Yep, I've seen reporting of Navy's using them for controlling periscopes on submarines (now that most are drive by wire), or Air forces using them for piloting drones, as well as for teleoperated robotic thoracic surgeries.

The widespread user familiarity and benefits in transferable hand coordination skills with common gaming based HID economics is hard to refute. Although, I'm guessing the market for safety certified joysticks will uptick.

Built like an airplane out of materials that were past their shelf life even for airplanes:

Only one thing concerned me: He said he had gotten the carbon fiber used to make the Titan at a big discount from Boeing because it was past its shelf-life for use in airplanes.

I asked him if that weren't a problem. He replied that those dates were set far before they had to be, and that Boeing and even NASA had participated in the design and testing of the Titan.

It is a conversation I have thought about a great deal over the past week.

https://www.travelweekly.com/North-America-Travel/Mission-Titanic-Part-2

Also, Boeing denied being involved, and NASA stated that they had given advice but not been involved in testing:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2023/06/23/titanic-submarine-submersible-implosion-recovery-live-updates/70349511007/

No, using a wireless controller was pretty dumb

An airplane with no safety checks

If it results in death when the controller stops working, you have a serious issue with the system architecture and should work on that instead of trying to improve the controller.

Out in the wild? Perhaps quite a few. For example, for teleoperated robotic thoracic surgeries, I imagine medical grade HID should mandate safety certified hardware that doesn't rely on electrically noisy mechanical potentiometers, subject to Dead zone drift, or non-deterministic dead man behavior under failure modes. Although I'm certain there's various reasons not to use hall effect sensing devices even within the same facility as MRI machines.

Batteries in the controller run out and you forgot to bring any more double As

Maybe you add an extra controller. But that's already pushing it, because as people already said, you losing the controller shouldn't be fatal.

IMO, it would better if there was a wired one. But you wont get anything more reliable than a high-quality mass produced item. The controller is not one of the problems with that sub.

Yeah, it was real nice once the kernel modules for PS DS3/4 finally shipped with Android's mainline. Although, it's still a pain that one needs to recompile the module to disable the rumble or LED when games using the device do not expose user level override settings.

If I recall, this controller was wireless via Logitech's proprietary 2.4Ghz USB dongle, but yes, weird would be better. I'm also surprised they still used wireless due to battery concerns, such as being an additional fire hazard in a confined space, or unexpected power loss during critical maneuvers, and not just from the connectivity liability of RF.