A suburban Chicago man who previously traveled in the "Titan" submersible shared details of his experience after Coast Guard officials said the vessel recently imploded while exploring the Titanic shipwreck, killing all five people on board.
David Waud, of Lake Forest, said he had long been fascinated with a trip to explore the Titanic wreck, and had previously planned for trips on Russian submersibles in the 2010s, all of which were eventually canceled.
Waud added that the Titan was first finished in 2019, though the submersible had not been tested enough at depth, leading to cancellation of planned dives that year.
The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic caused further delays, though Waud was among the first to take the trip with OceanGate in the Titan once voyages began in 2021.
Waud, an underwater videographer, had worked in the industry from the mid-1970s until his retirement just over a half decade ago. Having routinely showcased his work at school assemblies, Waud stated that he planned for this trip to inspire a movie that would then be shown at school assemblies and local charities in the Chicago area.
However, he added that his job didn't exactly equate to fascination with the Titanic shipwreck.
"It's not something I had wanted to do since I was a child. I was not a huge fan of the Titanic, even though I saw the movie a couple of times and I had since read 11 books about the sinking of the Titanic. Several of them when I was on the trip in 2021," Waud told NBC Chicago.
Waud added that part of what hindered his fascination with the shipwreck was not knowing that you could actually go see it.
He said the footage would be helpful in school assemblies to compare to Japanese shipwrecks from World War II that are in much shallower waters, visible to scuba divers.
With the comparison, Waud hoped to illustrate the difference between shipwrecks in warmer waters exposed to sunlight and more sea life to a shipwreck like the Titanic, in pitch-black, near freezing waters with very little sea life around.
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Waud described the experience of seeing the Titanic as thrilling, and said his excitement led for him to not feel fear.
"I was so excited. Just the process. I tell people, even if I'm just going down to see a fish on the bottom, just the experience of going with a company as professional as OceanGate, going down 12,500 feet in the largest submersible ever made to be able to go to that depth. That was just an experience in itself," Waud said.
Waud said he paid a significantly lower price than the $250,000 quoted due to being grandfathered into a lower rate from signing up for the voyage in 2019.
Those going on to the vessel were required to pass a physical, climb up ladders, not exhibit signs of claustrophobia and sign a lengthy waiver.
Waud said that he was allowed to bring a small amount of food and one bottle of water, and said that he was unsure if there was an area on the submersible where more water was potentially stored. His complete voyage took approximately 10 hours.
"Nobody ever said that there was, you know, five days of water or anything like that. So if the five divers or the five passengers had survived, I don't think they would have had very much to eat or drink when they were down there. And it would have been very, very cold," Waud said.
Waud said he entered his trip prepared for the worst.
"I knew when I went down, if something happened to the submersible, that was it," he said. "Even if it just got stuck, I didn't think there was any way. I knew there was 96 hours of air. I didn't think there was any way that anyone, any other type of submersible or any ship with some sort of way to all attach something to us would be able to pull us up."
And the worst is what happened during the vessel's latest voyage.
The Titan launched at 6 a.m. Sunday and was reported overdue Sunday afternoon about 435 miles south of St. John’s, Newfoundland, as it was on its way to where the iconic ocean liner sank more than a century ago.
Rescuers rushed ships, planes and other equipment to the site of the disappearance.
The sliver of hope that remained for finding the crew alive was wiped away early Thursday, when the submersible's 96-hour supply of oxygen was expected to run out and the Coast Guard announced that a debris field had been found roughly 1,600 feet from the Titanic.
“The debris is consistent with the catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber,” said Rear Adm. John Mauger, of the First Coast Guard District.
OceanGate Expeditions, the company that owned and operated the submersible, said in a statement that all five people in the vessel, including CEO Stockton Rush, “have sadly been lost.”
The others on board were: two members of a prominent Pakistani family, Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood; British adventurer Hamish Harding; and Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet.
“These men were true explorers who shared a distinct spirit of adventure, and a deep passion for exploring and protecting the world’s oceans,” OceanGate said in a statement. “We grieve the loss of life and joy they brought to everyone they knew.”
Waud told NBC Chicago that through the experience, he got to know two of the passengers who perished during the vessel's implosion this week: OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush and Paul-Henri Nargeolet, a French Navy commander who was on board.
Waud described Rush as a "visionary."
"I think that's the term I would use to describe him. Not boisterous, not somebody who just wants to attract attention and tell stories, but would answer your questions and talk all about his experiences. I was, you know, on the trips the first year he went down. So there were no previous descents to the Titanic before 2021, mission one through five," Waud said.
News of the recent implosion and deaths saddened him.
"Obviously, I'm very, very saddened," Waud said. "I had not talked to Paul or Stockton in over a year or even emailed them, so I don't know how all the trips have been going this year, but the year after I went down, I was offered a free trip and I was kind of supposed to be a mission specialist ambassador talking to people who are considering going on the trip and doing Zoom calls with them to tell them my experiences."
The Coast Guard will continue searching near the Titanic for more clues about what happened to the Titan. Efforts to recover the submersible and the remains of the five men who died will also continue, Mauger said.
Waud is one of at least 46 people to have successfully traveled on OceanGate’s submersible to the Titanic wreck site in 2021 and 2022. But questions about the submersible's safety were raised by former passengers.
Waud suggested that something caused the vessel to implode while in deep waters and he acknowledged the limited testing done prior to the trips.
"As you know, it had not been tested as much as maybe it should have," Waud said. "There was a lot of controversy from other people about whether it was safe to go continuously down to that depth. And I don't know, I'm not a marine archeology or architect expert, but just something happened to make it implode and everybody would be gone in a split second, which is a blessing."
One of the company’s first customers likened a dive he made to the site two years ago to a suicide mission.
“Imagine a metal tube a few meters long with a sheet of metal for a floor. You can’t stand. You can’t kneel. Everyone is sitting close to or on top of each other,” said Arthur Loibl, a retired businessman and adventurer from Germany. “You can’t be claustrophobic.”
When asked if Waud would go down to the Titanic shipwreck again, he said he would have backed away from his previous decision if he knew more about the vessel's safety concerns.
"If I had known more about the controversy in 2018 and 2019 from some real experts who thought it was not a safe submersible, no, I would not do it," Waud said.
Nicolai Roterman, a deep-sea ecologist and lecturer in marine biology at the University of Portsmouth, England, said the disappearance of the Titan highlights the dangers and unknowns of deep-sea tourism.
“Even the most reliable technology can fail, and therefore accidents will happen. With the growth in deep-sea tourism, we must expect more incidents like this," Roterman said.
Waud hopes the tragedy isn't discouraging to explorative minds, however.
"Well, I just hope that creative men and visionaries like Stockton keep thinking of new ways to do things, new opportunities, life-changing experiences for so many of us. I hope that continues. I have a feeling nobody is going to be going down in a submersible to the Titanic for a long, long time unless they're doing some sort of research," Waud said.
