My husband and son dived to see the wreck of the Titanic, and never came back – this is what happened at sea | Titanic sub incident
Walking into Christine Dawood’s kitchen, it’s unattainable not to be drawn to the mannequin Titanic in the centre of the room. Sitting in its personal glass-fronted cupboard, the Lego ship is virtually 1.5 metres lengthy, constructed of 9,090 of the iconic plastic bricks. Dawood’s 19-year-old son Suleman spent virtually two weeks constructing it. “People are always a bit shocked to see it,” she admits. “But what was I going to do? Break it up? Hide it away? Suleman put all those hours in. He’d been fascinated with the Titanic since we went to a huge exhibition when we lived in Singapore.“
I went to that same exhibition when it came to London, and remember marvelling at the china dinner plates that had survived intact; the unused lifejackets that had failed to save someone; the sheet music belonging to the orchestra who had supposedly bravely played even as the ship went down. Instead of a ticket, you were given a replica boarding pass with a real passenger’s name on it. At the end, you could find out who survived and who didn’t.
On 18 June 2023, Suleman Dawood died alongside his 48-year-old father, Shahzada, and three other men in the Titan submersible as it attempted to dive to the Titanic. They were 500 metres above the wreck when the submersible imploded. It was a horrifying tragedy that made headlines around the world.
“The Titanic was claiming another five people, right?” Dawood says. “And the age of my son was a huge thing. Another reason why the press latched on to this, I think. If it had been five grown men, it might not have been as juicy.”
We’re in the household dwelling in Surrey the place she lives along with her 20-year-old daughter. Dawood is understandably protecting of her. “I don’t want her to be known as that girl who lost her father and brother on the Titan,” she tells me. “She’s just starting her life and I prefer to leave her out. But she understands I do want to talk now.” Floor-to-ceiling home windows take up a complete aspect of the room. She wants that sense of mild and house, Dawood tells me, after rising up in the mountains of Bavaria. On the partitions hold richly colored Pakistani artwork, largely presents from her in-laws, to whom she stays extraordinarily shut. “I love this house still,” she tells me. “Even though they are not here any more.” Dawood, a skilled psychologist, is talking intimately for the first time; she has additionally written a ebook telling her story.
A media frenzy broke out with the information that the Titan was lacking. Rumours unfold. Was the sub trapped in the wreck itself? Or floating adrift in the North Atlantic? Reports circulated that the stricken craft had simply 4 days of oxygen. A countdown started; social media was gripped by the destiny of the little sub. And as particulars emerged about the males onboard, phrase unfold that Dawood ought to have been on the submersible herself, however had given the ticket to her son.
Almost three years on, she holds shut the recommendation she was given when she came ashore after the four-day search. “It was one of the Canadian Coast Guards,” she remembers. “A very experienced woman with blond hair – I forget her name – gave me the best advice I’ve ever gotten: ‘Hindsight won’t help you, so don’t fall into that trap. Just because you know it now … you didn’t know it before.’ I’ve always remembered her telling me that. Suleman wanted to go and I was happy to give up the seat. I was happy for him to make memories with his father. I can’t change that.”
During the 2020 lockdown, Dawood came throughout an advert for “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to dive to the Titanic”. The household had lately purchased a pet, a bernese mountain canine known as Stig, who is Dawood’s fixed companion as we speak. “I was scrolling through my Instagram,” she remembers, “lots of puppy pictures and that type of thing, when a photo of a submersible popped up right next to the Titanic. I couldn’t believe it and I called Quintessentially, our personal travel agency. They called themselves lifestyle managers, in fact, and we paid them a pretty big yearly membership. We’d had incredible trips organised by them, to Antarctica and Greenland. So when they came back to me and said this was doable, we were excited.”
OceanGate, based by CEO Stockton Rush in 2009, was certainly selling vacationer dives to the well-known wreck. The American’s mission was to democratise the deep ocean. In 2013, Rush started work on the Titan, a submersible he was satisfied could be as indestructible as its namesake was claimed to be. The experimental development flew in the face of tried-and-tested submersible design. The carbon fibre hull and cylindrical form changed the standard however confirmed constructions of titanium or high-strength metal spheres recognized to face up to the pressures of the deep.
