An American billionaire is set to visit the Titanic wreck almost a year after a submarine imploded and killed five people.
Real-estate investor Larry Connor plans to "prove the journey can be made safely" in a deep-sea submersible.
It comes after an OceanGate submarine killed the company CEO Stockton Rush, explorer Hamish Harding, French Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet, British-Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood, and his 19-year-old son, Sulaiman.
Ohio billionaire, Connor and co-founder of Triton Submarines, Patrick Lahey will plunge more than 12,400 feet in a two-person submersible.
The Titanic tourist sub vanished in the Atlantic Ocean last June
Reuters"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 Triton 4000/2 Abyssal Explorer - designed by Lahey at the cost of $20million (£15.67million) - is set to make the trip to the shipwreck site.
Connor added: "Patrick has been thinking about and designing this for over a decade.
"But we didn’t have the materials and technology. You couldn’t have built this sub five years ago."
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"[He 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," the co-founder of Triton Submarines said.
Lahey was one of many luxury-adventure industry leaders to condemn OceanGate before and after the disaster.
He accused the firm of questionable safety standards and called Rush’s business standards "quite predatory."
Before the implosion last year, an employee whistleblower and industry experts had come forward with concerns about the safety of the vessel.
Real-estate investor Larry Connor plans to "prove the journey can be made safely" in a deep-sea submersible
YouTube/ The Connor Group
The Titan was on an eight-day expedition off the coast of Canadian province, Newfoundland.
Participants paid $250,000 each to descend to the Titanic from the surface.
However just 45 minutes into the journey, the Titan imploded due to the oceanic pressure against the sub.
