I'm a bit of a white-knuckle ride lover myself, indeed later this year I'm hoping to hook up with a chum who's promised to take me up in his two-seater gyrocopter. I can also remember walking around Tenerife harbour years ago and coming across a "yellow submarine" vessel taking passengers for brief underwater trips and wishing I'd gone on it.
Maybe not so much now after watching this chilling one-hour BBC documentary on US entrepreuner and inventor Stockton Rush's ambition to build a carbon-fibre submersible capable of exploring the depths of the oceans. His OceanGate company was set up to take anyone willing and able to cough up the $250000 to take the trip down to see at first hand the wreck of the legendary Titanic where it sank in 1912, two and a half miles below the Atlantic Ocean.
As we now know, Dive no. 88 ended tragically when the Titan vessel imploded near the bottom of the ocean instantly killing its five passengers, including Rush himself and a British father and his young son. In a programme filled with interviews, that with the wife and mother of the latter goes hardest, as she just about manages to balance her anger at Rush with her deep sorrow for her loss.
There's an ongoing official US Coastguard enquiry into the disaster, so that this mini-documentary, which has access to some of the actual witness testimony, somewhat pre-empts the outcome but I personally didn't get the impression that the events leading up to it were presented in a partial way. We get Rush's back-story, that of a clearly ambitious individual, born to wealth but determined to make his own way in the world. Like his family predecessors, it's unsurprising that he looked to bend the great seas to his will, although we do learn that his first interest was actually in space travel.
Finally, he completes the design of his prototype mini-sub but there are clear signs along the way that his checks weren't anywhere near as rigorous as such a dangerous enterprise demanded. Past colleagues and employees relate to camera and the official investigation their concerns, especially on the matter of the potentially calamitous lapidation of the carbon-fibre core, although some of these claims are disputed. The centrepiece of the programme is the actual footage of OceanGate's own video feed of the moment catastrophe struck, as we see Rush's wife reacting to the noise of the bang when the implosion occurred, heartbreakingly followed by a delayed message from the Titan vessel indicating things might be okay.
In the end this is a tale of one man's extreme hubris blinding him to his duty of care to the unfortunate individuals who put their trust in him. Yes, he too paid his own personal price in the process, but in actively marketing a place on his little ship as the "safest place on the planet", he was misguided in the extreme and inflicted lasting heartache on the surviving friends and family of those who sadly perished with him.
