Any structural problem with the Titan meant they'd 'all be dead before we know it,' passenger was told
- One prospective passenger said there was "not really any training" for an emergency on the Titan.
- Arnie Weissmann said Paul-Henri Nargeolet told him passengers would "all be dead before we know it."
A journalist said Paul-Henri Nargeolet told him that Titan passengers weren't informed about emergency procedures because they'd "all be dead before we know it."
Arnie Weissmann, the editor in chief of Travel Weekly, spent eight days on the Polar Prince, the submersible's support ship, in May with personnel including Nargeolet. The French deep-sea explorer was one of the five people on the Titan when it imploded in June.
Weissmann didn't end up making a trip on the Titan because the expedition was called off due to bad weather.
He told Insider that prospective passengers were only taken through the process of how the sub "goes down and up."
"To be honest, there was not really any training. And even when I went in and did visit the sub on the last day, the inside being just a flat floor, actually surprised me," Weissmann said.
"I had a conversation with PH, and he said, 'Look, if there's a structural issue, we will all be dead before we know it.' He said it laughing with a smile that was a reassurance of sorts, I guess."
OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush made similar comments to another passenger in May 2021. The documentary cameraman Brian Weed told Insider's Natalie Musumeci that Rush said, "Well, you're dead anyway" when he inquired what would happen in an emergency.
Weissman said additional instructions might have been given to mission specialists had there been a dive. The prospective passengers were told to wear their flight suits and were required to wear steel-toed footwear when on the deck or the platform.
"The actual training was they handed you a flight suit and some warm socks and a kind of fleece vest," the journalist said. "They said basically, 'it'll be cold down there,'" he continued, adding that, "the list they sent you said to bring two pairs of warm socks."
One of the tasks Weissmann was assigned to, had the dive took place, was to move some ballast pipes weighing 37 pounds each.
"They're just old rusty pipes that they had acquired somewhere, and they were nothing fancy because they were going to be left on the ocean floor," he said. "I had been told that there had been an issue where after dropping the ballast, it still didn't rise."
An OceanGate representative told Insider that the company was "unable to comment."