A former marine operator who worked for the company behind the Titan submersible that imploded last year, killing five on its journey to view the wreck of the Titanic on the bottom of the north Atlantic, told an inquiry that he believed such a tragedy was “inevitable” as safety standards were flouted.
David Lochridge, the former operations director for OceanGate, the firm behind the deep sea diving craft, testified during a US Coast Guard hearing that he alerted the company to safety concerns he had about the submersible, but was largely ignored.
His testimony came as video footage of the remains of Titan was released for the first time by the Coast Guard. In the video, a broken tail cone can be seen on the ocean floor, with fragments of the vessel visible around the cone.
During his highly anticipated testimony, Lochridge said that the “whole idea” of OceanGate was to “make money”, adding: “There was very little in the way of science.”
Lochridge told the hearing of his doubts about how the Titan was built in 2017. “[I had] no confidence whatsoever, and I was very vocal about that, and still am,” he said.
Lochridge was later fired in 2018 and sued by OceanGate, alleging that he improperly disclosed confidential information to regulators. The company also accused Lochridge of refusing to listen to assurances from a lead engineer on the matter. Lochridge and OceanGate settled their suit in November 2018.
Lochridge also gave an account of the OceanGate CEO, Stockton Rush, previously crashing another submersible in 2016 after attempting to pilot the vessel to the Andrea Doria shipwreck, located off the Massachusetts coast.
During that chaotic and near-disastrous trip, Rush reportedly threw the vessel’s controls at Lochridge in a fit of rage after a passenger asked that someone else pilot the submersible when, Lochridge said, Stockton rushed the craft too close to the wreck, got into difficulty and panicked, then would not cede control until the tearful passenger yelled at him.
The US Coast Guard hearing to investigate the Titan tragedy comes more than a year after the submersible experienced a “catastrophic implosion” deep underwater under intense ocean pressure on its way to the Titanic wreck at the bottom of the north Atlantic.
Five people, including Rush, were killed in the June 2023 incident. The other victims were the British explorer Hamish Harding; the British businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman; and the French diver Paul-Henri Nargeolet.