Initially, Dawood steered they struggle a shallow dive, to get used to the feeling of being locked inside the 6.7-metre-long submersible. But Shahzada was adamant: he wished to go straight to the Titanic. “If I’m doing a dive, I want to do it properly,” he instructed her. “That was what made him successful in business,” she says. “You have a clear goal, and you go for it. But he wasn’t an adrenaline-seeker. If I’d have suggested going bungee jumping, it would have been, ‘No way!’ He wouldn’t do like [Jeff] Bezos did, and go up in a rocket, because you need to be physically fit, to train. He wouldn’t have done that. On paper, this dive looked comfortable. You just sit there, right? He didn’t have to be physically fit. It was possible, convenient. We always were the glampers of the explorers.”
The world was sluggish to emerge from Covid restrictions, so Dawood added the journey to the household bucket listing and for the subsequent two years, she didn’t comply with the progress of the OceanGate expeditions. Life grew to become busy once more with work and college. They went on a Mediterranean cruise along with her in-laws from Pakistan after having not seen them for therefore lengthy. In September 2022, Suleman began a brand new chapter of his life, learning enterprise at the University of Strathclyde.
Dreams of exploring the deep ocean had been forgotten till late 2022, when Quintessentially known as to ask in the event that they had been nonetheless curious about visiting the Titanic. “It was a shitload of money,” admits Dawood – “$500,000 for two seats! The kind of money I’d expect a house for.” She laughs barely, shaking her head at the price now. But the household may afford it – Shahzada was from one of Pakistan’s wealthiest households – and started planning to be part of OceanGate’s 2023 expedition. “Whatever due diligence I did,” she tells me, “I didn’t find a single civilian submersible accident. That was good enough for me. I hardly knew OceanGate, so my trust was based in Quintessentially.”
In a press release, Quintessentially mentioned that the providers they supply to members are confidential, however clarified that they never had a business relationship with OceanGate, promoted any of their expeditions or beneficial them to members. They mentioned that they “will continue to be supportive to the Dawood family”.
In February 2023, Rush and his spouse Wendy, OceanGate’s director of communications, flew from Seattle to London to meet the Dawoods. In a restaurant on the South Bank, Rush set about reassuring them that the journey could be price each cent. He boasted about how distinctive the Titan was. No different submersible may take as many as 5 individuals to the deep ocean, he instructed them. He’d already made desires come true by taking it to the Titanic 13 instances. He described the unusual ocean creatures and the flashes of blue, inexperienced and eerie white bioluminescence they’d see floating previous the giant viewing port – “the largest on planet Earth”, as he appreciated to name it – and, lastly, how they’d arrive at the wreck itself. They’d glide in the direction of the iconic bow encrusted with rusticles, the micro-organisms slowly consuming by way of the nice ship’s skeleton.
“We had never even been snorkelling,” says Dawood. “And Shahzada got so wrapped up in Rush’s stories. But Wendy was very quiet. Then the conversation went to communication between the sub and the ship. And Stockton says, ‘Yeah, sometimes we lose contact.’ I noticed Wendy’s whole body go rigid. ‘We don’t like it when that happens,’ she said to him. ‘If you don’t tell us where you are, we worry.’ I felt the dynamic between them; she couldn’t get through to him. I think she saw the risks; she saw the potential that there was something not quite right. He just ignored her.”
There was quite a bit that Rush had merely ignored – issues that Dawood would solely discover out after the tragedy. He had failed to inform them about the many aborted dives and tons of of technical points that had plagued the Titan throughout its two quick seasons in the North Atlantic. Or that in July 2022, whereas ascending, passengers had heard an explosive noise that shook the submersible, which Rush had never investigated. Or that the sub was working below the radar, that he had refused to have it inspected or categorized by any maritime authority, claiming that the security course of was too sluggish and “stifled innovation”. The Titan was not, actually, registered to carry passengers at all. As the {couples} shook arms, the Rushes uncared for to point out that for the previous six months, the Titan had been sitting in a parking lot in St John’s, uncovered and unwatched, uncovered to the icy circumstances of the Newfoundland winter.
