Original subtitles

We begin tonight with the urgent search

for a deep sea submersible vehicle

missing in the Atlantic Ocean

with five people on board.

Developing story that's really capturing

the world's attention right now.

[male reporter 2] The Titan bound for the wreckage of the Titanic

two miles below the surface.

[male reporter 3] Passengers paying up to $250,000.

Tonight, the families of the crew are waiting for word.

The idea that passengers were going to be aboard was insane to me.

[Stockton Rush] This is an experimental sub.

It's very dangerous down there.

You're in the dark. Just enough light to see.

Breaking news.

The tragic end to that deep sea dive.

All five men on board the craft lost at sea.

This was a moment in time when their sub was there, and then it was not.

The one person that should not have been on the Titan

was the teenage son.

I've gone back and forth a lot,

like whether I should have done more.

You know, whether there's some moral obligation to do more.

Do you solemnly swear that the testimony you're about to give...

Shocking new details about what led up to the deadly implosion

of the Titan submersible.

Everyone in the world wants to know what happened to Titan.

When you're outside the box, it's really hard to tell how far outside the box.

I've spent a great deal of time trying to figure that out.

If it wasn't an accident,

it then has to be some degree of crime.

Thanks very much.

You may have seen in the write up of this,

that I wanted to be an astronaut.

It's why I got an engineering degree,

I watched Star Trek, Star Wars.

And I wasn't going to get to Jupiter or Mars,

but I did realize that all the cool stuff that I thought was out there

is actually underwater.

[Tym Catterson] Stockton was a very strong personality.

He had a a trajectory of what his plans were.

Why were there only four submersibles

that could go to the average depth of the ocean?

I don't think Stockton started this whole project

knowing that it would end in total disaster.

He believed in having people have better access to the deep ocean.

[Catterson] He wanted to support science,

and he wanted to support educational outreach.

Make this kind of adventure

more approachable to the public.

That's basically why I stayed around.

The goal was, "Where do you want to go in the ocean?

"What is the most known site in the ocean?"

And it's clearly the Titanic.

It always has been a challenge to explain to people

why they would go in a sub

'cause they're typically nervous.

But when you say you're going to the Titanic, they don't care.

They've seen the pictures in the movie.

They want to go see the Titanic.

And so, from a business perspective, it was very appealing.

And to go to the Titanic, which is at 3,800 meters,

requires a special sub.

Level. Do a good cleaning, check the surface out and take measurements.

[Rush] Today is a critical joining of the titanium and the carbon fiber.

That seal needs to be uniform and small, but not too small.

[Josh Gates] Stockton wanted to bring people to Titanic,

so he built a vehicle that had a totally different shape.

Toilet paper tube.

[Rush] It'll be the deepest diving carbon fiber sub ever built.

But if we mess it up, there's not a lot of recovery.

I'm good already north-south. Just east-to-west.

[Gates] This carbon fiber hull

that was built to be lighter and stronger from the space age material,

it had these big titanium end caps that would seal this cylinder.

You can get more people inside that shape.

When I first saw it on the dock, it was kind of this marvel.

[Rush] This technology is what we need to explore the ocean depth.

We're going to go to 4,000 meters

after our testing in the Bahamas.

What he's doing is experimental,

and it involves exploration, and it's a business.

And with this, I thee christen, Titan.

[cheering and applause]

[Gates] If you're starting a submarine company,

is there a more famous destination

in the world than Titanic? No.

By the time we're done testing it,

I believe it's pretty much invulnerable.

And that's pretty much what they said about the Titanic.

-That's right. -[chuckles]

[news anchor] And we begin tonight with breaking news.

The tragic end to that deep sea dive

to the wreckage of the Titanic.

The Coast Guard reporting that pieces of the sub

have been found in a debris field near the Titanic.

Seeing all of the gear that came up,

the sheared off rings and the metal and the bent penetrators...

I was gutted. Um...

[R. Adm. John Mauger] Over the past week,

the world has followed the story of the sub Titan

and the five people who perished in the terrible tragedy.

The Coast Guard has officially convened

a Marine Board of Investigation

led by Chief Investigator, Captain Neubauer.

Thank you, Admiral Mauger.

This is the highest level of investigation the Coast Guard conducts

to determine the cause of this tragic incident.

The Coast Guard investigation can make recommendations

to pursue civil or criminal sanctions, as necessary.

Seeing the debris, the pieces that were left over,

kind of replaying what must have occurred,

that races through your mind over and over.

[Catterson] Three of my friends were in the sub, and disappeared.

Do I feel bad about it? Absolutely.

Stockton was a friend of mine. Now he's gone.

PH was one of the godfathers of diving.

And Hamish, they were all in there to get something out of this.

Do I miss them? Yeah.

I miss all of them.

Suleman knew nothing about it.

This was just his grand adventure.

And it was the same for his father.

[Christine Dawood] This is the life of my son and my husband

they are talking about.

This is the life of Hamish and two others who died there.

It was deeply personal. It can't get more personal.

They're never gonna come back.

Their voices are still in the house.

Their memories are in the house.

No matter what the investigation is,

the rooms are still empty.

Do I need to know exactly what happened

in order to come to terms with these empty rooms or not?

And I don't know the answer yet.

It's a process.

Mr. Stanley, the board's recorder Lieutenant Steele

will now administer your oath.

Do you solemnly swear that the testimony you're about to give

will be the truth, the whole truth

and nothing but the truth, so help you God?

I do.

[Lt. Steele] Thank you. You may be seated.

Mr. Stanley, if you would, explain your background and training

that relate to submersible operations.

I read a book when I was nine years old,

and started researching how to make a submersible.

This is the vehicle I operate now.

She's named Idabel after the town in Oklahoma,

and it's made out of one of the approved steels.

Actually, the US Navy was making their own submarines out of that steel.

[Capt. Neubauer] The public hearings are such an important process to have.

These are traumatic events with unexpected loss of life.

It's not a surprise to me when witnesses are deeply impacted.

Mr. Stanley, is there anything that you think would be valuable

for the board to consider?

I wish that you would indulge me a few minutes

to lay out what I think about this,

seeing that OceanGate came very, very close to killing me

and has had a severe impact on my business,

as well as an entire industry.

The definition of an accident is something that happened unexpectedly,

and by sheer chance.

There was nothing unexpected about this.

This was expected by everybody

that had access to a little bit of information.

And I think that if it wasn't an accident,

it then has to be some degree of crime.

Continuing coverage of the Titan submersible hearings.

Today we heard the testimony from a man

who went to the bottom of the ocean with OceanGate

and resurfaced with red flags.

Stockton Rush invited him on the deepest dive he had ever been offered,

and he just couldn't pass it up.

[Stanley] I got an email saying,

"Come out to Marsh Harbour, Bahamas,

and I have a spot open for you."

-[man] Yup, yup. -Looking good.

Looking good. Hold that line.

That was an extremely unique opportunity.

Kenny, do you hear that from Titan?

[man] That's affirmative. Stand by.

4,000 meters, we're there.

[people chuckle]

All of our test program has been about incremental testing.

Out here, we're really focused on one thing,

and that's the pressure vessel,

and making sure that that component,

which is clearly the most critical component of the sub,

is safe and capable of handling depths

down to 4,000 meters repeatedly

with people on board.

