44 people died in sub implosion five years before Titanic tourist disaster

It has been revealed that the tragic Titanic submersible accident isn't the first, with 44 people previously being killed due to a vessel implosion.

People all over the world are still reeling after learning the fate of the five passengers on board the Titanic sub that tragically imploded after going missing last Sunday.

The voyage was led by OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush alongside four passengers; British billionaire Hamish Harding, French diver Paul-Henri Nargeolet, British-Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son, Suleman.

The Titan's passengers each paid $250,000 to go deep into the ocean to visit the wreckage of the RMS Titanic.

However, concerns were raised for the mission on Sunday (18 June) when the sub lost contact with its surface vessel and failed to emerge the following day.

OceanGate

Following a huge international search for the sub, which spanned across five days, debris was soon found near the wreck, which were later confirmed to have belonged to the Titan sub.

During a press conference in Boston on Thursday (22 June), Rear Admiral John Mauger said that the debris was 'consistent with the catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber'.

And an investigation is currently underway to find out how and why the sub might have imploded.

An implosion is defined as the 'opposite of an explosion', when something 'collapses violently inwards' due to being placed under extreme pressure.

But it turns out that this isn't the first time that a sub has suffered a similar fate to the Titan.

OceanGate

There have been more than 30 major incidents involving submersibles since 2000, but the Titan is only the second known in history to implode.

On 15 November 2017, an Argentine navy sub, known as ARA San Juan, mysteriously disappeared in the South Atlantic. International navies, including the UK and US, quickly joined forces for an extensive search and rescue mission but it was abandoned two weeks later, on November 30.

However, it wasn't until a year later that authorities announced the vessel had been found 2,975ft below sea level, off the Valdes Peninsula, by the specialist American survey company Ocean Infinity, Sky News reported at the time.

The sub was also surrounded by a field of debris.

Argentina Navy/AP

ARA San Juan had 44 crew members on board when it disappeared, who have all since been confirmed dead.

And in November 2018, naval captain Enrique Balbi said they'd believed the vessel had imploded close to the seabed after beginning its journey from the town of Ushuaia on the Tierra del Fuego archipelago.

The submarine was built in Germany in the mid-1980s, however, it had recently been refurbished in 2014, which involved cutting the vessel in half to replace its engines and batteries.

It's believed that even the smallest mistake during the cutting process could have led to the sub's demise later, experts said.