The deadly dive to the Titanic

The pressure was on. It was the spring of 2023 and Stockton Rush had been busy selling seats on his submersible for the adventure of a lifetime a deep ocean dive to the most storied shipwreck on the planet the Titanic.

Five planned dives had sold out for the season at $250,000 US a ticket in his five-person sub fittingly named Titan. The expeditions left from St. Johns. But so far, the season was shaping up to be a bust.

Rush, the ever-optimistic CEO of OceanGate, a U.S. company with three submersibles, had already taken groups of paying customers 600 kilometres across the North Atlantic to the wreck twice over the last couple of weeks, only to be turned back by the weather and electrical problems with his sub.

Mission No. 5 would be the last of the season. And Rush, fuelled by hubris and freed by a lack of maritime oversight, was determined to make this dive a success. So he left St. Johns on June 16, bound for tragedy.

An investigation by CBCs The Fifth Estate and the Radio-Canadas Enqute has uncovered new information about the doomed sub, including how Rush silenced critics while he boasted about breaking basic engineering rules and misled the public. And how, for three years, his experimental submersible was allowed to leave a Canadian port without any oversight to carry passengers to the Titanic.

• Watch the full documentary, 96 Hours, from The Fifth Estate on YouTube or CBC-TV on Friday at 9 p.m. It is also streaming now on CBC Gem.

Diving in the middle of the North Atlantic, 3,800 metres down to the Titanic, is no easy feat. The undertaking is fraught with danger and risk. At that depth, the pressure on any hull is unforgiving. To get down and back up safely requires tested and proven engineering, built-in safety redundancies and well-thought-out contingency plans.

Rush reassured everyone that his sub Titan was up to the job and that the risks had been factored and mitigated.

This was, after all, OceanGates third season launching paid Titanic tours out of St. Johns the closest port to the wreck. Titan had successfully gone down to the Titanic 13 times. Rush and his sub had become welcome celebrities around town.

Always a pleasure to be in the company of Stockton Rush, CEO and founder of OceanGate Expeditions, which offers dives to the #Titanic wreckage, Newfoundland and Labrador Lt.-Gov. Judy Foote posted on Facebook after touring OceanGates support ship last May.

Memorial Universitys marine institute had also struck up a relationship with OceanGate. Students who already worked with remotely operated underwater vehicles or ROVs would now get an opportunity to support the worlds first five-person deep sea submersible and, if they got lucky, maybe even dive to the Titanic.

I guess if maybe one of the expedition members got cold feet and they felt like they didnt want to go and there was an empty seat, you never know, they might get an actual seat on the dive, Joe Singleton, interim head of ocean technology at the institute, said in a live CBC Newfoundland Morning interview last spring.

At first, local Titanic logistics expert Larry Daley thought the Titan trips were good for the province.

For Newfoundland-Labrador, it was good to see another operation coming to St. Johns, you know, to go out to the Titanic, he said in an interview with The Fifth Estate. That was good for us for, you know, for tourism and exposure to the province for people to come and visit here.

Last spring, Daley was looking forward to a visit with his old friend, the famous French explorer and submariner Paul-Henri Nargeolet. They had met in 1998 when Nargeolet dove in the French sub Nautile to recover a 17-tonne section of the Titanic.

PH, as he was known to his many friends around the world, had joined OceanGates dives over the last couple of summers.

Titanic had been Nargeolets calling since his first dive to it in 1987. He had 37 dives to the wreck. The 77-year-olds mere presence had a calming effect on OceanGates paying passengers as they were bolted into the Titans 2.4-metre cylindrical hull before descending nearly four kilometres to the bottom of the ocean.

Thousands of kilometres away, high up in the Pyrenees mountains between France and Spain, in the small principality of Andorra, Nargeolets daughter, Sidonie, was messaging with her father.

He was telling me that the weather was bad and that there was a good atmosphere on the ship, and that they were hoping to have better weather after the 16th of June, she said in an interview with Enqute.

But while Daley was looking forward to reuniting with his old friend in St. Johns, he was nervous about OceanGates operation.

