Was OceanGate sub doomed by bad tech or big egos? Inquiry continues

More than a year after an Everett company’s Titan submersible imploded in the North Atlantic, investigators still don’t know what caused it to collapse on its way to the Titanic wreck, killing all five people onboard.   

But testimony from six days of U.S. Coast Guard hearings shed more light on OceanGate, the company that ran the expedition; Stockton Rush, the OceanGate CEO and Seattle resident killed in the implosion; and previous dives before the final Titan expedition on June 18, 2023.

The four others killed in the implosion were British businessman and explorer Hamish Harding, Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son Suleman, and Paul-Henri Nargeolet, a French explorer known as “Mr. Titanic” for his ship expertise.

The missing submersible captured worldwide attention in part because it wasn’t immediately clear whether the five men were alive in a vessel with a dwindling oxygen supply. Recovery efforts included agencies from several countries, and total costs were estimated at more than $1 million. Titan and OceanGate have since been the subjects of multiple documentaries and continued media attention.

Here are some of the revelations from the Coast Guard hearings into the fatal OceanGate submersible implosion. The final three days of the two-week hearings, which began Sept. 16, will include testimony from 10 more people, including former employees and Coast Guard officials.

Titan’s final moments

Those who were on the Polar Prince, the Titan’s mothership, said the day of the expedition brought good weather and few jitters for the people about to begin the submersible’s descent. The fog had lifted, the water was calm and there were no red flags, OceanGate contractor Tym Catterson told the Coast Guard’s Marine Board of Investigation in North Charleston, S.C.

Renata Rojas, a banker and self-described Titanic obsessive, had gone on several dives with OceanGate, including one to the Titanic, and volunteered to work on the Polar Prince for the expedition. She recalled seeing Rush and the four passengers smiling and excited for their journey before getting into the submersible.

“They were just very happy to go,” she said. “That’s the memory I have. Nobody was really nervous. They were excited about what they were going to see.”

The Marine Board of Investigation showed an animation of the Titan’s descent, along with text messages between the submersible and mothership. Among the messages were “all good here” and the final dispatch saying the submersible had dropped weight, sent at 10,961 feet. The Titan pinged for the final time six seconds later.

OceanGate submersibles had allegedly crashed into a shipwreck and had other issues

David Lochridge, OceanGate’s former director of marine operations, recalled that in 2016 he planned to take passengers to view the wreckage of the Andrea Doria, which sank off Nantucket island, in Massachusetts, in 1956. The expedition was planned for Cyclops, a predecessor to Titan, and for the team to do 3D modeling of the shipwreck. Rush decided he would pilot the submersible, Lochridge testified, and jammed the vessel into the ship. The two argued over the PlayStation controller used to pilot Cyclops until Rush threw it to Lochridge, who said he then navigated the submersible out and back to the surface.

Also on that dive was Rojas, who disputed Lochridge’s characterization of the dive and said no one was panicked and it was clear that Rush was the pilot.

Tony Nissen, OceanGate’s former engineering director, said Titan was struck by lightning during testing in the Bahamas in 2018. The Coast Guard said OceanGate experienced more than 100 equipment issues in 2021 and 2022 during Titan dives. Passenger Fred Hagen recalled the submersible getting entangled in Titanic wreckage during one of the successful Titan dives when Nargeolet was piloting the vessel, though he added he didn’t think it was “that big of a deal.”

Workers say their concerns about safety were ignored

Nissen said he refused to pilot an early prototype of Titan and was then fired in 2019. Lochridge said he was phased out from OceanGate after the Andrea Doria dive.

Antonella Wilby, a contractor who was hired to navigate the Titan to the shipwreck, said she raised concerns about the expedition’s navigation and map systems. OceanGate’s process, she said, was to write down latitude and longitude coordinates then type them into an Excel spreadsheet, then import the spreadsheet into a map. Having to manually input coordinates caused delays, she found.

She brought up those concerns and suggested a different software, and was told she “wasn’t being solutions oriented,” according to Wilby.

Differing views of Stockton Rush

The witnesses who knew or worked with Rush provided disparate views of the CEO who cofounded the company in 2009. One side portrayed him as a brilliant inventor and explorer dedicated to safety culture; to the other side, he was an impatient and argumentative dilettante focused on profits and ego-boosting.

“Neither Stockton nor I were ever driven by tourism,” said Guillermo Sohnlein, who co-founded the company with Rush. “We were never motivated by going somewhere that people had already been before. The reason we got into this was because we both wanted to explore.

“We wanted to not only explore ourselves but create the technologies that would allow other explorers to explore the ocean.”

In the first crude test of the OceanGate submersible’s descent to Titanic, Sohnlein said, Rush opted to go by himself so no one else would be at risk.

Karl Stanley, a submersible operator who knew Rush for more than a decade, said Rush was driven by ego and a desire to make his mark in his family of historically significant figures, which includes two Founding Fathers. After hearing a cracking sound during a 2019 dive in the Bahamas with Rush, Stanley said he sent an email urging Rush to cancel the Titanic expeditions.

“I think these wealthy individuals … threw money at him and he was painted into a corner,” Stanley said.

Did the passengers know?

The confirmation the five men had died once debris and remains were found on the ocean floor brought up the morbid question: Did they have any warning of the impending implosion?

Catterson said that, especially with billionaires on board, Rush would have done everything he could to make sure the dive was perfect. He believes the implosion happened instantaneously.

“Nobody was suffering in there,” he said. “As a matter of fact, they were probably happy.

“They were all waiting to see the Titanic when this happened.”