OceanGate whistleblower traces the roots of his concerns about Titan sub to a crash
Whistleblower David Lochridge said today that his concerns about OceanGate and its approach to undersea exploration began long before the company built the submersible that imploded last year during a dive to the Titanic shipwreck.
Lochridge referred back to 2016, when OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush crashed a different submersible called Cyclops 1 into the wreck of the Andrea Doria while Lochridge watched.
“He basically drove it full speed into the port side of the bow, and we could hear the cracking of the fairing as he got us jammed in underneath,” Lochridge recalled. “I’m not going to say how foul my language was, but it wasn’t good.”
At the time, the Andrea Doria expedition was hailed as a momentous achievement for OceanGate. But for Lochridge, a veteran submersible pilot who had joined the company months earlier, it was the start of a sour relationship with Rush.
During the second day of Coast Guard hearings into last year’s loss of OceanGate’s Titan submersible and its five-person crew, Lochridge traced how he tried to sound the alarm about what he saw as lapses in Titan’s design and construction — and how he ran into resistance at the Everett, Wash.-based company.
In 2018, as the first version of Titan was taking shape, Lochridge wrote up a critical report about the project, and soon afterward, he was fired from his position as OceanGate’s director of marine operations. When Lochridge filed a whistleblower complaint from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, that sparked a messy legal dispute.
“My wife and I were served a settlement and release from OceanGate’s attorneys, basically threatening us,” Lochridge told investigators at the Marine Investigation Board’s hearing in North Charleston, S.C. After months of wrangling, they agreed to a settlement that forced Lochridge to abandon his countersuit against OceanGate and withdraw his whistleblower claim.
Lochridge said he wished OSHA had been more supportive of his claim.
“OSHA failed not only my family financially and emotionally, but stood by and did nothing to prevent further acts of retaliation from OceanGate whilst under the Seaman’s Protection Act,” said Lochridge, who read from a prepared statement. “I believe that if OSHA had attempted to investigate the seriousness of the concerns I raised on multiple occasions, this tragedy may have been prevented.”
Lochridge’s concerns were borne out a year after he was fired, when a crack in Titan’s carbon-composite hull was detected during a series of deep-water tests in the Bahamas. OceanGate replaced the hull and went ahead with dives to the Titanic starting in 2021 — but at today’s hearing, Lochridge pointed out that many of the components were carried over from the earlier version of the submersible.
“They reused these domes, they reused the sealant faces, they reused the acrylic, they reused the interior. Everything was reused,” he told the Coast Guard’s Marine Investigation Board. “It’s all cost. Now, I wasn’t there for that, but I know firsthand, everything was reused.”
Lochridge’s tussles with OceanGate, and particularly with Stockton Rush, came into the spotlight after last year’s catastrophic implosion of the Titan sub.
Five crew members died in last year’s incident, including Rush, who was Titan’s pilot for the Titanic expeditions. The other four were veteran Titanic explorer P.H. Nargeolet, British aviation executive and adventurer Hamish Harding, Pakistani-born business executive Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son, Suleman.
The tragedy didn’t come as a surprise to Lochridge. “It was inevitable something was going to happen,” he said at today’s hearing. “It was just [a question of] when.’
A bad day at the Andrea Doria
Lochridge’s account of the Andrea Doria expedition in 2016 hinted at issues that investigators say contributed to the last year’s loss. He said Rush insisted on piloting the Cyclops 1 submersible for the dive off the coast of Nantucket — but ran into trouble when he tried to maneuver the sub off its dive platform.
“He didn’t do it very well,” Lochridge said. “He ended up bending the dive skids on the bottom.”
Lochridge’s plan for the dive called for staying 50 meters (164 feet) away from the Andrea Doria, but he said Rush headed straight for the 60-year-old shipwreck.
“I kept saying, please keep your distance. ‘Don’t tell me what to do’ … That was the conversation,” Lochridge said. “He came straight down hard on the bottom. No trimming, no ballast, nothing. Smashed straight down on the bottom.”
