A witness to the Titan submersible disaster has told BBC News about the fear and false hope felt by those on its support ship.
Rory Golden was on the Oceangate expedition when contact with the sub and its five passengers was lost on a dive to the Titanic in June 2023.
“We had this image in our heads of them being down there, running out of oxygen in the freezing cold, getting terribly frightened and scared,” he said.
But after learning the sub had imploded just hours into the dive, he said it was a comfort to know those onboard hadn’t suffered.
Mr Golden was on the Polar Prince support ship to give presentations about the Titanic when the submersible went missing.
“When the sub was overdue we weren’t unduly concerned because communications break down a lot in the ocean,” he explained.
“But when the alarm was finally raised, that’s when we realised that there were some serious issues.”
A major search and rescue operation was launched by the US Coast Guard.
A few days in, sounds of banging were detected underwater raising hope that these were coming from the missing sub.
But it’s now known that those onboard most likely died instantly after Titan suffered a catastrophic failure as it neared the Titanic at the bottom of the Atlantic.
“We lived in false hope for four days,” Mr Golden said. “There’s still a lot of questions to be answered.”
Those who perished were British explorer Hamish Harding, the British-Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman, Stockton Rush, the CEO of Oceangate, and French diver Paul Henri – or
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