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The co-founder of the company behind the Titan submersible has denied that the passengers on the craft qualified as “tourists” and said they were well aware of the danger of the voyage.
Guillermo Söhnlein, co-founder of OceanGate Expeditions, the company that owned and operated the craft, told the ABC that passengers on board the submersibles shipwreck would not “consider themselves tourists”.
“I don’t think any of them would consider them tourists. They were part of the crew. They were ‘Mission Specialists’, they were trained for it. And they were very well aware of the risks”.
The Titan was a small vessel that was launched from another ship, the Canadian icebreaker Polar Prince.
All five people on board the Titan were killed. Debris from the vessel was located about 12,500 feet (3810 meters) underwater and roughly 1600 feet (488 meters) from the Titanic on the ocean floor, the Coast Guard said last week.
Guillermo Söhnlein, co-founder of OceanGate Expeditions.Credit: sohnlein.com
“They knew what they were getting into. And yeah, and it’s just, it’s a sad thing that they died doing something that they were passionate about.”
Söhnlein, who co-founded and helmed the company, left it in 2013, before the doomed Titan submersible was developed. He retains a small stake in it.
His comments to the ABC come as an international group of agencies investigates what may have caused the Titan submersible to implode while carrying five people to the Titanic wreckage.
US maritime officials say they’ll issue a report aimed at improving the safety of submersibles worldwide.
Investigators from the US, Canada, France and Britain are working closely together on the probe of the June 18 accident, which happened in an “unforgiving and difficult-to-access region” of the North Atlantic, said US Coast Guard Rear Admiral John Mauger, of the Coast Guard First District.
OceanGate is based in the US but the submersible was registered in the Bahamas. Meanwhile, the Titan’s mother ship, the Polar Prince, was from Canada, and those killed were from England, Pakistan, France, and the US.
Salvage operations from the sea floor are ongoing, and the accident site has been mapped, Coast Guard chief investigator Captain Jason Neubauer said on Sunday. He did not give a timeline for the investigation. Neubauer said the final report will be issued to the International Maritime Organisation.
“My primary goal is to prevent a similar occurrence by making the necessary recommendations to advance the safety of the maritime domain worldwide,” Neubauer said.
Evidence is being collected in the port of St John’s, Newfoundland, in co-ordination with Canadian authorities.
One of the experts whom the Coast Guard has been consulting said on Monday that he doesn’t believe there is any more evidence to collect.
“It is my professional opinion that all the debris is located in a very small area and that all debris has been found,” said Carl Hartsfield, a retired Navy captain and submarine officer who now directs a lab at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution that designs and operates autonomous underwater vehicles.
Early northern summer is the best time to be conducting this type of operation because of the lower likelihood of storms, but it’s still likely to be painstaking, said Donald Murphy, an oceanographer who served as chief scientist of the Coast Guard’s International Ice Patrol.
The search is taking place in a complex ocean environment where the Gulf Stream meets the Labrador Current, an area where challenging and hard-to-predict ocean currents can make controlling an underwater vehicle more difficult, Murphy said.
AP with staff reporter
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