TITANIC
The OceanGate CEO’s warning if Titan battery malfunctioned: “I thought he was joking”
Videographer Jaden Pan remembers what advice he claims he was given for his Titanic trip if the battery went “kaput”.
Jaden Pan, a documentary filmmaker who traveled aboard the submersible Titan in 2021 to see the remains of the Titanic, explained a year ago about another small failure that the vessel suffered while he was aboard. The haunting thing was the surreal reaction of Stockton Rush, the CEO of OceanGate who passed away last month due to a “catastrophic implosion” of the deep-sea vessel.
Titanic trip malfunction advice: “fall asleep”
As Pan explained to the BBC’s The Travel Show, one of the submersible’s batteries ran out of power during the dive. According to the videographer, they had been underwater for about two hours when Rush reported that there was a problem, with the vessel at a distance of approximately two football fields from the Titanic. It was then that the CEO of OceanGate explained that they would have to go back up to the surface.
“At first, I thought he was joking because we were over two hours into our expedition and so close to the bottom,” Pan said. “But then he explained that one of the batteries went kaput and we were having trouble using the electronic drops for the weights, so it would be hard for us to get back up to the surface,” the documentary filmmaker continued.
After he explained that the battery had gone “kaput”, he suggested that the crew members fall asleep while the weights that the submarine had attached were dissolved. The weights needed about 24 hours to dissolve in the water.
Half of the Titan’s crew said they had no problem falling asleep and spending the night under the sea at that depth, the Titanic rests at around 12,500 feet below the surface. However, other members of the expedition were not as comfortable with the idea of just sitting around waiting for the weights to fall off of their own accord.
They expressed their desire to go up as soon as possible and a debate broke out. Eventually, Stockton used hydraulics to release the weights from the submarine, which ended up rising to the surface of the sea.
Following June’s tragedy, in which five people died aboard the Titan, including Stockton himself, OceanGate has announced that it was suspending all exploration and commercial operations. The investigation continues.