(New York Post) OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush ignored a flood of hair-raising red flags about the company’s Titan submersible in the years leading up to its doomed Titanic voyage last month.
During the ill-fated June 18 dive to the 1912 wreckage of the famed ship, the Titan imploded, killing Rush, who was piloting the vessel, along with the other four passengers: French Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet, 77; British billionaire Hamish Harding, 58; prominent Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood, 48; and his 19-year-old son, Suleman Dawood.
But countless times before the voyage, Rush brushed aside or downplayed concerns from passengers, staff and colleagues about the Titan’s safety and construction.
Testing concerns
David Lochridge, OceanGate’s former director of marine operations, said that he found “a lack of non-destructive testing performed on the hull of the Titan,” and when he raised his concerns, he was fired in 2018, according to a lawsuit.
Following the Lochridge blow-up, the Marine Technology Society sent a letter on to OceanGate, warning that its experimental designs and refusal to follow industry-accepted safety protocols could lead to “catastrophic” results.
OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush downplayed concerns from passengers, staff and consultants about his doomed Titan submersible.Arnie Weissmann/Travel Weekly via AP
An OceanGate director was allegedly fired in 2018 after raising concerns about Titan’s safety and lack of testing, years before the vessel imploded en route to the Titanic wreck on June 18.Becky Kagan Schott / OceanGate Expeditions
Will Kohnen, the chairman of the organization, told the New York Times that Rush called him afterward to complain that industry regulations were undermining his company’s work.
‘MacGyver-y jerry-rigged-ness’
Several others were additionally wary of the fact that the Titan sub had “elements of MacGyver-y jerry-rigged-ness,” as CBS reporter David Pogue told Rush in a 2022 broadcast.
The seemingly on-the-fly construction that caught past passengers’ attention included the Playstation controller used to steer the sub — and the fact that its buoyancy was maintained via rusty construction pipes resting on shelves on its side.
The flimsy construction caused Chris Brown, 61, a multimillionaire thrill-seeker who signed up for the doomed voyage with his friend Harding, to pull out of the trip.
“Eventually I emailed them and said, ‘I’m no longer able to go on this thing,’” Brown told the Sun, fearing OceanGate was “cutting too many corners.”
Debris from the Titan submersible that was recovered from the ocean floor near the Titanic is unloaded from the Horizon Arctic in St. John’s, Newfoundland, on June 28.AP
Former passenger and German adventurer Arthur Loibl, who paid nearly $110,000 for a peek at the Titanic wreck in 2021, said that when the bracket of the stabilization tube responsible for balancing the submersible tore, it was “reattached with zip ties.”
“It was a suicide mission back then!” he said. “The first submarine didn’t work, then a dive at 1,600 meters had to be abandoned.”
‘On the fringe’
While giving Rush consulting advice on marketing and logistics, deep-sea expert Rob McCallum voiced his concerns about Titan’s system running on Bluetooth, he told the New Yorker.
“Every sub in the world has hardwired controls for a reason — that if the signal drops out, you’re not f–ked,” he said.
McCallum jumped ship on working with Rush after the CEO refused to have the Titan marine-certified, despite him telling Rush how supportive classification agencies have been on his other projects.
“Stockton didn’t like that. He didn’t like to be told that he was on the fringe,” McCallum said.
When people began hearing about Rush’s plan to take passengers to the Titanic, they “would ring me, and say, ‘We’ve always wanted to go to Titanic. What do you think?’ And I would tell them, ‘Never get in an unclassed sub. I wouldn’t do it, and you shouldn’t, either,’” he told the New Yorker.
Several passengers voiced concerns about the seemingly slap-dash nature of the Titan’s construction.
