1 day Ago By Mashable News Staff
The US Coast Guard (USCG) has released the first footage of the Titan submersible which imploded underwater with five tourists onboard in 2023. The eerie video shows a conical part of the vessel lying on seabed. It was recorded using a remotely operated underwater vehicle as part of the investigation by the US government.
This comes as a fired OceanGate Expeditions employee made shocking revelations about the tragedy that occurred June 2023. During his testimony at the USCG's Marine Board Of Investigation hearing on Tuesday, former Operations Director at OceanGate David Lochridge revealed that Titan's implosion underwater was "inevitable." 🚨 #BREAKING : New haunting footage has been released by the U.
S. Coast Guard, showing the tail cone of the Titan submersible after the fatal implosion that killed five people in June 2023. Their last messages from the doomed vessel were, ‘All good here.
.. Dropped two [weights] pic.
twitter.com/4Bbe6LmMrk — R A W S A L E R T S (@rawsalerts) September 18, 2024 Lochridge joined OceanGate in 2015 to help build the submersible which would take tourists to the Titanic wreckage site in the north Atlantic Ocean. But he was reportedly fired from the company in 2018 after submitting a report highlighting the safety concerns with Titan, whose development started in 2017.
Lochridge, according to ABC News, claims he had "no confidence" in Titan's design and that he was "very vocal" about it. This was also the reason why he locked horns with OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush who disregarded the former's warnings. Ironically, Rush was one of the five tourists who perished in the tragedy.
The others were adventurer Hamish Harding, Titanic explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet and multimillionaire Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son Suleman Dawood. Harding also went to space with Jeff Bezos's company Blue Origin in the NS-21 mission launched in 2022. ALSO SEE: Transcript Detailing Final Moments Of Titan Submersible Passengers Is Fake, Says Report According to Lochridge, Rush "liked to do things on the cheap" and favoured cost-cutting measures "to get to the Titanic as quickly as we could to start making profit.
" "I knew that hull would fail. It's an absolute mess," he said per ABC News. The Titan submersible began its descent to the Titanic wreckage on June 18 last year and lost contact soon after.
A search operation was launched to rescue the crew but it was called off five days later after Titan's debris was found about 500 metres from Titanic’s bow. Estimates say the submersible imploded an hour and 45 minutes into the dive. ALSO SEE: Titan Submarine Implodes Near Titanic Wreckage Claiming Lives Of Crew Members; Twitter Is In Shock (Image: US Coast Guard/OceanGate).
