The search for more debris from the Titan submersible continues today, Friday, as officials try to piece together a timeline of the vessel's final moments.
On Thursday, authorities said the five passengers on the sub that was diving 13,000 feet to view the wreckage of the Titanic on the ocean floor died in a "catastrophic implosion," bookending an extraordinary five-day international search operation.
OceanGate co-founder Guillermo Sohnlein cautioned rushing to judgment without the data following the catastrophic loss of the submersible.
“There are teams on site that are still going to be collecting data for the next few days, weeks, maybe months, and it’s going to be a long time before we know exactly what happened down there,” he told CNN Friday. “So I would encourage us to hold off on speculation until we have more data to go on.”
Sohnlein left the company in 2013 and was not involved with the voyage or the development of the Titan submersible. He still maintains minority ownership of OceanGate.
He added, “safety was the number one priority” for himself and CEO Stockton Rush who perished along with four others on board.
“He was a very strong risk manager, and I believe that he believed that every innovation that he created — whether technologically or within the dive operations — was to both expand the capability of humanity exploring the oceans while also improving the safety of those doing it,” he said.
