A cameraman who swam with sharks and trekked through tundra says his test-dive on OceanGate's sub was the only time where he thought something was 'wrong'

• An adventure-documentary cameraman said his dive aboard OceanGate's doomed sub was daunting.
• "I've been in some of the most extreme environments," the camera operator Brian Weed told Insider.

A veteran adventure-documentary cameraman who swam with sharks, trekked through subarctic temperatures in Siberia, and rappelled into South American caves said that his test dive aboard OceanGate's doomed submersible was one of the most daunting experiences of his life.

"I've been in some of the most extreme environments and dangerous, risky situations you can imagine, and I am not afraid of it," Brian Weed, who has been a camera operator for 15 years, told Insider. "But this was one of the only times in my life where I thought, 'this is wrong, I shouldn't be in here.'"

Weed was working for the Discovery Channel's "Expedition Unknown" TV show when he and his colleague got the opportunity in May 2021 to take a test-dive on the Titan sub with OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, who created the vessel, piloting the mission.

The test-dive to a shipwreck in Puget Sound, Washington, was supposed to be a "precursor" to a dive on the sub later that summer to the Titanic shipwreck in the depths of the North Atlantic, where the TV crew had planned to film for a special episode.

But Weed said the dive aboard the 21-foot sub did not go as planned and was plagued with problems from the start, including even getting off the launchpad.

"Everything started to go wrong" once the sub finally got in the water and got the all clear to dive, he said.

At least one thruster on the sub failed fairly quickly, and "there was basically a major malfunction with its whole thruster system," Weed said.

The sub spent more than two hours in the water "going nowhere" before Rush "had to sheepishly confess we had to abort the dive because there was no way for the vessel to get down to the target," he continued.

"The whole time I'm in the water locked in this [submersible] and thinking this is supposed to go to the Titanic in two months," Weed said. "We can't get below 100 feet, and this is supposed to go 12,000 feet under the ocean."

He said this combined with Rush's apparent "cavalier attitude" toward "basic safety" made him feel "uneasy."

Weed ultimately pulled out of the documentary project because of safety concerns. He told his producer, "I can't do this project. I don't trust the submersible. I don't feel comfortable going down to those depths in this. It doesn't feel safe."

The "Expedition Unknown" production was also later canceled because of the same concerns, Weed said.

The Titan sub imploded last month on an expedition to the Titanic's wreckage in the depths of the North Atlantic around 12,500 feet below the ocean's surface, killing Rush and all four others on board.