Past Titan Dives Suffered From Potentially Catastrophic Problems, Passengers Confirm

One passenger called their experience a “suicide mission.” Another felt he was “incredibly lucky,” to have survived a deep-sea dive aboard the Titan. Passengers who previously bought an expensive ticket to dive down to the wreck of the HMS Titanic are coming forward with harrowing tales of their dives.

The Daily Beast caught up with some former passengers who described communication and mechanical failures that led to hours of wandering lost in the ocean in near-freezing temperatures:

Nearly all former passengers spoke of electrical and communication failures—jarring issues that ex-passenger Mike Reiss described as a common occurrence on dives by OceanGate, the company that operates the missing submersible.

“Every time they lost communication—that seems to be just something baked into the system,” Reiss told ABC News.

Reiss, the showrunner for The Simpsons, completed four tours with OceanGate, including one to the site of the Titanic. He said his submersible lost contact with the host ship on every dive, just as the Titan did on Sunday afternoon less than two hours into its ill-fated trip.Others echoed similar horror stories in their dive to the ocean’s bottom. Arthur Loibl, 60, said he was “incredibly lucky” to survive his dive on Titan back in 2021.Loibl, a wealthy German adventurist, told Bild the submersible he was scheduled to dive with initially became inoperable. Then, once aboard the Titan, a second attempted dive was abandoned at 1,600 meters because of equipment failures and electrical problems.Loibl said he eventually began his successful dive five hours behind schedule, but said the ordeal was the most terrifying experience of his life—topping grueling treks he made to the north and south poles.“It was a suicide mission back then,” Loibl said.

At least one passenger pulled out of a trip—and lost his $88,000 deposit—when OceanGate failed to properly address his safety concerns. Of course, the CEO of OceanGate and one of the men currently lost in the Titan, Stockton Rush, wasn’t much for safety, as he said on the podcast Unsung Science:

“You know, there’s a limit. At some point safety just is pure waste. I mean if you just want to be safe, don’t get out of bed. Don’t get in your car. Don’t do anything. At some point, you’re going to take some risk, and it really is a risk/reward question. I think I can do this just as safely by breaking the rules.”

The Titan also lacked basic safety features, such as a locator for the accompanying ship the Polar Prince to locate the sub. One former employee alleges that OceanGate never properly tested the vessel, which would go far deeper than any carbon-fiber constructed submersible before it. Not to mention a hatch sealed by bolts that can only be opened from the outside with no way for a fellow sub to dock. In fact, the sub could have traveled so deep that rescue may be impossible, according to CBS:

“I think if it’s on the seabed, there are so few submarines that are capable of going that deep, and so therefore, I think it was going to be almost impossible to affect a sub-to-sub rescue,” Titanic expert Tim Matlin told the Reuters news agency.

Ralf Bachmayer, a professor of marine environmental technology and deep-sea engineering at the University of Bremen in Germany, told CBS News on Wednesday there were two main possibilities for a rescue if the sub is on the sea floor. It could be winched up, which he said would be “very difficult” at the depth in the area, which is around 13,000 feet, or almost two and a half miles.

Matlin cast doubt on the feasibility of such an operation, telling Reuters that rescuers “can’t have a line tethering it all the way down because it would be too heavy and too much drag,” given the length of cabling that would be required.The other possibility could be a flotation device, which Bachmayer called a lift bag, that could be slid under the sub to help lift it to the surface.But the Titan could be entangled in debris in the wide field of the Titanic’s wreckage, and that type of rescue attempt would require remotely operated vehicles to gain sufficient access to slide such a device under the 21-foot-long submersible.

As of Thursday morning, the Titan is estimated to have been running out of oxygen, yet many remain hopeful that other factors have conserved oxygen reserves, such as the consumption of oxygen by the passengers or the status of the electrical system.