The U.S. Coast Guard reported that the crew aboard the Titan submersible's support ship felt a "shudder" when it imploded deep underwater. The five passengers aboard the sub were killed instantly: Stockton Rush, the co-founder and CEO of the sub's maker, OceanGate, French explorer Paul Henri Nargeolet, British businessman Hamish Harding, Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son, Suleman.
The statement was provided to the board in October 2023, when the unidentified master was asked if he or crew members heard anything indicating the OceanGate submersible imploded, Neubauer said.
"The answer from the master was, 'With the benefit of hindsight, I now believe I felt the Polar Prince shudder at around the time communications were reportedly lost, but at the time, we thought nothing of it. It was slight,'" Neubauer said.
The operation was a slapdash mess and the sub was a rinkydink nightmare. But Rush had a plan: bribery.
A former OceanGate employee testified during the hearing on Friday that he resigned from the submersible company after Rush told him he would "buy a congressman" to make problems with its Titan vessel go away.
Matthew McCoy was an active duty member of the U.S. Coast Guard prior to joining OceanGate as an operations technician in April 2017 as the company was building the first Titan prototype, which was never used on Titanic dives. He said he quit six months later, in September 2017, a day after his conversation with Rush.
Even with all the money in the world, there's no legislation that can overturn p = F / A.
Previously:
• Message from Titan submersible before implosion: 'All good here'
• One of the many terrible things about the Titan submersible is the bizarre seating arrangement
• Titan submersible creator added to Wikipedia's 'List of inventors killed by their own invention'
• Debris found was from the Titan submersible. All aboard are dead, says OceanGate
• A Titan sub documentary has already aired and viewers had 'uneasy reactions': 'Too soon'
