OceanGate's former chief pilot says he was 'cut out' from the Titan project after telling CEO Stockton Rush the sub wasn't safe

Business Insider

21 hours ago

The former chief pilot of OceanGate said the company's CEO ignored his warnings that the Titan submersible — which was destroyed in a deadly implosion — was unsafe.
David Lochridge made the claim in Netflix's new documentary, "Titan: The OceanGate Disaster." It examines what went wrong in the run-up to the Titan's visit to the wreck of the Titanic, which ended in the CEO of OceanGate, Stockton Rush, and four others dying onboard.
Lochridge recalled just how determined Rush was to achieve his goal of making deep-sea tourism a reality.
The documentary features archival footage of Rush and his team building submersibles, including the Titan. In one clip taken from an interview with CBS, Rush says: "By the time we're done testing it, I believe it's pretty much invulnerable."
Lochridge was OceanGate's director of marine operations and the company's chief pilot from 2015 to 2018. He recalled how in 2016, Rush chartered a dive with the Titan's predecessor, the Cyclops 1 submarine, to see the SS Andrea Doria wreck off the coast of Massachusetts. The ship sank in 1956 after colliding with the SS Stockholm due to heavy fog.
Lochridge said he had to persuade Stockton to let him accompany him on the voyage, which included paying passengers, after he decided to pilot it himself.
Footage from inside the Cyclops during the dive, featured in the documentary, shows Rush piloting the submarine into a debris field underneath the bow of the Andrea Doria. The craft gets stuck, and Lochridge takes over the controls to pilot it to safety.
"He had us jammed good and proper. I said to him, 'Please don't do anything. Just give me the controller.' He didn't have a lot of experience in piloting subs," Lochridge said.
"At that point, I got us clear, I motored us 50 meters away, turned us round and I said 'That is what we were supposed to have fucking done on the dive,'" he added.
Lochridge said that after the crew resurfaced, Rush's attitude toward him changed.
"The passengers were hugging, but with Stockton, it was a complete turnaround for me. He never really spoke to me the rest of the trip. The dynamic changed. After the Andrea Doria, I started getting cut out by senior management from the Titan project. I was dropped from all email communications, verbal communications. I was totally out of the loop," he said.
Lochridge said he was fired two years later in 2018 after he discussed his safety concerns with Rush in a meeting about the Andrea Doria incident.
In 2023, OceanGate threatened to sue Lochridge if he didn't withdraw his allegations to the US Department of Labor that he was fired in retaliation for raising these concerns.
In the documentary, Lochridge said that he was worried about the stability of Titan's carbon fiber hull and the caliber of the design team working on the project.
He said: "I was seeing every single piece, and pretty much every single piece had an issue. The engineering director, Tony Nissen, we used to argue on a regular basis. He brought in people with very little experience from the manned submersible industry. A lot of them were fresh out of college."
"At the time, I had no experience with carbon fiber, but for the untrained eye, it was like Swiss cheese. You could actually see the porosity, you could see the delaminations, you could see all the voids," he continued, referring to the separation of layers.
Nissen also appears in the documentary and said he was pressured by Rush to "make sure nobody spoke up."
Footage from 2018 also shows Rush arguing with Lochridge as he believed that the submarine could handle pressure at the extreme depths.
"What you do is you set a testing program where you do it incrementally. It's not just going to go to 3100 [metres] and be perfect, and at 3200 [metres] it all goes anyway. That ain't going to happen, and I will put my life on the line to say that ain't going to happen," he said.
OceanGate ceased operations in July 2023 and could not be reached for comment.