From disturbing safety warnings to haunting final moments, we're diving deep into the most chilling aspects of the Titan submersible tragedy. Join us as we explore the alarming signs, crucial evidence, and devastating aftermath that led to one of the most talked-about maritime disasters in recent history.
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00:00By the time we're done testing it, I believe it's pretty much invulnerable.
00:04And that's pretty much what they said about the Titanic.
00:06That's right.
00:07Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we're looking at the most chilling moments
00:11from OceanGate's operations before and after the Titan implosion.
00:15It's been a long process to ensure that Titan can go to the Titanic repeatedly and safely.
00:2320 hours.
00:24But then he explained that one of the batteries kind of went kaput
00:29and we were having trouble using the electronic drops for the weights.
00:34Not a lot of people outside the world of ocean exploration
00:37were aware of Titan before it disappeared in 2023.
00:41And those who did fell into two camps.
00:43Those rich and naive enough to trust Stockton Rush
00:46and those who were horrified by what he was doing.
00:49Did we change our map?
00:51Hold on a second.
00:52We are starting to come up.
00:55We are?
00:56Yep.
00:56One business magnate from British Columbia took two different trips on the sub in 2022,
01:01and in one of them, there was a malfunction that left them underwater for 20 hours.
01:07We had a bit of issue with one of the battery banks.
01:10Stockton had mentioned we're not seeing full vertical thruster availability.
01:15Something malfunctioned and the sub couldn't drop the ballasts it uses
01:19to make itself buoyant enough to rise to the surface.
01:22So they were all stuck down there, waiting until the failsafe,
01:26ropes that dissolve over time, kicked in.
01:29The warnings.
01:30A carbon fiber sub that's essentially a home build with no independent oversight
01:35is not up for the task.
01:37Engineers and experts were calling and writing to Stockton Rush
01:41for years before the catastrophic implosion, warning him over and over again about one thing,
01:46carbon fiber.
01:47The carbon fiber hole was the root of all Ocean Gate's problems,
01:51and the reason the sub failed like it did.
01:53Stockton threatened me with legal action if I went any further with my course of action.
01:59The problem is that carbon fiber is a composite that weakens over time
02:02as it's exposed to repeated strain,
02:05meaning that on every single dive, it gets weaker and weaker.
02:08More dives doesn't prove that the carbon fiber is safe,
02:12it just brings it closer each time to the point at which it isn't,
02:15with experts saying that when that happened,
02:17there would be a catastrophic failure.
02:20And that's exactly what took place on June 18th.
02:23And then would you describe Titan,
02:25based on the information that you know,
02:27as an experimental man submersible?
02:31Yeah.
02:31Dive 80.
02:33Do you have any questions about what's going on,
02:34about acoustic monitoring, about carbon fiber problems we had,
02:39rumors of problems we had, actual problems we had?
02:41Titan had a real-time monitoring system
02:44that would be able to detect the sound of a potential failure before it happened.
02:48And actually, the real-time monitoring system does seem to have worked, kind of.
02:52On Titan's 80th dive on July 15th, 2022,
02:56nearly a year before the implosion,
02:58the RMT detected a, quote, loud acoustic event,
03:02which was the carbon fiber hull failing.
03:05Mission 4, when we got to the surface, Scott was piloting,
03:07he heard a really loud bang.
03:10Not a soothing sound.
03:12No.
03:12But on the surface.
03:13If Rush and the other engineers at Ocean Gate had heated this
03:16and realized that the sub was a ticking time bomb from this point on,
03:20the implosion wouldn't have happened.
03:22The first time the carbon fiber made a noise in that hull,
03:26it was extremely loud.
03:28It was like a gunshot.
03:29Although it's highly likely that Rush would have built another identical sub
03:33as he'd already done before and kept going.
03:37Earplugs.
03:37You don't want to be in a submarine and hear those kinds of sounds.
03:40There have been many documentaries released after the implosion
03:43and a handful made before, following Rush's dives to the Titanic.
03:48But one of the most disturbing things Rush said about the safety of Titan
03:51was his personal solution to the cracking sounds.
03:54Those click sounds, that wasn't a mouse clicking.
04:00And you could feel it.
04:02I was in the dome.
04:02I could feel these things popping.
04:04The cracking sounds were the carbon fiber buckling and tearing
04:07under the pressure of the ocean.
04:09And he solved this by wearing earplugs so that it didn't bother him anymore.
04:14The second dive I put earplugs in.
04:15Right.
04:16And it worked much better.
04:17I ignored it.
04:18Right.
04:18This was after journalists and other experts pointed out that the cracking was a danger sign
04:23and that it meant the integrity of the hole was being slowly eroded.
04:27Yet again, ego got in the way of safety.
04:30It's like you're paying somebody to play Russian roulette
04:32and there's really three bullets in the chamber, but you're told there's only one.
04:38That's not right.
04:39The waiver.
04:40This is an experimental sub.
04:41People are informed that it's very dangerous down there.
04:44What could be scarier than being asked to sign a waiver that acknowledges you have a very
04:49real risk of dying 4,000 meters under the sea?
04:52A legal case from the family of one of the victims, Paul-Henri Nargile, is ongoing.
04:58It looks like OceanGate thought that this waiver would absolve them of ever being sued should
05:02something go wrong.
05:03The team always says, you know, there's no guarantee you're going to see the bow.
