Latest news with #RobMcCallum
CTV News
05-08-2025
- General
- CTV News
‘Preventable': Adventurer, friend of OceanGate CEO speaks out on fatal Titan sub dive
This photo provided by OceanGate Expeditions shows a submersible vessel named Titan used to visit the wreckage site of the Titanic. (OceanGate Expeditions via AP) A former OceanGate passenger who narrowly missed joining a Titanic dive has spoken out following the release of a new U.S. Coast Guard report into the 2023 Titan submersible disaster, calling the deadly incident 'preventable.' Per Wimmer, Danish adventurer and philanthropist, was originally scheduled to be on OceanGate's 2019 Titanic expedition - the company's first operational season - but the dive was cancelled for administrative and financial reasons. 'I ended up not going,' Wimmer told CTV News Channel in an interview Tuesday. 'Subsequent to that, I met with one of my good friends and one of the leading experts of deep sea diving in the world, Rob McCallum, who quite frankly, scared me quite a bit.' McCallum warned Wimmer about the risks of using carbon fibre in deep-sea submersible design, a flaw that the U.S. Coast Guard's investigation confirmed in its final report released today. The vessel's carbon fibre hull design and construction introduced flaws that 'weakened the overall structural integrity' of its hull, the report stated. 'You would have picked that up along the way had you followed normal, conventional methods of testing submersibles,' Wimmer said. The report found OceanGate ignored repeated warnings and did not properly test the submersible to withstand the intense pressure of the deep ocean. All five people aboard, including the CEO Stockton Rush and British billionaire Hamish Harding - friends of Wimmer - were killed when the Titan imploded en route to the Titanic wreck. Victims also included French deep-dive explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet, Pakistani-British businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood. 'These people ... would have felt 5,000 pounds of pressure per square inch by the time the Titan imploded,' Wimmer said. 'They would have been killed instantly, so they wouldn't have suffered, but they shouldn't have been killed in the first place. This was preventable.' Wimmer said Rush's drive for innovation, while admirable, was not balanced with safety. 'I know Stockton had an ambition to be the Elon Musk of deep sea diving ... but you can't do that playing jeopardy with people's lives,' he said. 'This was an experimental submersible and you can't take paying customers on board something experimental.' He added that the financial pressures may have influenced OceanGate's decision to forge ahead but that ultimately the tragedy was avoidable. Wimmer said there were clear red flags on 'previous dives,' like audible sounds of carbon fibre cracking under pressure - but those warning signs, observed during earlier Titanic and Caribbean expeditions were ignored. 'Bottom line is, it shouldn't have gone ahead. It was clearly not safe, and we have now got that vindicated,' he said.
RNZ News
10-07-2025
- General
- RNZ News
The Kiwi who tried to stop the OceanGate Titan disaster
OceanGate's Titan submersible was en route to the wreck of the Titanic when it imploded killing five people on board. Photo: AFP / OceanGate Expeditions The New Zealander who warned about the Titan OceanGate disaster where five people died aboard a submersible en route to the wreck of the Titanic in 2023 says it was something he had long predicted. On 18 June 2023, five people died aboard a submersible which was en route to the wreck of the Titanic - 3800 metres beneath the waves in the North Atlantic Ocean. The Titan submersible, operated by the American tourism company OceanGate, imploded 90 minutes into the journey - killing all passengers. New Zealander Rob McCallum, who himself runs expeditions to remote places through his company EYOS Expeditions. Five years prior to the disaster, McCallum raised concerns with OceanGate about the risks of the vessel's carbon fibre and titanium construction. In March 2018, he emailed OceanGate founder Stockton Rush to warn him about the dangers of their submersible and that he was risking lives. Stockton Rush died in the implosion along with four others. McCallum has a company that has run about 1800 expeditions across all oceans and all continents. "I personally specialise in surface expeditions, that is expeditions from the surface all the way down to 11,000 metres." The Titanic site is very exposed and not sheltered by any land because it is in the North Atlantic and is about 350 miles (563km) offshore, he said. McCallum said he felt sick when he first heard that something had gone wrong with the Titan submersible, but it was something they had long predicted. "As soon as I heard that the sub had gone I knew straight away what had happened, you know I had a call on the day of the implosion to say it imploded and you know the next three days about the media reports about the oxygen count-down were a bit of a mystery to me - but in a way I'm glad that the end was an implosion and not an oxygen starvation scenario." The Titan submersible was made of carbon fibre which is a composite material and was never usually used in manufacturing submersibles, he said. "All of the subs we use are made of steel or titanium and the reason for that is that metals are a consistent material and because they're consistent it means that from an engineering perspective, you can with great accuracy calculate out stresses and pressures and failure points." It was not possible to do that with carbon fibre because it was a composite material, he said. McCallum said all the submersibles