On 14 June, the household set off with a mix of nervous pleasure. “We’d all been so busy,” Dawood remembers. “And this was the start of a family adventure, that’s how we saw it.” They missed their connecting flight to St John’s, so by the time they arrived they’d to leap straight aboard the Polar Prince, a ship that might take them 400 miles south-east throughout the North Atlantic to Titanic waters. Unbeknown to Dawood, funds had been working low and the Polar Prince was all Rush may afford. An outdated ice breaker, the ship was not initially designed to carry passengers and its spoon-shaped hull pitched and rolled regularly. In 2021 and 2022, OceanGate had employed a contemporary ship, the Horizon Arctic, which had transported the Titan on deck. It was unattainable to carry the sub onboard the Polar Prince, so it was towed behind on a platform, buffeted and pounded by the waves. “This was the roughest we’d ever travelled,” Dawood admits. “I’m almost 50 and you put me in a bunk bed with scratchy bed sheets! Cruise ships have very nice stabilisers, and you pay $500,000 for this?” But she laughs and tells me how they joked about it.
That month, Newfoundland had been having fun with unusually heat climate. A sea fog rolled gently alongside the rocky coast and a couple of icebergs lingered to the north. The capelin had arrived close to the shore of their thousands and thousands and there had been excited sightings of greater than 300 humpback whales as the large mammals feasted on the tiny fish. But out in the Atlantic, the place the Polar Prince was headed, a heavy fog persevered; since the begin of their 2023 expedition, OceanGate had not but managed a single dive under 10 metres.
“We didn’t have much time to think or to get too apprehensive,” Dawood says. “We were on the ship two days getting out there and by that time I was so seasick. So when the crew said the weather had come good [and that] the dive was on, my plan was to see them off then try to sleep until they came up.”
Shahzada and Suleman wore jumpsuits, the form you see astronauts in, bearing their names and the OceanGate emblem. They had been joined by Rush, who was piloting, a British businessman known as Hamish Harding and French diver Paul-Henri Nargeolet, dubbed “Mr Titanic” as the world’s main authority on the wreck. He had already seen the ship 37 instances, 5 instances onboard the Titan, and acted as the knowledgeable information for OceanGate.
“It was one of those occasions where you go into dark humour,” Dawood remembers. “We were talking about crashes. I remember Hamish saying how he’d never travel on a helicopter – he thought they were too dangerous. Suleman had his Rubik’s Cube, because he was planning to get the record for solving it at the deepest depth ever. And we were giggling, because Shahzada is clumsy and when he was going down the stairs he was wobbling a bit. I waved. And that was it. They got into a dinghy and sped off. It went very fast, the goodbye.”
Dawood watched as her husband and son had been transported to the Titan, floating about 100 metres away on its launch and restoration platform. The two divers stationed there hauled the males on to the precarious construction and guided them into the sub one after the other. “Have a great dive,” one mentioned to Suleman as he helped him inside. The hatch was bolted shut, and the flotation tanks at every nook of the platform had been flooded with water. The Titan sank beneath the waves, indifferent from its platform and began its freefall. It would take about three hours to attain the wreck, 2.5 miles down on the ocean ground.
At round 11am, Dawood was in the eating space, eager for a sea illness remedy, when the first blow landed. “They’ve lost communications,” she heard somebody say. Then they observed her. “Don’t worry, it’s not unusual,” she was instructed. “In that moment, what am I supposed to do?” she says now. “I felt trapped on that ship and I had no choice but to trust what they told me.” The OceanGate crew appeared unfazed. They had been by way of this earlier than and all could be nicely. The sub would nonetheless return by 3pm.
It’s insufferable to think about how lengthy the subsequent hours will need to have felt. The fixed scanning of the horizon for a sighting of the submersible, the white tops mistaken for the tail of the Titan coming up from below the ocean. In the communications room the place Wendy Rush was stationed, the monitoring display screen remained clean, and the textual content console silent.
At 6.30pm, there was nonetheless no signal of the Titan; Kyle Bingham, OceanGate’s mission director, known as a briefing and declared that the Titan was now formally lacking. Dawood struggles to describe what it was like listening to these phrases. “It’s like an avalanche,” she tells me. “You see it coming. This is it, I’m going to be hit. But you’re on a cliff, so where can you go? I had to make a conscious choice. I knew I couldn’t let the emotions come. So, I grew wings, I flew away in my mind. That’s how I saved myself from the avalanche.
