- OceanGate sent a submersible down to the ocean floor with a thruster facing the wrong way in 2022.
- When he started the thrusters, the pilot noticed the submersible was spinning in circles.
OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush sent a submersible down to the Titanic shipwreck with a thruster pointed in the wrong direction in 2022 and had to troubleshoot the problem on the fly, according to a BBC documentary.
A documentary crew from BBC's "The Travel Show" joined OceanGate on an expedition to the Titanic shipwreck last year. Rush remained on board the surface vessel while his logistics director, Scott Griffith, piloted the submersible, according to BBC News.
Four other passengers, including the banker Renata Rojas and the businessman Oisin Fanning, were in the submersible during the dive.
A diver noticed the submersible "started spinning really weird" during the submersible's launch, according to the documentary. However, OceanGate still proceeded with the dive.
The diver shrugged at the time and said, "they checked it and it seemed good."
But Griffith realized something had gone wrong when the Titan landed on the ocean floor.
"I don't know what's going on," Griffith told the other passengers when he noticed the vessel was spinning in circles.
"When I'm thrusting forwards, one of the thrusters is thrusting backwards," Griffith told Rush during the dive. "Now the only thing I can do right now is a 360."
Rush later suggested to Griffith to remap the submersible's controller.
"Yeah — left and right might be forward and back. Huh. I don't know. It might work," Rush told Griffith.
Rush's suggestion worked, and Griffith took the passengers to the bow of the sunken Titanic. But the setback ended up alarming some people on board.
"I was thinking, we're not going to make it!" Rojas told the documentary crew. "We're literally 300 meters from Titanic and although we're in the debris field, we can't go anywhere but go in circles."
The New Yorker reported on Saturday that Rush dismissed multiple safety warnings during the development of the ill-fated submersible.
This was not the first time things went wrong during the Titan submersible's dives. A documentary cameraman who took a test-dive in the Titan in May 2021 told the AP that Rush got "flustered" and tried to make excuses when its propulsion system and comms failed.
The Titan submersible went missing during a dive to the Titanic shipwreck on June 18. The five passengers, including Rush, were declared dead after the US Coast Guard said on June 22 that the submersible had likely imploded.
A representative for OceanGate did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent outside regular business hours.