[woman] Rocks around. We've got two different directions...

-[man on radio] Go ahead. -[woman] Just checking on your progress.

[Stanley] When we were doing that dive,

I did not even come close to appreciating the real danger.

I was the one that was like, "Hey, capture this moment."

Like, I was happy to be there.

[Petros Mathioudakis] In 2019, I got invited to go down to the Bahamas.

OceanGate purchased a laser scanner,

and the intent was, at the time, to mount that on Titan

to be able to make a 3D model of the Titanic.

And they basically wanted someone there

to ensure that it was operating correctly.

I had never been involved in any submersible operations before,

so it was a lot to take in.

You know, being in the Bahamas and feet in the sand,

getting to work on underwater robotics and submersibles.

I mean, I couldn't think of a more fun thing to do.

You know, he was young and naive.

Kind of crazy for somebody in their 20s to be going that deep

with, really, no specific background.

Okay, I'm good. Lock me up.

Stockton had mentioned that it's really tough to test

the hull of Titan correctly.

It was just not feasible, not possible.

It fell outside the boundaries of normal testing.

I was aware that this was extremely risky,

and Stockton was very clear.

He said, "Do you have a wife?"

And I said, "No."

"Do you have kids?" And I said, "Nope."

He said, "Okay, you're in."

[laughs]

When you're inside of Titan,

on your descent, you're just freefalling.

You're just heavy and your, you know, gravity is pushing you down.

You're essentially in the dark.

Just enough light to see.

[Rush] Uh, no. Left is forward is down. On the left stick.

-[Stanley] This is down? -[Rush] That's up.

-[Stanley] That's up? -[Rush] Yup.

-[Stanley] That's down? -[Rush] Yup.

I remember driving for a large amount of the time.

[Stanley] Okay.

[Rush] You don't check down.

[laughter]

The first time the carbon fiber made a noise in that hull,

it was extremely loud.

It was like a gunshot.

[muffled thud]

Any noise would have been loud, but that was loud.

You don't want to be in a submarine

and hear those kinds of sounds.

Everyone stops talking for a little bit and...

That loud, sudden noise

that you know is essentially part of your pressure vessel breaking

when you're sinking in the near pitch blackness and silence,

I think that's going to scare anybody.

Just how much noise do I hear before we all die?

[muffled thud]

[Stanley] Took a while, let's say maybe like five or ten cracking incidents.

That was when I think I was composed enough

to isolate

where the cracking sounds were coming from.

Stockton saw this, but still he pushed on.

And you really have to ask yourself why.

[Mathioudakis] It didn't faze Stockton.

He's like, "Yep, that's normal.

"Like, you know, that happened before."

We're slightly negative.

Like, we're getting closer to it, but we're not touching it.

When we got almost to the bottom, or at the bottom,

the lights on the exterior of the sub powered down.

[Rush] I see the bottom. I don't think we're touching it.

We had a bit of issue with one of the battery banks.

Stockton had mentioned we're not seeing full vertical thruster availability.

[Stanley] Who wants to be the first one to say

that they're scared and they want to go back up,

canceling the trip for everybody because you got scared?

The supposed goal was to test it

to the exact depth of the Titanic.

We got 96% of the way there.

But because the cracking sounds were continuing,

at some point, collectively, we came to a decision of,

"Well, that's good enough. Let's call it a day."

I'm sure we were within a few percentage points of implosion.

You sent an email in April 18, 2019 to Mr. Rush.

You say, "The sounds we observed yesterday

sounded like a flaw/defect in one area

being acted on by the tremendous pressures

and being crushed/damaged.

"Would indicate there is an area of the hull

that is breaking down/getting spongy."

In my email, I tell him that the hull is yelling at him

and he needs to listen.

You'd literally see it on a graph of paper,

and he still chose to ignore that.

This exchange of emails strained our relationship.

I felt like I kind of pushed things as far as I could

without just him telling me to...

shut up and never talk to him again.

Mr. Stanley, within those emails, were you made aware

that a crack was identified in the hull?

According to the maintenance log, it was on May 29, 2019.

-I learned about the crack quite recently. -Quite recent.

[Stanley] It's like you're paying somebody to play Russian Roulette,

and there's really three bullets in the chamber,

but you're told there's only one.

That's not right.

[Capt. Neubauer] We will now hear testimony from Mr. Tony Nissen,

the former OceanGate Director of Engineering.

As the director of engineering,

did you make all engineering decisions?

No.

-Did you make any engineering decisions? -Yes.

And who would make the majority of the engineering decisions?

It was Stockton.

In June 2019, an OceanGate pilot

was conducting a pre-dive inspection

and identified a crack in the carbon fiber.

I got a picture.

I said... I think the email was,

"Hey, Tony, is this supposed to be there?"

Said, "No, that's a crack."

And I spent a couple hours trying to convince people that no, this is not salvageable.

And I said, "Titan's got a crack in it. I said, "The hull's done."

And we started carving it out,

they noticed that the crack was bigger than we thought.

When the first hull failed, they sanded it all out

and they saw that there was a crack.

It went virtually the whole length of the hull.

Now, I know what it takes to create a sub.

It's because it's what I do.

That was the issue with the Titan.

They painted themselves in the corner early in the game.

As Stockton was planning to build the sub using carbon fiber...

eh, I did not agree with it.

Hardly anybody in the public is familiar with carbon fiber.

It's stable all the way up until this magic point that it is not.

The failure happens catastrophically.

Nearly explosively.

As you're diving down, the pressure is getting greater.

Now, they heard big pops.

So your fibers are like this.

When this breaks like that, that would make some pretty loud pops.

And if it's still hanging in there, still supporting it,

it doesn't mean it's failed completely yet.

Certainly, Stockton had the money.

He had the vision, the drive to do this,

and he surrounded himself, for the most part,

with people that would say yes.

Because if you didn't say yes,

you weren't there working with him.

[Capt. Neubauer] Thank you, Mr. Nissen. I appreciate your testimony.

You are now released as a witness at this formal hearing.

[Lt. Cdr. Tom Whalen] So after dive 47,

Tony Nissen identified a crack.

Stockton and OceanGate needed to maintain their company vision

of taking people in a carbon fiber innovative submersible,

going down to the Titanic for the trip of a lifetime.

They didn't know what to do at that point

because the hull had a crack in it.

The director of engineering, Mr. Tony Nissen,

states that they are going to need to scrap it.

Basically what he says is, "The hull is done."

Mr. Nissen is then fired.

Stockton and OceanGate then move forward

to create the final Titan hull

of the same material as the first hull,

which was carbon fiber.

We're offering opportunities to go to the Titanic in 2021,

and we'll be out for around four weeks,

leaving from St. John's, Newfoundland,

which is 380 nautical miles from the Titanic,

and we're planning to go with our Titan submersible.

It is the rarest of rare to go see that.

Fewer people have seen the Titanic

than will summit Everest in one day.

[Dawood] This arrogance of the people in charge

when they think they're above everything.

That really gets to me.

Like, why is ego and arrogance more important than safety?

The irony is not lost on me

that the Titanic sunk for exactly the same reason.

