A six-month-old CBS report on OceanGate’s Titanic tourism submarine is going viral on social media after reporter David Pogue raised safety concerns about the now-missing vessel.
Pogue traveled to OceanGate’s facilities last year and was submerged in Titan, a $1 million submarine that disappeared off the Canadian coast on Sunday. Stockton Rush, the CEO of OceanGate, was among the four passengers in addition to the pilot.
Pogue was given a tour of the sub before getting on board, and he made a comment about its “improvised design.” This includes a Playstation controller that was used to operate the submarine and lighting from Camping World.
Last year, Pogue, a correspondent for CBS News’ Sunday Morning, joined the crew of the ship and chatted with Stockton Rush, the CEO of OceanGate Expeditions, the company that owns it. He described his own fear as he prepared to board the minivan-sized submersible, including the time when communications failed and the vehicle became below for many hours.
“This is going to sound very janky to a lot of people, but a lot of this submersible is made of off-the-shelf, improvised parts,” Pogue said Monday in an interview on CBS. “For example, you control it with an Xbox game controller. Some of the ballasts are these abandoned lead pipes from construction sites and the way you ditch them is everybody gets to one side of the sub and they roll off a shelf.”
“The important thing,” he continued, is “the capsule that contains the people and the air, that was co-designed with NASA, the University of Washington. The part that keeps you alive is rock solid.”
