The OceanGate submersible that imploded during a dive to the Titanic wreck last month spun out of control during its dive to the depths of the ocean in 2022, a BBC documentary has revealed.
“Am I spinning?” a male voice can be heard saying as the film shows a clip of the terrified passengers cooped up inside the cramped submersible, Titan. “Yes,” a female voice says in response.
"We have a problem,” pilot of the sub, Scott Griffith said, according to one of the five crew members on Titan.
They were part of the 2022 OceanGate Titanic Expedition – a commercial initiative to explore the 110-year-old shipwreck the submersible that took five people 12,500 feet below sea level.
"You know what I was thinking, we're not going to make it," passenger Reneta Rojas told the BBC, according to a Mirror report.
"We're literally 300m (600 feet) from the Titanic, and although we are already in the debris field, we can't go anywhere but go in circles,” she said, recalling the heart-stopping moment the submersible started spinning uncontrollably.
At that time, Titan had faced a technical issue involving one of its thrusters which was not mounted properly, the Mirror reported, quoting the BBC film titled "Take Me To Titanic". Thus, while one thruster was propelling the sub in one direction, the other was taking it the other way.
The crew members reportedly had to wait inside the sub underwater for hours as OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, who was on the submersible’s support vessel, worked to fix the issue.
“This is an experimental sub. People are informed that it’s very dangerous down there,” he had said in the documentary.
Rush was among the five members who died on the ill-fated submersible during the Titanic expedition this year. Other members on board were Pakistani billionaire Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son Suleman, British billionaire-explorer Hamish Harding and French explorer Paul-Henry Nargeolet.
They presumably died instantly when the Titan sub, about the size of an SUV car, imploded under the crushing pressure of the North Atlantic at a depth of more than two miles.
Mangled debris recovered from the small submersible was offloaded last week in eastern Canada, ending a difficult search-and-recovery operation.
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