History repeats itself.

[Catterson] Stockton invited me once to go out flying with him.

We were friends,

and we were friends that would argue,

and sometimes I would win.

Most of the times I didn't.

He's got an experimental aircraft.

"Experimental."

But anyways, we went out flying

and he said, "Do you want to fly?"

"Give me that thing."

So, you know, I'm flying the airplane a little bit. It's great fun.

And then he takes it back and says,

"So do you want to do a barrel roll?"

"Sure."

He told me how to do it and then I did one.

He said, "You know, this is great.

"You know, nobody else ever wants to go and do this stuff."

I said, "Well, it's either going to work or it's not going to work.

"You know, while we're doing it,

it's going to be, you know, a great fun time."

Yeah, we could've crashed.

Somewhere in there, we were a kindred spirit.

Why I kept working with him? I don't know.

Because I definitely did not say yes to him all the time.

My dynamic with Stockton Rush was interesting.

I mean, I liked Stockton. I respected him.

I think that he liked and respected me as well.

We didn't agree on everything.

There we go. I bring this up.

The Earth is really a water planet.

You know, Stockton wasn't always right,

but he was, like, sure he was right.

...clients who go to the Titanic

have either been to space or are going to space.

[Hagen] I'm guilty of the same hubris that Stockton had.

The same desire to do great things and to expand my horizons.

I was raised relatively poor

and became relatively successful.

I've always been drawn to people that were more successful.

He was a genius,

and he had a very distinct vision of what he was going to build,

how he was going to do it and what he was going to achieve.

[Stanley] It's a very small group of people in the world

that have done what Stockton and I have done.

Made a submersible, designed it, built it and operated it themselves.

Yes, he was attempting going deeper,

more people, more money involved.

However, looking at his finances and experience,

it didn't seem so unreasonable to me.

I mean, he was working with tens of millions of dollars,

doing something that I had done

with tens of thousands of dollars

and that I had started as a teenager with no formal training,

and he was an Ivy League engineer.

The sense of adventure appealed to him,

but I don't believe he had to work for money pretty much ever.

His primary motivations were more ego-driven than financial.

[Hagen] People accuse him of trying to prove himself

and live up to his own ancestry.

And those are relevant points.

Yeah. I mean, his family legacy

was really about the closest that you could get

to royalty within the United States.

[Hagen] Stockton was a true blue-blood patrician,

as was his wife, Wendy.

Her great grandparents were the people that owned Macy's,

whose lives were lost on the Titanic.

She had that direct connection.

They were of the upper crust.

I don't think most people can even imagine the access that Stockton had

to the uber elites of the world.

Stockton's father had been the president-elect of the Bohemian Club,

which owns a multi-thousand-acre reserve

of old growth redwood forest

an hour outside of San Francisco

that they use for their private campground.

You have such an accumulation of wealth,

and there's people that want something cool-sounding to invest in.

[man] Yeah, no, I'll get there.

[Stanley] Stockton pitched an idea

at the right place and the right time.

[man] Apparently, Stockton's directing this too.

[Stanley] People threw money at him,

and he felt some kind of psychological need

to accomplish something and impress these people.

[interviewer] What does it mean to you to actually go to the Titanic?

It's a culmination of over 11 years of work,

and tons of time and blood, sweat and tears.

I'm going to be so excited when I get down there

and I see that bow come into view.

Stockton wasn't necessarily fascinated by the Titanic.

He was trying to improve this technology

and trying to take it to a different level

using private funding.

[interviewer] What have you done to make sure

Titan can survive a trip to Titanic?

It's been a long process to ensure that Titan

can go to the Titanic repeatedly and safely.

We've refined the process

so that we have extremely uniform five-inch-thick carbon fiber.

And with great wealth comes great responsibility.

And unfortunately, it is not always the case

that those who possess great wealth behave responsibly.

The director of engineering at the time asked him,

"While that's great you want to build with carbon fiber,

but can we build one out of another material?"

He pushed and pushed and pushed, and OceanGate said,

"There is no debating this.

"It's gonna be carbon fiber."

There are certifying agencies.

the Pressure Vessel for Human Occupation committee,

the SUBSAFE program in the Navy.

These programs are over the top

in their rules and regulations,

but they had nothing with carbon fiber.

So we had to go out and work on that.

And one of the things I learned is,

you know, when you're outside the box,

it's really hard to tell how far outside the box you really are.

And we were pretty far out there.

[applause]

He had stated all of the advantage of carbon fiber,

but never stated any of the disadvantages of carbon fiber.

He felt that operations overruled safety

and saw classifications

as being a waste of money and a waste of time.

They wanted to be innovative.

[Capt. Neubauer] There's a few anomalies that I've never seen before

in thousands of investigations

and thousands of incidents that I've overseen.

One of them was just not registering the Titan.

So we weren't tracking it.

We call it "stateless," when a vessel doesn't have a flag or a registration.

[interviewer] Why would they not register it?

One reason to not register is to make sure that no one,

from a regulatory standpoint, is monitoring your operations.

To operate in a manner that you stay off the radar.

Ultimately had jurisdiction because it was US-built, US-operated

and not flagged by anybody else.

-Hey! -How are you, man?

-Glad to meet you. -Nice to meet you in person.

-How are you? -Great!

-Welcome to Everett. -Thrilled to be here.

-This is not Titan, I'm guessing. -No, this is Suds.

-S-U-D-S? -S-U-D-S.

What is Suds?

Suds is a a sub that I built, partly finished,

and dove it the first time in 2006.

As the host of Expedition Unknown on Discovery,

my job is to go around the world

investigating great mysteries

and to tell stories of exploration.

We had read about OceanGate. They had been in the news.

Here was this innovator that was going to come and break design barriers

and to create a next-generation submersible

that could take passengers down to see Titanic.

And we thought this would be a great story for Expedition Unknown.

Okay.

Oh, dear. What am I looking at?

-[Rush] These are the results of some of our pressure tests. -[Gates] Okay.

-High pressure tests? -High pressure tests.

This is a third-scale model of the Titan hull.

You have the cylindrical section

and you have the domes that we originally thought

we could make out of carbon fiber.

-So this would have been a sub you don't want to be in. -This is true.

But I assume, also, a valuable lesson, this test.

Yes. One element we were looking at is

could we predict the failure of carbon fiber?

So a carbon fiber sub may work great for one dive or ten dives or a hundred,

but will it get soft like the deck of your fiberglass boat

after somebody's been stepping on it too much?

-Right. -And how do you know that before somebody gets hurt?

And there's been a bunch of work on acoustic emissions.

So basically we're listening to the sound of the carbon.

They start popping and crackling,

these micro-buckling pieces.

You know, little air bubbles go and fibers snap.

And we found that you can tell quite clearly

way before the carbon fails that it's going to fail.

-Hmm. -And that would allow--

-You can hear it? -Yes.

So If you get to 2,000 meters

and it's making more noise than the last time you went to 2,000 meters,

you can stop and go to the surface, say, "We've got a problem."

-Right. -Our first hull didn't work out,

so we made a full-scale hull.

We tested it to 4,000 meters, and it didn't get quieter.

