OceanGate told the woman whose husband and son were on the Titan that comms were often patchy, report says

• Christine Dawood was told comms with the Titan sub were often patchy, The New York Times reported.
• Dawood said she was "looking out on the ocean" in case the sub resurfaced after it lost contact.

Communication between OceanGate's Titan sub and its mothership was often patchy, Christine Dawood said she was told, per The New York Times.

Dawood, whose husband, Shahzada, and 19-year-old son, Suleman, died on the sub, told the newspaper that comms failures were common after teams lost contact between the Polar Prince and the Titan.

She said that OceanGate told her that the expedition would be aborted and that the Titan would drop weights so it could resurface if it couldn't reestablish communication after an hour.

"I was also looking out on the ocean, in case I could maybe see them surfacing," she told the newspaper.

Shahzada and Suleman Dawood were among the five passengers on OceanGate's sub that imploded on an expedition to the Titanic's wreckage.

Shahzada was a 48-year-old multimillionaire who came from one of Pakistan's wealthiest families. He was a member of the British Asian Trust, a charity that the British royal family started.

Suleman was studying at Strathclyde University in Glasgow. A statement from the university said it was "profoundly saddened" to learn of the deaths.

Christine Dawood told BBC News last week that she'd planned to go on the expedition with her husband, but let her son take her place "because he really wanted to go." She was still on the Polar Prince with the crew when the US Coast Guard announced that it had found debris from the Titan.

Her 17-year-old daughter, Alina Dawood, was also on the Polar Prince on the day of the dive. The Times reported that OceanGate waived a rule to allow her to join.

The Titan sub was reported missing on June 18, and the US Coast Guard said four days later that the passengers all died after its teams found debris from the submersible on the ocean floor.

The Transportation Safety Board of Canada, which is investigating the Polar Prince, said this week that it had sent the ship's voyage-data recorder to a lab in Ottawa for analysis.

OceanGate didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from Insider made outside normal working hours.