The company that manages the submersible that disappeared in the North Atlantic on a tourist dive to the wreck of the Titanic was warned several times that the vehicle could suffer “catastrophic” safety problems, according to court documents.
There were five people aboard the Titan, which if it continued to function would have a dwindling supply of oxygen, as a growing international fleet of ships and planes searched for the vehicle operated by OceanGate Expeditions. The Everett, Washington-based underwater exploration company has made annual trips to the Titanic since 2021.
In the first good news since the search began, a Canadian aircraft detected underwater noises, although the submersible had not been located, the US Coast Guard said Wednesday morning.
THE WARNINGS OF THE LAWSUIT
David Lochridge, OceanGate’s director of maritime operations, wrote an engineering report in 2018 stating that the vessel being developed needed further testing and that passengers could be endangered when it reached “extreme depths,” according to a lawsuit filed that year in a federal district court in Seattle.
OceanGate sued Lochridge that year, accusing him of breaching a nondisclosure agreement, while he countersued, alleging he was illegally fired for raising concerns about safety and testing. The case was settled a few months into a private settlement whose terms were not made public.
Lochridge’s concerns centered on the firm’s decision to base failure detection on sensitive acoustic monitoring, which detected sounds produced by the hull under pressure, rather than on a hull scan. Lochridge said the company told him there was no equipment that could do those tests on a 5-inch-thick carbon-fiber hull.
“This was problematic because this kind of acoustic analysis would only identify when a component was about to fail – often milliseconds before an implosion – and would not detect existing failures before the hull was subjected to pressure,” the counterclaim stated.’
It had five crew members when it disappeared in the Atlantic.
“THE PASSENGERS WERE IN DANGER”
Additionally, the vehicle was designed to reach depths of 12,123 feet (4,000 meters), where the Titanic was located. But, according to Lochridge, the passenger window was only certified for depths up to 4,265 feet (1,300 meters) and OceanGate did not want to pay the manufacturer to produce one certified for 4,000 meters.
The company’s decisions, the countersuit asserted, “subject passengers to possible extreme danger in an experimental submersible,” Lochridge’s countersuit asserted.
However, the firm stated in its lawsuit that Lochridge “is not an engineer and was not hired or commissioned to perform engineering services on the Titan.” He was fired after refusing to accept assurances from OceanGate’s chief engineer that the acoustic monitoring and testing protocol was actually a better system for detecting any failure than a scanner would be, according to the documents.
OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush last year defended his strategy in a speech at a conference in Seattle hosted by technology news site GeekWire. He described how he had taken a prototype down to 4,000 meters, noting that it “made a lot of noise.”
To see more from Telemundo, visit
So he brought the sub to the surface again and on the second dive it made the same disturbing noises, although it should have been much quieter. The company scrapped that hull, built by a marine manufacturer, and built another with an aerospace supplier, Rush explained.
In an email statement, a company spokesperson said the missing vehicle was completed in 2020-21, so it would not be the same vehicle named in the lawsuit.
OceanGate also received another warning in 2018, from the Marine Technology Society, which describes itself as a “professional group of ocean educators, policymakers, technologists and engineers.”
In a letter to Rush, the association said it was crucial that the firm put its prototype through tests supervised by a non-company expert before putting it into operation to safeguard its passengers.
Rush had refused to do it. The manager was piloting the missing submersible.
The letter, first reported by the New York Times, said society members feared that “the current experimental strategy adopted by OceanGate could lead to negative results (ranging from minor to catastrophic) that would have dire consequences for everyone in the world.” sector”.
In a 2019 interview with Smithsonian Magazine, Rush complained that industry strategy was stifling innovation.
“There hasn’t been an injury in the commercial submersible industry in over 35 years,” he said. “It’s obscenely safe because we have all these rules. But neither has it innovated or grown, because they have all those rules”.
