I was meant to be on the Titan sub. I refused after the safety briefing

Times

6 days ago

There was less than an hour to go before Jim Kitchen would step on to a submersible that would take him to the bottom of the sea and reveal the ruins of the Titanic.
But at the briefing for the June 2023 trip he began to have serious doubts.
Sitting in a hotel room in St John's, a city on the Newfoundland coast, with five other passengers and a team of about 20 leading the dive, Kitchen raised his hand to ask a series of questions.
'Would the ship transporting the sub be able to withstand the Atlantic's 25ft-high waves?'
'What does the weather look like?'
'How long could they expect to be waiting at sea before making the dive?'
His concerns, he said, were waved away by a senior mission co-ordinator. 'Everyone's looking at me sideways, thinking, 'Hey, can you just give it a rest?'' said Kitchen, a 60-year-old American entrepreneur and business professor at the University of North Carolina.
But it was the response to his last question that sent chills down his spine. He wanted to know how many times the submersible — a first-of-its-kind deep-sea vessel named Titan, led by the maverick explorer Stockton Rush — had descended the 3,800m down to the Titanic shipwreck that summer.
'The answer was: 'none',' Kitchen told The Times. 'So I motioned to Rush and I said, 'Hey, talk to me after.' I didn't want to spook everyone else in the group. I told him I wasn't going to go. There was no way I was getting on board.'
One week later, on June 18, Titan imploded, instantly killing all five passengers on board including a teenage boy and Rush himself.
The vessel had almost completed its journey to the Titanic when its carbon-fibre hull fractured under the immense pressure of the deep ocean. Rescuers searched the ocean floor for four days before locating the wreckage.
This week, a two-year US coastguard investigation concluded that the 'primary' cause of the disaster was the failure of OceanGate, the vessel's operator, to 'follow established engineering protocols for safety, testing and maintenance of their submersible'.
It said the safety culture and operational practices of the company, founded by Rush, were 'critically flawed' and that the disaster had been 'preventable'.
Days earlier, the dive that Kitchen was meant to be part of was abandoned due to poor weather. Had it descended, 'it would have been my group who died', Kitchen said.
Now, the entrepreneur, who has been to space, all 193 UN recognised nations and the deepest point in the Earth's seabed, said he suffered from 'survivor's remorse' and harboured a lot of 'anger toward that company because they were so deceptive'.
He said 'the heartbreak that I felt toward the mum and her boy, who didn't even want to go on the trip,' could not be overstated. He was referring to the 19-year-old Suleman Dawood, who died in the disaster alongside his father, the British businessman Shahzada Dawood, the British explorer Hamish Harding and the French diver and Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet.
In the months before his trip to St John's, as he learnt more about the operation's shortcomings, he said he saw first-hand how flawed OceanGate was. He said the company 'deceived and manipulated' its customers, repeatedly dismissed his safety concerns and refused to refund him the $150,000 he had paid for the trip.
He revealed how OceanGate tried and failed to secure insurance — 'Why would we need it?' Kitchen is said to have been told — and that the company listed him as a 'researcher' for the trip to get around US coastguard regulations that forbade paying members of the public from diving on the vessel.
'You had to be designated a researcher — even though I wasn't,' he said. 'Why? Because that was the only way that they could get around the rules.'
Kitchen, who started his first business in the 1980s promoting low-Earth orbit trips, knew the British explorer Harding from their involvement in the Blue Origin space missions. 'I had met him several times. I just felt awful when I learnt the news.'
A spokesman for OceanGate said that 'after the tragedy occurred, the company permanently wound down operations and directed its resources fully towards co-operating with the coastguard's inquiry through its completion. We again offer our deepest condolences to the families of those who died on June 18, 2023, and to all those impacted by the tragedy.'
Before his involvement with OceanGate, Kitchen was part of the historic dive in July 2022 to Challenger Deep, a slot-shaped valley in the floor of Mariana Trench, the deepest known point in the Earth's seabed. It is nearly 11,000m down — surpassing the height of Everest.