that his company used were classed or independently certified but "the OceanGate submersible Titan was an unclassed vehicle". McCallum said he first became involved with OceanGate which developed the Titan in 2009 when his company owned three submersibles. "When OceanGate started the two founding partners used to come down to see our work and to look at our subs and to ask us lots of questions about how you manage a submersible business, where you source staff, how you go about maintenance and that sort of thing." The Titan submersible was made of carbon fibre, which is a composite material. Photo: AFP / OceanGate Expeditions In about 2015, OceanGate's chief executive decided that he would like to go to the Titanic and build his own craft, he said. McCallum said they stopped having contact the following year. "By 2016 when he announced that he wasn't going to build a classed vehicle, it was going to be an experimental craft that had no sort of independent oversight, no third party sign-off - that's when we part ways." There are six main certifying or classing agencies throughout the world which get involved at the planning stage of building a submersible and are involved in making rigourous checks through the entire process including all the trials assessing the vehicle, he said. The Titan was one of only two unclassed submersibles in the world that were doing commercial service, he said. To get a vehicle classed or certified is expensive and costs about 25 to 30 percent of its total build cost, McCallum said. OceanGate could not decide to get the vehicle classed when it was part way through building it, instead to get it classed they would have had to start again and get the assessors involved right from the outset which would have financially crippled the company, he said. McCallum believed Stockton's character also meant he was not able to admit that he was wrong. The company designed the process to work around the legislation, he said. The sub was built in the United States but the company was registered in the Bahamas where the sub was mainly tested, he said. "There seems to have been a miscommunication between the US and the Bahamas about who was keeping an eye on this vehicle." The Titan submersible being towed to a dive location in Everett, Washington. Photo: AFP / OceanGate Expeditions OceanGate had the ridiculous idea that it would assess the hull to ensure it could deal with the depths it was being taken to by using a series of censors around the vehicle to listen to the noises the hull made under pressure, he said. "When they got to a certain point the idea was to relieve the pressure by ascending again. "It's as ridiculous as it sounds, quite frankly if you're listening to the sounds of your hull degrading, you're standing way too close to the edge, I mean this is not the right vehicle to be in this place." McCallum said he sent a series of emails to Stockton Rush in 2017 and 2018 in which he tried to maintain a "professional coolness" on the basis he did not want to cut off communication since as long as they were talking there was a chance that Stockton would listen and change tact. "The letters are polite but they become increasingly more pointed as I sort of lay out all the things that are going wrong and why he's on the wrong path." But "every offer of support was firmly rejected", probably because Stockton was on a path that he could not get off, McCallum said. McCallum said Stockton Rush should take the lion's share of the blame for the disaster as the company's chief executive and the founder and funder of the company, but there were others who enabled him to act the way he did who should be held to account. "By enabled I mean the engineers who are prepared to sign off on something they're not comfortable with, or in a position where you know what their skill set, their experience, their qualifications shouldn't be signing off stuff anyway." A board of directors also seemed to be absent and no one seemed to have the power to say stop, he said. McCallum said there were many ticking clocks prior to the disaster. The first was the decision to build a submersible from carbon fibre using end caps that were made of titanium, he said. "You've got a material that is not suitable for this purpose being mated to two other components that are of a different material." Also, every test model that they made failed and before they predicted it would, he said. "Their operational model failed in a way they weren't expecting." In the final model there was a loud cracking sound which occurred on its 80th dive, about a year before the implosion, he said. Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero , a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
RNZ News
09-07-2025
- RNZ News
The Kiwi who tried to stop the Titan OceanGate disaster
On 18 June 2023, five people died aboard a submersible which was en route to the wreck of the Titanic - 3,800 metres beneath the waves in the North Atlantic Ocean. The Titan submersible, operated by the American tourism company OceanGate, imploded 90 minutes into the journey - killing all passengers. Our next guest is New Zealander Rob McCallum, who himself runs expeditions to remote places through his company EYOS Expeditions. Five years prior to the disaster, Rob raised concerns with OceanGate about the risks of the vessel's carbon fibre and titanium construction. In March 2018, he emailed OceanGate founder Stockton Rush to warn him about the dangers of their submersible and that he was risking lives. Stockton Rush died in the implosion along with four others. Rob McCallum speaks to Kathryn Ryan. To embed this content on your own webpage, cut and paste the following: See terms of use.
