The call came one morning in June last year, when documentary cameraman Brian Weed was at his home in California.
‘Had he heard?’ one of his colleagues asked. ‘The Titan sub is missing.’
The same exchange was criss-crossing the globe, in horrified texts and phone calls as news that the submersible, taking wealthy tourists on a voyage two-and-a-half miles beneath the Atlantic to view the wreck of the Titanic, had lost contact with its ‘mothership’.
Everyone clung to hope of breathable air reserves and temporary power glitches – but Brian knew immediately. All was lost.
‘I knew right away, I knew it was disastrous,’ he says.
‘That sub was a ticking timebomb and Stockton was a cowboy. He was cutting corners and it makes me angry that people didn’t understand the risk they were taking.’
Brian Weed (right) sits on board the OceanGate Titan in 2021 alongside co-founder and CEO Stockton Rush (centre). Weed labelled the craft a ‘ticking timebomb’
Brian is referring to Stockton Rush, co-founder and CEO of OceanGate, the maritime exploration company which pioneered the ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ trips to view the stricken liner that sank in 1912.
He was killed alongside Paul Henri Nargeolet, a 77-year-old French diver, Hamish Harding, 58, a wealthy British explorer, Shahzada Dawood, 48, a British-Pakistani businessman and his 19-year-old son Suleman, when the Titan imploded.
Why is Brian, 43, so outspoken? Because two years earlier, he also had climbed into the tiny submersible, in May 2021, while filming for the Discovery Channel.
It’s something that still haunts him today.
For that trip – an aborted test dive three months before the first successful mission in August – went so wrong that Brian refused to set foot in it again, and the documentary was shelved.
‘Stockton was a very charismatic person, he was smart, but I think he knew he was being dishonest,’ says Brian, talking exclusively to the Mail. ‘It’s very convincing to listen to a person who believes so wholeheartedly in their own vision. You want it to be true.
‘It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to go and see the Titanic. It sounded amazing. Fewer people have gone there than have gone to the Moon, it really clouds your vision.’
Stockton Rush died while on the doomed journey to the Titanic launched on June 18 last year
But once the ‘smoke and mirrors’ cleared, he says, he saw the trip for what it was – a vanity project, headed by a blinkered, arrogant amateur with scant regard for safety.
That’s certainly the image emerging in evidence presented this week to the US coastguard’s Marine Investigation Board, as the inquiry into the disaster began.
The two-week long hearing in Charleston, South Carolina, was told how during 13 trips to the Titanic in the two years prior to its catastrophic failure, Titan had suffered a jaw-dropping 118 technical issues.
These included its front dome falling off when it was brought out of the sea, its thrusters – which steer the craft – failing at more than 11,000ft down, and the cladding round its tail cone being ripped.
On one dive, the passengers – whose only criteria for selection was that they were sufficiently rich to fund the trip and sufficiently small to fit in the capsule – were stuck inside for 27 hours. On another they were sealed inside the sub for up to five hours before it launched, sweltering in sauna-like conditions.
The enquiry also heard how the vessel had previously been struck by lightning as well as spending seven months stored uncovered in a car park.
Listening to the evidence unfold this week, it all rang horribly true to Brian.
He admits he’d initially felt honoured and excited when he was invited to film the documentary – feelings that were not shared by his wife.
‘I said to her: ‘What do you mean? I have to do this!’ Brian recalls. ‘It really blinds you. There’s something about the Titanic, and Stockton understood that fascination.’
Brian’s enthusiasm for the expedition soon palled, however, as he climbed inside the capsule.
‘We were told not to eat food or drink any water for 12 to 24 hours beforehand because there’s no bathroom down there,’ he says.
‘It was cold inside. It was dark and it was eerie – there was one porthole but you couldn’t really see anything out of it. We were sitting on the floor, there are no chairs, no pads – nothing.’
Things started to go wrong almost immediately.
‘We lost power to the thrusters. Stockton was very cagey about what was happening and was having issues with the computers. He had this PlayStation controller and was trying to communicate with his team outside but that wasn’t working.
‘There were a lot of awkward conversations because this was meant to be for TV. After an hour he had to stop it. He said: ‘This isn’t going anywhere,’ and we had to go back up. I think we only made it down down 100ft.
