OceanGate told the woman whose husband and son were on the Titan that comms were often patchy, report says
Reuters
- Christine Dawood was told comms with the Titan sub were often patchy, The New York Times reported.
- Dawood said she was "looking out on the ocean" in case the sub resurfaced after it lost contact.
- OceanGate waived a rule to let her 17-year-old daughter on its mothership, she said.
Communication between OceanGate's Titan sub and its mothership was often patchy, Christine Dawood said she was told, per The New York Times.
Dawood, whose Shahzada husband and 19-year-old son Suleman died on the sub, told the newspaper that comms failures were common after contact between the Polar Prince and the Titan was lost.
She was reportedly told by OceanGate that the expedition would be aborted and the Titan would drop weights so it could resurface if it couldn't reestablish communication after an hour.
"I was also looking out on the ocean, in case I could maybe see them surfacing," she told the newspaper.
Shahzada and Suleman Dawood were among the five passengers on OceanGate's sub that imploded on an expedition to the Titanic's wreckage.
Shahzada was a 48-year-old British-Pakistani multimillionaire who came from one of Pakistan's wealthiest families. He was a member of the British Asian Trust, a charity started by the British royal family.
Suleman was studying at Glasgow's Strathclyde University, which said it was "profoundly saddened" to learn of the deaths.
Christine Dawood told BBC News last week that she'd planned to go on the expedition with her husband, but let her son take her place "because he really wanted to go." She was still on the Polar Prince with the crew when the US Coast Guard announced it found debris from the Titan.
Her 17-year-old daughter, Alina Dawood, was also on the Polar Prince on the day of the dive as OceanGate reportedly waived a rule to allow her to join, per the Times.
The Titan sub was reported missing on June 18 and the US Coast Guard said four days later that the passengers all died after it found debris from the sub on the ocean floor.
The Transport Safety Board of Canada, which is investigating the Polar Prince, said this week that it had sent the ship's voyage data recorder to a lab in Ottawa for analysis.
OceanGate didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from Insider, made outside normal working hours.