'It was otherworldly,' he said of the dive. 'The life down there is likely what exists on Jupiter's moons. Seeing these creatures and how beautiful and persistent life is was just unimaginable.'
The expedition, led by the undersea explorer Victor Vescovo and a team of experts on a submersible called Limiting Factor, showed Kitchen what a professional deep dive looked like. 'It gave me the knowledge of what a proper organisation and sub should be,' he said.
Unlike the Titan, the Limiting Factor was made of titanium, not carbon fibre, and had been commercially certified by DNV, an internationally recognised classification society, Kitchen said. Every nut and bolt used in its assembly was approved for use, as was the design of the vessel.
It had been subjected to extensive and repeated testing, too. At one point, the sub was flown to the Krylov State Research Centre, a shipbuilding institute in Saint Petersburg, and placed into a vast pressure chamber where it was tested at a pressure equivalent to 14,000m deep, according to Patrick Lahey, the chief executive of Triton Submarines, which built the vessel.
'It remains one of the most formidable pressure-test facilities in the world. In fact, when we did our pressure test, it was the deepest test they'd ever done, because we went to full ocean depth plus 20 per cent,' Lahey said.
Only once did Titan experience this type of testing, at a facility in Maryland under limited conditions, according to court documents compiled by the coastguard. The carbon-fibre hull is also said to have imploded during early scale-model testing at the University of Washington, a sign that the vessel's design was not reliable at extreme depths.
Yet, reports say, OceanGate pressed ahead with its design, bypassing standard engineering caution and expert advice.
Industry leaders like Lahey voiced their concerns about OceanGate to US regulators, but Rush ignored the criticism and accused his rivals of stymieing innovation, Kitchen said.
'I remember asking them, what would happen if Titan got to Titanic depth and something happened? 'No problem, we'll just ascend,' was their answer,' he said. 'They were claiming affiliations with Nasa, with Boeing, with the University of Washington — all to give the appearance of legitimacy. It was all smoke and mirrors.' Plus, on its 90 dives to the Titanic, the Titan had reached the shipwreck's depth only 13 times.
Kitchen first signed up for his once-in-a-lifetime trip to the Titanic after his journey to the Mariana Trench. Described as a 'modern-day Marco Polo' by news outlets after going into space with Blue Origin in 2022, the married father of two said his 'desire to push boundaries' was what turned him into an explorer.
But when the Limiting Factor team learnt of his plans to step on board the Titan, he said they warned him against it and told him it was a matter of time before Rush's operation ended in disaster.
That convinced Kitchen he should pull out, but when he approached OceanGate to ask for a refund he was told the money had already been spent. He considered taking the company to court but decided to see how Titan's dives went in 2023 before making a final call.
'I wanted my money back but I'll be honest: I really wanted to go to the Titanic,' Kitchen said. 'I wanted to believe what they were telling me, but there was a big part of me that just didn't.'
The 2023 dives proceeded without major incident. There were reports of 'mishaps' — including aborted dives due to technical issues — but nothing 'catastrophic', Kitchen said.
So when he got the call from OceanGate in early 2023 that he was still enlisted for the summer, he told himself: 'I guess I'm going.'
He believes that today's commercial submersible industry is safe. Lahey said tens of millions of commercial dives had been completed over the past four decades without incident. But still, Kitchen welcomes the recommendations made by the coastguard's report this week.
'If there are calls for additional safety — good,' he said. 'I want to see deep-ocean vehicles made from the proper materials. I want to see them certified. I want to see them insured. I want to see them tested.'
In the meantime, he hopes the case against OceanGate remains open, as 'a lot of other people were complicit' in the disaster, beyond Rush. Though no OceanGate employees have been arrested or criminally charged, the company remains under investigation.
'What they did was manipulate,' Kitchen said. 'They deceived and manipulated customers. Rush could not do that alone.'