‘It was a real failure and there were some uncomfortable conversations. That’s when a lot of the talk about emergency situations came up.
Footage shows the sub at the bottom of the Atlantic. All five people on board perished
‘I remember we pressed him about certain elements about the submersible and he would be very vague about the details,’ Brian adds. ‘He always had some way to justify elements of his design.
‘I asked about what would happen if something went wrong and we were able to surface, but weren’t found quickly and the oxygen ran out. He said, matter of factly: ‘Well, you’d be dead.’
‘I was giving Stockton the benefit of the doubt but it wasn’t until we got back to the surface and I got out of the sub and looked at it that I thought, if this thing can’t go down 100ft without problems, how is it going to be ready to go to the Titanic in two months?
‘That’s when my brain started thinking rationally. It took me two or three weeks before I came to conclusion it wasn’t something I was comfortable with, and I dropped out.
‘The problem is that you can fall in love with your project so much you ignore the glaring obstacles in the way. And I think he also had a lot of budget constraints – he’d already spent loads of money on this and he thought he could work around them.
‘He took that thing down to depth so many times and never replaced that hull – you can only do that so many times before it breaks.’
Hindsight, of course, is always crystal clear, but Brian’s concerns about the hull were hauntingly prescient.
Photos were presented to the inquiry showing how the five-inch-thick hull was constructed from layers of carbon fibre stuck together with glue, which were prone to separate like ‘porous paper’.
‘I knew that hull would fail – it was an absolute mess,’ Scots-born David Lochridge, who worked as OceanGate’s operations manager from 2015 to 2018, told the hearing, describing it as ‘an abomination’.
‘The whole idea behind the company was to make money. There was very little in the way of science. At the end of the day, safety comes first. Yes, you’re taking a risk going down in a submersible, but don’t take risks that are unnecessary with faulty, deficient equipment.’
The lead-up to the fateful launch of Titan had not gone well. To save money, the mothership Rush hired for the 2023 expedition was smaller than usual. It meant that Titan had to be towed behind during trips to the wreck site, rather than stowed on board, covering a distance of 3,600miles in this way.
That May, after a stormy night at sea, it partially sunk and suffered damage to the tail area. Even when repaired, subsequent attempts to dive over the Titanic were prevented by more bad weather.
But it seemed that Team Titan’s luck had at last changed as dawn broke on June 18.
‘That final day… that was the first day we saw the sun,’ Tym Catterson, a contractor working for OceanGate on board the support ship, told the hearing. ‘The fog was gone, the ocean was calm.’
It appeared, he said, like ‘somebody just blessed it that day’.
The paying passengers boarded Titan with emotions ranging from nervous excitement to fear.
University student Suleman’s aunt would later reveal the teenager was ‘terrified’, only going aboard the 22-foot submersible because the trip fell over Father’s Day weekend and he was eager to please his dad.
The hearing into the disaster has revealed how the craft was built on a budget with little safety protocols and reused equipment
During the first hour-and-a-half of the descent, messages sporadically reached the surface. At 10.15am and at a depth of 7,500ft, the submarine sent one that read: ‘All good here.’ Half-an-hour later and 1,500ft above the Titanic, the final message was received, informing the support vessel that they had ‘dropped two wts [weights]’ meaning it had shed two of its ballast weights, either as an initial move towards resurfacing due to an emergency, or to slow it as it neared the bottom.
Six seconds later, contact was lost and never regained.
Four days later, debris from Titan was discovered littering the ocean floor.
When it emerged that the vessel had imploded, focus immediately fell on the design of the hull.
Usually, it is made from metals such as titanium, not carbon fibre. And while most deep-sea subs have a spherical hull to distribute the pressure equally across the structure, Titan’s was cylindrical.
Former OceanGate engineering director Tony Nissen told the hearing that when he joined the company in 2016, it had already built a one-third size model of the Titan submersible.
He recalled being invited by chief executive Rush to watch it undergo testing, witnessing the model repeatedly fail pressure tests.
The full-size hull was also never reviewed or classified by any third parties, as is standard procedure, with Rush citing the ‘time and cost’ involved. Instead, the company did most of its engineering in-house.
