A FORMER Royal Navy officer has said the doomed Titan Sub was an “accident waiting to happen”.
Speaking to GB News, Chris Parry also said he believed all hope of finding those on board alive was over.
He said: “I am afraid time’s up. I don’t think there’s any prospect of getting these people back alive now. The maximum time was 96 hours, they disappeared 92 hours ago. They haven’t found Titan yet. And it’s going to take more than four hours to get them up to the surface. So I think we have to be realistic and say at the moment, obviously it will allow some time for extra margin, perhaps a day but I think we need to, I’m afraid look at the worst here.”
He continued: “I don’t think anybody’s prepared for a tragedy like this. It comes at you with a shock you think it’s a routine activity, but it isn’t. Of course I’m sure the risks probably weren’t explained at all to the people concerned. The company itself was very irresponsible in the way it actually put this business out and put their technology in the water. I think there are going to be heavy recriminations in relation to whether the vehicle itself was actually seaworthy and whether it should have been done at that depth.
He added: “This is a fundamentally unsafe operation and an accident was bound to happen at some stage. If you’re gonna go down four km into the ocean, we’re talking about quite a long way. Everything has to go right. Every time. And I’m afraid the odds were stacked against this expedition right from the start. If you look at the flimsy nature of the technology, the very dodgy certification that has occurred up until now and I would say the bravado of the people promoting it, there’s something seriously wrong. I’m also concerned about the fact it took eight hours to actually raise the alarm after they lost contact with this vehicle. That suggests to me things have gone wrong in the past. I think ocean gate has got a lot to answer for.”
