OceanGate CEO made a chilling comment about dying, Titan passenger says

Publish date: 2024-05-02

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A ​documentary cameraman who went on a test dive aboard the doomed Titan submersible has revealed OceanGate Expeditions CEO Stockton Rush had an unsettling response when he asked about potential emergencies — telling him, “Well, you’re dead anyway.”  

Brian Weed was working with Rush ​on Discovery Channel’s “Expedition Unknown” in May 2021 when he and colleague Josh Gates boarded the vessel in Puget Sound, Washington, for a test dive, Insider reported.

After the Titan was bolted shut, Weed asked what would happen if they had to quickly surface due to an emergency and were away from the sub’s mothership.

“Well, there’s four or five days of oxygen on board, and I said, ‘What if they don’t find you?’ And he said, ‘Well, you’re dead anyway,’” the camera operator recounted.

“It felt like a very strange thing to think, and it seemed to almost be a nihilistic attitude toward life or death out in the middle of the ocean,” Weed told Insider.

Brian Weed, a documentary cameraman who went on a test dive on the doomed Titan sub, recounts a chilling comment by OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush about what would happen in an emergency. Courtesy of Brian Weed
Cameraman Brian Weed, who went on a test dive on the Titan, said Stockton Rush made a chilling comment when asked what would happen in an emergency. “Well, you’re dead anyway,” he said the OceanGate CEO told him. Courtesy of Brian Weed

He said he took Rush’s apparently “cavalier attitude” to suggest that “if you’re out there, and they don’t find you in that many days, you’re just going to die anyway — it’s over for you, so what does it matter if you can’t get out of the sub on your own?”

Weed added that Rush’s approach to “basic safety” was a “red flag” that made him feel uneasy about the test dive.

​”That whole dive made me very uncomfortable with the idea of going down to Titanic depths in that submersible,” Weed told Insider.

The Titan imploded during its descent on June 18. Courtesy of Brian Weed
Wreckage from the Titan being salvaged in St. John’s harbor on June 28, 2023. Reuters

Ultimately, the dive had to be aborted due to a host of mechanical and communications glitches.

“We were sitting in the water and lost propulsion,” Weed told The Post previously, saying the Titan had to be brought up prematurely.  

“I extricated myself from the dive. I didn’t trust it,” he said. “Stockton thought the things that went wrong were minor and they would be easy fixes.

OceanGate Expeditions CEO Stockton Rush was piloting the Titan submersible when it imploded June 18 near the wreckage of the Titanic, killing all five people on board. Arnie Weissmann/Travel Weekly via AP

“I worried that the problem we experienced would require extensive testing. Stockton thought there would be nothing to worry about,” Weed added to The Post.

“He struck me as a cowboy. He was not afraid to do his thing. He talked about nobody ever having done what he was doing. As far as he was concerned, he cracked the code,” he said.

The cameraman ended up pulling out of the project due to safety concerns and the Discovery production was canceled.

The five victims of the Titan implosion including Oceangate CEO Stockton Rush (top right). Dirty Dozen Productions/OceanGat/AFP via Getty Images

On June 18, the submersible imploded during its dive to the Titan shipwreck, killing Rush, 61, British billionaire Hamish Harding, 58, French Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet, 77, Pakistani tycoon Shahzada Dawood, 48, and his son, Sulaiman, 19.

OceanGate has announced that it has suspended all exploratory and commercial operations in the wake of the tragedy.

In the weeks since the disaster, Rush and the embattled company have been assailed for what some perceive as lax attitudes about safety that may have contributed to the disaster.

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