Ohio billionaire, Larry Connor, plans to take $20M submersible to Titanic site to prove industry’s safer a year after OceanGate implosion
Nearly one year after the OceanGate Titan submersible disaster gripped the world, another ambitious businessman is looking to make the same trip.
Real estate investor, Larry Connor, is planning to take a deep-sea submersible to Titanic depths to prove the industry is safer in the wake of the doomed OceanGate vessel that imploded last year. Larry said he and Triton Submarines co-founder Patrick Lahey will plunge more than 12,400 feet (2.3 miles) to the 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 vessel dubbed the Triton 4000/2 Abyssal Explorer, which Connor said can carry out the voyage repeatedly. “Patrick has been thinking about and designing this for over a decade. But we didn’t have the materials and technology,” Connor said. “You couldn’t have built this sub five years ago.”
The duo said they want to prove that the trek can be done without disaster — despite the implosion of the Titan submersible in June, which k+lled 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. Rush, billionaire explorer Hamish Harding, French Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet and Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son, Sulaiman, di£d instantly when the Titan imploded under the pressure of the Atlantic Ocean.
New York Post reports that a few days after the tragedy, Connor called Lahey and urged him to build a better sub. However, Connor didn’t say when the voyage will take place.