The Sun
22-06-2025
- General
- The Sun
I talked dozens out of boarding doomed Titan sub over catastrophic safety risks – Brit victims were deceived, says diver
A LEADING deep sea diver who warned Stockton Rush over Titan sub's catastrophic safety risks says victims were "deceived". Titanic expedition leader Rob McCallum talked almost 40 people out of going on the doomed sub - which claimed five lives when it imploded two years ago. 9 9 9 9 McCallum, who has led seven dives to the Titanic, implored OceanGate boss Rush to let an independent agency test his vessel. But his warnings over the sub's critical safety failings fell on deaf ears and "intolerant" Rush simply brushed aside cautions from experts. The world was put in a chokehold when the unclassed sub vanished from radar during a 12,500ft dive down to the Titanic wreckage. Five days after it disappeared on June 18, 2023, a piece of debris was found on the ocean floor - confirming fears it had imploded. All five on board - Rush, British billionaire Hamish Harding, 58, French Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet, 77, British-Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood, 48, and son Suleman, 19 - were killed. Harrowing emails show McCallum tried to warn Rush over Titan's danger - but the OceanGate CEO replied he was "tired of industry players who try to use a safety argument to stop innovation". Rush wrote: "We have heard the baseless cries of 'you are going to kill someone' way too often. I take this as a serious personal insult." McCallum said their tense email exchange ended after OceanGate's lawyers threatened legal action, and so he focussed on limiting the number of people who boarded Titan. He told The Sun: "I'd written to him three or four times, and he wasn't going to change. "I'd run out of options. I thought the sub would not survive sea trials and so I just focused on trying to limit the number of people that got into that thing. 'What's that bang?' Chilling moment sound of doomed Titan sub imploding heard from support ship "I probably talked three dozen people out of going on Titan, and I wouldn't get melodramatic about it, because I didn't want to over dramatise it. "Both because I wanted them to keep listening to what I was saying, but also I didn't want to become a drama queen and sort of written off as hysterical. "And so my simple answer was always, I would never get in an unclassed vehicle and nor should you." McCallum said he spoke to both Harding and Nargeolet, who both decided to take the risk. But he said Dawood and his son Suleman would have had "no idea" about the danger they were putting themselves in on the £195,000 dive as OceanGate downplayed the risk. McCallum said: "Hamish and Paul-Henri knew it was risky, but not the level of risk that they were taking. "The other two had no idea at all. And the reason that there's that uncertainty is because I think there was a concerted effort of deception. 9 9 9 "If you look at the culture of OceanGate, they weren't willing to take outside commentary, and anyone inside the camp that spoke out got fired or worse. "And so you've got this diminishing group of people that are only listening to themselves and they just tuned out the talk of the risk. "The risk was still there. But they just weren't talking about it anymore." McCallum, who founded expedition company EYOS, said all of those who he successfully advised not to board Titan realise they had a "close call". He added: "Within 48 hours of the implosion one rang up in tears and said, 'I owe you my life. I was going to get into that sub, and I couldn't get your voice out of my head, and so I turned around and came home'. "He lost his deposit but he said 'I just couldn't get your voice out of my head', and he was in tears. "People are very conscious that they had a close call." McCallum said on the fateful day of the sub's disappearance from radar he "just felt sick". After the sub lost contact with its support ship Polar Prince rescue crews worked around the clock in what was thought to be a race against time to save the crew. But McCallum said it was clear the sub had imploded. 