Jay Bloom, a Las Vegas investor and real estate developer, almost died this week aboard the Titan submarine. So did his son, Sean.
As previously reported, the Titan submarine was en route to the wreckage of the Titanic last weekend when it imploded, killing all five passengers.
The Titan had been en route to the Titanic as part of a tour put together by OceanGate, a company co-founded by Richard Stockton Rush III, one of the passengers who died aboard the craft when it imploded this week.
On Monday, while the Titan was still missing, Bloom published a Facebook post revealing that Rush had invited him to attend this particular tour.
“So this is crazy… I got invited to go on this dive. If I accepted, I would’ve been one of the five onboard right now,” he wrote.
“Stockton Rush has been trying to get me to go for a year now. I last saw him at Luxor when we went through the Titanic Exhibition together. I spoke with him a couple of weeks ago and he told me they had an opening on this dive,” he added.
“I think there is probably five people on board. I hope they’re OK. But they’ve been down for 48 hours now with no communication. It’s supposed to be an eight hour dive,” he concluded.
Look:
So this is crazy… I got invited to go on this dive. If I accepted, I would’ve been one of the five onboard right…
Posted by Jay Bloom on Monday, June 19, 2023
In another post published Thursday, after word of the Titan’s implosion had spread, Bloom added that his son had also been invited to the tour.
“In February Stockton asked me and my son, Sean, to go with him on the dive to Titanic in May. Both May dives were postponed due to weather and the dive got delayed until June 18th, the date of this trip,” he wrote.
In response to the invitation, he “expressed safety concerns,” to which Rush replied by texting him a bunch of sketchy assurances. Included in the Facebook post were screenshots of some of these texts.
“While there’s obviously risk it’s way safer than flying in a helicopter or even scuba diving. There hasn’t been even an injury in 35 years in a non-military subs,” one of the texts read.
Continuing his post, Bloom expressed disagreement with this claim.
“I am sure he really believed what he was saying. But he was very wrong,” he wrote.
So. I decided to share some of my texts with Stockton Rush, the CEO and founder of OceanGate, the company that built…
ADVERTISEMENTPosted by Jay Bloom on Thursday, June 22, 2023
He ultimately rejected the trip offer.
“I told him that due to scheduling we couldn’t go until next year. Our seats went to Shahzada Dawood and his 19 year old son, Suleman Dawood, two of the other three who lost their lives on this excursion (the fifth being Hamish Harding),” he explained.
As previously reported, Shahzada Dawood’s son hadn’t really wanted to go on the tour.
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.
19-yr-old Titan sub explorer ‘felt terrified’ about trip, but went with dad for Father’s Day, aunt says https://t.co/9RZzjgjUVF via @americanwire_
— Bo Snerdley (@BoSnerdley) June 24, 2023
Dovetailing back to Bloom’s disagreement with Rush, he was right in more ways than he realized. 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.
“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 [email protected] 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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