A former passenger on OceanGate’s Titan submersible stated throughout a U.S. Coast Guard listening to this week that the vessel finally “wasn’t imagined to be protected,” as he understood the hazards concerned in exploring the Titanic wreckage earlier than participating in two earlier dives.
Fred Hagen, an OceanGate mission specialist — which is how the corporate referred to its passengers — appeared on the Coast Guard’s ongoing listening to into the Titan tragedy on Friday, Sept. 20. He defined the expertise from the attitude of somebody who was beforehand onboard.
Hagen known as the Titan dive a “high-risk endeavor during which a devoted try was made to stick to a tradition of security,” ABC News studies.
“It was not protected diving within the Titan and it was by no means imagined to be protected,” Hagen stated.
Courtesy of Fred Hagen
“Anybody that felt protected going to depths within the Titan was deluded or delusional. It was an experimental vessel, it was clear that it was harmful,” Hagen added, per a video shared by ABC News 4. “It is form of like leaping out of an airplane. You don’t do it as a result of it’s protected, you do it as a result of it’s an adrenaline rush.”
Hagen then defined that he was not “happening searching for security,” however moderately “exploration.” He beforehand instructed PEOPLE that taking part in a dive is “a extremely dangerous endeavor that might lead to demise,” one thing that passengers “clearly perceive.”
5 individuals — together with OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush — died within the implosion in June 2023. The Coast Guard’s listening to kicked off on Monday, Sept. 16, and has since highlighted the ultimate “all good right here” message from the doomed voyage earlier than the submersible misplaced contact with the floor, in addition to different first-hand accounts from mission specialists.
The 4 different individuals onboard the Titan who died within the tragedy have been explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet; adventurer Hamish Harding; and father and son Shahzada and Suleman Dawood.
Hagen — who took half in dives in July 2021 and July 2022 to view the wreckage of the Titanic — additionally detailed “the paradigm that we needed to be snug with,” per ABC Information, which was that there “have been restricted belongings” that might rescue passengers if one thing have been to go flawed in the course of the dives.
As he defined, citing conversations he had with individuals corresponding to Nargeolet, these belongings “in all probability couldn’t be organized logistically and scrambled in time to avoid wasting anybody if one thing went flawed” on the submersible.
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Throughout the listening to, Hagen additionally recalled an “incident” in 2021 during which a number of bolts “shot off like bullets” when a crane operator abruptly let go of the submersible on the deck days earlier than a dive, per CNN. Throughout that dive particularly, Hagen remembered, the Titan was free-falling for about two-and-a-half hours, in keeping with CNN. He additionally cited one other dive during which the submersible was quickly caught within the Titanic‘s wreckage, which he described in video shared by ABC Information 4.
“We noticed all the traditional, iconic websites, and I wished to analyze the realm of the rupture,” Hagen stated. “In fact, there’s a variety of currents swirling round and we briefly bought caught. It was simply, like, pipes and issues. Once I say caught, we weren’t caught — I doubt if it was greater than a minute or two.”
Hagen’s newest feedback in the course of the listening to come days after the U.S. Coast Guard launched footage of the Titan wreckage on the ground of the North Atlantic Ocean, taken by a remotely operated automobile. Because the Coast Guard famous in a video description, the footage “led to the conclusive proof of the catastrophic lack of the submersible Titan and the demise of all 5 members aboard.”
