‘Absolutely shocking': Netflix documentary examines how the Titan sub disaster happened

The Guardian

a day ago

If you were sentient in the summer of 2023, you probably remember the feverish speculation, vicarious horror, snap consternation and armchair sleuthing after the disappearance of the submersible called Titan during a commercial voyage to the wreck of the Titanic. The Titan sub disaster was inescapable for weeks as the story evolved from critical rescue mission – the best-case scenario being a mechanical failure deep in the North Atlantic with 96 hours of oxygen for the five passengers, which you better believe became a countdown clock on cable news – to tragic recovery operation.
The sub, it turned out, had imploded at 3,300 meters beneath the surface, 90 minutes into a dive that was supposed to reach 3,800 meters deep. All five passengers – British explorer Hamish Harding, British-Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son Suleman, French diver Paul-Henri Nargeolet and submersible owner Stockton Rush – were killed instantly.
Even as the search for the sub, whose wreckage was eventually returned to land, continued in earnest, concerning reports about the safety record at OceanGate, the company which operated the vehicle, began to emerge: that a whistleblower had declared implosion of the sub's trademark carbon fiber hull a mathematical certainty years earlier. That Rush, the company's founder and CEO, pursued commercial voyages anyway, eluding any type of third-party certification. For the majority of the public, the story ended along those lines: a preventable tragedy, another sin of human hubris at arguably the most famous shrine to the folly of human hubris in history.
That is not wrong; according to the new Netflix documentary Titan: The OceanGate Disaster, the sub's implosion was virtually guaranteed by its design. 'I'm convinced, based on the research and the discussions that I've had, that the submersible Titan could have imploded at any time,' said the film's director, Mark Monroe. In fact, it was 'absolutely shocking' that Titan made as many successful dives – 80 attempts, 13 to Titanic depth, between 2021 and 2022 – as it did. But for those who either worked at OceanGate, were tasked with the investigation or loved someone lost on board, the story is much more complicated, and concerning, than a design flaw.
Another film would proceed through an exact timeline of Titan's final mission on 18 June, 2023; include footage of the wreckage or diagrams of its descent coordinated to text messages sent to its surface-level team; play the audio of its implosion, recorded 900 miles away by a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration device; or allow viewers to see Rush's wife Wendy hear the implosion, whose sound reached its support ship, Polar Prince, before their last text message, allowing them to mistakenly assume the sub was fine. The Netflix film, made by the veteran production company Story Syndicate, doesn't do any of that, eschewing a Seconds from Disaster-type narrative and instead focusing on the nearly decade-long procession toward disaster, through numerous decisions prizing flashy ambition over safety.
'It's scarier, in a way, to understand the decision-making over the 10-year period that led to that moment,' said Monroe. 'I feel pretty strongly if the civilians' – the paying customers OceanGate called 'mission specialists' to skirt around commercial maritime safety regulations – 'had seen the decisions made along the way, they would have been a lot more reticent to get into that submersible. And I think that was not clear, or made clear, to the public.'
With access to company footage, data, files and several former employees and whistleblowers, the 111-minute documentary paints a fuller picture of a company with idealistic ambition and plenty of scientific backing – at least at first. Founded outside Seattle in 2009 by Rush, an entrepreneur with a rich family and an engineering degree, OceanGate attracted talent from the fields of engineering, diving and marine exploration with its ambition to revolutionize deep sea travel for the masses. The question of how to make deep subs, usually made of very heavy titanium steel, lighter and nimbler – and thus commercially viable – was an appealing puzzle to an array of scientists, deep-sea divers and exploration enthusiasts.
It's what drew David Lochridge, a highly experienced submersible pilot, to uproot his family and move to Everett, Washington, to become OceanGate's operations director. In the film, Lochridge explains that he didn't initially understand, on a technical level, OceanGate's answer to the lightweight, deep-sea sub conundrum: carbon fiber, a lightweight but high-strength composite material of tightly pack carbon threads cemented with resin, used in everything from sports cars to deluxe skis. But in time, the material's problems became clear. For one, carbon fiber had never been tested at extreme depths, and thus had no reliable safety record. And two, its integrity naturally degrades with repeated use. 'There is a fatigue aspect to carbon fiber – once you use it, it won't be as good the next time you use it, by increments,' Monroe explained.