It stayed noisy. That was not a good sign.

So we took it to a chamber and tested it and said,

"This hull is not good enough."

So we scrapped that one and we made a new one and tested that,

and it was perfect.

Okay, so in the end, have you cracked the code?

I think we've cracked the code.

-Okay. You ready? -Yeah.

-Brian, whenever you're ready. -[man yells]

-Go ahead. Lead the way. -Okay.

We went up in May 2021

to meet Stockton and his team in person.

-So, Josh, this is Titan. -Wow.

[Gates] Stockton was going to give myself

and my director of photography, Brian, a trip in the sub

to understand what it's like to be in Titan

and to talk about where we might mount cameras and film it

when we went out into the North Atlantic.

-[Rush] Come onboard. -[Gates] Hi, everybody. How are you?

[Gates] Stockton was a really compelling salesman,

and that's a good way to describe him, I think.

So, this is the largest view port

on any deep diving sub in planet Earth.

Wow, that is extraordinary.

Stockton's answers were reassuring, I suppose,

but they also felt rehearsed.

They felt like they were the smooth answers that you were bound to get

as you cruised the showroom floor for a new car.

Carbon fiber will be one-third the weight

-of a similar titanium structure. -[Gates] Right.

If you look at other deep diving subs, they tend to be spheres

because the shape is the ideal shape for pressure.

-Right. -A cylinder is a better shape for actually doing something.

This was an experimental vehicle.

It had never been to Titanic at this point.

[Rush] Hang on here.

[Gates] We all rely on that Spidey sense.

We all have that little voice that whispers to us.

In my job, I've learned I have to really listen to that voice.

Because, you know, I dangle off a cliff for a living

and dive into flooded tombs.

I mean, that's my day-to-day job.

-[Rush] Come on, get your shoes off. -[Gates] All right.

[Gates] And that voice started whispering to me early on.

-[Rush] Shoes off and you're in. -All right.

See you later.

The way that Titan was designed, it had no top hatch.

You can't interrupt that hull with a hatch.

The only way to get in or out of Titan was through the front.

-Thank you, sir. -[Rush] Copy that.

[Gates] And so, when you climbed inside of it

and they close that door,

they seal you in from the outside.

Okay, the door is closed. Now what's happening to it?

[Rush] They're bolting it in.

[Gates] Literally bolting it in.

How many bolts go around it?

-Four bolts. -Four bolts.

-So... So we're in. -You're in.

[Gates] I mean, the only way out of this is if someone lets you out.

-[Rush] Yes. -[Gates] We're sealed up.

You are a prisoner. My prisoner.

[chuckles] I'm happy to be here. Happy to be serving.

Stockton just didn't see, even psychologically,

the need for a way out of this sub.

And so my question was,

in your tests, how long does it take

for Titan to mate with its sled

and rise to the surface

and for the bolts to be undone and passengers to get out?

How long does that take?

And Stockton said, "I have no idea."

The only things you really want to worry about: fire.

-There are smoke hoods. -[Gates] Those are where?

On the side here. Pull back the mat a little bit.

[Gates] Okay, under here?

[Rush] Yup. Open that compartment.

-There's a smoke hood there. -[Gates] Yup.

[Rush] You open that up and there is a packet which you pull open

and you have a hood that you put on top of your head, and that will keep you alive.

Got it.

He had never done any emergency docking procedures.

In fact, we were there in May.

They were bringing passengers a few months later

for the first time to the North Atlantic.

This is Titan, Topside. Topside, Titan.

[indistinct response]

[man] There he goes.

[Brian] It's gonna take it pretty steep.

This is where it gets interesting.

[man 2] Yeah?

We're settling down. We are underwater.

And we'll turn on our TBL.

[Gates] We were in the sub for hours with Stockton.

And the dive was interesting

in that nothing really worked right.

Nothing.

[Rush] I'm having trouble with our port horizontal thruster.

[Gates] Okay.

I don't know why, because it's starboard's that we changed.

Okay, show him that.

[Gates] "Aft is unlocked. No UBT light."

-Got that? -Aft is unlocked?

"Aft is unlocked. No UBT light."

The sub didn't really do anything it was asked to do.

You know, we took it underwater,

and then there was just a cascade of problems with the sub.

Now this guy will be down at Titanic too, right?

[Rush] Yeah. Yup.

They have an emergency override on the VBT

in case we have a software problem.

Then there was an issue with the software.

The system crashed at one point.

Hello. Do you copy?

Topside, Titan.

Motor doesn't even seem to be moving.

But the control program says it's moving. No current.

Give him an okay, and then just say we're going to thrust.

Testing thrust again.

Yeah, we don't like when the thrusters go out. We may just go

back in the platform

rather than go to the bottom.

-[Josh] Okay. -We're pretty much here.

Hey, Topside.

Topside Titan.

[Josh] At one point, three of the thrusters

weren't working, you know?

I mean, it was...

non-functional,

is a good way to put it.

And so, eventually, it was decided

that we had to scrub the dive

and bring it back to the surface.

[Stockton] Okay, we're up.

[woman speaking indistinctly over radio]

Yep, everything's good.

Tell us back whenever you're ready.

We're gonna get some good footage.

Big time.

And this will make a different story.

[Josh] Stockton seemed completely unaware

of how bad this dive had gone from our perspective.

And so on the way back to port,

I asked him about his experiences

in deeper dives on the sub.

How noisy is it when it goes down,

-you think? -[Stockton] What?

[Josh] Just the general descent,

-is it pretty quiet? -Oh, it'll be quiet.

There's usually a bang, um, somewhere...

-Most subs have a bang of some type. -Mm-hmm.

[Stockton] When I was in the sub before,

and it was, you know,

I'll play you what it sounded like

when the carbon fiber's collapsing around you

and you don't have much time left.

This is what it sounds like.

[Josh] And what, you just were ascending, ascending,

ascending at that point?

[Stockton] No, no, I was going down. I kept going down,

because [chuckling] why not?

-[Josh] That was in the first iteration. -Yeah.

Once I saw that that was

where he was willing to go

to get this operation

up and running,

a kind of fear set in for me

that was so much deeper

than anything I experienced while riding in the sub.

[Stockton] I don't know if it'll play on the speaker, but...

[faint clicking]

[Stockton] Those click sounds...

[clicking continues]

[Stockton]...that wasn't a mouse clicking.

And you could feel it.

I was in the dome. I could feel these things popping.

[Josh] Uh-huh.

[Stockton] It was... sort of different.

Second dive, I put earplugs in...

-[Josh] Right. -[Stockton]...and it worked much better.

[Josh laughing] You just ignored it.

-Right. -Yeah, yeah.

It wasn't just a red flag for me,

it was like a flare had gone up.

And here we were in 2021,

and I was thinking,

"When did they go back and test this new sub

in the Bahamas?"

And I couldn't quite make the dates line up in my head.

And so I pressed Stockton and said, "Wait a minute,

when did you take Titan,

this Titan, to the Bahamas?"

Hello.

Oh. We're back.

We've had 52 dives in the sub to date.

-[Josh] Test dives? -Test dives.

[Josh] Are those dives all here around Everett?

No, so 52...

We've had 52 dives on the hull.

