Chris Brown, a 61-year-old businessman who works in marketing, had paid a bond to travel on the Titan but canceled his participation and asked that it be returned to him because it seemed unsafe.
He was concerned about the quality of the technology and materials used. Among his concerns were OceanGate’s use of “old scaffolding poles” for ballast and the fact that its controls were “based on computer game controllers,” reports the Daily Mail.
Brown says that despite being one of the first people to sign up for the trip, he ultimately decided that “the stakes were too high.”
The businessman was a personal friend of British explorer Hamish Hardin, one of the five passengers who died on the Titan.
Brown and Harding signed up for the trip, which at the time cost £80,000, after sharing “a few beers” while holidaying on Sir Richard Branson’s Necker Island.
The couple paid a 10% deposit for the trip, the price of which has more than doubled since then, when the Titan was still in development.
But Chris Brown alleged that in subsequent years he learned that OceanGate had “missed key targets” when conducting depth tests of the submersible. and found it worrying that the ship was controlled with a modified Playstation controller.
He was also concerned about technical problems and delays in the development process. “I heard they used old scaffolding poles to ballast the submarine,” he told the Daily Mail. “If you were trying to build your own submarine, you could probably use old scaffolding poles. But it was a commercial vessel.”
Chris Brown says he’s not one to shy away from risk, but he ended up emailing OceanGate and asking for his money back.
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