A YOUTUBER has shared haunting video from his time onboard the Titan during a trip that was canceled due to a series of malfunctions – just days before the same vessel imploded.
Jake, also known as Dallmyd, took a short ride in the same OceanGate sub that was found in pieces this week after it went dark on a mission to see the Titanic wreckage 13,000 feet below the ocean surface.
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“If my dive wasn’t canceled, it could’ve been me inside that submarine today,” Jake said in a video posted on Friday.
The YouTuber said that he was heartbroken over the deaths of Sunday’s crew before going on to share his own experience on the dangerous excursion.
Jake included pictures of himself with OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, who would eventually die inside his creation.
“It’s crazy to think if the weather cleared up and the conditions were perfect and Stockton looked up at me and said, ‘Do you wanna go?’ I would’ve done it,” Jake said.
“And my fate could’ve been just like the five who had lost their lives on that same submarine.”
Rush boarded the sub for a final time on Sunday alongside British billionaire Hamish Harding, French Navy Veteran Paul-Henri Nargeolet, businessman Shahzada Dawood, and Dawood’s 19-year-old son Suleman.
All of the passengers were declared dead after the US Coast Guard found debris belonging to the sub during a desperate three-day search for the missing vessel.
In Jake’s video, he gave a close look at the cramped conditions of the cabin and zoomed in on the infamous video game controller that was used to control the 22-foot sub.
ISSUES ON-BOARD
The vessel went through a series of now-disturbing trials as Jake and the team prepared to head down to the Titanic wreckage.
In the video, an employee explained that the sub does an engineering dive when they get out to sea to check for any malfunctions.
It was during this dive that the team first started noticing issues.
“Everybody’s ready to go and one of the computers, we’ve got two spheres, two computers, that control a lot of the thrusters and one of them was acting up a little bit,” the employee said.
“It was offline. They restarted it and it came back online but some of the functionality wasn’t exactly as we’d hoped.
“That, coupled with some winds and a little choppy seas, [is why] we decided to scrub the dive for today.”
Rush spoke to the crew of hopeful divers and explained that they had a “control problem” that needed to be fixed.
“So, it just didn’t seem quite right, to put it bluntly, and that’s why I called it,” Rush told the crew in a room on the mother ship.
“But mostly because we’ve got to find out what this control problem is. That’s sort of important controlling the sub – it’s up there with life support. So, we’ll be working tonight on that.”
He explained that there could have been a “wiring problem” that hindered the sub-controls from communicating with the motors.
“These things can be reusable now for three years… they’ve been pretty durable, but you never know,” Rush said.
After a few days of bad weather, engineers felt that the controls were in good enough condition to do a 3,000-foot test dive with the passengers.
On the dive, Jake recorded the sub being submerged in the water while attached to a platform with divers around to assist with the plunge.
The crew of passengers murmured and laughed while the cramped ship nose dived into the ocean.
However, it wasn’t long before Rush began to lose communication with the mother ship and said that fog was rolling in which made diving conditions too dangerous.
That meant Jake was not able to go on the 13,000-foot trip down to the Titanic and only experienced the test dive.
“If the fog didn’t roll in and cancel the dive, who knows, maybe we would’ve left that platform, and maybe we would’ve imploded,” Jake said.
While it’s unknown how the dive could’ve ended that day, Jake said he feels like he dodged a bullet and is heartbroken for the families of the late divers.
“I didn’t know these people too well but they treated me very nicely, and I lost a few friends,” he said.
In the caption of the video, Jake clarified that he did not pay for a ticket as he was asked to share his experience with his 13.4million YouTube subscribers.
He concluded his video by saying: “I think this is a big reminder, not only to myself but everyone, that life is very precious, and it can go away very quickly.”
DEVASTATING FIND
A deep-sea robot sub found five pieces of debris belonging to Titan two miles beneath the surface of the ocean on Thursday.
It was a sad conclusion to a massive three-day hunt that saw specialized ships sail in from around the world.
Search crews were desperately looking for the vessel in the Atlantic after it lost communication on Sunday with just 96 hours of oxygen remaining for the crew.
The sub failed to resurface later that afternoon – with its final “ping” to mothership Polar Prince placing the sub directly above the ruins of the Titanic.
In a haunting interview last year, Rush told how his main worry was that the sub – steered by a gaming controller – would get trapped under the water.
He also claimed there should be “limits” to safety precautions.
“You know, at some point, safety is just a pure waste,” he told CBS.
“I mean, if you just want to be safe, don’t get out of bed, don’t get in your car, don’t do anything.
“At some point, you’re going to take some risk, and it really is a risk-reward question.
“I think I can do this just as safely while breaking the rules.”
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