According to Lochridge, Rush steered the sub up and around, ran into the wreck and started to panic. Lochridge said he tried to take hold of the converted video-game controller that was used to steer Cyclops 1, but “every time I went to take the controller from him, he pushed it further and further behind him inside the submersible itself.”
Eventually, one of the mission specialists in the sub spoke up. “She shouted at Stockton to give me the effing controller,” Lochridge said.
Lochridge said Rush threw the controller at him and “clattered it off the right side of my head.”
When the device hit the deck, one of the buttons came off the controller, Lochridge said. “I picked it up, repaired it, and had us out in 10, 15 minutes,” he said. Rush and the others in the sub were relieved to be free of the wreck, Lochridge said, but bad feelings lingered long afterward because he had “embarrassed the CEO on the Andrea Doria wreck.”
“At a point, he stopped talking to me,” Lochridge said.
Further frictions at OceanGate
Lochridge said he also had a rocky relationship with Tony Nissen, who was OceanGate’s director of engineering at the time and took charge of the design and development of the Titan submersible. (NIssen testified during Monday’s hearing.)
During the early phase of the Titan development effort, the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Laboratory provided engineering assistance, but in mid-2016, the relationship with UW was discontinued. Lochridge said he was frozen out as well.
“Unfortunately, after the incident on the Andrea Doria, I was phased out of the project completely,” Lochridge said. “I was told everything was going to be getting done in house with Tony Nissen and his team, who I had no confidence in whatsoever.”
Although Lochridge wasn’t directly involved in Titan’s development, Rush did ask him to conduct an inspection of Titan once it was built, in his role as director of marine operations. Lochridge wasn’t reassured by what he saw.
“I looked at everything — and there wasn’t anything, and I mean anything on that build or pre-build, basically, when the components were there, that gave me any confidence in them producing an efficient product,” he said.
The ability of the carbon-composite hull to hold up under deep-ocean pressure was a major concern. Lochridge noted there were gaps in the pieces of material trimmed off the hull’s edges that were big enough to shine a light through. He was also concerned about the strength of the sub’s acrylic viewport, and the resilience of the seals between the hull and the sub’s titanium domes.
Lochridge said he recommended further testing — with the goal of having the submersible certified, or “classed,” by Lloyd’s Register or a similar standards organization. “The submersible was meant to be classed,” he said. “Part of that classification process is to do unmanned pressure testing of not only the viewport … but the hull itself.”
Rush was opposed to classing the Titan sub, even after the first hull was found to be incapable of withstanding Titanic-level pressures. In a 2019 online posting that has since been deleted, OceanGate argued that the classing process was too slow to accommodate the types of innovations that went into Titan.
“Bringing an outside entity up to speed on every innovation before it is put into real-world testing is anathema to rapid innovation,” OceanGate said back then. “For example, Space X, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic all rely on experienced inside experts to oversee the daily operations, testing and validation versus bringing in outsiders who need to first be educated before being qualified to ‘validate’ any innovations.”
OceanGate’s executives dismissed Lochridge’s concerns, which set the stage for his dismissal, the legal mess that followed — and, arguably, last year’s tragedy. Which naturally leads to a question that was asked during the hearing: Why was the advice from an experienced inside expert of Lochridge’s caliber so often ignored?
“Cost cutting, bad engineering decisions,” Lochridge said. “I’d say that’s the two main things. The desire to get to the Titanic as quickly as they could, to start making profit. I knew nothing about the financial side of things, but there was a big push to get this done, and a lot of steps along the way were missed.”
Lochridge acknowledged that he himself wasn’t immune to the Titanic’s allure.
“I wanted to go to the Titanic,” he told the investigation board. “It was on my bucket list, but I wanted to do it safely.”
The board’s next session is due to start at 8:30 a.m. ET (5:30 a.m. PT) Thursday, and will be livestreamed: