- Stockton Rush once made a "bizarre" comment about an emergency scenario, a former passenger said.
- Brian Weed asked what would happen if they got lost in the sub since they were bolted inside.
An adventure-documentary cameraman who went on a test-dive in the Titan submersible said OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, the creator of the vessel, made a "bizarre" comment when a passenger raised concerns about what would happen in an emergency.
Brian Weed, a veteran camera operator, was working for the Discovery Channel's "Expedition Unknown" TV show when he and his colleague boarded the Titan sub in Puget Sound, Washington, in May 2021.
Weed told Insider that the test-dive was supposed to be a "precursor" to a dive to the Titanic shipwreck site in the depths of the North Atlantic that the TV crew had planned to film later that summer.
Moments after Weed, the "Expedition Unknown" host Josh Gates, and Rush were locked in the sub, Weed asked Rush what would happen if the vessel had to suddenly make an ascent in an emergency situation and was nowhere near its mothership.
Weed told Insider that Rush said, "'Well, there's four or five days of oxygen on board, and I said, 'What if they don't find you?' And he said, 'Well, you're dead anyway.'"
The cameraman said Rush's response was "very strange."
"It felt like a very strange thing to think, and it seemed to almost be a nihilistic attitude toward life or death out in the middle of the ocean," Weed said.
Weed added that Rush's whole point was: "If you're out there, and they don't find you in that many days, you're just going to die anyway — it's over for you, so what does it matter if you can't get out of the sub on your own."
Weed said Rush's apparent "cavalier attitude" toward "basic safety" made him feel "uneasy" from the start and was his first "red flag" from the dive experience, he said.
The test-dive was plagued with mechanical and communications issues and had to be aborted, Weed said.
"That whole dive made me very uncomfortable with the idea of going down to Titanic depths in that submersible," Weed said, adding that it just didn't feel safe.
Weed ultimately pulled out of the documentary project over safety concerns, and the "Expedition Unknown" production was also later canceled.
The Titan sub imploded last month on an expedition to the Titanic's wreckage around 12,500 feet below the ocean's surface, killing Rush and the four passengers on board.