depths of the Atlantic in the Titan was ‘safer than crossing the street’, despite having been warned by dozens of experts in 2018 that his company’s ‘experimental’ approaches could be ‘catastrophic’.
The CEO – who considered himself to be more of a scientist than a salesman despite much of his efforts being focused on marketing the sub trips – was also begged in 2019 to suspend operations after a submersible expert heard cracking sounds during one of the Titan’s dives in the Bahamas.
Mr Dawood and Suleman were among the five people who perished on the $250,000-a-head trip to the Titanic shipwreck.
His devastated widow claims Mr Rush and his wife Wendy, where the Dawoods lived, in February to brief them on the journey.
The couple met with their family at a café close to Waterloo, where Mr Rush is understood to have provided details about the journey.
He shared what it would be like to go down in the sub, but Mrs Dawood said the technical aspects of the trip had not been made clear to the family.
It has now emerged that Mr Rush had been made aware about potential dangers about the journey.
The chair of the Marine Technology Society’s manned underwater vehicles committee had drafted a letter to Mr Rush in 2018 alleging there were potentially ‘catastrophic’ consequences associated with OceanGate’s approach, The Times reported. Dozens of experts had signed the letter.
The following year, an expert warned Mr Rush that he had heard cracking sounds during a dive and urged him to suspend the Titan’s operations. But, after making revisions, the CEO continued to take customers onboard.