Last spring, he had watched the Titan being towed on its custom dive platform in the harbour behind the Polar Prince, a former Canadian Coast Guard ship co-owned by Miawpukek Horizon Maritime Service and Horizon Maritime.

In 2021 and 2022, OceanGate had chartered the Horizon Arctic, a large, modern offshore oil service ship that had ferried the Titan on its deck. The Polar Prince was smaller, cheaper and towed the Titan off its stern.

First thing I said, you know, I wont repeat it, but, you know, what the hell are they doing? You know, is that how theyre going to get that out to the Titanic site? said Daley. If this is what theyre doing, this is going to end poorly.

But the federal agencies clustered in St. Johns Harbour that are responsible for maritime safety didnt seem to share Daleys concern.

For three years, the St. Johns Port Authority, the Canadian Coast Guard and Transport Canada all watched Titan being ferried and towed in and out of the harbour, in front of their offices. Pilot boats escorted the Titan and its support ship through the iconic narrows that shelter the harbour.

Aside from whether towing the Titan for 36 hours one way over the North Atlantic was advisable, none of those agencies had any say over whether the Titan was fit to take passengers to the Titanic.

The Titan was not certified to any internationally recognized safety standard and the Titanic was resting in international waters. Consequently, no official agency in Canada had jurisdiction over Titan leaving a Canadian port.

It happened in plain daylight in front of everyones eyes, if you will, former Canadian Coast Guard search and rescue co-ordinator Merv Wiseman said in an interview with The Fifth Estate.

Wealthy Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood was up for the adventure. He brought his wife and two children to St. Johns last spring. Shahzada and his 19-year-old son, Suleman, were booked on the Titan.

The year before, Toronto businessman Colin Taylor and his son, Richard, dove in the Titan and had laid their eyes on the haunting bow of the Titanic. Taylor had become friends with both Nargeolet and Rush, meeting the latter for dinner in St. Johns last June.

He was someone who made things happen and was the kind of person that was willing to step into the breach and take risks and try and push the edge of things, Colin Taylor told The Fifth Estate.

Finally on June 16, 2023, there was a break in the weather and the Polar Prince towed the Titan out of St. Johns for what everyone involved hoped would be a successful Mission No. 5.

One of the paying customers on board was Hamish Harding, a British man who was reportedly a billionaire and who had posted to Facebook on June 17 that 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.

It would be Monday morning quarterbacking to say the Titan should have never taken passengers. It would be if sub experts hadnt warned years earlier that the Titan was a catastrophe waiting to happen.

The Titanic was the worlds largest passenger ship on its maiden voyage from Southampton, England, to New York City when it struck an iceberg on April 14, 1912, and sank in the early hours of the following day. The ships overconfident captain had ignored warnings of icebergs and steamed ahead, believing the Titanic was unsinkable. More than 1,500 passengers and crew perished.

Ever since the Titanic was located on the ocean floor in 1985, explorers, salvagers, historians, scientists, television and film productions have been drawn to it.

Getting to it is the hard part.

Stockton Rush was not obsessed with the Titanic not at first. That was a business decision that would come later.

I dont think he had any fascination with Titanic, said OceanGate co-founder Guillermo Sohnlein. What drove him since childhood was going somewhere people have never been.

I wanted to be an astronaut, Rush told a 2017 gathering of the Explorers Club in New York City.

Rush came from a wealthy family born, it seemed, to explore. At 19, he was a trained commercial pilot. He got an aerospace engineering degree at Princeton University.

I wasnt going to get to Jupiter or Mars, but I did realize that all the cool stuff that I thought was out there is actually underwater, he said in 2017.

Rushs widow, Wendy Rush, is the great-great-granddaughter of retailing giant Isidor Straus (Macys) who, along with his wife, Rosalie (Ida), were two of the wealthiest people to perish on the Titanic.

In 2009, Rush co-founded OceanGate with Sohnlein in Everett, Wash., north of Seattle. At first, the business plan was to buy submersibles and charter them to explorers and scientists.

We bought an existing sub that was already old at the time, Sohnlein said. We got some practice operating the stuff understanding how subs worked.

But when they wanted to go deep, they ran into a problem. No one built a sub that could go down thousands of metres into the ocean and carry more than a couple of people.

It wasnt possible to build it in a way that made financial sense, said Sohnlein. Because if youre going to build a titanium steel sphere to carry five people to 4,000 metres, it was going to weigh a lot, and it was just going to cost way too much money, which is why we ended up deciding to build our own sub.

To build a lighter, cheaper and roomier submersible, Rush would use a novel material carbon fibre.

No one had ever built a cylindrical deep sea submersible hull out of carbon fibre before, and for good reason water pressure exerts immense force on the hull. At 10,000 metres, for example, the pressure is nearly one ton per square inch.

Until Rush came along, all of the pressure hulls in the deepest diving human-occupied submersibles were spherical, not tubular, and they were made with impenetrable titanium. The U.S. Alvin, the Russian Mir, the French Nautile they have all carried humans 3,800 metres down to the Titanic and their spherical pressure capsules are all made of titanium.

WATCH | Diving down in a submersible:

Understanding how carbon fibre would stand up to the incredible pressure of the ocean would require testing, lots of it.

OceanGates promotional videos said the sub had been designed with the help of some engineering heavy-hitters.

We partnered with aerospace experts at the University of Washington, NASA and Boeing on the design of our hull, Rush said in one video.

The Fifth Estate contacted each of them. The University of Washington said it was not involved in the design, engineering or testing of the Titan. Boeing was not a partner on the Titan and did not design or build it and NASA only provided virtual consulting. The agency did not conduct any testing and manufacturing via its workforce or facilities.

But before it was ever deemed fit to take paying passengers to the Titanic, you would think Titan would be scrutinized by a knowledgeable, independent third party.

You would be wrong.

Patrick Lahey was in a bar on vacation in the Bahamas in 2019 when some young people asked him about the Triton logo on his shirt.

I said, Oh, Triton Submarines is my company, he said.

So we started chatting and they told me they had a submarine there that they were testing and would I like to come and see it, Lahey recalled in an interview with Enqute.

They were testing OceanGates fledgling five-person experimental sub dubbed Titan.

Ottawa-born Lahey also had a sub and it was making headlines around the world. His sub, Limiting Factor, was being solo-piloted by billionaire Victor Vescovo to the deepest points in five oceans. In April 2019, Vescovo set a new record by diving 10,925 metres to the bottom of the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean.

At, you know, 11,000 metres, the pressure on that hull is equivalent to 292 fully fuelled jumbo jets sitting on top of it, Lahey said.

When Lahey saw the Titan, he wasnt impressed.

I walked around it and I expressed alarm and concern about many of the things that I did see, Lahey said.

When I left, I sort of felt like that thing was probably so far from being ready to dive that it probably never would. And I guess I misjudged [Rushs] tenacity.

Lahey had seen the first version of the Titan in 2017, Rush had bonded two titanium domes on a custom built carbon fibre pressure hull.

But in January 2018, just before Rush was to begin crewed deep dive tests in the Titan, OceanGates then-director of marine operations, David Lochridge, produced a 10-page report addressed to Rush and company executives that raised serious safety concerns that he claimed had been dismissed on several occasions.

I feel now I must make this report so there is an official record in place, Lochridge wrote.

Among the more than two dozen safety issues Lochridge said needed to be addressed: O-rings designed to connect parts that didnt seal properly, flooring material that easily burned, the glass viewport on the front dome had only been certified by the manufacturer to a depth of 1,000 metres and visible signs of delamination and holes in the carbon fibre hull.

He concluded: Until suitable corrective actions are in place and closed out, [Titan] should not be manned during any of the upcoming trials.

Rush fired Lochridge the next day.

Lochridge then filed a whistleblower complaint with the U.S. Department of Labours Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).

Through a U.S. freedom of information request, The Fifth Estate obtained hundreds of pages related to Lochridges complaint to the OSHA, as well as an audio recording of his meeting with an investigator in February 2018.

Speaking about the carbon fibre hull, Lochridge told the investigator: You can see in it like Swiss cheese. So when you put a torch at the back of it, you can see all the way through. You can see all the delaminations where the resin has not bonded properly.

