DAYTON, Ohio (WKRC) - A billionaire from Dayton, Ohio is planning on taking a sub to the Titanic site to prove a point.
According to The New York Post, Dayton real estate investor Larry Connor said he and Triton Submarines co-founder Patrick Lahey will take a two-man submersible to the wreck of the Titanic to prove the industry is much safer in the wake of the tragic OceanGate implosion.
“I want to show people worldwide that while the ocean is extremely powerful, it can be wonderful and enjoyable and really kind of life-changing if you go about it the right way,” Connor told reporters with the Wall Street Journal.
Per The Post, Lahey designed a $20 million submersible, the Triton 4000/2 Abyssal Explorer. Connor told the Wall Street Journal that he is confident that the vessel can make the voyage to the Titanic multiple times.
“Patrick has been thinking about and designing this for over a decade. But we didn’t have the materials and technology. You couldn’t have built this sub five years ago,” Connor told the publication.
According to The New York Post, Connor and Lahey are aiming to prove that a safe journey to the Titanic is possible in the wake of the OceanGate implosion, which claimed the lives of all five individuals on board. Per The Post, days after the OceanGate tragedy, Connor contacted Lahey, asking him to design and construct a capable submersible.
“You know, what we need to do is build a sub that can dive to (Titanic-level depths) repeatedly and safely and demonstrate to the world that you guys can do that, and that Titan was a contraption,’” Lahey told the Wall Street Journal.
According to The Post, Lahey was an industry critic who called OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush's approach "quite predatory." The publication noted that several industry experts, along with a whistleblower, had come forward with concerns over the OceanGate submersible's ability to handle the voyage, in part because the company did not opt to certify it through groups like the American Bureau of Shipping (ABS) and Europe's Det Norske Vertas.
When speaking with the Wall Street Journal, Connor did not specify a date for when the voyage would take place.
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