‘My dive to the Titanic was cut short – I feel like I won Russian roulette’

CBS Sunday Morning visits Titanic with OceanGate Expeditions

Science and technology journalist David Pogue was “disappointed and annoyed” when he realised his only chance to see the legendary Titanic in person had faded away.

Pumped with the adrenaline coming from a once-in-a-lifetime adventure, the US reporter candidly admitted in the spur of the moment he thought the reason why he had to leave the Titan, during his dive in 2022, after having dived only a few miles into the Atlantic Ocean was rather “dumb”.

He told Express.co.uk: “We were only 37 feet below the waves when mission control aborted our dive, for what I thought was a really dumb reason: two black, oval floats had come untied from the sub’s submerged launching platform.

“The floats weren’t part of the submersible, and would have no effect on the dive itself. Who cared about the stupid platform?

“I was disappointed and annoyed. That dive had been my one and only chance to see the Titanic. Now I’d be sitting there on the ship for another week, watching other people get to go.”

READ MORE: Video explaining how Titan sub imploded racks up over 5 million YouTube views

Mr Pogue had been invited by OceanGate itself to take part in a deep-sea dive to the Titanic wreck in July 2022 – a mission eerily similar to the one during which five people died 11 months later.

Travelling with fellow members of the CBS Sunday Morning crew, the journalist considered taking part in the peculiar mission as a “dream assignment” and a unique chance – not only to see up close the remains of the passenger ship that sank in 1912 but also to get to know OceanGate as a company, its submersible, and its business model.

Much like any other passenger who took part in a dive on the Titan, Mr Pogue had to sign a waiver which, as it became known to the public after alarm bells started to ring for the safety of the five people aboard the Titan on its last, fateful, mission in June, mentioned the risk of death multiple times on its first page alone.

The waiver crewmembers had to sign in order to get inside the Titan also made clear the operation would be conducted inside “an experimental submersible vessel that has not been approved or certified by any regulatory body”.

Indeed, the sub was reportedly not registered as a US vessel or with international agencies that regulate safety nor hadn’t been classified by a maritime industry group that sets standards on matters such as hull construction. This decision was defended by OceanGate in a blog post in 2019, in which it was claimed “bringing an outside entity up to speed on every innovation before it is put into real-world testing is anathema to rapid innovation”.

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A mention in the document of its carbon-fibre, titanium and plexiglass body was also made, as the waiver stressed the Titan “may be constructed of materials that have not been widely used in human-occupied submersibles”.

Despite the blunt mention of death and danger, Mr Pogue confessed he didn’t think too much of the waiver.

He recalled: “I really didn’t consider the waiver a big deal. You sign exactly the same sort of waiver before you go scuba diving, skydiving, whitewater rafting, and so on.

“I just figured that its purpose was to cover OceanGate’s legal bases, to let the lawyers have their say.”

The journalist also found comfort and reassurance in OceanGate’s CEO Mr Rush, in his knowledge of deep-sea explorations and the Atlantic itself as well as in the fact he was putting his own life on the line with these missions.

Given it took two days of navigation from St. John’s in Newfoundland, from where passengers and crewmembers departed, to the wreckage site from which the Titan used to dive, Mr Pogue had the chance to get to know Mr Rush and the vessel on which he was meant to travel to the bottom of the ocean.

Mr Pogue said “so many things” gave him confidence in the Titan’s safety seeing the sub and Mr Rush in person.

He said: “For example, the sub had already made 20 uneventful dives to Titanic depths. Rush, an aerospace engineering major, had designed other subs and planes before. And Paul-Henri Nargeolet, veteran of 37 dives to the Titanic, approved of this sub’s design and joined OceanGate’s expeditions.”

Much like Mr Rush, Mr Nargeolet was one of the five crewmembers to die aboard the last Titan’s mission last month.

The journalist claimed to have noticed some “off-the-shelf components here and there” inside the Titan, including interior lights which he said Mr Rush told him to have bought from US store Camper World, home security cameras and the now-notorious video-game controller used to control the sub.

However, Mr Pogue added: “But when I asked him about all this, his answer was plausible: that the important, life-saving elements, like the actual carbon-fibre hull, were not jerry-rigged or off-the-shelf.” Rather, Mr Rush added to the journalist, they were “high-tech and pressure-tested” pieces of tech and components.

The journalist also said the Titan had “many redundant life-support systems” which had reassured him about its safety, such as two CO2 scrubbers, emergency oxygen tanks under the floor and seven different ways to rise to the surface, including one that would allow the sub to return to the surface even if all the crewmembers were unable to control it.

He continued: “So overall, yes, I was very confident in the sub. I just figured: If it were dangerous, why would Stockton Rush himself be the primary pilot? And why would they invite a national TV crew on board for a dive?”

Mr Pogue also found it easy to trust the OceanGate CEO given his experience. He said: “He came across as a cocky ‘The Right Stuff’-sort of adventurer. He loved making provocative statements.

“He obviously knew everything about the submersible, its materials, other subs, the Titanic, and the North Atlantic. He had long, detailed answers about the science of deep-sea diving. He was charismatic. You trusted him.”

So much so that, before the dive, Mr Pogue said he wasn’t particularly worried about safety but more about “capturing a big story for the show”.

One year after Mr Pogue shared a trip in the Atlantic Ocean with Mr Rush – who has since lost his life after the Titan imploded last month during a deep-dive mission undertaken alongside Titanic expert Mr Nargeolet, British adventurer Hamish Harding, entrepreneur Shahzada Dawood and his teenage son Suleman – Mr Pogue is looking at his aborted adventure under a different light.

Asked if he still feels like he “won at the Russian roulette” – as he mentioned in an article for the New York magazine he penned after the Titan tragedy, he claimed: “The Titan made only three more dives before it imploded. It could have been me.

“No matter how I look at it, no matter how much time goes by, I now realise that the Titan was a time bomb. I should not have been happy that it had made 20 good dives — I should have been frightened!”

At least 46 people successfully travelled on the submersible to the Titanic between 2021 and 2022, letters OceanGate filed with a US District Court in Norfolk, Virginia, claim.

All these divers descended to the Titanic wreck at 12,467ft below sea level, where pressure is 300 times heavier when compared to that of the atmosphere at the sea surface, facing at times strong underwater currents and the dangers coming with damaged parts of the cruiser and ropes attached to the sunk vessel.

The last-ever trip of the Titan, however, ended in a “catastrophic implosion” that likely happened during its descent and claimed the lives of its passengers.

A few days later, OceanGate suspended all its exploration and commercial operations.

While the circumstances and causes of the implosion of the Titan are not yet clear, Mr Pogue leans towards one of the many theories circulating, according to which the numerous dives made by the sub could have weakened the carbon-fibre or the seams between its hull, the plexiglass window and the titanium end caps.

Mr Pogue concluded: “So yes, even now, I get a little chill thinking about how close I came to being one of the victims. I’m here today because of pure dumb luck.”

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