LISTEN | Raising concerns about Titans design:

Lochridge was in Scotland for his fathers funeral in March 2018 when an OceanGate lawyer reached out to him, threatening to sue. That June, OceanGate sued Lochridge for breach of contract, fraud, unjust enrichment, conversion, injunctive relief and misappropriation of trade secrets.

The submersible community is a tight-knit world of engineers. Word of Lochridges break with OceanGate soon leaked out.

Will Kohnen, president of Hydrospace Group and chair of the Marine Technology Societys (MTS) manned underwater vehicles committee, and his brother, Charles, grew up in rural Quebec, but for the past 30 years they have built human-occupied submersibles in southern California.

Kohnen told The Fifth Estate he tried in vain to convince Rush not to build Titan with a carbon fibre hull.

The engineering of calculating what each layer is doing is almost impossible to do, Kohnen said.

If this goes bad, its not just bad for the company and the people involved, but the whole industry.

In March 2018, Kohnen drafted a letter to Rush on behalf of the MTS. He wrote that industry members have expressed unanimous concern regarding the development of Titan and the planned Titanic expedition and the possible negative outcomes from minor to catastrophic.

The letter was circulated to dozens of experts, but the MTS board was opposed to it being sent out. It was eventually leaked to Rush, who then called Kohnen.

Well, he was ticked off, Kohnen said.

And he says, Well, whats this? I was like, Well, you can read it, you could see what it is and it says were really concerned. And its like, Yeah, well, you know, were ahead of innovation and the rules are just holding us back. And I said, Look, Stockton, I have as much desire as you to be able to innovate and come up with new ideas that maybe there are not any rules about, but theres a way of going about it.

In December 2018, OceanGate and Lochridge reached a settlement the lawsuit and the OSHA complaint were dropped. Lochridge has refused multiple interview requests from multiple media outlets to discuss his time at OceanGate.

According to documents obtained by The Fifth Estate, the OSHA did pass Lochridges complaint along to the U.S. Coast Guard.

When asked if they investigated Lochridges complaints, the Coast Guard told The Fifth Estate in an emailed response that whether the Coast Guard received any such information or was contacted by OSHA will be investigated by the Marine Board of Investigation.

Rush had survived the maelstrom of his critics and began test diving the Titan.

I took it to 4,000 metres and it made a lot of noise, which is a sphincter-tightening experience, Rush told the Geekwire Summit in 2022.

WATCH | The full documentary from The Fifth Estate:

The noise he was referring to was the hull cracking under pressure.

We brought it back and it wasnt getting quieter on the second dive. It should have been dramatically quieter. So we scrapped it. We went back and we built another one.

Rush said his new pressure hull was 12 centimetres thick thats 667 layers of carbon fibre but that was the same design as the previous hull. However, Rush added an acoustic system to monitor cracking under pressure. If the cracking became too frequent, the sub could, in theory, resurface and avoid a catastrophe.

So inside the sub when we were in it, there was a counter. It was counting the number of cracks that were happening in that sub, and you could see them ticking away all the way through the ride up and down, Colin Taylor said after he dove in the Titan in 2022.

It is a concern. But you know its happening and you know its being monitored. And you know that its natural that carbon fibre goes through stresses and does have those cracks in them.

Rush may have built another pressure hull, but there was still the question of having Titan safety-certified by an outside agency.

Most subs are inspected and certified by independent and internationally recognized agencies like the American Bureau of Shipping (ABS).

In 2018, Lochridge said in court documents that he had strongly encouraged the company to bring in ABS to inspect and certify the Titan.

But that never happened.

In 2019, OceanGate said it was going to another agency instead seeking classification from Lloyds Register.

The Fifth Estate contacted Lloyds, which said it declined a request from OceanGate to provide classification following a preliminary observation of OceanGate testing a Titan submersible in 2019 and that it never did class the Titan.

The OceanGate sub was not certified. It was an experimental craft, said Patrick Lahey of Triton Submarines.

And as such, it should have never carried human beings. It was not fit for purpose, frankly. And if you want to use it to carry human beings, you should be willing to submit your design, your engineering, your analysis, to a third-party review.

