This may be hard to believe, but the missing Titanic tourist submersible is reportedly piloted with a gamepad controller.
The deep-sea vessel, operated by OceanGate Expeditions, lost contact about an hour and 45 minutes after submerging on Sunday morning with a 96-hour oxygen supply.
CBS reporter David Pogue was submerged on the $1 million vessel last year and his report about the experience has gone viral on social media following news of the disappearance.
"This is going to sound very janky to a lot of people but a lot of this submersible is made of off the shelf improvised parts," Pogue said in a CBS interview. "For example you control it with an Xbox game controller. Some of the ballasts are these abandoned lead pipes from construction sites."
Capsule 'Rock Solid'
He also said the Titan "is no radio and no GPS..that works underwater so you really are on your own when you're in this thing."
Pogue, who said the vessel was about the size of a minivan, pointed out that the capsule containing the people--"the part that keeps you alive, is rock solid."
He tweeted on June 20 that the Titanic "is in international waters, so the OceanGate sub has not been licensed, inspected, or certified by any external body."
"It takes about 3 hours to reach the surface. What concerns me is that they have SEVEN different ballast systems… " he tweeted. "why HAVEN’T they returned to the surface? Have they gotten caught on something?"
Founder Believed to be Aboard
British billionaire explorer Hamish Harding, renowned French diver Paul-Henri Nargeolet and Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son Sulaiman Dawood are on the 21-foot submersible named Titan.
Stockton Rush, the founder of OceanGate Expeditions, is believed to be the fifth person aboard.
"We have clients that are Titanic enthusiasts, which we refer to as 'Titaniacs,'" Rush said in Pogue's report. "We've had people who have mortgaged their home sto come and do the trip, and we have people who don't think twice about a trip of this cost."
"We had one gentleman who had won the lottery," he said.
OceanGate offers eight-day missions to see the Titanic debris at a cost of $250,000 per person.
"The company tweeted that we are exploring and mobilizing all options to bring the crew back to safety," the company tweeted.
The Titanic sank in the early on the morning of April 15, 1912 in the North Atlantic Ocean, four days into her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York City. More than 1,500 people died .
