Larry Connor, an Ohio billionaire, plans to descend to Titanic depths with a deep-sea submersible to demonstrate that the industry is safer following the demise of the OceanGate vessel last year.
The US-based business that oversaw the tourist submersible that broke apart while diving to the Titanic wreckage halted all commercial and exploratory operations last year.
The five people on board, including billionaire explorer Hamish Harding, Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet, father and son Shahzada and Suleman Dawood, and OceanGate Expeditions CEO Stockton Rush, perished in a catastrophic implosion that occurred during the Titan’s June 18, 2023, descent to the Titanic site.
The two-person new submersible called the Triton 4000/2 Abyssal Explorer, will be used by the Dayton-based real estate investor and Patrick Lahey, Co-Founder of Triton Submarines, to dive over 12,400 feet to reach the Titanic debris site. The date of the trip was not disclosed. Lahey designed the $20 million yacht.
“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,” as reported.
A few days following the implosion of the Titan submersible, according to Connor, he called Lahey and pushed him to construct a “better” ship.
According to reports, Lahey said that Connor told him that “what we need to do is build a sub that can dive to repeatedly and safely and demonstrate to the world that you guys can do that, and that Titan was a contraption”.