Rush became publicly defiant about the fact that Titan was not safety-inspected.

At some point, safety is pure waste, Rush told CBSs Sunday Morning program in 2022. If you want to be safe, dont get out of bed, dont get in your car, dont do anything. At some point you got to take some risk. I say I can do this just as safely by breaking the rules.

Lahey bristles at the idea that rule-breaking can be done safely when it comes to deep ocean diving.

I disagree with this idea that somehow certification is an impediment to innovation or that it somehow hinders progressive thinking. Its absolutely not true. I just think, you know, thats a cop-out.

In 2017, Rush said during an interview with CBC that OceanGate was selling seats to the Titanic for 2018 and 2019, but those dive seasons came and went in St. Johns with no dives. Rush conceded the Titan wasnt ready.

Finally, in 2021, OceanGate came to St. Johns and launched six successful dives to the Titanic. In 2022, the Titan made seven successful dives to the wreck.

Passengers on the Titan were required to sign a waiver acknowledging they understood that the experimental submersible vessel has not been approved or certified by any regulatory body and may be constructed of materials that have not been widely used in human-occupied submersibles.

The possibility of death was mentioned eight times in the waiver.

But going into the 2023 dive season, after multiple incident free trips to the Titanic, it seemed Rush was going to prove his detractors wrong.

For three years, the St. Johns Port Authority, the Canadian Coast Guard and Transport Canada all watched the Titan go in and out of St. Johns harbour.

All three federal agencies declined to be interviewed for this story. And all of them said they did not have the authority to stop the Titan from leaving St. Johns.

Transport Canada said in emailed statement that a highly specialized vehicle like Titan is currently not covered by the safety-related elements of the International Convention on the Safety of Life at Sea, and referred The Fifth Estate to the International Maritime Organization guidelines on the design, construction and operation of passenger submersible craft.

The department further suggested The Fifth Estate contact the safety certification groups including the ABS and Lloyds Register for details about these standards and certification process.

Transport Canada also pointed out that the flag state of the submersible, the U.S.A. in the case of the Titan, would be the lead for inspection and certification of the vessel.

But The Fifth Estate found no evidence that Titan was flagged in the U.S., or in the Bahamas, as an OceanGate representative had claimed in legal documents.

The St. Johns Port Authority told The Fifth Estate it watched the Titan go out and back from the Titanic wreck site. It was standard safety practice for pilot boats to escort the Titan and its support vessel out of the harbour.

WATCH | Who was observing as the Titan came and went?:

The Marine Institute in St. Johns also declined to be interviewed about its relationship with OceanGate, citing ongoing investigations.

In an emailed statement, the institute said: The extent of the Marine Institutes involvement with OceanGate is that it provided OceanGate with storage and workshop space for its submersible. Marine Institute was not a partner on the Titan expedition. There was never a formalized plan for Marine Institute employees or students to travel onboard the Titan.

On Sunday, June 18, 600 kilometres from St. Johns, the Polar Prince had reached its destination in the North Atlantic.

It was finally dive day for the Titan.

The five passengers were bolted into the subs carbon fibre hull. Rush was joined by British billionaire Hamish Harding, Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son, Suleman. Their guide was the storied French submariner Paul-Henri Nargeolet. It seemed there would be at least one dive to the wreck in 2023.

An hour and 45 minutes into a 2-hour descent, the Polar Prince lost contact with the Titan. Initially, it wasnt a cause for alarm. Titan had lost communication with the surface ship on previous dives.

I know that Stocktons wife ... was on board the vessel and was unconcerned about the fact that theyd lost communication because it had happened times before. How many times? I cant tell you, said Horizon Maritime owner John Risley, who co-owns the Polar Prince and received a call from his company CEO.

Unlike the support vessel used by OceanGate in 2021 and 2022, the Polar Prince did not have a remote operated vehicle (ROV) on board that could be deployed to search for the Titan.

Asked what the contingency plan was if the Titan got into trouble, Risley told The Fifth Estate: Call the Coast Guard. I mean, thats, you know, when youre in trouble at sea, there isnt really a backup plan. You call for help, right?

