‘I thought he was joking’: Ex-passenger says Stockton Rush told crew to sleep when Titan's battery died during voyage

Harrowing revelations claim that OceanGate’s Titan submersible once had a battery die during a dive to the Titanic. In that situation, the company’s CEO, Stockton Rush, allegedly suggested that the crew sleep in the vessel, as per a BBC documentary.

Jaden Pan opened up about his voyage in a 2022 episode of the BBC's ‘The Travel Show.’ He took the Titan submersible to the Titanic wreck in 2021, and later revealed that his expedition was disturbed when a battery "went kaput."

The submersible was two hours into its descent at the time. Jaden said they were two football fields' distance from the famed shipwreck when Stockton said they would need to return to the surface.

"At first, I thought he was joking because we were over two hours into our expedition and so close to the bottom," Jaden said. "But then he explained that one of the batteries went kaput and we were having trouble using the electronic drops for the weights, so it would be hard for us to get back up to the surface."

Stockton allegedly suggested that they sleep as the submersible sank to the ocean floor. "We're down here for another 16 to 24 hours," Stockton said on the show. "We will drift down. We'll hit the bottom. We'll have communications. We can talk to them."

Jaden said most of the crew were fine with sleeping on the ocean floor inside the sub. Some, however, were not okay. Stockton eventually used hydraulics to drop the weights, which allowed the Titan to float to the top.

When Stockton Rush told said he would ‘shut down the company’ before operating an unsafe sub

Stockton told a friend in 2019 that he would close the company rather than operating an unsafe sub. Stockton emailed a friend named Karl Stanley, who is an expert in submersibles. Karl had earlier expressed concerns over the safety of the Titan submersible after hearing cracking noises while on a dive in the Bahamas.

"I think that hull has a defect near that flange, that will only get worse. The only question in my mind is will it fail catastrophically or not," Karl previously told Stockton in an email, according to the news outlet Insider.

"I made it clear after our dive that I will not take nonessential crew, clients or media in the sub until I am confident that the hull is safe," Stockton responded. "As I told you before, I cancelled last year's expedition and will cancel this year's, or even shut down the company, before I will operate an unsafe sub."

Stockton, along with British billionaire Hamish Harding, French diver Paul Henry Nargeolet, and Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son, Suleman, after as a result of a atastrophic implosion of the Titan submersible.