Titan: the boy who didn't want to climb into the tin can

One more chilling story that sets off my claustrophobia. When I look at the last photo of father and son and think about a boy who didn't want to climb into that tin can but did it for his father, I genuinely struggle to breathe.

In that picture are Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son Suleman. They stand on the deck of a ship in bright orange jackets, smiling at the camera. It is one of the last photos before they climb into the Titan submersible and head down roughly 3,800 metres to the wreck of the Titanic.

Five people in a tube

18 June 2023, the North Atlantic. The Polar Prince sits above the spot where the Titanic lies. Five people get into Titan: Shahzada and his son, British businessman Hamish Harding, legendary Titanic explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet and Stockton Rush, the sub's creator and founder of OceanGate.

Inside is a cramped cylinder with no seats, just a small viewport in the nose. You sit on the floor, shoulder to shoulder. The hatch is bolted from the outside: there is no way to open it from within. On paper this is called an expedition. To me it looks like a voluntary cell with no right to leave.

Before the dive, passengers signed a waiver which, according to journalists who saw it, mentioned the possibility of death three times on the first page alone.

A hull even the engineers didn't trust

Titan's hull was made of carbon fibre held together by titanium rings. The material is light and strong, but it had never been used for crewed vessels at such depths. Engineers warned that carbon fibre handles repeated compression cycles badly: it accumulates damage that can't be seen from the outside.

OceanGate's former director of marine operations, David Lochridge, later testified under oath that he knew the hull would fail.

To keep at least some control, the hull was fitted with a system that "listened" for cracking and strain in real time. That fact alone tells you even its creators weren't fully sure the structure would hold.

"All good here"

Titan detaches from its platform and begins its own descent. On the Polar Prince a separate team tracks it: receiving data, reading short text messages from the crew and answering them. The ship regularly sends acoustic pings to the sub.

At about 2,274 metres a message comes in: "All good here."

At about 3,341 metres, another: "Dropped two wts." Two weights released, a routine step to adjust buoyancy before approaching the bottom.

At about 3,346 metres communication and tracking cut out. The master of the Polar Prince later said he thought he felt the ship shudder. The team keeps sending messages for a while, but there is no reply. Slowly it dawns on everyone that the link hasn't just frozen. It is gone for good.

Milliseconds

What happened in the deep is called an implosion: the instant collapse of a hull under enormous outside pressure. Calculations show Titan was destroyed in milliseconds, faster than the nervous system can register pain or even realise something is wrong. The people inside died instantly.

The search lasted several days while the whole world watched. On 22 June debris from the sub was found on the seabed about 500 metres from the Titanic's bow.

Suleman

The detail that chokes me most is how Suleman ended up on board.

His mother, Christine Dawood, told NBC that she was originally meant to go with her husband, but the trip was cancelled because of the pandemic. Later she stepped back to make room for her son: "Because he really wanted to go." Suleman brought a Rubik's Cube. He wanted to solve it 3,700 metres down at the Titanic and set a record.

His aunt, Shahzada's sister Azmeh Dawood, told a different story. She said Suleman wasn't very up for it and was terrified. He agreed because it was Father's Day weekend, and Shahzada loved everything to do with the Titanic.

Both versions can be true at once. A boy who is scared, and a boy who wants to please his dad and invents a record so the fear feels smaller. When I imagine sitting on the floor of a cramped tube bolted shut from the outside, I feel short of air just thinking about it. If someone offered me that dive, I wouldn't go for any money. And I wouldn't take my son.

The man who called safety a waste

At the centre of this story is Stockton Rush's character. He dreamed of "opening the ocean to everyone" and openly scorned certification. In a 2022 interview he said that at some point safety becomes "just pure waste," and that he could do things just as safely while breaking the rules.

Titan never went through independent certification. Formally, every passenger accepted the risk. In human terms, they trusted a man who was more in love with his idea than with common sense.