Suleman Dawood, the 19-year-old university student who died aboard the Titan submarine, had never wanted to ride in it in the first place.
As previously reported, five people died when the Titan submarine imploded while touring the wreckage site of the Titanic, which sunk in 1912. One of the deceased was Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood, and another was his son Suleman.
Speaking with NBC News after news of Titan’s implosion broke, Suleman’s aunt Azmeh Dawood said that prior to the trip, he “wasn’t very up for it” and had “felt terrified.”
Yet Suleman ultimately decided to tag along with his father anyway because the trip was planned for Father’s Day weekend and he reportedly wanted to please his father, who according to Azmeh was very passionate about the Titanic.
Shehzada dawood with his son Suleman Dawood.
To Allah we belong and to Him we shall return. pic.twitter.com/qA1gVEwBJS— Mansoor Ahmed Qureshi (@MansurQr) June 23, 2023
With both men now gone, Azmeh can’t get their possible last moments out of her mind.
“I am thinking of Suleman, who is 19, in there, just perhaps gasping for breath … It’s been crippling, to be honest,” she told NBC News.
She was reportedly devastated when she learned of her family members’ deaths.
“I feel disbelief. It’s an unreal situation,” she said while sobbing, describing how she’d been glued to the TV for days watching coverage of the Titan rescue efforts.
“I feel like I’ve been caught in a really bad film with a countdown, but you didn’t know what you’re counting down to. I personally have found it kind of difficult to breathe thinking of them. I never thought I would have an issue with drawing breath. It’s been unlike any experience I’ve ever had,” she said.
Not that she’d been particularly close to her brother. In recent years, in fact, she’d stopped communicating with him nearly as often.
“She was diagnosed with primary progressive multiple sclerosis in 2014 and ‘reduced to being in a wheelchair.’ She and her husband decided to move from England to Amsterdam so she would have easier access to medicinal cannabis,” NBC News notes.
“But some of her family members, including Shahzada, disapproved of her use of cannabis and they started speaking less frequently. She said that she continued to feel close to Suleman, a young man she described as thoroughly good-hearted.”
But with Shahzada now being dead, Azmeh has been reminded of the deep love she has for him.
“He was my baby brother. I held him up when he was born,” she said.
She added that Shahzada had grown up being “absolutely obsessed” with the Titanic.
“When they were kids in Pakistan, the Dawood siblings would constantly watch the 1958 film ‘A Night to Remember,’ a British drama about the sinking of the cruise liner,” according to NBC News.
“She recounted that when Shahzada met her husband, he asked if they could sit down and watch a four-hour documentary about the Titanic. Shahzada also loved going to see museum exhibitions featuring artifacts recovered from the wreckage,” the outlet reported.
Thus she wasn’t particularly surprised when her brother purchased tour tickets to see the wreckage of the Titanic — though FYI, this is definitely something she herself would never do.
“If you gave me a million dollars, I would not have gotten into the Titan,” she said.
Many feel similarly, as the Titan was, frankly, a hot mess of a submarine.
“Experts from within and outside OceanGate raised concerns about the safety of its Titan submersible as far back as 2018, years before it went missing during a deep-sea dive to the Titanic shipwreck site,” according to NPR.
OceanGate is the company that owned Titan.
“Most of the companies in this industry that are building submersibles and deep submersibles follow a fairly well-established framework of certification and verification and oversight, through classification societies,” Will Kohnen, the chair of the Marine Technology Society’s Submarine Committee, told the outlet.
“And that was at the root of OceanGate’s project, is that they were going to go solo, going without that type of official oversight, and that brought a lot of concerns,” he added.
Indeed, this lack of oversight ultimately led to massive problems.
A CBS reporter who rode the Titan last year told USA Today that the submarine seemed “less sophisticated” than it should have been.
“There were parts of it that seemed to me to be less sophisticated than I was guessing. You drive it with a PlayStation video controller … some of the ballasts are old, rusty construction pipes. There were certain things that looked like cut corners,” CBS correspondent David Pogue said.
The PlayStation controller being used to pilot the Titan submersible appears to be a @Logitech Gamepad F710, available at Amazon for $30.
I wonder if Logitech would recommend using their products to pilot a homemade submarine to the wreckage of the Titanic. pic.twitter.com/FjnZSWzsyn
— TomHoefWrites (@TomHoefWrites) June 20, 2023
Mike Reiss, a writer who road the Titan last year, said something similar to the BBC.
“It couldn’t be lower tech. You just drop down for 2 and half hours. The ship is propelled by very tiny motors that look like a fan you would have on your desk and it is steered by an X-box joystick from a game system. You are very taken with how simple it is,” he said.
Writers and editors can be contacted at writers@bizpcreview.com with feedback, tips, or corrections.
V. Saxena is a staff writer with a decade of experience as a professional writer, and a lifetime of experience as an avid news junkie. He holds a degree in computer technology from Purdue University. Saxena also contributes to BizPac Review.
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