9 "I knew immediately what had happened," he said. "There were two or three days when everyone was going through the search and rescue. "I didn't understand that because we knew it had imploded. "I was sad to lose some friends and shipmates. But I was grateful for small mercies that it would have been instantaneous." Engineer Rush, who co-founded OceanGate in 2009, created Titan with an experimental design made up of a carbon-fiber pod with titanium rings bolted on. McCallum said carbon fiber material is not fit for submerging so deep underwater. But McCallum's warning that carbon fiber would not withstand such pressure, Rush informed him he was "going to carry on regardless". In 2018, OceanGate's then chief pilot David Lochridge was fired after his inspection report laid bare a series of safety risks. A report from the Marine Board of Investigation is expected to be released in the coming weeks. McCallum said: "The report will be comprehensive and should cover all of the attributing elements that led to the disaster. "It will also indicate who is responsible and who might be subject to prosecution." 9 How the Titan tragedy unfolded By Katie Davis, Chief Foreign Reporter (Digital) FIVE men plunged beneath the surface of the North Atlantic in a homemade sub in a bid to explore the Titanic wreckage. Four passengers paid £195,000 each to go on the sub, with the fifth member of the trip being a crew member. But what was supposed to be a short trip spiralled into days of agony as the doomed Titan vanished without a trace on June 18, 2023. The daring mission had been months in the making - and almost didn't happen at the hands of harsh weather conditions in Newfoundland, Canada. In a now chilling Facebook post, passenger Hamish Harding wrote: "Due to the worst winter in Newfoundland in 40 years, this mission is likely to be the first and only manned mission to the Titanic in 2023. "A weather window has just opened up and we are going to attempt a dive tomorrow." It would be his final Facebook post. The following morning, he and four others - led by Stockton Rush - began the 12,5000ft descent towards the bottom of the Atlantic. But as it made its way down into the depths, the vessel lost all contact with its mother ship on the surface, the Polar Prince. It sparked a frantic four-day search for signs of life, with the hunt gripping the entire world. There was hope that by some miracle, the crew was alive and desperately waiting to be saved. But that sparked fears rescue teams faced a race against time as the passengers only had a 96-hour oxygen supply when they set out, which would be quickly dwindling. Then, when audio of banging sounds was detected under the water, it inspired hope that the victims were trapped and signalling to be rescued. It heartbreakingly turned out that the banging noises were likely either ocean noises or from other search ships, the US Navy determined. Countries around the world deployed their resources to aid the search, and within days the Odysseus remote-operated vehicle (ROV) was sent down to where the ghostly wreck of the Titanic sits. The plan was for the ROV to hook onto the sub and bring it up 10,000ft, where it would meet another ROV before heading to the surface. But any hopes of a phenomenal rescue were dashed when Odysseus came across a piece of debris from the sub around 1,600ft from the Titanic. The rescue mission tragically turned into a salvage task, and the heartbroken families of those on board were told the devastating news. It was confirmed by the US Coast Guard that the sub had suffered a "catastrophic implosion".
NZ Herald
20-06-2025
- NZ Herald
Rob McCallum, the Kiwi adventurer who tried to stop Stockton Rush's Titan OceanGate disaster
Rob McCallum discusses 11,000m dives, Titanic and the deadly deep-sea insanity of OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush. New Zealander Rob McCallum is a pioneer of deep-sea diving. He's broken the record for the deepest dive in the Mariana Trench – almost 11,000m below sea level. He's worked with the
