Ohio billionaire plans to take $20M sub to Titanic site to prove industry’s safer after OceanGate implosion

The pressure’s on.

An Ohio billionaire is planning to take a deep sea submersible to Titanic depths to prove the industry is safer in the wake of the doomed OceanGate vessel that imploded last year.

Real estate investor Larry Connor, of Dayton, said he and Triton Submarines co-founder Patrick Lahey will plunge more than 12,400 feet to the shipwreck site in a two-person submersible.

“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.

Lahey has designed a $20 million vessel dubbed the Triton 4000/2 Abyssal Explorer, which Connor said can carry out the voyage repeatedly.

“Patrick has been thinking about and designing this for over a decade. But we didn’t have the materials and technology,” Connor said. “You couldn’t have built this sub five years ago.”

The duo said they want to prove that the trek can be done without disaster — despite the implosion of the Titan submersible in June, which killed all five people on board, including OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush.

The Titan had been headed to the Titanic site when it suddenly had a “catastrophic implosion” on June 18.

A few days after the tragedy, Connor called Lahey and urged him to build a better sub.

“[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,’” Lahey told the paper.

Connor didn’t say when the voyage will take place.

Lahey was among the critics in the deep sea adventure industry who accused OceanGate of questionable safety standards, calling Rush’s approach “quite predatory.”

Industry experts and a whistleblowing employee had previously come forward with fears about the safety of the vessel — in part because OceanGate opted not to certify it through credible safety groups such as the American Bureau of Shipping and Det Norske Veritas in Europe.

Rush, billionaire explorer Hamish Harding, French Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet and Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son, Sulaiman, died instantly when the Titan imploded under the pressure of the Atlantic Ocean.