Ohio real estate tycoon plans to take new submersible to Titanic wreck

A real estate tycoon from Dayton, Ohio, wants to visit the wreckage of the Titanic in the depths of the north Atlantic Ocean to prove that the personal submersible industry is safe, announcing his plans less than a year after a similar trip killed five people.

Larry Connor, 74, recently told the Wall Street Journal that he intends to team up with the deep-sea explorer Patrick Lahey to take a submersible to a depth of about 12,467ft (3,800 metres) to research and explore the Titanic’s remains as well as prove that proper engineering can make it possible to safely visit the wreckage site about 400 nautical miles (740 kilometres) off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada.

“Ours is not just a trip to the Titanic,” Connor said in a separate interview with the New York Times on Tuesday. “It’s a research mission … to demonstrate to people around the globe that you can build a revolutionary, first-of-its-kind sub and dive it safely and successfully to great depths.”

The submersible reportedly is still being designed, and a specific start date for the expedition had not been immediately announced.

But Connor – whose real estate investment firm runs luxury apartment complexes across the US – is being taken seriously because of his past record of explorations.

He has drawn attention for having previously traveled with Lahey in a submersible to the Mariana Trench. He also garnered news headlines after paying to fly to the International Space Station in 2022.

In June of last year, Connor and Lahey watched as the OceanGate Titan submersible went silent after descending into the deep north Atlantic to view the British passenger liner that was once described as “practically unsinkable” but sank in 1912 and left more than 1,500 people dead.

Investigators ultimately determined that the Titan likely imploded on its descent, killing the five people aboard, including Stockton Rush, the chief executive officer of the company that built the submersible.

OceanGate went out of business after the disaster. Other firms in the private submersible field reported plummeting sales and canceled trips amid what industry experts have characterized as a chilling effect.

Lahey publicly accused Rush of brushing off his prospective passengers’ concerns about safety and accused him of embarking on a “predatory” mission aimed at convincing influential people that his submersible was secure when it was not, as Business Insider reported.

That all purportedly prompted Connor and Lahey to collaborate on making a better kind of submersible. They intend to call it the Triton 4000/2 Abyssal Explorer. The 4000 alludes to the depth in metres that the submersible can plumb.

As Lahey put it to the Wall Street Journal: “[Connor said], 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.”

Connor added: “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.”