Father and son share red flags that caused them to turn down doomed trip on Titanic sub
Topics: Titanic, US News, World News
Joe Harker
Featured Image Credit: Facebook/Becky Kagan Schott/OceanGate
Topics: Titanic, US News, World News
A father and son who were offered the chance to be on board the doomed OceanGate submersible explained the 'red flags' which caused them to turn the offer down.
Five people were on board, OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, Hamish Harding, Paul-Henri Nargeolet, Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman.
A number of people had the opportunity to buy passage aboard the Titan sub to dive down and see the wreck of the Titanic but many turned down the chance over concerns about safety.
Advert
Among those who came close to boarding the sub were Jay Bloom and his son Sean, who were offered a discount price on tickets by OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush.
Bloom posted text messages he had with Rush of the two of them discussing a potential spot on the sub, with the OceanGate CEO offering a 'last minute price' of of $150,000 per person as opposed to the $250,000 fee others paid.
In the text messages they discussed the safety of the sub as Bloom said his son's friend had been worried about it and in the end they didn't go.
Since the Titan sub disaster which claimed the lives of all five people on board, Bloom and his son have spoken to CNN to explain exactly what 'red flags' they had with the doomed sub.
"One of the safety concerns I had before getting on was literally about the structural integrity of the submarine," Sean said of his worries about how safe the Titan would be to board.
"Before we got on I saw a video of Stockton explaining how the submarine worked with the remote and everything like that. I saw a lot of red flags with it and it was only meant for five people.
"I just didn't think that it could survive going that low into the ocean so ultimately I ended up warning my dad about it and he ended up agreeing with me. When we tried to ask Stockton questions he kind of brushed it off a little bit so kind of red flags from the start."
His father Jay then said he got more worried was when Rush came to see him in Las Vegas and made the journey by flying in a 'two seater experimental plane' he'd made himself.
Bloom, a helicopter pilot who said he 'wouldn't get into an experimental aircraft', started to develop reservations about going down to the Titanic in a 'five seater experimental sub that he built'.
Jay said that he and Sean were 'haunted' by pictures of the people who took their places on the sub, father and son duo Shahzada and Suleman Dawood.
He said it was 'really weird' to see the pictures of the father and son who tragically died in the disaster because 'one decision, [and] that would have been our picture'.