Titanic submarine implosion: Why Chris Brown, a friend of Hamish Harding, backed out of the ill-fated excursion to 111-year-old wreck

UK multimillionaire Chris Brown was nearly a passenger on the doomed submarine expedition to the wreckage of the Titanic. Brown pulled out due to the safety concerns. The Titan submersible craft, belonging to OceanGate Expeditions, suffered a catastrophic implosion while voyaging to the wreckage of the famous luxury ocean liner, which rests nearly 13,000 feet below the surface of the North Atlantic Ocean. According to the US Coast Guard, the implosion killed all five people on board.   

Chris Brown, a successful digital marketing businessman, was initially drawn to embarking on the expedition while he was vacationing on Richard Branson’s private island. At the time, the Titanic sub was still being developed. So, Brown had paid a $102,000 deposit to join the dive.

Brown decided to pull out of the dive after becoming concerned by the built quality of the Titanic submersible and its design. Brown was particularly alarmed by Titan’s "shoddy" parts when it underwent tests several years ago.

He revealed the same during a chat with Reuters, which took place before the sad news of Titan’s implosion was confirmed by the US Coast Guard on Thursday.

Brown told Reuters, “Parts of the submarine that I had seen in its testing in the Bahamas seemed shoddy. They are using old industrial piping for the sub’s ballast, they are using a video game controller for steering. I wasn't happy with the design like the thrusters on the outside. They flatly refused to get any proper certification and they did not have any intention of getting a certification for going down to those depths once, let alone several times. There was a lightning strike during the testing once, which blew all the electronics.  Where is the redundancy, because it is normal for any vessel that sustains human life to have redundancy. So, the fact that one lightning strike blew the whole thing and I was like where are the safety measures here. So, all of those things together made me think that there are lots of risks here that I am not able to mitigate and control. So I pulled out in the end. That was the end of 2018.”

Besides, it has now emerged that OceanGate was previously warned about serious safety flaws by the company’s director of marine operations in 2015.

When Chris Brown met Hamish Harding and astronaut Buzz Aldrin

Chris Brown was friends with one of the passengers of Titan, British adventurer Hamish Harding. He reportedly met Harding and astronaut Buzz Addrin on a 2016 trek to the South Pole.

Brown has said that Hamish Harding is an extremely amiable guy, very level-headed. “So, he will be a beacon of calmness inside that submarine. It wouldn't surprise me if he was behind the banging that was happening every 30 minutes, Brown said

Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the Moon

When it comes to explorers, Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin’s name is probably at the top of the list. Interestingly, Aldrin had travelled to Antarctica in 2016 with Hamish Harding. Aldrin, who is the second man to walk on the moon, became the oldest person to reach the South Pole at the age of 86.