Um, a lot of them at Everett,

-and many of them in the Bahamas. -Okay.

We spent a year and a half in the Bahamas

testing the sub.

[Josh] But this version of Titan had never even been

to the Bahamas.

The first hull had been on 49 dives,

but this hull, this new hull,

was only on its third dive ever,

and it had never been down to depth.

I suddenly realized,

what would it mean if I made

this kind of promotional documentary

about Stockton and about OceanGate

that maybe inspired other people to go

and take a ride in this sub...

and then something happened to it?

And so I made the really difficult decision

to call up the president of the network

and to fall on my sword and say, "I'm really sorry.

I know that money's been spent here.

I know that this is something

that was a big deal for you to sign off on,

and I appreciate the opportunity,

but we shouldn't do this.

This is a mistake.

Something bad is going to happen here."

[narrator reading]

OceanGate Expeditions offers you

the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity

to be a specially trained crew member

safely diving to the Titanic wreckage site.

This is not a thrill ride for tourists.

It's much more.

[Josh] There's something eternal

about Titanic and her passengers.

We know the ship is wrecked.

We know about the lives lost.

We know that it's down in the depths of the ocean,

but it's still kind of out there.

It's the ship of dreams. It captures all of us.

We all went to that movie.

There's something about the story of Titanic

that really reaches out to us.

The Titanic, to me, was the embodiment.

It was the crowning moment of the Gilded Age.

We thought that we were leaving the past behind,

that we had created an unsinkable ship

of incredible speed and opulence,

and it sank on its maiden voyage

and took most of the celebrities of the age with it.

You know, you can't even imagine what that was like.

[Stockton] The Titanic is one of the most amazing brands

in the world.

People are so enthralled with Titanic

that it became a must-do dive.

[Josh] The idea that the very first time

that Titan was going to visit this...

really deadly wreck,

passengers were gonna be aboard,

was insane to me.

[Stockton] 920 meters.

[Alfred] Stockton did bring in people like myself

to help fund his perfection of this technology,

and that's what this was all about.

[man 1] We kill the thrust,

we are descending in a bit.

[man 2] Yeah, we're going down.

[Stockton] We make sure

that everyone who joins an expedition understands

this is an experimental sub.

There are no rules

for a carbon fiber and titanium sub.

People are informed

that it's very dangerous down there.

We're constantly improving the sub

to allow us to innovate.

But we have to be very careful

so that you don't, by trying to improve it,

create a safety problem.

[Alfred] I do have a higher tolerance for risk

than the normal person,

and so did Stockton.

Maybe that's bravery,

or maybe it's foolhardiness. I'm not sure.

[Jason] I understand the draw to go down and see

the underwater world of the Titanic firsthand.

But how do you keep the person safe

who doesn't understand submersible operations,

who just knows they want to go see something unique?

How do you prevent them

from taking the ultimate risk like that?

Especially because it was a commercial arrangement

and they're paying passengers.

That is something the Coast Guard has to look at.

[female panel member 1] So to confirm,

to become a mission specialist,

did you pay Oceangate any money?

I did.

As a mission specialist,

were you part of the submersible crew

or were you a passenger?

Well, both. I was a...

I was a passenger

who was given the latitude

to participate in the mission.

I didn't do any of the,

what I would say, critical items,

but certainly tighten bolts on the dome

and other things that I would qualify

as what we would say

in a slang version, monkey work.

[Jason] The term 'mission specialist' was created by Oceangate

to give the perception

you know, to others and including regulators

that these were really crew members,

when in fact they were paying passengers.

You can do an operation safely,

where you give passengers simple duties,

but it has to be done with the proper oversight.

And that's what was lacking in this case.

Did you observe the incident as the dome fell off?

Yes, I did.

And did the dome slide down the ramp?

A short distance, then it got stuck.

I actually have a picture of it on my phone.

When the titanium dome fell off,

there were only four bolts in it

and they just sheared

and they exploded like bullets.

Suddenly the people inside were looking out at the ocean

down a ramp

and obviously, a horrifying moment.

The thought with the four bolts was

simply that once you went to depth,

I mean, you didn't need anything to hold it on.

The pressure was so intense

that you couldn't pry it off.

Stockton wanted to appropriate

any pictures or videos of the occurrence.

So there was a dedicated effort

to hush that up.

[Jason] It was clear to me from Mr. Hagen's testimony

that he had a very high risk tolerance,

and that he felt like

there was a possibility

that the worst could occur.

[Alfred] I was okay with accepting the risk.

I insisted on going down on the next mission

after the dome fell off

because it was the first actual descent.

[female panel member 2] And if you look under dive 62,

there are several issues listed.

Some are dive critical.

[indistinct radio chatter]

[female panel member 1] And that was the dive you were on, correct?

Dive 62?

-Yes. -Okay.

It states "Incident, external hull,

HPA valve set in the wrong position

for the dive.

Starboard control pod failed at 1700 meters

after pop sound heard.

Two drop weights jammed in the starboard channel.

Number 1 and number 3 acoustic sensors

have extreme and unusual events.

Dome hinge retention plate bent.

DVL intermittent.

External lights flickering and tilt not functional.

Port battery will not turn on

and sub comes off the platform in a rough launch."

Did any of that cause you any concern

while you were inside the submersible at the time?

Well, there wasn't anything I could do about it.

I mean, we just had to get back to the surface.

It was...

I wasn't unduly con...

I mean, there was a level of concern.

I just figured we'd sort it out

and return to the surface.

[female panel member 1] Since you paid to go to the Titanic,

did you get reimbursed

since you didn't make it to the Titanic?

No, I did not.

I don't believe

there was any provision to be reimbursed,

but Stockton made it clear

that if you did not get to the Titanic,

you would get another opportunity.

I went back the next year,

so I had two expeditions basically

for the price of one.

Did I answer your question?

You did. Thank you.

Hi, my name is Stockton Rush.

I'm the CEO and founder of Oceangate.

Let's take a look at Titan.

So we're coming into the sub.

This is the only toilet available

on a deep diving submersible.

Best seat in the house. You can look out the viewport.

We put a privacy screen in, turn up the music.

It's very popular.

We have our control screen here,

our sonar screen here.

This is the second year we've been out to the Titanic.

We're a completely privately funded operation

and we're funded by what we call mission specialists

who help support the mission.

So they take quite a bit of money to come and join us.

We really are focusing on the Titanic,

on the science around it.

We want to document what the wreck is like now

and also try to predict

what it will be like in the future.

[Antonella] All my background, other than Oceangate,

has been in science work.

I love that aspect of the job.

There's a...

you know, the exploration aspect of it is certainly fun.

I'd been contracted to be an engineer

in operations tech.

There are very few women in this field.

So you're already swimming in to it

from a place of self-doubt, you know,

having fought to be taken seriously.

The moment I stepped onto the ship,

I never forgot it.

I had to sign the liability waiver.

And Stockton was there,

and to a room full of people,

some of them who had paid him lots of money to be there,

all I really knew was

a quarter million dollar price tag.

He says, "The company's registered in the Bahamas,

and they don't do punitive damages,

so don't even bother suing me."

And he says this with a laugh.

And I was so shocked. I wrote it down.