The documentary includes ample footage from OceanGate's years-long test phase, as various carbon fiber designs failed in experiments simulating high pressure. Nevertheless, Rush persisted, dismissing safety concerns from engineers on staff and continuing to insist to credulous media that commercial ventures to the Titanic were soon within reach. Lochridge and others attest to Rush's hardheaded approach, at times openly hostile to any intra-company dissent. He openly admired Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, expressing a desire to, as one employee recalled, be a 'big swinging dick'.
In that vein, Rush claimed to be working with Boeing, Nasa and the University of Washington, though no formal partnerships existed. (In fact, a Boeing engineer involved in Titan's early designs emailed Rush in March 2012: 'We think you are at high risk of a significant failure at or before you reach 4,000 meters. We do not think you have any safety margin.') Rush also elected to withhold any OceanGate craft from third-party safety inspections, the industry standard for submersibles.
That decision proved to be a breaking point for several employees; Lochridge was fired after he inspected Titan himself, and said in a written report to Rush that he had no confidence in the submersible. The documentary includes remarkable audio of a 2018 senior staff meeting in which Rush fires Lochridge and quashes his concerns as a discrepancy of vision – 'I don't want anybody in this company who is uncomfortable with what we're doing. We're doing weird shit here and I am definitely out of the mold. There's no question. I am doing things that are completely non-standard.'
'There is a danger in the kind of cult of personality, particularly the tech bro, 'move fast and break things,'' Monroe said. 'When other people's lives are in the balance, I think we should all take a step back and be careful about that. It's one thing to put unmanned spacecraft into space, but you're taking money to provide an expedition.'
One has to wonder, given all the dissent, given the fact that the sub would produce loud cracking sounds with each descent (which Rush called, unscientifically, the carbon fiber 'seasoning' with use) – did the CEO actually believe it was safe? 'I'm not in Stockton's mind, so I don't know,' said Monroe. But he took into account Rush's public personality as a maverick, the media tailwinds in his favor. 'When you say you're going to go to Titanic in a new submersible that no one's ever done before, and the sound of your own voice resonates year after year while you're trying to figure out how to do it, I think there's a pressure that builds, that suggests 'I have to do this.''
What is clear, from numerous interviews, was that 'if you went against the boss, there were going to be repercussions.' Lochridge knows this well; after he filed a whistleblower complaint with the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (Osha), OceanGate sued him for improperly disclosing confidential information to regulators. The legal costs, and Osha's protracted investigation, forced him to withdraw his complaint, ending what could have been the one regulatory oversight on the company.
OceanGate continued apace; the film lingers only briefly on the dive in 2022 which seemed to damage the sub, even according to the company's own 'real-time monitoring system'. Titan imploded on its next dive to Titanic depths a year later, after several aborted attempts due to inclement weather. Though the 'delamination' of the carbon fiber hull is the presumed cause, the US Coast Guard's official written report, including recommendations for the prevention of a similar tragedy, has yet to be publicly released. 'I don't know what those recommendations could be,' said Monroe, 'but you would think they would have to do with how to run an experimental submersible when offering it to the public.'
Such as, perhaps, oversight, or a healthier sense of skepticism when the only safety assurances come from the company itself. Rush 'believed in the ethos of move fast and break things. Rules don't apply when you want to change the way things work,' said Monroe. 'That's dangerous when other people's lives are at stake. There are certain rules that do apply, like the rules of physics, the rules of science – these rules do apply to all of us.'
Titan: The OceanGate Disaster is now available on Netflix