Sam Howe Verhovek, the author of “Jet Age: The Comet, the 707, and the Race to Shrink the World,” is a contributing writer for National Geographic magazine.
The British-built de Havilland Comet, the first jet airliner ever to fly, was a sleek, beautiful, fatally flawed machine. Within two years of entering service in 1952, three Comets blew apart in the sky, killing everyone aboard. But when a court of inquiry convened to determine the cause, the man who a decade before had committed his nation to winning the race to jet-powered passenger flight lectured his inquisitors before they could even get to the first technical question.
“You know, and I know, the cause of this accident,” thundered Lord Brabazon of Tara, a daring aviator who held the very first official pilot’s license in the United Kingdom. “It is due to the adventurous, pioneering spirit of our race. It has been like that in the past, it is like that in the present, and I hope it will be in the future.”
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I thought of Lord Brabazon’s words when I first heard early this week about the disappearance of the Titan, a submersible craft built to travel to the ocean floor and explore the debris field that is the final resting place of history’s most famous shipwreck, the Titanic.
The Titanic and Titan disasters are now eerie bookends, and along with the tragedy of the de Havilland Comet, they will go down in history as cautionary tales of human hubris. But as someone who had a passing acquaintance with Titan’s creator, Stockton Rush, I confess that I experienced a gathering sense of dismay as the media story seemingly got baked in real time that the aptly named Rush was a villain, reckless and negligent.
Having spent a bit of time with Rush and his wife, Wendy, just last month during a reporting trip in Newfoundland and Labrador, and having gotten a good look at Titan when Rush showed me around the craft as it sat in dry-dock maintenance there before its first exploration of the season, the criticism struck me as cartoonishly one-dimensional.
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Rush was tried and convicted in absentia by many in the media as we all waited to find out whether his craft was catastrophically pulled apart, incapacitated on the ocean floor or, most optimistically, lost somewhere on the surface of the sea. I think the least we could do, now that we know for sure he will never be able to respond to his critics, is to contemplate his “side of the story,” as we say in the news business.
Share this articleShareFirst, though, let me come ahead with some by now familiar observations. There is no escaping his responsibility. His clear faith in his machine — or his impatience — played a role in balancing risk and judgment, and thus led directly to his death and those of his clients.
Second, to the degree Rush’s passion for underwater exploration reminded me of Lord Brabazon’s passion for flight — and the costly projects both men were evangelizing for — we have to show proper respect for the victims of this endeavor. Lord Brabazon was rightly criticized for insensitivity to the loved ones of the Comet’s passengers, whom he seemed to characterize as collateral damage in the greater quest for Britain’s technical glory.
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“Here is a great imaginative project, to build a machine with twice the speed and twice the height of any existing machine in the world,” he told the court. “Of course we gave hostages to fate, but I cannot believe that this Court, or our country, will censure us because we have ventured. You would not have the aeronautical people in this country trail behind the world in craven fear lest they be censured in such a Court as this for trying to lead the world.”
As for Rush, the families of the other four men who perished might indeed blame him for their deaths, though each passenger signed a release that, according to one previous passenger on Titan, explicitly mentioned the possibility of death no less than three times on the first page.
When I saw Rush in Newfoundland, he struck me as no less confident in his machine than Lord Brabazon was in the Comet, of which he declared: “Everything within the realm of human knowledge and wisdom was put into this machine.” Rush told me all about the titanium in Titan, the “NASA-grade carbon fiber” wrapped around it, the redundancies built in — in case of emergency.
And while deep exploration of the oceans carries obvious risks, I can’t quite accept the notion that he was cavalier about it all. I knew Stockton through a mutual friend of ours in our hometown of Seattle, and within those circles of acquaintance he was known as a terrific husband, father, grandfather and friend, with an infectious, fun-loving curiosity that will linger as an influence long beyond his death. His risks were calculated ones, however flawed the calculations might turn out to be.
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We know now that several leaders in the submersible industry sent Rush a letter a few years ago, presciently warning him that the “experimental approach” his company was taking with Titan could lead to problems “from minor to catastrophic.” And we also know that, had Rush taken their concerns to heart, he and his fellow passengers might be alive today.
Was Rush reckless? Given the outcome, there’s a strong case for yes, though a full inquiry may yet exonerate him to some degree. But if an experimental approach to discovery is a crime, then we might as well put the Wright brothers, Charles Lindbergh and Apollo’s lunar-bound astronauts on trial. All of them took frightful risks that could have as easily ended in disaster as in triumph.
So, rather than simply condemning Rush for the Titan tragedy, let’s give the man his due here: He believed in his machine, so much so that he was willing to get into it time after time and travel more than two miles down to the ocean’s depths. That’s the kind of faith that can get you killed, but it can also change the world.
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