Commentary
​“This operation will be conducted inside an experimental submersible vessel that has not been approved or certified by any regulatory body.”
​“Travel in and around the vehicle could result in physical injury, disability, emotional trauma, or death.”
​Those are quotations from a waiver signed by a 2022 passenger on OceanGate Expeditions’ Titan submersible, the catastrophic implosion of which on June 18 on a planned visit to the wreck of the Titanic in the North Atlantic resulted in the likely instantaneous deaths of all five people aboard.
It’s likely that the four passengers (the pilot was OceanGate’s 61-year-old CEO, Stockton Rush) signed a similar waiver—a lengthy lawyer-drafted document designed to absolve OceanGate from liability on the theory that the four were well aware that they were about to engage in a highly risky activity from which they might not return alive. Another former passenger, a veteran of multiple Titan dives, told the BBC that the waiver mentioned death three times on its first page alone….