Titan submersible may have tried to resurface before tragedy

The Titan submersible may have "dropped weights" before the tragedy
A former advisor said it suggests it was trying to resurface
The advisor was critical of how the company designed its subs

Updated: Jul 3, 2023 / 04:10 PM EDT

This photo provided by OceanGate Expeditions shows a submersible vessel named Titan used to visit the wreckage site of the Titanic. In a race against the clock on the high seas, an expanding international armada of ships and airplanes searched Tuesday, June 20, 2023, for the submersible that vanished in the North Atlantic while taking five people down to the wreck of the Titanic. (OceanGate Expeditions via AP)

(NewsNation) — New details about the implosion of the Titan submersible indicate the vessel “dropped weights” before communication was lost, reported by The New Yorker.

In an interview, Rob McCallum — a former advisor to OceanGate, the company that designed the Titan submersible — said he received a report that when the submersible reached 3,500 meters it dropped weights, meaning it aborted the dive, The New Yorker reported, before it “then it lost comms, and lost tracking, and an implosion was heard.”

At one point, McCallum criticized the company’s Cyclops I — the predecessor to the doomed “Titan” Cyclops II submersible — for its design to be piloted by a PlayStation controller.

“Everyone was drinking Kool-Aid and saying how cool they were with a Sony PlayStation,” he told me. “And I said at the time, ‘Does Sony know that it’s been used for this application? Because, you know, this is not what it was designed for.’

In the article, The New Yorker quotes a 2021 interview with Stockton Rush, the OceanGate executive who perished aboard the submersible.

In that interview, Rush said that he wanted to be “remembered as an innovator,” and quoted General Douglas MacArthur saying that people are remembered for the rules they break.

“The carbon fibre and titanium?” he said, referring to the submersible’s hull. “There’s a rule you don’t do that. Well I did.”

The U.S. Coast Guard is still investigating the tragedy, and it’s not clear whether someone on the crew knew things were amiss before the likely implosion that destroyed the submersible.