Excerpt from a documentary about the exploration of the Titanic wreck last year has vividly highlighted the incident involving the Titan submersible.
According to the NY Post, footage taken inside the Titan submersible, extracted from the 2022 BBC documentary “Take Me To Titanic”, has drawn renewed attention following the tragic accident on June 18.
It is known that this footage captures the expedition journey to the Titanic wreck at the ocean’s depths, featuring a team of five explorers, with Scott Griffith operating the Titan at that time.
Tense scene as the Titan submersible encounters a mechanical failure.
The footage reveals that the incident occurred when the crew was approximately 300 meters away from the Titanic wreck. At that moment, the Titan’s propulsion system began to malfunction.
“Something is wrong with my propulsion system. I’m trying to thrust but nothing is happening,” Griffith stated.
After investigating, it was found that the cause of the malfunction was due to improper installation of the Titan, causing its two engines to push in opposite directions, leading the Titan to spin uncontrollably.
At the moment of the incident, Reneta Rojas, a crew member present on the submersible, expressed her anxiety by holding her head and beginning to panic as the team attempted to reprogram the vessel’s movement using a controller resembling a video game joystick.
The Titanic wreck exploration team in 2022.
“You know what I’m thinking, right? We’re not going to make it. We’re literally 300 meters from the Titanic and have partially reached the wreck, but all the vessel is doing is spinning,” Rojas shared.
Although the crew identified the issue, the aforementioned documentary also revealed that the team had to wait for hours for OceanGate’s CEO, Stockton Rush, to resolve the issue from the mothership.
Rojas said, “We were really happy to figure out a way to move forward. We started clapping inside the submersible and saying ‘Yes, we can go now.’
Fortunately, despite the terrifying incident, Rojas and the rest of the expedition team were able to safely see the Titanic wreck during that dive. Prior to this, Rojas also admitted that they had been warned before the dive that this vessel was only in the “testing” phase and could encounter dangerous situations.
When the 2022 documentary crew surfaced after the expedition, Stockton Rush began to dismiss the team’s concerns about the propulsion issue, telling his clients: “Most deep-sea submarines make noise at some point.”
Following the Titan implosion incident on June 18, this CEO’s disregard for past safety warnings about the vessel was brought to light and received significant criticism.
Alongside Stockton Rush, British billionaire Hamish Harding (58), renowned Titanic explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet (77), prominent Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood (48), and his son Sulaiman Dawood (19) tragically lost their lives in this submersible explosion.
