The loss of the crew members inside a submersible off the Newfoundland coast is tragedy in the extreme and my heart goes out to their families and friends on hearing the news of them passing. But I find myself thinking that the whole thing was avoidable if simple commonsense had prevailed.What I find particularly baffling is the fate of billionaire Hamish Harding. You don't get to be a billionaire businessman unless you know a good deal when you see one. And you don't get to have billions in the bank unless you can see a bad deal coming from a mile off.
So I found myself thinking about what I would have done had the thought of spending a quarter of a million dollars on a 'ticket' to the bottom of the ocean crossed my mind. I would have been thinking long and hard about the small and confined tubular space of a submersible made of carbon fibre. And if such a proposition was offered to me and the person offering it explained that I would be locked in from the outside and crammed in to the capsule with four other fully grown men, with just a curtain and loud music reducing the embarrassment of answering the call of nature while others listen, well, I think I would have said 'no thanks'.
That 'no thanks' you might think was understandable. You might think doubly so when you consider the cost of the trip. Think for a minute what you could do with a quarter of a million dollars. But then, if you were a billionaire, a quarter of a million dollars is nothing, it's peanuts, so perhaps money wouldn't come into it, but fine, that's understandable. However, surely sitting in a carbon fibre submersible on a hard floor with four fully grown men, heading down thousands of feet in the dark to the seabed, knowing that you're sealed in from the outside and can't let yourself out, surely that's enough to simply say no and not feel bad about it. It's simply not a good deal and at worst it won't end well. At best it'll be an unbearable few hours of hoping you won't have to answer the call of nature and you'll come away thinking you've wasted your money and could have watched the whole thing in a documentary on Netflix.
But there's more. What if, having agreed to spend the money, you were then handed a piece of paper from the company you intend to give a quarter of a million dollars to, and that piece of paper was a kind of contract that absolved them of any responsibility for you if, God forbid, the submersible met with a catastrophe and you lost your life at the bottom of the ocean along with your fellow passengers? Would you sign? Or would you come to your senses pretty damn quickly and decline the whole thing, possibly donating the money to charity instead?
And if you were a billionaire businessman, somebody who knew how to cut big deals, surely you would have conducted some background checks into the technology being employed to convey you to the bottom of the ocean? Surely you would have baulked just a little bit when you heard that the submersible you would be travelling in was controlled by a hand-held computer games controller, the sort of thing you might use to play Grand Theft Auto, and that, in some quarters, concerns about safety had already been expressed some years ago? Even if you got as far as standing on the quayside wearing a jumpsuit with the logo of the company emblazoned upon it, surely, as you were beckoned into the submersible, knowing you were about to be locked in from the outside, you would come to your senses and perhaps even advise your fellow passengers to think again and return with you to the hotel's coffee shop on the quayside and reconsider. Surely! You're a billionaire! You didn't get to where you are today by just blindly accepting everything thrown at you without asking a few pertinent and important questions.
There are many things I would rather watch from afar, from the comfort of my own home rather than actually being there: tennis and football spring to mind, Glastonbury too, and I think I'd throw in the wreck of the Titanic. I've seen footage before, I get it, I can do without going there in person. Give me a mug of tea and a slice of coffee and walnut cake and I'll happily sit there in front of the box without a care in the world. I don't need to be there and I don't need to tell others I've been there either. So what? "Oh, you've been down to see the wreck of the Titanic, good for you," or, worst still, a rather patronising "well done you."
I felt concerned for the safety of William Shatner when he, no doubt, forked out a considerable sum of money to actually experience 'space, the final frontier', similarly those who went up with Richard Branson at roughly the same time to do the same thing: look out at the earth from space. Fortunately, they all came back without so much as a broken bone and, of course, they all paid dearly for the experience. And there lies my big problem with all of this: the price of the ticket and the fact that these people are not explorers, they're not Scott of the Antarctic or Sir Ranulph Fiennes or Benedict Allen or even Indiana Jones, these are people who simply have money to burn, thrillseekers, adrenaline junkies, call them what you will. The tragedy of the Titan submersible's catastrophic implosion and the resulting deaths of the five men inside, is that it was completely unnecessary.
