A year after OceanGate implosion, an American billionaire plans to take Ksh. 2.6B submersible to Titanic site

Real estate investor Larry Connor, of Dayton, Ohio said he and Triton Submarines co-founder Patrick Lahey will plunge more than 12,400 feet (3.78 kilometres) to the Titanic shipwreck site in a two-person submersible.

"I want to show people worldwide that while the ocean is extremely powerful, it can be wonderful and enjoyable and really kind of life-changing if you go about it the right way,” Connor told the Wall Street Journal.

Lahey has designed a $20 million (2.6 billion) vessel dubbed the Triton 4000/2 Abyssal Explorer, which Connor said can carry out the voyage repeatedly.

The duo said they want to prove that the trek can be done without disaster — despite the implosion of the Titan submersible in 2023, which killed all five people on board, including OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush.

The Titan had been headed to the Titanic site when it suddenly had a “catastrophic implosion” on June 18.

Speaking about his submersible, Connor said, "Patrick has been thinking about and designing this for over a decade. But we didn’t have the materials and technology."

"You couldn’t have built this sub five years ago.”

He also added that a few days after the tragedy, he called Lahey and urged him to build a better sub.

"You know, what we need to do is build a sub that can dive to [Titanic-level depths] repeatedly and safely and demonstrate to the world that you guys can do that, and that Titan was a contraption,’” Lahey told the paper.

He, however, didn’t say when their own voyage will take place.

Last year, OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, billionaire explorer Hamish Harding, French Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet and Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son, Sulaiman, died instantly when their submersible 'Titan' imploded under the pressure of the Atlantic Ocean.

The Titan submersible was designed to take tourists to the Titanic wreckage, located approximately 2.5 miles below the surface of the North Atlantic Ocean.

An investigation into the implosion is still ongoing, but David Lochridge, OceanGate's former director of marine operations, raised safety concerns before the implosion. In a 2018 lawsuit, Lochridge said he was fired for raising his concerns about the design and testing of the hull.