A family member of two Titanic survivors ripped the Ohio billionaire’s “offensive” idea to take a $20 million sub to the shipwreck site nearly a year after the OceanGate tragedy.
Real estate investor Larry Connor announced last week that he and Triton Submarines co-founder Patrick Lahey will dive down more than 12,400 feet (2.3 miles) in a two-person submersible to view the historic shipwreck site.
However, the deep-sea expedition in the Atlantic Ocean has not sat well with Shelley Binder, the descendant of Titanic survivors Leah and Phillip Aks.
Binder believes the resting place of the Titanic should be left undisturbed — especially following the Oceangate disaster in June 2023, according to The Sun.
“For generations, people who have the money are going to spend it doing things to prove their machismo and appease their sense of adventure, but does that mean they should?” Binder asked.
She slammed the billionaire and others like him for wanting to develop a tourism industry around one of the world’s greatest tragedies.
“Fundamentally, I think one could say these people have more dollars than sense,” Binder told the outlet. “And the idea of tourism to a wreck where 1,496 people lost their lives in a truly horrific disaster of epic proportions is offensive.
“What happened aboard that ship was extremely traumatic and harrowing for my great-grandmother and great-uncle. This was a devastating and landmark moment in their lives, and it had long-lasting repercussions for my entire family.”
And she’s not alone in thinking so.
She has spoken to numerous others who lost relatives when the Titanic sunk in 1912, who are with her in thinking tourism around visiting the unwater burial site is wrong.
“There are so many people that see the wreck as a grave site and they’re truly offended by it, this idea of commercial tourism […] they believe it’s an abomination,” she told the outlet.
The decedent of two Titanic survivors spoke about how the “majority of the people aboard that ship were in third class,” including her great-grandmother and great-uncle, and how they had to “fight for their lives to get out of third class and to safety.”
“I think my great-grandmother would’ve been offended by it too, this idea of rich people or a bunch of billionaires going down and seeing where a majority of poorer people died trying to immigrate to the United States.”
Binder’s great-grandmother, Leah Aks, was 18 when she boarded the ship in Southampton, UK, on April 10, 1912, with her 10-month-old son Phillip, she told the outlet.
Leah’s husband, Sam Aks, had left the UK three months earlier to begin preparing for their new life in America and wanted his young wife and newborn to stay behind to travel on the Titanic since he — like many others — believed the ship was unsinkable.
Due to the turn-of-the-century design and technology used to build the Titanic, it was given a nickname that made headlines worldwide: “The Unsinkable Ship.”
But on the night of April 14, 1912 — four days after venturing out on its maiden voyage — the ship collided with an iceberg off the coast of Newfoundland and began to sink.
As passengers divulged into chaos trying to reach the Titanic’s main deck to find safety on its lifeboats, Binder’s great-grandmother was fighting her way out of third class and got separated from her baby son, she told The Sun.
As time passed and the ship sank further into the icy cold waters of the Atlantic, Leah Aks believed her son had died and climbed onto a rescue vessel named the Carpathia.
Miraculously, Binder’s great-uncle survived and was placed on the Carpathia by another woman, unbeknownst to his mother. The two were later reunited in the vessel’s hospital ward, she explained.
Of the ship’s 2,240 passengers and crew, only around 700 survived the tragedy.
“My two relatives survived, and it’s a miracle I’m here talking to you today, but some of their families’ bodies were never recovered and this is their last resting place,” she shared. “For those families […] they think it’s tacky and obnoxious to go there.”
When asked what her great-grandmother would think about billionaires trying to form a tourism industry around its wreckage, Binder believes she would think it’s “rude” and inappropriate.
“It’s horrific. And you can see the wreckage without having to physically go down there yourself,” she told the outlet.
“Why don’t you just get a huge pit in your backyard and burn $250,000 and then watch the 8k footage of the wreck they recently uploaded online?”
Connor and Lahey said they want to prove that the trek can be done without disaster — despite the implosion of the Titan submersible in June 2023, which killed all five people on board, including OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush.
“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,” Connor told the Wall Street Journal.
The Titan had been headed to the Titanic site when it suddenly had a “catastrophic implosion” on June 18.
Connor didn’t say when the voyage aboard a $20 million vessel dubbed the Triton 4000/2 Abyssal Explorer would take place.
Still, Lahey was among the critics in the deep-sea adventure industry who accused OceanGate of questionable safety standards, calling Rush’s approach “quite predatory.”