That's a verbatim quote,

because I wrote it down right after this meeting,

'cause I was

just shocked.

I wasn't even aware

the extent of how ridiculous

and unsafe their operation was.

Even just the level of attention to detail

in inspecting the sub

or pre-diving the sub.

You know, I'd walk around right before a dive

and just find cables that were loose

or unplugged.

My experience comes from the ROV world.

Remotely Operated Underwater vehicles.

We wouldn't send an ROV down like that.

And they don't have people on an ROV.

[people cheering and talking indistinctly]

[Antonella] It felt like

watching some really bizarre, surrealist movie or something,

and I'm the only one going,

"This is insane, right?

Like, is anyone else seeing this?"

You know what I mean? Sort of like,

what's the old, like, story? The emperor has no clothes, right?

And only one person is saying, "Wait a second."

[Josh] How does this guy keep taking this sub down?

There's only so many answers to this question.

Uh,

delusion

or desperation.

Someone who is so deep into this

and has so many creditors at the door

and has their personal reputation on the line

that they have to move forward

and keep forging ahead.

And that's when you start selling something as a product

that isn't a product.

It's an experiment.

[Alfred] I'm constantly reminded of the Titan

and my descents to the Titanic.

Anytime I see a glorious tapestry

of a lightning sky,

you remember that glorious morning

without a cloud

and the first rays of sun

brightening the eastern horizon.

And you tend to think of that

because it was that kind of a day.

And it was such a memorable day,

and such a wonderful adventure.

All right, good morning, everyone.

Headed back to the Titanic.

Right now, we did vessel checks this morning.

Uh, a couple of very minor anomalies,

which is great.

[indistinct chatter]

[Antonella] It was putting on a show.

It's like, "Pay attention to this,

pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

We're going to talk about

all these different little things."

No one actually notices,

"Wait a second.

Like, there's a bigger problem here."

[indistinct conversation]

[Alfred] It was one of those moments

where you embrace the possibilities,

you embrace the unknown.

-[man] There you go. -[ratcheting]

-[woman] All right, we're good. Ready? -[man 1] Yeah.

[man 2 over radio] Roger that.

[man speaking indistinctly over radio]

Platform tugger line will get you in place.

Titan is a go for a dive to the Titanic.

You find that in that moment

you're living a life trembling with joy.

At that moment, that's the essence of what I felt.

-[man 1] Unlocked. -[man 2] Unlocked.

[man 3] We're unlocked.

[Alfred] I remembered how passionate we were

in that moment,

how excited I was to see this iconic shipwreck

and to go deeper than I'd ever gone before,

I'd ever imagined.

[man 1] Oh, my God, that's it, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[man 2 speaks indistinctly]

-[man 1] Yeah. That's it, that's it. -[man 2 speaks indistinctly]

[man 1 chuckling] Oh, my God, we're pretty close here.

We're pretty close.

It's a devastating thing to look at,

but it's also awe-inspiring.

And inspirational in some ways,

and deeply sobering,

where all these people lost their lives,

but their remains are not there.

Their belongings are.

The detritus of their lives

and the detritus of the tragedy

are broken and ridden with bacteria

and scattered across the floor of the ocean for all to see.

-[man 3] Above here... -[man 4] Oh, yeah.

[man 3] That's the funnel number 1.

[man 4] And that's where they were

launching the lifeboats.

[man 3] Yeah.

[somber instrumental music playing]

Right now, we're doing three knots,

and we're trying to get back to the sub.

[Alfred] We were ascending in the Titan.

We were actually fairly close to the surface, as I remember,

and we heard a loud crack.

Which sounded like the ship breaking apart.

It was very loud,

it was very dramatic,

and everyone sat up, like, "What was that?"

Mmm, look at that blue.

[Alfred] I can see the surface almost.

[man 1] That's a pretty welcome sight.

[Alfred] It was certainly concerning,

because we didn't understand what it was.

I mean, we were close enough to the surface

where I knew we were going to come out

and that we were going to be okay.

FRC, we see them now out of our 9 o'clock,

about 450 meters out.

[Antonella] We spoke

to a member of the Horizon Arctic crew

about the bang that was heard,

'cause I was, you know, just concerned

and kind of shocked that this had happened.

And he told me that he heard this bang.

[dull thud]

[Antonella] He was out in the Zodiac

waiting as the sub came up,

and he was able to hear it from the surface.

Um.

It must have been loud.

I was just, like, shocked.

No one else really sort of reacted,

and then Stockton sort of shut it down

and, you know, just, "Oh, we'll talk about that later."

[Stockton] It's an open book here.

If you have any questions about what's going on,

about carbon fiber, problems we had,

rumors of problems we had, actual problems we had.

When we got to the surface, Scott was piloting,

he heard a really loud bang.

-Um, not a soothing sound. -[man] No.

Um, but on the surface,

and as Tym and P.H. will attest,

almost every deep diving sub makes a noise at some point.

You have dissimilar shapes

and metals that are

expanding due to thermal interaction,

due to pressure changes,

and it's quite common to have a noise.

[Antonella] My initial reaction was like,

"Hold on. You know, you don't..."

Even if you heard your car make that sort of noise,

you'd probably stop and go,

"Wait a second, we need to, like, see what happened here."

[Cmdr. Williams] When they heard this loud bang,

there should have been all stop,

do not continue, investigate further.

This picture here is

of the placements

of the acoustic emission sensors

on the Titan.

The purple you see here,

this is the acoustic emissions,

basically the energy

or acoustic data that was heard.

On Dive 80,

this purple line goes all the way to the top,

which means it was a loud bang.

There is this huge amplitude.

Delamination is essentially a parting of the carbon fiber.

And what we have come to the conclusion was

there was a delamination

on Dive 80

upon surfacing at 2:46 p.m. local time.

[Antonella] I did talk to Phil Brooks,

the director of engineering.

He had told me,

"It looks like there was movement in the hull,

but only a few microns."

But I did say to him...

I brought up the possibility of delamination.

And I asked him, "Are you going to keep diving the sub?"

And he said, "Yeah, we'll do the next mission,

and then we'll visually inspect it

when we get back to Seattle."

I was just shocked.

Like, you don't need to be a composites expert...

to see that and think,

"Okay, maybe we need to step back

and stop the operation

until we figure out

what this actually means."

But of course, as with anything with Oceangate,

the response was to just go,

"Oh, okay."

and then just keep going.

Stockton Rush touted this system as,

"It will let me know something is happening

before something bad happens." Right?

Their system did that.

Their system said

there has been a fundamental change

in the material of your carbon fiber,

and it was no longer structurally sound

like it had been prior to Dive 80.

Delamination at Dive 80 was the beginning of the end.

And everyone that stepped on board the Titan

after Dive 80

was risking their life.

[Antonella] I've gone back and forth a lot, like...

[sniffles]...whether I should have done more, you know,

whether there's some moral obligation to do more.

I felt like it was the right thing to do

to share what I knew

and tell that part of the story.

So many people are watching

and commenting.

We will now hear virtual testimony from Ms. Antonella Wilby,

former Oceangate contractor.

Ms. Wilby, can you hear us?

-I can. -Thank you for your time today,

Ms. Wilby. We appreciate it.

