A BBC documentary released last year captured a chilling malfunction on the doomed Titan submersible that left passengers stuck circling at the bottom of the ocean.
On one of OceanGate’s dives to the Titanic wreckage nearly 13,000 feet below the surface in the North Atlantic, its sub’s thrusters malfunctioned, causing the vessel to spin only in circles.
It was captured in the BBC’s documentary “Take Me to the Titanic.” In the footage, as the submersible reaches the ocean floor near the Titanic’s resting place, pilot Scott Griffith can be heard saying: “There’s something wrong with my thrusters. I’m thrusting and nothing’s happening.”
“Am I spinning?” Griffith said at one point. “Oh, my God.”
He explained to passengers that one of the thrusters was thrusting forward, and the other backward ― meaning they couldn’t navigate toward the shipwreck just 1,000 feet or so away.
“You know, I was thinking, ‘We’re not going to make it,’” passenger Renata Rojas told the BBC. “We can’t go anywhere but go in circles.”
Crew members were forced to wait at the bottom of the ocean while OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush worked to come up with a solution from the host ship.
Eventually, the pilot was directed to reprogram the video game controller that steers the vessel and regained control of the sub. The passengers were then able to view the wreckage they’d paid $250,000 to visit.
Rush and four other people were killed last month when the same submersible imploded during another tourist expedition to the Titanic site.
In the wake of the incident, numerous dive experts and former OceanGate employees and associates have spoken out, accusing Rush and the company of ignoring repeated warnings.
David Lochridge, OceanGate’s former director of marine operations, wrote in a 2018 email that he feared Rush “kills himself and others in the quest to boost his ego,” The New Yorker reported this week. Lochridge claims he was fired from the company after sounding the alarm on safety issues in a report.
Multiple previous passengers have also spoken about an array of glitches and malfunctions they experienced on their own Titanic expeditions.