Netflix documentary about Titan sub disaster reveals moment CEO fired pilot for raising security concerns
A new Netflix documentary about the Titan Sub disaster has uncovered a recording that reveals the moment late OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush fired a member of staff for raising security concerns.
Titan: The OceanGate Disaster focuses heavily on what eventually led the Titan sub to implode, killing the five people inside.
Stockton Rush was among the five to die in the sub that took paying passengers down to see the wreckage of the Titanic in June 2023.
The Netflix documentary includes a recording of the moment that Rush fired his former Director of Marine Operations, David Lochridge.
Lochridge, an experienced diver and submersible pilot, says Rush told him at the very last minute that he wanted to be the one to pilot the sub for the dive.
When Lochridge pushed back he was overruled, but convinced the late CEO to allow him to join the expedition.
Footage from inside the sub shows how Rush, a comparably inexperienced pilot, almost crashes the sub into a debris field, forcing Lochridge to have to step in.
In the documentary, he claimed that he was then 'frozen out' of meetings and senior decisions by the CEO.
Lochridge said: '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 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 also described how the sub was made from carbon fibre, suggesting it was an unsuitable material to make a submersible from.
Lochridge went on to claim he was the 'only person' to stand up to Rush over security and engineering
The late CEO had decided he did not see the need to classify the Titan sub, and said he was happy for Lochridge to do an inspection of it.
The former OceanGate Director of Marine Operations described how he sent an email with his inspection notes, including his concerns around the submersible.
The next day Lochridge was brought into a meeting, the recording of which is shared for the first time in the Netflix doc.
Rush seems noticeably agitated in the recording, suggesting that anyone who said carbon fibre couldn't work for a deep sea submersible was 'full of s**t'.
He goes on to say: 'I don't want anyone in this company who is uncomfortable with what we're doing.'
'It was about the decision-making that led to their deaths,' director Mark Monroe says of Titan documentary, which traces the events and key decisions that culminated in the disaster.
Official investigations into the Titan disaster began shortly after the incident, with inquiries launched by both the United States Coast Guard and the Transportation Safety Board of Canada as the vessel was operated by a US company and launched from a Canadian ship.
The US Department of Justice is examining OceanGate's financial practices. But the Coast Guard's Marine Board of Investigation has yet to release its final report.
But according to the director, the investigations are now in a "holding pattern".
The Titan submersible imploded due to structural failure during its descent to the Titanic wreck.
The documentary shows how the novel use of carbon fibre in the hull of the craft, coupled with other questionable engineering decisions, raised alarms for many OceanGate employees.
In particular, the film highlights the inadequacies of OceanGate's acoustic monitoring system, designed to identify weak points in Titan's hull in real time.
The documentary includes portions of Karl Stanley's September 2024 testimony before the US Coast Guard Marine Board of Investigation.
In April 2019, Stanley, a deep-sea diving expert, went on one of OceanGate's first crewed dives of a prototype submersible in the Bahamas, and reported hearing cracking sounds in the hull.
In the film, Keith Fawcett, a Coast Guard technical adviser, asks Stanley if he partook in 'any meeting where the results of the real-time monitoring acoustic sensors were examined by the group and tried to isolate where the sound occurred?'
'That information was not shared with me,' Stanley replies.
Monroe believes the Coast Guard thinks OceanGate 'didn't even look at the data. OceanGate has this thing they're promoting as this state-of-the-art unparalleled safety mechanism.'
Taking note of the acoustic monitoring system picking up additional fibres breaking across the dives leading up to Titan's 88th and final voyage, lead Coast Guard investigator Captain Jason Neubauer notes in the documentary, 'That should've been a warning. In the end [OceanGate] discounted the one system that was going to be vital to their operation. It is really in my mind like the smoking gun of what eventually caused this.'
16 minutes after communications from the Titan ceased, an unexpected sound reached an underwater recording device 900 miles from the Titanic wreck.
'Science tells us that when an implosion of that scale happens in the ocean, it makes a humongous noise,' Monroe says.
'The Navy has acoustic monitoring throughout the oceans. We know how sound travels in water, and we know that if a thing is 900 miles away, it's going to be about 16 minutes for that noise to reach the recording device. My belief was that's most likely the sound, and so to include it felt like resolution, definitive, some feeling of, 'that's what happened.' '
Titan: The OceanGate Disaster is available to watch on Netflix now.
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