- Stockton Rush once made a "bizarre" comment about a possible emergency situation on his sub, a former passenger said.
- Brian Weed questioned what would happen if they got lost in the sub since they were bolted inside.
- 'Well, you're dead anyway,'" Weed said Rush replied during a 2021 test dive on the doomed Titan.
A documentary cameraman who once went on a test dive in OceanGate's doomed deep-sea Titan submersible said the company's CEO and creator of vessel, Stockton Rush, made a "bizarre" comment when he raised concerns about what would happen in an emergency.
Veteran camera operator Brian Weed was working for the Discovery Channel's "Expedition Unknown" TV show when he and his colleague boarded the Titan sub in Washington state's Puget Sound in May 2021.
The dive was supposed to be a "precursor" to a dive on the sub later that summer to the famed shipwreck site of the Titanic in the depths of the North Atlantic where the TV crew had planned to film.
Moments after Weed, his colleague "Expedition Unknown" host Josh Gates, and Rush were deadbolted into the sub with no way out except from the outside, Weed asked Rush what would happen if the vessel had to suddenly make an ascent in an emergency situation and was nowhere near its mothership.
"[Rush] says, 'Well there's four or five days of oxygen on board, and I said, 'What if they don't find you?' And he said, 'Well, you're dead anyway,'" Weed told Insider.
Weed said he found Rush's response "very strange."
"It felt like a very strange thing to think and it seemed to almost be a nihilistic attitude toward life or death out in the middle of the ocean," Weed told Insider.
Weed explained that Rush's whole point was, "If you're out there, and they don't find you in that many days, you're just going to die anyway — it's over for you, so what does it matter if you can't get out of the sub on your own."
Rush's apparent "cavalier attitude" towards what Weed considered to be "basic safety" made him feel "uneasy" from the start and was his first "red flag" from the dive experience.
Weed said the test dive was plagued with mechanical and communications issues and had to be aborted.
"That whole dive made me very uncomfortable with the idea of going down to Titanic depths in that submersible," Weed said, adding that it just didn't feel safe.
Weed ultimately pulled out of the documentary project over safety concerns and the "Expedition Unknown" production was also later canceled.
The Titan sub imploded last month on an expedition to the Titanic's wreckage in the depths of the North Atlantic 12,500 feet below the ocean's surface, killing Rush and all four others on board.