Too little faith in the Bathyscaphe Titan or work commitments. Refused to give discount at the last minute.

Not even a last-minute discount of $200,000 (out of 500,000) prompted American businessman Jay Bloom of Las Vegas to accept an invitation to participate with his son Sean on a Titan mission. The waiver followed assurances from Oceangate organizers that the mission was certainly “less risky than crossing the street”.

In addition to publishing “correspondence” with the company, including an expression of pain for the mission’s tragic ending, he wrote in a Facebook post: “I have expressed concerns about safety and Stockton told me: ‘However While there is clearly a risk, it is much safer than flying in a helicopter or scuba diving.”

And at least three other people by their own choice or by accident – not very lucky – found themselves on the torn bathyscaphe near the wreckage of the Titanic. And it is possible that in the coming days even more wealthy personalities will appear, who deposited the amount of 250 thousand dollars for each ticket, but later preferred to postpone it.

Among them was expert diver Chris Brown, 61, a friend of the Englishman the late Hamish Harding, who did not trust himself to “climb” on the adventure after an inspection on the aid ship: better be $80,000, reports the Mail Online Leave the deposit amount of which he has still asked to return. For him, the control system of various phases of the mission was also not convincing.

Instead, fate decided for David Concannon, who was forced to give way to others due to work commitments. Furthermore, former deep-water rescue expert Robert Meister did not trust them after visiting Titan’s erstwhile bathyscaphe, the Antipodes: in his opinion, there were too many “commercial and ready-to-use” components: “fiberglass hull carbon didn’t convince me, it’s not a material that’s ever been used successfully at great depth”

“They were using standard hardware – said Meester – and clearly it didn’t seem like enough”.

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at Il Gazzettino