“I told myself they were stuck,” she says. “But I was worried. Suleman is not … well, both my men, they’re not very good at being in the dark, and I knew it would be a very different darkness down there. Nothing. You literally can’t see a thing.”
She remembers that the OceanGate physician gave her one thing for sea illness and requested one of the different vacationers, who had been hoping to be on the subsequent dive, to “keep an eye on her”. She remembers wandering round the ship, determined for information however scared of what she would possibly overhear. “There were lots of hushed voices,” she tells me. “They stopped when I was near, but I overheard them saying their water could run out and maybe they’d drink the condensation on the sub walls through straws … I didn’t need those things in my head, so I tried not to listen. I deleted all news from my phone. I wasn’t even really aware of the oxygen countdown. All I’d been told by the crew was that they could last four days down there, no more.”
As the search and rescue operation kicked into gear, the skies above the Polar Prince had been cut up by the trails of planes despatched by the US and Canadian Coast Guards. Back in St John’s, the media gathered at the harbour, press conferences had been held, theories mentioned and rumours unfold a few poisonous tradition at OceanGate, that Stockton Rush had ignored numerous warnings about his operation, that he had dismissed security as a waste of time. The reality was beginning to come out.
But, 400 miles out at sea, Dawood was solely depending on the firm briefings. “The energy on the ship was complete denial,” she says. “The crew were [acting] like nothing was happening.” Bingham continued to predict there had been a technical difficulty, however Rush and Nargeolet had been knowledgeable sufficient to carry the sub back to the floor. He talked about banging that had been heard. “Regular and significant,” he reassured everybody. They had been attempting to find the place it was coming from, whether or not the males had been sending an SOS from inside the Titan. “It’s just taking time,” he instructed them. “It did cross my mind that OceanGate had ulterior motivations about what they told us,” admits Dawood. “They were just trying to avoid the truth. But I would have deteriorated a lot quicker without hope.”
A schedule was launched to move the time for the onboard crew. Jamming classes had been organized, films chosen and a nightly poker recreation organised. “Ultimately, I think they wanted to distract people, keep everyone occupied,” Dawood believes. “They wanted everyone onside, not to feed anything to the press. But jamming sessions? Am I really going to sit there and sing Kumbaya? I did try to give a movie a go, but when I got there it felt like an act of betrayal. Watching Wayne’s World while they are trapped in the dark did not sit well with me.”
As I strive to think about the surreal scene she has simply described, out of the nook of my eye I’m conscious of a purple plate with a small handprint and Suleman’s identify painted beneath displayed on the sideboard. I realise that for the first time at present Dawood has the beginnings of tears in her eyes.
On 22 June, the Horizon Arctic arrived at the scene carrying a remotely operated car succesful of diving to the Titanic depth. It was deployed instantly and 90 minutes later reached the backside. Casting its robotic gaze throughout the seabed, it transmitted footage to the operators above and to the US Coast Guard, which was now in command. As the car was guided this approach and that, they noticed one thing at the edge of the body. The twisted remnants of the Titan’s tail cone hove into view. “Every indication at this point is that a catastrophic event has occurred with the Titan,” had been the rigorously chosen phrases of the US Coast Guard officer on a name to the Polar Prince. Wendy Rush and OceanGate had been compelled to face the reality that some of them had suspected from the begin. The Titan’s hull had failed virtually three hours into the dive. Under the immense pressures of the deep ocean it had imploded, collapsing inward in a fraction of a second. The 5 males died instantaneously.
“My first thought was, thank God,” admits Dawood. “When they said catastrophic, I knew Shahzada and Suleman didn’t even know about it. One moment they were there and the next they weren’t. Knowing they didn’t suffer has been so important. They’re gone, but the way they went does somehow make it easier.”
And that is when Dawood discovered herself in what she calls “the after”. “In some ways, I was terrified to leave that weird bubble,” she says. The dregs of hope she had clung to in the center of the ocean had been gone and she had to face the sensible enterprise of getting dwelling. “What was I going to do with their stuff? Their bags? Shahzada’s clothes and things were in my cabin, so I packed his bags. But I didn’t pack Suleman’s. I couldn’t. Someone else did that.”
