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OceanGate still advertising Titanic dives on website, appears to have deleted trips and altered dates
According to OceanGate Expeditions’ website, you can still sign up for dives to the Titanic, despite the implosion of the Titan submersible last month.
On 18 June, the Titan submersible lost contact with its support ship, the Polar Prince, just under two hours after beginning a dive towards the wreckage of the Titanic. For several days, authorities scoured the north Atlantic for the vessel, in a search mission that involved agencies from the US, Canada, France and the UK.
On 22 June, however, the worst fears were confirmed when debris from the Titan was found on the seafloor, near the Titanic. Although hopes of rescuing the submersible’s occupants had earlier been raised when a series of noises were picked up by searchers in the area around the Titanic, the US Coast Guard confirmed that the vessel appeared to have suffered a “catastrophic implosion”, and this week revealed that “presumed human remains” had been found on the debris.
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Five people were killed in the accident: the Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman, a 19-year-old student; the British explorer Hamish Harding; the French diver Paul-Henri Nargeolet; and Stockton Rush, the CEO of OceanGate Expeditions, the company behind the Titan trips to the Titanic.
Dives to Titanic advertised for June 2024
Despite last month’s tragedy, OceanGate is still advertising two trips to visit the Titanic, which is located some 12,500ft below the surface of the Atlantic. The first is scheduled for 12 to 20 June 2024, with the second running from 21 to 29 June 2024.
Trips, dates seemingly altered
According to the tool Wayback Machine, which allows internet users to view websites as they appeared previously, on 13 June there were five future dives to the Titanic on OceanGates’s schedule, all with different dates to those now listed.
However, by 19 June, the day after the Titan’s disappearance - and the next date on which another site-history tool, Archive Today, has records of an updated OceanGate page - three trips had been deleted, and the dates of the remaining expeditions modified. Between 13 and 19 June, there are no available snapshots of the OceanGate site. This appears to indicate that at some point during this period, the missions listed on the website were altered.