“I was a bit naive, looking back now,” Loibl said.One of the best souvenirs I have from my first trip around the world is the journal I kept over those 18 months. He described Rush as a tinkerer who tried to make do with what was available to carry out the dives, but in hindsight, he said, “it was a bit dubious.” The dive was repeatedly delayed to fix a problem with the battery and the balancing weights. “You can’t be claustrophobic.”ĭuring the 2.5-hour descent and ascent, the lights were turned off to conserve energy, he said, with the only illumination coming from a fluorescent glow stick. Everyone is sitting close to or on top of each other,” Loibl said. “Imagine a metal tube a few meters long with a sheet of metal for a floor. His submersible mates included Rush, French diver and Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet and two passengers from England. “You have to be a little bit crazy to do this sort of thing,” he said. ‘I WAS A BIT NAIVE’Īrthur Loibl, a retired businessman and adventurer from Germany, was among OceanGate’s first customers to dive to the sunken ocean liner. “But in the end, for sure, the fatal flaw is what he will be remembered for - even though he was a three-dimensional human being like everybody else,” Weissmann said. Looking back, Weissmann believes Rush had a fatal flaw: overconfidence in his engineering skills and the perception that he was a pioneer in an area that others weren’t because they were sticking to the rules. If a repair was complex, Weissmann said Rush would tell those assigned to it to pause for five minutes after completing it to make sure it was done correctly. And that’s the one I saw when we went out the back of the boat and had our cigars.”īut he also was a strong leader, said Weissmann, who recalled Rush leading lengthy planning meetings and urging anyone who was interested to read a book called “The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right” that he left in the ship’s lounge. And there was this cocky, self-assured, others be damned, ‘I’m going to do it my way’ sort of guy. “There was the one who was a good team leader and efficient and getting the work done. “I really felt there were two Stockton Rushes,” Weissman said. Over cigars one night, Rush told Weissmann that he got the carbon fiber for the Titan’s hull at a big discount because it was past its shelf-life for use in airplanes, Weissmann said. Wind, fog and waves were the stated reasons, but Weissmann wondered whether the submersible’s readiness was also a factor. He briefly climbed into the submersible, but the dive was ultimately canceled. ‘THE FATAL FLAW IS WHAT HE WILL BE REMEMBERED FOR’Īrnie Weissmann, editor in chief of Travel Weekly, never rode in the Titan despite spending a week aboard its support ship in late May, waiting for the weather to clear. “I don’t know if that’s an equipment failure or because magnetism is different two and a half miles down,” he said. The Titan’s compass also started “acting frantically” when they got to the ocean floor near the sunken Titanic. Reiss said he did notice some issues with the Titan, although he wasn’t sure everything was a glitch.įor instance, the communications didn’t always work, like a cellphone losing service. You even know you could die and it doesn’t bother you.” “You just become a different kind of person. Reiss said he was in a “different state of mind” on the expedition because he was so engaged. I didn’t get the same feeling I get in the New York elevator. And at no time did the pressure change in my ears. And I went from sea level to two and a half miles down, and then back to sea level. “Mostly it was just breathtaking how well it all went,” Reiss said of his 2022 dive to the Titanic. Reiss said he went on three trips with OceanGate in waters near New York City - and that the company took safety seriously. “When my wife first came to me with this (idea), I said to her, ‘Well, this sounds like a fun way to get killed,’” Reiss said.
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