Before disembarking at St John’s, she was suggested to disguise herself and was efficiently shielded from the cameras. Shahzada’s household had flown from Pakistan to take her back to London. She carried Suleman’s backpack on to the airplane and remembers how vital that grew to become to her mother-in-law. “She just wanted to hug the backpack,” Dawood remembers. “She held on to it all the way and kept apologising, saying I could take the bag back. But I said, ‘No, you can keep it. You lost them, too.’”
Over the subsequent 18 months, the US Coast Guard carried out a forensic investigation into Stockton Rush and OceanGate. The deadly flaws that had been mendacity in wait came to mild, together with the many warnings that Rush had blatantly ignored. Dawood was suggested it will be an excessive amount of for her to attend the public hearings, and to this day she continues to defend herself – she is very cautious about what number of of the revelations she wants to study. The official report into the tragedy concluded it was preventable and brought on by insufficient engineering and testing, in addition to Rush’s reckless strategy. If he had survived, he would have confronted prison proceedings. Tighter laws of passenger submersibles have been beneficial, but it surely is all far too late for Dawood and her household.
“From the beginning, I had a lot of reasons to hate Stockton, but does that really help me?” Dawood says. “He died with them. If I’m angry with him, I’m giving him power, and I refuse to do that. I’m sure people will say I’m naive, but if I start to analyse every single thing, where does that lead me? So, I choose my own … not happiness but … I choose me, every day. If I don’t, I wouldn’t be here. I would have killed myself, for sure.” Dawood pauses, then continues in a whisper. “It’s very hard. Being strong doesn’t mean you’re not feeling it.”
She tells me that there have been days when panic assaults have fully paralysed her. When the lights have felt too shiny and any sound at all too loud. Everything grew to become a problem. She tells me that even after many hours of intense remedy, Suleman’s room stays how he left it, her husband’s examine untouched.
“I have learned to give the grief attention,” she sighs. “So I go into Suleman’s room. Sometimes I find the cat sleeping on his pillow and I sit on the bed and let the grief come. And after a while I can put the grief away until the next time it gets too much. I’ve worked a lot on my grief for Suleman, but I’m only now starting to grieve for my husband. Publicly they are always put together, but they are two different relationships. Two very different pains.
“We didn’t get the bodies for nine months,” she provides. “Well, when I say bodies, I mean the slush that was left. They came in two small boxes, like shoeboxes.” The slush, as she calls it, are the stays that had been recovered from the sea mattress and meticulously separated and DNA examined by the US Coast Guard. “There wasn’t much they could find,” she says. “They have a big pile they can’t separate, all mixed DNA, and they asked if I wanted some of that, too. But I said no, just what you know is Suleman and Shahzada.”
After some time, Dawood takes me out into the backyard. The canine follows us. It’s the first day the solar has made an look after weeks of rain, and the cat has discovered its approach right into a fragile sq. of daylight on one of the raised beds. The canine sits good-naturedly however closely on my foot and Dawood encourages him back to her aspect. “In a way, the dog reminds me of Suleman sometimes,” she says. “Because he is clumsy, spatially not aware. He doesn’t know his own strength and Suleman was sometimes awkward, didn’t quite know what to do with his physical strength. He was 19, just becoming a man.”
Recently, Dawood walked from Hampton Court to her son’s college in Glasgow. The journey took 5 weeks and had been one thing Suleman had typically mentioned he’d like to do. She walked in tribute to him. She tells me additionally about her superior plans to arrange a grief and trauma centre, and listening to her pleasure I can see how vital these are for her personal therapeutic.
“It’s the normal questions that people ask that are still the most difficult,” she says, stroking the canine’s neck. “Like, ‘Do you have children?’ That is the most dreaded question. I knew it would come, but it constantly takes me off guard. What do I say? I have two children but … if I say that, then they ask, ‘What does your older one do?’ So now I avoid saying children. I just say I have a daughter. I’m not lying, but it’s what I choose to say.”
We sit very quietly for a minute or two. It’s not simple discovering a approach to finish the time we’ve spent discussing this unimaginable grief. But then Dawood turns her consideration to the backyard. “I’m waiting for the tulips now,” she says. “I have hundreds of them, and more come up every spring.” As I look carefully, I discover the many clumps of large inexperienced leaves hiding the beginnings of the flowers to come.
