Ohio billionaire plans to explore Titanic in submersible to ensure safety post OceanGate incident

An Ohio billionaire is planning on taking a deep sea submersible to the bottom of the ocean floor in the northern Atlantic to tour the wreckage of the Titanic just one year after another submersible imploded at the site.

Real estate investor Larry Connor said that he will be making the voyage in a two-person submersible — more than 12,000 feet deep — with Triton Submarines co-founder Patrick Lahey.

Lahey, speaking about Connor, told The Wall Street Journal: “We had a client, a wonderful man. He called me up and said, ‘You know, what we need to do is build a sub that can dive to [Titanic-level depths] repeatedly and safely and demonstrate to the world that you guys can do that, and that Titan was a contraption.’”

Connor told the Journal that he wants to “show people worldwide that while the ocean is extremely powerful, it can be wonderful and enjoyable and really kind of life-changing if you go about it the right way.”

“Patrick has been thinking about and designing this for over a decade,” Connor continued. “But we didn’t have the materials and technology. You couldn’t have built this sub five years ago.”

The two will make the journey in a $20 million submersible, the Triton 4000/2 Abyssal Explorer, which can dive to a depth of 4,000 meters. The Titanic rests at the 3,800 meters below the ocean’s surface.

Last June, a submersible from OceanGate imploded on its way to the bottom of the ocean floor to view the Titanic. All five people on board — including OceanGate’s CEO, Stockton Rush — were killed within a fraction of second due to the extreme pressures that exist at that depth.

David Lochridge, a submersible pilot and engineer who had served in Great Britain’s Royal Navy and worked all over the world, had expressed reservations about the design and build of OceanGate’s submersible, but his concerns were reportedly dismissed. He found numerous problems with the vessel, including the carbon-fiber hull having “very visible signs of delamination and porosity,” the glue for ballast bags coming off, sealing faces with errant plunge holes, and O-ring grooves whose design was not standard, among many others. When Lochridge brought up his concerns at a company meeting, he was fired.

“I would consider myself pretty ballsy when it comes to doing things that are dangerous, but that sub is an accident waiting to happen,” Lochridge wrote to Rob McCallum, who co-founded a company called Eyos Expeditions and had taken tourists to the Titanic years before. “There’s no way on earth you could have paid me to dive the thing. … I don’t want to be seen as a Tattle tale but I’m so worried he kills himself and others in the quest to boost his ego.”

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OceanGate’s director of finance and administration said in the interview that she could not work for Rush, and so she quit as soon as she found another job.

“I could not work for Stockton,” she said, claiming that he had asked her to take over as chief submersible pilot. “I did not trust him. It freaked me out that he would want me to be head pilot, since my background is in accounting.” She noted that several of the engineers for the company were in their late teens and early twenties.

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