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By Giulia Carbonaro
Senior Reporter
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Comments made by a journalist who traveled on the missing OceanGate submersible last year, saying that the vessel had lost contact with the surface during another trip and could not be located have raised questions on social media, with many asking why more attention wasn't brought to the issue at the time.
Reporter David Pogue traveled on the Titan last summer, the same OceanGate vessel which went missing on Sunday, covering the experience for a CBS story on visiting the Titanic wreckage.
The Titan, owned by a private company organizing deep-sea expeditions, OceanGate, went missing after leaving Newfoundland, Canada, on Sunday morning. It was halfway through its descent to the wreckage of the Titanic, which lies around 900 miles off the coast of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, when it stopped communicating with the surface.
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Aboard the vessel were five people between crew members and passengers, identified as Stockton Rush, CEO of OceanGate, French submersible pilot Paul-Henry Nargeolet, billionaire British explorer Hamish Harding, and Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood, and his son Suleman Dawood.
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As the clock continues ticking and pressure grows on rescuers to locate the missing sub, Pogue's November 2022 report on his trip on the Titan has resurfaced online.
In the piece, the reporter mentioned his doubts over the solidity of the equipment aboard the sub, telling Rush that the submersible had "some elements of MacGyver jerry-riggedness," which the CEO of OceanGate denied.
He also noted that another passenger said that the vessel went missing for two-and-a-half hours during a separate trip when communications suddenly broke down and the expedition was unable to find the wreck of the Titanic.
"On my expedition last summer, they did indeed get lost for about 5 hours, and adding such a beacon was discussed," Pogue tweeted on June 19, mentioning a different time length than in the piece.
"So they got lost when you were in the sub? I don't remember that from the story," one user commented.
"In theory, they do one dive a day. So I was not on the sub the day they got lost. But it's there in the story..." Pogue responded. In another message, Pogue elaborated, saying he was not on the sub that day.
"I was on the ship at the surface, in the control room," he said. "They could still send short texts to the sub, but did not know where it was. It was quiet and very tense, and they shut off the ship's internet to prevent us from tweeting."
He said that this episode raised "many red flags" for him. Other users kept confronting him about why no action was taken by OceanGate to address the issue.
"Did the communication blockade make it onto the show?" one person tweeted. "Cause that sounds like a good reason to shut the company down and investigate."
OceanGate Expeditions, the company that owns the submarine that went missing while traveling to see the Titanic wreckage, was previously sued over safety concerns related to that specific vessel, Newsweek reported.
Pogue confirmed that there is no beacon aboard the Titan allowing for vessels to detect the submersible.
Newsweek reached out to Pogue via email for comment on Wednesday.
Since Sunday, rescuers have been racing against time to find the missing submersible, as the crew has only a limited amount of oxygen available. As of Tuesday afternoon, the crew had about 40 hours left of breathable air.
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