05:07There's no guarantee you're going to get down there because there's so many variables.
05:11We don't know how this case will go and whether anybody other than Rush, who also perished
05:16in the sub, is liable for what happened.
05:18But there's no small number of people out there who refused to dive on Titan.
05:23Suleiman Dawood, one of the victims, nearly backed out until being persuaded to dive by
05:28his father.
05:29And I think that if it wasn't an accident, it then has to be some degree of crime.
05:38The sound of the implosion.
05:39On July 18th, the sub lost contact with the surface, and a media frenzy began.
05:48But as we now know, the sound of the implosion was recorded when it happened.
05:52Footage was released in May 2025 that showed Wendy Rush, Stockton's wife, on the surface,
05:58reacting to a sound and not realizing that she'd just heard the instantaneous death of
06:03her husband.
06:16Elsewhere, and the U.S. Navy eventually announced that it had already detected the sound of a
06:22possible implosion from the wreckage of the Titanic, which director James Cameron has talked
06:27about in various interviews.
06:28They were informed by naval intelligence that an implosion event was tracked to the coordinate
06:36of the Titanic wreck site.
06:37He said he and his fellow submarines had contacts in the Navy and knew that an implosion had already
06:43happened days before the families and public were informed.
06:4796 hours of air.
06:48The mini-sub called the Titan vanished an hour and 45 minutes into its four-kilometer plunge.
06:54Despite the implosion being recorded and heard the moment it happened, an intense media circus
06:59ensued with 24-7 coverage of the missing submarine.
07:03The Titan carries 96 hours worth of oxygen, and a third of that is now gone.
07:08They may have as little as 60 hours before breathing becomes impossible.
07:13There were constant reports counting down how many hours of air the sub had, waiting for
07:18its various fail-safes to kick in and hopefully for it to surface.
07:22This was derided after the fact as offering false hope to the families of the victims, when
07:27the Navy knew the sub was already lost.
07:30There's no other explanation for losing comms and tracking when they weren't yet at the bottom
07:37other than implosion.
07:38The U.S. Coast Guard was still saying in press conferences that it was a rescue mission,
07:44but it took four days for officials to find the wreckage, after finally getting some remote
07:48submersibles that could search for the debris.
07:51Ten days after it disappeared, human remains were found.
07:54Banging sounds.
07:56It seemed impossible, but just a few hours ago, signs of life from a sonar, which acts
08:02like a bionic ear underwater.
08:03It wasn't just wishful thinking that kept people searching for Titan on the surface, though.
08:08There were also widespread reports of banging sounds detected by sonoboys drops to listen
08:14for underwater noises.
08:16People were led to believe that the banging could indicate that the crew was alive and
08:20waiting to be rescued, again giving false hope to the families that they might be reunited
08:24with their loved ones.
08:26Crews searching for the sub reportedly heard today banging sounds at 30-minute intervals.
08:33The Coast Guard admitted that it didn't know what the banging sounds were, but others, including
08:38James Cameron again, theorized that it could have been noises from the ships in the area.
08:44It's also been suggested that it was the sound of the Titanic wreckage itself shifting and
08:49creaking at the bottom of the sea.
08:50Right now, underwater drones are trying to confirm the source of that banging and to hopefully
08:55spot the missing sub.
08:56The wreckage.
08:57Debris was found right in that search area on the seafloor, just 1,600 feet away from
09:03the bow of the Titanic.
09:04Though debris was found after a few days, no footage of the wreck was revealed until September
09:092024.
09:11The footage was released as part of the investigations, with separate clips showing the two sections
09:15of the sub on the ocean floor.
09:17This all proved exactly what we already knew, that it was the carbon fiber hull that failed.
09:22When another clip of the front of the Titan was released, the mangled carbon fiber was
09:27plain to see.
09:28Seeing the debris, the pieces that were left over kind of replaying what must have occurred.
09:34A BBC documentary later showed some of the pieces of debris that were recovered and brought
09:39to the surface, including a pen thought to have been on Stockton Rush.
09:43They also recovered some stickers meant to celebrate the company and the dive to the Titanic.
09:48Stockton would have understood the reality of an implosion being instantaneous and painless.
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10:13The hearings.
10:14The Coast Guard has officially convened a Marine Board of Investigation, led by Chief Investigator
10:21Captain Neubauer.
10:23Throughout 2024, the Marine Board of Investigation held hearings to interview various witnesses
10:29and experts and determine how this had been allowed to happen.
10:33We heard chilling testimony, with people discussing how they expressed their concerns to Rush and
10:38were ignored, insulted, or in at least one case, fired from the company.
10:43The term mission specialist was created by Oceangate to give the perception, you know, to others and
10:50including regulators that these were really crew members, when in fact they were paying passengers.
10:57We also heard that people tried to notify the authorities that illegal dives were happening
11:01in an unregulated vessel, including for-profit expeditions, and that nobody acted to stop Rush
11:07in an official capacity.
11:09And finally, we heard many experts explaining how they would never in a million years
11:14gotten into an experimental submersible that made these design choices.
11:19Oceangate came very, very close to killing me and has had a severe impact on my business
11:27as well as an entire industry.
11:29Let us know in the comments whether you think expeditions like this should be banned.
11:33We took it underwater, and then there was just a cascade of problems with the sub.