A former passenger of the submersible which went missing during an exploration of the Titanic shipwreck on Sunday said the voyage is not for the faint of heart.
“It’s not a Disney ride,” Aaron Newman told Tampa Bay 10.
Newman, a Florida resident, took the same plunge on OceanGate’s minivan-sized Titan vessel back in August of 2021 with four others, including Hamish Harding, the British explorer who was on this week’s dive and remains missing.
“These are people that even in the most dire situations would have been calm, would know how to think this through and do the best that they could,” Newman told the outlet.
Newman described the surreal descent into the ocean’s innards and waiting hours to sink to the targeted depth.
“It’s staring out the window and watching the water fly by for hours – maybe taking a nap or listening to music – until you get to the bottom and it’s almost like you’re landing on the moon,” he said.
While he hoped for a “Hollywood” happy ending, Newman acknowledged the immense challenges of the rescue operation.
“This is the challenge of being on the leading edge of this, rescue efforts become very tricky,” he said.
Newman, an investor in OceanGate, told CBS News that exhaustive safety precautions are taken prior to voyages — and passengers are well prepared for all contingencies.
“We covered everything from what would happen in a fire, to what would happen if weights didn’t drop, what are the backup systems, to communicating in the worst case scenario, so there was a lot of training,” he told the network, describing the interior as “comfortable, but not luxurious.”
“There’s room to move around, but you’re not walking around or anything,” he said. “It doesn’t have seats or anything like that.”
Asked if the sudden disappearance of the Titan this week would slow sea exploration efforts, Newman said explorers will likely continue to plumb the depths.
“Until this is resolved, I don’t think I’m processing that, but we can’t just sit here and do nothing because we’re afraid of pushing the limits,” he told Tampa Bay 10.
“We know more about the surface of the moon than the bottom of the ocean and we’re investing a lot of money into space exploration when we put very little money into searching the bottom of our own oceans of exploring the earth we already have.”
