‘Preventable’: Adventurer, friend of OceanGate CEO speaks out on fatal Titan sub dive

Adventurer and Astronaut Per Wimmer reacts to the report about how Stockton Rush’s lack of oversight led to the Titan submersible deaths.

A former OceanGate passenger who narrowly missed joining a Titanic dive has spoken out following the release of a new U.S. Coast Guard report into the 2023 Titan submersible disaster, calling the deadly incident “preventable.”

Per Wimmer, Danish adventurer and philanthropist, was originally scheduled to be on OceanGate’s 2019 Titanic expedition - the company’s first operational season - but the dive was cancelled for administrative and financial reasons.

“I ended up not going,” Wimmer told CTV News Channel in an interview Tuesday. “Subsequent to that, I met with one of my good friends and one of the leading experts of deep sea diving in the world, Rob McCallum, who quite frankly, scared me quite a bit.”

McCallum warned Wimmer about the risks of using carbon fibre in deep-sea submersible design, a flaw that the U.S. Coast Guard’s investigation confirmed in its final report released today.

The vessel’s carbon fibre hull design and construction introduced flaws that “weakened the overall structural integrity” of its hull, the report stated.

“You would have picked that up along the way had you followed normal, conventional methods of testing submersibles,” Wimmer said.

The report found OceanGate ignored repeated warnings and did not properly test the submersible to withstand the intense pressure of the deep ocean. All five people aboard, including the CEO Stockton Rush and British billionaire Hamish Harding - friends of Wimmer - were killed when the Titan imploded en route to the Titanic wreck.

Victims also included French deep-dive explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet, Pakistani-British businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood.

“These people ... would have felt 5,000 pounds of pressure per square inch by the time the Titan imploded,” Wimmer said. “They would have been killed instantly, so they wouldn’t have suffered, but they shouldn’t have been killed in the first place. This was preventable.”

Wimmer said Rush’s drive for innovation, while admirable, was not balanced with safety.

“I know Stockton had an ambition to be the Elon Musk of deep sea diving ... but you can’t do that playing jeopardy with people’s lives,” he said. “This was an experimental submersible and you can’t take paying customers on board something experimental.”

He added that the financial pressures may have influenced OceanGate’s decision to forge ahead but that ultimately the tragedy was avoidable.

Wimmer said there were clear red flags on “previous dives,” like audible sounds of carbon fibre cracking under pressure - but those warning signs, observed during earlier Titanic and Caribbean expeditions were ignored.

“Bottom line is, it shouldn’t have gone ahead. It was clearly not safe, and we have now got that vindicated,” he said.