A former adviser to OceanGate – the company responsible for the Titan submarine, which imploded last month, killing all five passengers on board – said the vessel had dropped the ballast weights keeping it on the ocean floor to try to get back to the surface. , indicating that the pilot knew something was wrong.
Rob McCallum, a consultant with experience in expeditions, declared for The New Yorker: “The report I received immediately after the event – long before the oxygen time was up – was that the submarine was approaching 3,500 meters.”
“He dropped the weights,” he said. “And then he lost communications and tracking, and an implosion was heard.”
McCallum is co-founder of the expedition company EYOS Expedition, and has led dives to the wreck of the Titanic and other deep ocean dives. When OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush – one of those killed in the Titan submersible tragedy – decided to build a submersible to reach the world’s most famous shipwreck, he contacted McCallum for help.
When he arrived at OceanGate’s workshop, he didn’t like what he saw. “Everyone was drinking Kool-Aid (an American brand of juice) and talking about how cool they were with a Sony PlayStation,” McCallum said to The New Yorker.
“And I asked at the time, ‘Does Sony know that [o controle do PlayStation] was it used for this purpose? Because, you know, it wasn’t designed for that,” she said. “You have the hand control communicating with a Wi-Fi unit, which is communicating with a black box, which is communicating with the sub’s thrusters. There were several points of failure.”
He added: “Every submarine in the world has wired controls for a reason – if the signal drops, you’re not screwed.”
Source: CNN Brasil
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