A former OceanGate advisor has detailed how he ‘talked dozens of clients’ out of embarking on the ill-fated Titanic submersible.
On Monday (September 16), a hearing into how five people died onboard the doomed vessel opened at the Charleston County Council building in South Carolina.
Last June OceanGate Expeditions CEO Stockton Rush orchestrated a trip for British adventure Hamish Harding, father and son Shahzada and Suleman Dawood and French diver Paul-Henri Nargeolet to venture down to the RMS Titanic wreck.
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The ship graveyard is situated 12,500 feet below the North Atlantic Ocean, south of St John’s, Newfoundland.
The hearing has seen unreleased footage of the sub’s aft tail cone being shared by the US Coast Guard as well as the final communication the vessel shared with its support ship, the Polar Prince.
It’s also understood that when the Titan submersible was initially built in 2020, it was ‘unregistered, non-certificated and unclassed’.
Amid the trial, a former advisor of OceanGate has come forward to claim he ‘tried to convince’ Rush to call off using the vessel.
Rob McCallum, an expedition consultant, told The US Mirror: “I had tried to convince Stockton Rush he was placing himself and his clients at extreme risk during email exchanges 2021-2018.
“Between 2020-23 I talked dozens of clients out of riding in Titan. Only four actually went and sadly, one of them perished, Hamish Harding.
“Hamish had dived Challenger Deep with us.”
McCallum continued to claim he would ‘never put clients in an unclassed vehicle’ and that he hopes people can see that the OceanGate sub was an ‘outlier entity operating outside of the industry norms.
“The Titan implosion demonstrated that the penalties for circumventing sound engineering principles and ignoring safety standards is a terrible one,” he added.
Elsewhere another expert has weighed in on why they believe images and videos taken at the sub’s final resting place show a large part of it remaining, despite the ‘catastrophic implosion’ that destroyed it.
Arun Bansil, a physics professor at Northeastern University, has made an educated guess on the matter.
Speaking to The Mirror he said: “Although it seems counterintuitive, large objects do not normally split apart into smithereens in an implosion or explosion.
“For example, a pressure cooker usually explodes with the top blown off but the body remains intact,” he continued. “The initial failure of Titan would have occurred at its weakest links such as defects in the hull.
"Once a crack opens, however, large pieces of the hull will no longer experience very violent forces and remain more or less intact."
The hearing into the fatal submarine implosion is expected to continue for two weeks.