It was in 2017 that OceanGate announced it would be conducting trips to the Titanic shipwreck. A ticket would be £80,000 per passenger – equal to the inflation-adjusted cost of a first-class berth on the doomed liner’s maiden voyage. By 2023, the price had more than doubled.
Nissen told the hearing that he felt pressured to get the prototype vessel ready to dive – but refused to pilot it himself.
‘I’m not getting in it,’ Nissen said he told Rush, whom he described as being difficult to work with.
‘Stockton would fight for what he wanted and, even if it changed from day to day, he wouldn’t give an inch,’ he said. ‘Most people would eventually back down to Stockton. It was death by a thousand cuts.’
The following year, Titan completed its first deep-sea tests, during which it was struck by lightning on a mission.
Plans to dive on the Titanic in 2019 were cancelled after a large crack was identified on the inside, meaning a replacement hull had to be built in 2020.
By then David Lochridge’s time with the company had come to an acrimonious end.
He described how OceanGates’ co-founder was driven by ‘arrogance’ and fostered a corporate culture that put money over sound engineering decision-making.
They quickly clashed over the training of personnel and the design and safety of the sub.
Tony Nissen, head engineer for OceanGate, scratches his head at the Massachusetts inquiry
‘They wanted to qualify a pilot in a day, somebody who had never sat in a submersible,’ he said. ‘That is a huge red flag. I know Stockton’s vision was ‘give somebody this PlayStation controller and within an hour they’re going to be a pilot’. That’s not how it works. It’s like showing somebody how to fly a helicopter and then them taking passengers up.’
Asked whether he had confidence in the way the Titan was being built, he said: ‘No confidence whatsoever.’
Other cost-cutting moves, he claimed, included a home-made carbon-dioxide ‘scrubber’ designed to remove gas during dives. Rather than buying one, he said Rush had constructed his own version using a computer processor fan and a plastic toolbox from Home Depot.
He also told how when the second Titan was built – the one involved in the incident – items were ‘recycled’ from the original version.
‘Everything was reused,’ he said. ‘It’s all cost.’
The pair’s relationship soured further still as the result of the incident he claimed happened on board Titan’s predecessor, Cyclops 1, in 2016.
The plan had been to take four paying clients to view the remains of the Andrea Doria, a wrecked Italian ocean liner located 50 miles south of Nantucket Island, Massachusetts.
Rush insisted on piloting the vessel to the ship by himself. Lochridge lodged several objections about the safety of the craft and water conditions but, in the end, joined the dive.
Lochridge claimed that Rush then ‘smashed’ the vessel into the ship before wedging it under the wreckage. An argument broke out when Rush refused to hand over the controls.
Lochridge was eventually fired from the company after he submitted an inspection report about the Titan that detailed the design’s flaws.
He sued OceanGate and took his concerns to the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration, but he said they were slow and failed to act. After increasing pressure from OceanGate’s lawyers, he dropped the case and signed a non-disclosure agreement.
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Evidence was also heard from OceanGate employee Bonnie Carl, a former accountant, who joined the company as a human resources and finance director. She too left because of safety concerns.
She explained that the people described by the company as ‘mission specialists’ were paying customers – all high-worth individuals.
Asked if there were any qualifications necessary to become a mission specialist, she simply replied: ‘Money.’
On Thursday, OceanGate’s scientific director Steven Ross told the inquiry that Titan had malfunctioned days before its final, fateful dive. He described how passengers on board ‘tumbled about’ as they struggled to get the sub out the water.
‘One passenger was hanging upside down. The other two managed to wedge themselves into the bow-end cap,’ Mr Ross said, adding that he did not know if an assessment of the hull was performed after the incident.
The wider investigation of the public hearing is expected to continue in private. OceanGate suspended commercial and exploratory operations in the wake of the accident.
In August, the family of Mr Nargeolet filed a $50million (£37.5million) civil lawsuit against the company. The dead diver’s estate said that the crew aboard the sub experienced ‘terror and mental anguish’ before the sub imploded and its operator was guilty of gross negligence.
For Brian Weed, every day of the inquiry brings more horror.
‘I had been in that thing. I knew the claustrophobic feeling, knew the sounds of the pressure on the hull. Just imagine it… tourists in there.’