Stockton Rush of OceanGate wanted to engage in a new era of discovery with his line of seacraft, with the Titan being the company's crown jewel. It was reportedly the only five-man submersible that could make the 12,500-foot journey to the wreck of the Titanic.
On June 18, Rush and four others died when the submersible imploded. There’s some palace intrigue since the US Navy knew the craft was destroyed and the passengers dead days before the US Coast Guard officially announced it, with some speculating the news was put on hold due to the bad news week the Biden administration was having regarding the IRS whistleblower case involving Hunter Biden.
During the search for the wreckage of the sub, there was a flurry of reports about the company, which charged $250,000 per person to participate in these expeditions, and the safety regulations they bypassed. Rush admitted he broke some rules and claimed the regulatory protocols hampered creativity. That mindset got him killed. The only relief to the families of those who perished is that the death of their loved ones was rapid; we’re talking nanoseconds. They never knew what hit them.
One YouTuber, Jake Koehler, who has over 13 million subscribers, documented his trip on OceanGate, even going on a test dive that was supposed to descend to 3,000 feet. It never got past 30 feet due to a slew of technical difficulties, which Koehler documented. While an exciting video, it highlights how the sub's features were something of a circus. The Titan also had no distress beacon, and other participants who went into this seacraft and survived noted how communications would be lost for hours (via Business Insider):
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A YouTuber who rode inside the Titan submersible just days before it went missing shared footage of his nine-day excursion in the Atlantic Ocean, which included OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush expressing concern about issues with the sub's control systems.
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In his video, Koehler said that they had to take the submersible to a nearby cove for repairs before heading out to sea.
"We're mission number three. But the first two missions, they weren't able to dive down to the Titanic due to weather conditions. And, also, the Titan, the submarine, I guess something happened when they were towing it back. A ghost net got wrapped around it, broke a lot of stuff," Koehler says in the video. "They're just double-checking everything right now, making sure everything's safe."
An OceanGate official said in the video that the Titan was initially set to do an "engineering dive" before heading out to sea but said that Rush called this off because the sub was having issues with functionality and the weather conditions were bad.
Rush debriefed the crew on why he called off the dive and said something "just didn't seem quite right" with the submersible's control system, which he called the "brains" of the sub.
"That's why I called it, but mostly because we've got to find out what this control problem is that sort of important controlling the sub," Rush said in the video. "It's up there with life support."
Rush said the problem was that two "control pods" on top of the sub were not "consistently communicating."
The red flags pointed to this company and its craft heading for a catastrophic event.
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