Titan passengers spent harrowing last moments in darkness – Sky News Australia

by | Jul 4, 2023 | Engineer

The wife and mother of Shahzada and Suleman Dawood has revealed terrifying new details about the Titan passengers’ tragic final moments and revealed they likely died in the pitch black.
The widow of billionaire Shahzada Dawood has revealed new details about the doomed Titan submersible and the frantic hours she spent aboard the mother ship during the search and rescue operations.
The OceanGate submersible disappeared on June 18 sometime during its planned 3,800-metre journey down to the wreck of the Titanic.
All five passengers – OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, British billionaire Hamish Harding, French mariner Paul-Henri Nargeolet, and Mr Dawood and his 19-year-old son Sulaiman – were killed.
Christine Dawood, the wife of Shazhada and mother of Suleman, was waiting on the Titan’s mothership with her daughter at the time the sub disappeared.
In a long form interview with The New York Times, Ms Dawood spoke about the panicked hours on the Polar Prince as search and rescue scoured for the sub.
“I was also looking out on the ocean, in case I could maybe see them surfacing,” she told the newspaper on Sunday.
She opened up about how the family became fascinated with the wreck of the Titanic after visiting a 100th anniversary exhibition for the vessel in Singapore back in 2012.
In 2019, Ms Dawood came across an advertisement for OceanGate and was originally meant to accompany her husband on the trip before her son opted to take her place.
Ms Dawood claimed OceanGate pitched the family, without any guarantees, the sub would take about two-and-a-half hours to drop to the Titanic and roughly the same amount of time to ascend up to the surface.
In between, there would be about four hours of touring the wreckage of the famed ocean liner, which sunk after striking an iceberg in 1912.
According to The New York Times, the Titan typically descended about 25 metres per minute, or at 1.6 kilometres per hour.
At this speed, there was no sense of motion for the five men inside the sub.
Mr Rush allegedly kept the lights off inside the Titan during the descent to conserve energy for when they reached the wreckage.
It means the passengers only had a small amount of light from computer screens and light-up pens used to track the journey on paper.
Although the men were likely in darkness at the time of the implosion, Mr Rush did allow the passengers to play music through a Bluetooth speaker to provide comfort.
Ms Dawood claimed her husband had little understanding of the sub’s engineering despite paying up to AUD$365,000 for the once-in-a-lifetime trip.
“That engineering side, we just had no idea,” she revealed in the interview.
“I mean, you sit in a plane without knowing how the engine works.”
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