A YouTube star rode in the Titan sub days before it went missing. His footage shows OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush discussing control issues with the 'brains' of the sub.
A YouTuber uploaded a video of himself riding in the Titan submersible days before it went missing.
His footage showed OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush discussing issues with the "life-support" system.
Jake Koehler said in the YouTube video that the sub had issues "every day" during his trip.
A YouTuber who rode inside the Titan submersible just days before it went missing shared footage of his nine-day excursion in the Atlantic Ocean, which included OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush expressing concern about issues with the sub's control systems.
Jake Koehler uploaded the nearly 30-minute video to his YouTube channel, DALLMYD, on Friday. Koehler's channel has more than 13 million subscribers and typically features videos of himself finding lost items while diving.
The video chronicled Koehler's journey to St. John's in Newfoundland, Canada, where he joined the Titan submersible for its third mission. The submersible went missing during its fifth mission on June 18. The US Navy later confirmed that the sub imploded shortly after it started its descent.
The British businessman Hamish Harding; Shahzada Dawood, a British-Pakistani multimillionaire; Dawood's 19-year-old son, Suleman Dawood; Paul-Henri Nargeolet, a Titanic expert; and OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush were all killed in the implosion.
Koehler showed footage of Nargeolet and Rush in his video but said he removed some footage given the circumstances of their deaths.
In his video, Koehler said that they had to take the submersible to a nearby cove for repairs before heading out to sea.
"We're mission number three. But the first two missions, they weren't able to dive down to the Titanic due to weather conditions. And, also, the Titan, the submarine, I guess something happened when they were towing it back. A ghost net got wrapped around it, broke a lot of stuff," Koehler says in the video. "They're just double-checking everything right now, making sure everything's safe."
An OceanGate official said in the video that the Titan was initially set to do an "engineering dive" before heading out to sea but said that Rush called this off because the sub was having issues with functionality and the weather conditions were bad.
Rush debriefed the crew on why he called off the dive and said something "just didn't seem quite right" with the submersible's control system, which he called the "brains" of the sub.
"That's why I called it, but mostly because we've got to find out what this control problem is that sort of important controlling the sub," Rush said in the video. "It's up there with life support."
Rush said the problem was that two "control pods" on top of the sub were not "consistently communicating."
Koehler cut the video after Rush's comments. Koehler said he wasn't sure whether the control-pods issue was the same issue that later caused the Titan's catastrophic implosion.
"Your guess is as good as mine," Koehler said.
"It could have been anything," Koehler continued. "Long story short, every day they did have some problems, and we tried to fix every little thing to make sure everything was perfect for our opportunity to dive to the Titanic."
Koehler said that the issues with the sub "seem weird now" but added that they seemed like an "everyday thing."
Luckily for Koehler, his trip to the Titanic — which is more than 12,000 feet below the surface of the ocean — didn't happen. But he still got to take a test-dive to a depth of about 30 feet.
"I would have been in that submarine, and my fate could have been just like the five who lost their lives just recently on mission five," Koehler said.
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