Nearly eight hours later, OceanGate left a voicemail with Pelagic Research Services. Located just outside Buffalo, N.Y., Pelagic operates a remote sub, Odysseus, that can dive to 6,000 metres.

Nine minutes later, OceanGate notified the U.S. Coast Guard the Titan was missing.

Why it took that long is a mystery to me. I just simply dont understand that part, said Wiseman.

I mean, you can always stand down resources. You know, all it takes is just a quick call.

And once that call was made, a massive search-and-rescue effort would be deployed, led by the U.S. Coast Guard.

We understand from the operator of the vessel that the vessel was designed with a 96-hour sustainment capability if there was an emergency on board, U.S. Coast Guard Admiral John Mauger told the news media in Boston the following day.

The countdown was on. An international armada of ships and planes searched thousands of square kilometres in the North Atlantic.

Three days after it disappeared, Pelagics remote-operated sub Odysseus was flown up to St. Johns from Buffalo. It was carried out into the North Atlantic by the Titans previous support ship, Horizon Arctic.

But as the search was underway, the U.S. Navy had already detected an anomaly in the ocean that was consistent with an implosion. An underwater noise, picked up by sonar, that occurred about the same time as the Polar Prince lost contact with The Titan.

WATCH | Picking up a banging sound:

They were unable to tell us with 100 per cent certainty that thats what it was, U.S. Coast Guard Capt. Jamie Frederick told The Fifth Estates Mark Kelley. And quite frankly, in the business of search and rescue, we work in certainties only.

Subsequently the Royal Canadian Air Force sonar buoys picked up what sounded like banging in the ocean, but it was later determined not to be from a human source.

On Thursday, June 22, the Odysseus discovered debris from the Titan on the ocean floor.

They first detected a tail cone, said Frederick. One of the next pieces of debris they found was the large capsule door and the glass window. And at that point it was obvious that there had been a complete failure of the pressure capsule.

The next day Mauger told the news media: The debris is consistent with a catastrophic implosion of the vessel.

Nine months later, investigations by the Transportation Safety Board of Canada and the U.S. Coast Guards Marine Board of Investigation are ongoing.

The exact cause of the implosion is still not known, but it is comforting to Nargeolets daughter, Sidonie, to believe her father died quickly and pursuing what he loved.

I think its much more better to know that the sub imploded at the moment they lost the radio, she said. For them its fine. Its hard for the people who are still left.

Sub builder Patrick Lahey said he didnt understand why his friend Nargeolet ever agreed to dive in Titan and at one point had raised it with him in as plain a manner as you could.

He was very smart, and he was highly experienced, Lahey said. And so when I asked him: Why are you doing this? he said: Well, because, you know, maybe if Im out there, I can help them avoid a tragedy, you know, maybe I can help enhance the safety of their operation. I believe he genuinely thought that he could do that.

Rush believed the safety rules didnt apply to him.

Id like to be remembered as an innovator, he said in a YouTube video.

I think it was [U.S. Gen. Douglas] MacArthur who said youre remembered for the rules you break. And you know, Ive broken some rules to make this. I think Ive broken them with logic and good engineering behind me. The carbon fibre and titanium, theres a rule you dont do that. Well, I did.

Today, there is nothing in place to stop it all from happening again.

Adventure tourism is in high demand and sub certification is still not mandatory.

Colin Taylor said that while he and his son will always have the memory of their Titanic visit, he now regrets exposing his son to that risk.

I think the people that got on that, including us, we knew we were test pilots. You dont get on a ship like that, on an oil rig service ship and, you know, motor out to the middle of the North Atlantic and get in a carbon fibre tube and go down four kilometres to the bottom of the ocean and not know theres some risk involved.

WATCH | The full episode from The Fifth Estate:

Top image: OceanGate,CBC/Allison Cake/CBC | Editing: Janet Davison

A previous version of this story suggested pilot boats in St. Johns Harbour as being owned by the St. Johns Port Authority. In fact, the port authority is the federal agency responsible for administering the port but it does not own the pilot boats.

March 28, 2024 | 1:45 p.m. ET