The aunt of the teen boy who perished in the Titanic submarine claims that he only consented to the trip for Father’s Day and that he was “terrified” about it.
It comes after the heartbreaking news that the victims on board the vessel are believed to have been “sadly lost” after debris was found that is “consistent with catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber.”
The sub, named Titan, was carrying 5 people down to the bottom of the ocean to see the Titanic’s shipwreck in real life, which is located 3,800m below sea level, and is 370 miles off the coast of Newfoundland. The trip is thought to have cost £195,000 per head.
It vanished on Sunday morning after losing contact with its mothership MV Polar Prince roughly 1 hour and 45 minutes into the vessel’s 2 hour descent.
On board the sub was Stockton Rush, the CEO of OceanGate Expeditions, the company who own the vessel and conduct the tourist trips. Alongside him was the British billionaire Hamish Harding, British-based Pakistani millionaire Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son Suleman. The fifth person on board is Paul-Henry Nargeolet, a French submersible pilot who was considered one of the world’s leading experts on the Titanic.
Since the underwater vessel lost contact on Sunday, the search effort hugely ramped up after authorities estimated that they were quickly running out of oxygen.
An update gave authorities more hope, as an aircraft have detected “underwater noises in the search area.”
“As a result, ROV (remotely operated vehicle) operations were relocated in an attempt to explore the origin of the noises. Those ROV searches have yielded negative results but continue,” the Coast Guard tweeted.
It was additionally reported that a second aircraft with underwater detection abilities detected “banging sounds.”
However, in the wake of the heartbreaking discovery of the debris, the Coast Guard has confirmed that these sounds were likely just ‘background ocean noise’.
OceanGate announced in a statement that the passengers’ presumed whereabouts are unknown: “We now believe that our CEO Stockton Rush, Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood, Hamish Harding, and Paul-Henri Nargeolet, have sadly been lost.
“These men were true explorers who shared a distinct spirit of adventure, and a deep passion for exploring and protecting the world’s oceans. Our hearts are with these five souls and every member of their families during this tragic time. We grieve the loss of life and joy they brought to everyone they knew.
“This is an extremely sad time for our dedicated employees who are exhausted and grieving deeply over this loss.”
Following the heartbreaking news that the sub has likely suffered a catastrophic implosion, a video depicting what this may have looked like has appeared on TikTok.
In a clip shared by user @sincerelybootz, viewers can see a vessel being flattened out and then ripped apart.
“It’s very instantaneous as far as death when it comes to any lives that may be on board,” the narrator says.
A different clip shared by @starfieldstudio shows the OceanGate Titan careering to the floor of the ocean when it crumples as a tin can would when stepped on, before the metal explodes after the vessel imploded, leaving none of the sub intact.
“The hull would immediately heat the air in the sub to around the surface of the sun’s temperature, as a wall of metal and seawater smashed one end of the boat to the other, all in around 30 milliseconds,” the text over the video reads.
This fits with what an expert has said regarding the implosion. If something penetrated the vessel’s hull to produce a loss in pressure, expert Ofer Ketter predicted that the implosion would happen in a millisecond, if not a nanosecond.
“They never knew it happened,” he said. “Which is actually very positive in this very negative situation.”
“It was instantaneous — before even their brain could even send a type of message to their body that they’re having pain,” Ketter told The Post.
Since the heartbreaking news came out about the victims of the submersible, the aunt of the teen boy who perished has revealed that he was ‘terrified’ about the voyage.
Azmeh Dawood told NBC: “I am thinking of Suleman, who is 19, in there, just perhaps gasping for breath… It’s been crippling, to be honest.”
She continued: “Suleman had a sense that this was not okay and he was not very comfortable about doing it.
“But it was a Father’s Day thing. It was a bonding experience and he wanted the adventure of a lifetime just like his father did.
“His father wanted it and that was Sule all the way – he’d do anything for anyone. It was his biggest wish, dream, everything.
“For Shahzada, he fulfilled his dream in an extraordinary way. He’s become part of the Titanic legend. I mean, in those terms, it could be nothing greater.”