I was really impressed that Ms. Wilby contacted us

and said "Hey, I'm willing to go on the record"

in a very high profile setting

and gave us some really critical testimony.

So as I understand it,

you were present

during dive 80 on July 15th, 2022,

where a loud bang was heard upon surfacing.

Am I correct?

Yes.

Can you please tell me in detail

about what you know about that dive?

[Antonella] Um,

I wanted to say something before the next dive

because they were going to be diving the sub

a couple days later.

I went to Amber Bay,

the director of administration.

The culture is sort of, you know,

anyone who has a legitimate safety concern

should feel free to raise that concern

without fear of retribution.

I initially went to Amber Bay.

And I told her I was really concerned

that they were going to continue diving the sub.

Her initial response was,

"Yes, people are concerned about you too.

You don't have an explorer mindset."

And, like, that's not the mindset, you know.

Talking about explorer mindset, like,

this is not a mindset that you should have for doing anything.

[Stockton] It's a very participatory sub.

Often you'll be sitting there, and he'll back in.

And he'll say, "Everybody in the dome."

And so you all pile in the dome,

and that brings the nose down so he can slam it in there.

[Wilby] It was all about

I wasn't capable of working with them

because they were too innovative.

And not at all listening to, like, what I was trying to explain,

that, you know, there's a lot of evidence

that something has gone really wrong here.

[Stockton] All stations are reporting the launch as a go.

Please stand by.

It's two-and-a-half miles down,

and it's difficult.

That's why no one else does it.

[Williams] After dive 80, every single time

you would go down to depth,

you were further damaging that hull.

Eventually, something bad was going to happen.

[man] The bottom should be within a couple of meters.

-All right. -[people applauding]

[Stockton] Right now, they will cruise around the bow,

and they'll spend about two hours on that, and then they'll come up.

It'll take about two-and-a-half hours to get it to the surface.

[man on radio] Okay, all hands.

Sounds like we're go for the dive.

Next stop, Titanic.

[Gates] There is a real symmetry between Titan and Titanic.

That is wild.

[man] That is nice, yep.

Naming your submarine Titan is maybe a first clue

in some of the failings and some of the hubris

that ultimately led to what happened.

Titan reports on bottom.

-[all cheering] -None of it broke out.

[Stockton speaking]

[Stanley] There's no possible way that Stockton didn't know

how this was going to end,

and they just carried on anyway.

I think he painted himself in a corner.

He didn't have a good out.

And if he admits defeat and failure,

and then has to tell this to the people

that had given him so much money,

like, what's the rest of his life look like?

These guys, I-- I set up for the dome.

The hull itself, you're not going to hurt the hull.

From the standpoint of passenger safety,

you're going to be alive because the hull--

Nothing is breaching the hull.

It's the safest spot on the entire planet.

He wasn't necessarily set on murder-suicide at that point,

but he had given up hope on the project

coming to fruition the way he had promised.

And then it was just a matter of

is it going to fail with me in it,

or with other people, or how--

How is it going to fail?

But it was obvious that it was going to fail in some way.

[Wilby] I left after two weeks.

They offered to send me home, and I said yes.

You know, no one even looked at me.

Like, I just grabbed my duffel bag

and walked off the ship.

And, like, people were--

Wouldn't make eye contact with me.

It's just added another feeling of just feeling bad.

Like you've somehow done something horribly wrong.

Like you're the evil, terrible person that people won't even like.

Look at you.

[reporter 1] We continue to track some of the coldest air

so far in years felt across eastern Canada.

It pushes into the maritime provinces...

[reporter 2] Central and eastern Canada is in the grips

of a polar vortex right now.

Everything was conspiring against the sub.

When they would take it back and store it,

it was left out in the elements.

Once it started getting into freezing weather,

the water would then start to expand

and try prizing the--

The hull away from the titanium ring.

And each time, the water would go through freezing cycles.

It's like ice breaking up rocks.

[Gates] You're not going to tell them it was left out all winter in the cold.

You're not going to tell them about previous sounds

and cracking from inside the hull.

They didn't treat the Titan hull with respect.

And that was your moneymaker.

[Stockton] It's an open book here.

Do you have any questions about what's going on about, uh, acoustic monitoring,

about, uh, carbon fiber problems we had,

rumors of problems we had.

We want everyone going into this fully informed

this is an experimental sub.

This is a dangerous environment.

Almost every deep-diving sub makes a noise at some point.

You have these similar shakes...

[Gates] My suspicion is that Stockton had

enormous financial pressure to keep going,

and that's when bad things happened.

[man 1 on radio] Go ahead.

[man 2] Yeah, I need to stay alongside of this water.

[man 3] When I woke up, I was like, "Oh, God, no."

[Catterson] There was a risk that something could go wrong...

[man on radio] Topside stage,

diver one and diver two heading to surface.

...which is why I always kept coming back as safety diver.

It's a choice.

It's either to make yourself available to help if you're needed or not.

On the 18th, it was a perfect day for diving.

The sun came out, the skies were blue,

the seas were calm, the wind was down.

What was your responsibility on that day?

I was running the platform again.

Basically, I did all the dive checks for the platform.

Stockton was the pilot.

He was doing all the internal checks.

He's like, "This is great! This is great!"

We get to dive.

Did you have any communications with the passengers

after they had come out to the submersible?

-They'd come out on another dinghy... -[Whalen] Mm-hm.

...and they get out.

And then they got into the sub.

[Hagen] Anyone that went down in it,

whatever their motivations,

should have understood how risky it was.

They were either embracing that reality

or they were delusional.

The one person that should not have been on the Titan

was the teenage son.

Suleman was close to the last to going in.

And when he came up, I grabbed him by the--

The back of his-- His flotation device.

You know, pull him and make sure

he's not gonna, you know, go sliding off into the water.

And...

I helped him get in.

I helped him get into the sub,

and then I said, "Have a good dive."

[man] At 9:14 a.m. local,

according to the Polar Prince deck log,

the Titan disengaged, maneuvered away

and proceeded to dive with five persons aboard.

The Polar Prince received a ping from the Titan

approximately every five to ten seconds.

They're going down to see the Titanic.

You have this young boy, you know, who's excited.

His dad is excited for him.

These are the flashes going through your mind.

The quiet, right? The moments before.

What questions,

what conversations were they having?

[man] Communications continued

throughout the descent.

There were no transmissions which indicated trouble

or an emergency aboard the Titan.

At 10:47:27 a.m. local,

the Titan messaged, "Dropped two wts."

At 10:47:33 a.m. local,

the Titan was pinged for the final time.

The depth of the Titan was 3,346 meters.

[Whalen] Okay, so what you're going to see

is Miss Rush, uh, as she is the--

On the comms and tracker.

-[Neubauer] She leads that team, right? -[Whalen] Yes.

-You will hear a noise that is external to the ship. -Okay.

Or external to the room, I should say.

-And you will see their reaction to the noise. -Okay.

-And then we'll rewind and go again. -Right.

How many meters to go?

Um...

[thud over comms]

[Whalen] So at that point, she said, "What was that bang?"

[Neubauer] Yeah. "What was that bang?"

Is this max volume right now?

