LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA: The firm that has rights over the Titanic ruins has now accused OceanGate of falsely heaping praise on its doomed submersible that perished on June 18. RMS Titanic has alleged in its court filing that it gave "dispensation" to French explorer Paul-Henry Nargeolet to go for the dive in the Atlantic Ocean on Titan after receiving a letter from the vessel’s owner company in 2021.
However, as per David Concannon, a counsel of OceanGate, who also penned down that 2021 letter, the accusations by RMS Tiantic were baseless. He told Insider, “PH [Nargeolet] told me directly in 2021 and 2022 that he was on the Ocean Gate Expeditions on his own accord. He was not there as a representative of any other company, nor did he require permission from anyone to participate.”
Who did Paul Henry Nargeolet work for?
Nargeolet was an employee of RMS Titanic, who died alongside four others with the doomed Titan, which was on its way to the Titanic wreckage site. In its court papers submitted on Saturday, July 8, RMS Titanic stated, “PH was merely a guest on the expedition and did not participate as an agent of RMST. RMST has never endorsed tourist dives at the wreck. P.H.’s love and passion for Titanic drew him to Titan, and OceanGate welcomed him as a true expert. Because he was RMST’s full-time Director of Underwater Research, the Company gave him dispensation to participate as a guest on the OceanGate expedition.”
The filing also asserted that RMST was convinced that Titan was “properly designed and developed” after Concannon’s letter claimed that the vessel was "Cyclops-class manned submersible," which included "engineering evaluation work performed by Boeing Company" and "detailed engineering and development work under a Company issued $5 million contract to the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Laboratory and a Space Act contract with NASA for advanced designed work on the carbon fiber hull."
‘I watched him assess the safety of the sub every day’
But Concannon insisted that it was Nargeolet who knew more about sub’s safety as he stated, “PH was one of the four or five most knowledgeable experts about deep sea submersibles in the world. I spent more than three weeks at sea with him in 2021 and 2022. I watched him assess the safety of the sub every day.”
Comparing Nargeolet to the German-American space architect Wernher Magnus Maximilian Freiherr von Braun, Concannon added, “If Wernher von Braun told you he believed the Saturn V rocket was safe to take you to the moon, would you question his expertise?”
