OceanGate, wealthy clients won’t pay for multimillion-dollar rescue of missing Titan sub

OceanGate is unlikely to foot the bill for a rescue mission launched to find survivors among the five-man crew in the missing Titan submersible — and the operation is expected to cost millions of dollars, according to experts.

Ret. Adm. Paul Zukunft, who commanded the Coast Guard from 2014 to 2018, told The Washington Post that the underwater exploration company — which charges wealthy clients $250,000 each to see the wreckage of the Titanic — would likely not be required to reimburse the federal government.

“It’s no different than if a private citizen goes out and his boat sinks,” Zukunft told The Washington Post.

“We go out and recover him. We don’t stick them with the bill after the fact.”

Chris Boyer, who heads the National Association for Search and Rescue, told The New York Times that the rescue mission would “probably cost millions.”

The Navy has dispatched a specialized system known as the Flyaway Deep Ocean Salvage System (FADOSS) that has the capability of recovering objects as deep as 20,000 feet below the surface of the ocean.

But the system’s required consumption of fuel as well as the considerable investment in personnel and maintenance will easily run into the millions of dollars, according to Zukunft.

The former Coast Guard commander said that if the authorities determine that there is no hope of finding any survivors alive, it is likely that OceanGate would be asked to pursue a salvage operation on its own dime.

The submersible’s passengers include OceanGate founder and CEO Stockton Rush; British billionaire Hamish Harding; Pakistani billionaire Shahzada Dawood and his son Sulaiman Dawood, and French deep sea diver Paul-Henri Nargeolet.

The five were bound for the Atlantic seabed 13,000 feet below the surface of the ocean, where the remnants of the Titanic rest.

“There’s a huge humanitarian piece to this when we have a vessel missing at sea,” Zukunft said.

“Loved ones start calling into the Coast Guard and saying, ‘Can you give us an update?’”

“And we’ll give them regular updates on each mission, and if they want, we can even show them the patterns we’re searching and every effort being expended to saved their loved ones,” he said.

The Post has sought comment from OceanGate and the Coast Guard.

The Titan, which is made of carbon fiber and began running annual tours in 2021, went missing on its third expedition.

American, Canadian, and French search and rescue personnel are looking for the missing submersible hundreds of miles off the coast of Newfoundland.

The US Coast Guard has estimated that the four-day oxygen supply in the submersible would run out on Thursday morning.