[Whalen] It is max volume for this.

I'm gonna back up and play it one more time.

It sounds like a door slamming.

Approximately in five seconds, you will hear the bang.

[Wendy] Um...

[thud over comms]

Yeah.

Now, next, she's going to look at the computer,

and she says, "Dropped two weights."

Dropped two weights was the last message from the Titan.

[Neubauer] Right.

The message actually comes in after they heard the noise of

what could possibly have been the implosion noise.

Right. Okay.

It appears that she thinks something happened,

or she senses something, and then the relief

once she sees "Dropped two weights."

Agreed.

[Whalen] What we believe is the implosion sound came first,

before the computer message of "dropped two weights."

Based upon the speed of actual sound.

Sound travels through the water column

-at 1,500 meters per second. -[Neubauer] Right.

And so they were at 3,346 meters below the surface,

so that would have been, like, two-and-a-half seconds.

Dropped two weights is the last thing that they stated.

-Within five seconds is when we lost comms and tracking. -[Neubauer] Yeah. Okay.

Gotta show some other folks.

That is--

I mean, you figured, the fatal moment, you know, for all of them.

[Whalen] Mm-hm.

It is. It's very sobering.

[Jamie Frederick] At 5:40 p.m., we received a call.

A report of an overdue submersible

at the site of the Titanic.

We happened to have the United States Coast Guard

C-130 on deck in St. John's.

And, ironically, that aircraft

was on deck in St. John's because they were conducting

an international ice patrol mission,

which is something the Coast Guard does

as a result of the sinking of the Titanic.

[reporter] The Canadian Coast Guard,

they have new ships that have just arrived on scene.

The Horizon Arctic,

a ship that can drop a remotely-operated vehicle.

If they find that sub, they've got a huge challenge

lifting it up out of the water,

maybe from a depth of two-and-a-half miles.

There's no other explanation for losing comms and tracking

when they weren't yet at the bottom,

other than implosion.

They found what they were looking for.

It was no longer a search and rescue, but a recovery.

They found debris.

Stockton would have understood the reality of an implosion

being instantaneous and painless.

You're talking about something happening

in a fraction of a second,

where you're exposed to temperatures hotter than the sun

and pressures more than double what's inside a scuba tank.

So they--

You know, they didn't feel a single--

It's basically the perfect, painless way to die.

[Catterson] This was a moment in time

when their sub was there, and then it was not.

[Dawood] I lost two people who are important in my life.

I would never want anybody to go through that pain. [sniffles]

So here is a picture of the aft dome that came up.

It is filled with water.

And then we emptied the water,

and then we started to go through some of the debris.

This is what the sludge looked like

once you got rid of the water.

So a lot of this is just carbon fiber or fiberglass.

You know, electronic parts.

I mean, really, it turned into sludge.

[Steele] Let's just consider the end cap to be a bowl, a mixing bowl.

Items that were inside of the Titan at the time

now become encased inside of the end cap.

We were all just, kind of, getting all hands in

and separating what needed to be considered

as, uh, human remains

and what was just other wreckage pieces.

So as we were pulling apart, that's how we realized what it was,

Mr. Rush's, uh, clothing.

It was actually caked inside of sand.

It was the piece of his sleeve, uh, that had survived.

No, not the whole suit.

Um, just that end inside of the sleeve of it

was ink pen, business cards

and stickers for the Titanic.

And there was nothing else but that.

But each one of those pieces,

even the pen, was still intact.

It hadn't been broken.

All of this debris,

all of these things shattered,

but his pen was still intact.

[Williams] Everyone wants to know what happened to Titan.

Could it have been prevented?

I think it's important for the public to hear the truth.

The whole world is interested in that.

[Neubauer] The testimony gathered has been critical,

but there is still more work to be done.

And our final report will be essential in shaping future safety standards.

I'm now ready to take your questions.

Anne Emerson, Channel 4.

Do you believe you have enough to recommend criminal charges?

And if so, who are you looking at charging?

[Dawood] I think I will never be the same.

I don't think that anybody who goes through loss and--

And such a trauma can ever be the same.

One of the most important things that came out for me

was when the Coast Guard

also assured us as a family that

we couldn't have known.

For me, that was...

yeah, I guess the most important,

um, reassurance they could have given me.

[Catterson] My belief with the dead is just leave them alone.

The same goes for Stockton.

[scoffs]

I wish he was here right now,

and I would smack him one, you know.

Um...

[sighs]

[stammering] It does no good to--

To speak ill of the dead. You know, it's...

[Steele] Those days searching,

I was hoping that the outcome

was not going to be what it was.

You know, laws are written in blood,

you know, regulations are written in blood.

That's the saying in the Coast Guard.

We needed to provide closure.

We needed to provide closure to those families.

OceanGate gave this idea that they were safe.

But when you look at all of the things

that OceanGate bypassed and didn't do,

safety was not their priority,

it was monetary gain.

For me, a submersible is way riskier

than other vessel operations.

So why are we giving them less stringent safety requirements?

It just doesn't make sense.

We've, of course, talked about some of the recommendations.

The most important one to me is--

Is changing how we handle

any US passenger submersible in our naval waters.

If you want to be an explorer, an inventor, an innovator,

that's awesome, you know.

Knock yourself out.

But when you start inviting the public,

when you bring a kid into this thing you've invented,

you have a responsibility at that point to be totally forthright

about what it is that you're offering.

[Stanley] When people are doing things like spending $250,000

in a death tube that wasn't tested,

controlled by a game controller

by a guy that's telling you

how he wants to be remembered for breaking rules,

it's a message to the super wealthy,

the oligarchy, if you will,

that your money can't buy everything.

[Whalen] He was arrogant.

He felt that his way was the only way and the best way.

And, I mean, I don't know why he felt that way, but he did.

And, um--

-[Williams] Five people perished because of it. -You know, it's-- Mm.

[Williams] There were so many opportunities

for Stockton to stop this operation from happening,

and he always chose to continue the operation,

instead of thinking about it from a safety perspective.

With regards to the actions and the inactions of Mr. Rush,

continued, um, failures to properly, um, inspect the hull,

failures to--

To properly, um, identify risks

and risk mismanagement.

So many steps and so many failures

that got to where this is at.

So really, what we have here is not an accident.

It's a potential crime.

-[Whalen] Yes, sir. -[Williams] Yes.

Okay.

[Whalen] He knew the risks he was taking

with carbon-fiber hull and with the Titan.

But he didn't tell anybody else about those risks

because he had to make the money.

It's inescapable.

There is no letting Stockton off the hook at the end of this.

How did the people that had access to the information

that the general public didn't have until after the disaster,

how did those people not only not stop him, but keep giving him money?

That's the question that keeps me up at night.

[Dawood] I'm not looking for blaming.

We all know who the culprit is.

Well, it's not changing anything, does it?

The culprit died with them, right?

So...

who am I to blame?

[Stockton] There are a group of people,

I don't know how many there are,

that say you shouldn't visit the Titanic

because it's a grave site.

Um, in my mind, I think that's just absurd.

The fact of the matter is

the best way to honor those who died

is to draw attention to it, to make people think about it.

I think it's very important to keep the Titanic alive.