Latest news with #Titan:TheOceangateDisaster
Yahoo
a day ago
- General
- Yahoo
'Titan' Sub Pilot, Who Led Trip That Killed 5, Was Like the 'Emperor Who Had No Clothes': Former Colleague (Exclusive)
Two years since OceanGate's Titan sub imploded — killing five people — and a fuller picture is now emerging about what really happened before and during tragedy "The emperor had no clothes when I arrived," former employee David Lochridge says of working with OeanGate co-founder Stockton Rush The company tells PEOPLE in a statement: "We again offer our deepest condolences to the families of those who died"David Lochridge doesn't mince words when it comes to describing his time working for Stockton Rush at the experimental diving company OceanGate, which eventually launched a doomed quest down to the Titanic in 2023 — and five people died. 'I didn't realize that they were so good at cutting corners until I actually got across there,' Lochridge tells PEOPLE in a new interview, marking one of the fist times he is speaking publicly. In the two years since OceanGate's Titan sub imploded — killing Rush, the company's co-founder, and four passengers — a fuller picture is now emerging about what really happened before and during tragedy. The U.S. Coast Guard is preparing to release a final report, after lengthy investigation. Some of those close to Rush and the victims, like Lochridge, are also speaking out, including in Netflix's new documentary Titan: The Oceangate Disaster, which premieres on Wednesday, June 11. Lochridge also appeared on the Today show on Friday, June 6. A former diver in the U.K.'s Royal Navy, he worked as OceanGate's operations director until early 2018 and says he was closely involved in the training and preparation for what the company promised to potential explorers (for a hefty fee): trips to wondrous undersea artifacts like the wreck of the Titanic off the coast of Canada. "The company needed a lot of I would say my experience put into it to be able to create this competent team, to be able to actually go out and perform this job that they wanted me to do,' Lochridge says. But 'the emperor had no clothes when I arrived." "I'll never forget this. It was Day 1 [working at OceanGate in 2016]. We landed. … Stockton, I think he was at home or at [the lab], and he stated that the new submersible Titan would not be having any underwater communications in it,' Lochridge recalls. 'I honestly thought he was joking,' he says of Rush, 'but he was deadly serious.' In the roughly two years that Lochridge was a top official at OceanGate, 'I was always met with a lot of resistance,' he says. 'But at the same time, I had to watch what I was doing. I was the new boy in the company.' He says safety warnings included more than an initial lack of concern over underwater communication. Lochridge cites the monitoring system for the Titan's novel carbon fiber hull — the same system that showed eerie cracking noises. 'If I had heard noises like that in a sub, I would never go on it again,' Lochridge says. 'Nobody would ever go on it again.' He also says some of the glue used to put components together was applied merely with spatulas. 'There was nobody there verifying that there were no voids,' he says. 'And it's like somebody putting icing on a birthday cake.' Amid the scrutiny and criticism from people like Lochridge, however, Rush and OceanGate do have defenders for the work they were attempting. (And another person who went on OceanGate dives previously pushed back on Lochridge.) "I believe that it was a noble effort," Fred Hagen, a developer who made two successful trips to the Titanic on Titan, tells PEOPLE. "The goals were to enable mankind to access the depths of the abyss and to further our understanding and to foster a sense of connectivity to the bottom of the sea, which is integral to the future of life on Earth," Hagen continues. "And Stockton took some risk and lived outside the box and paid for it with his life." Never miss a story — sign up for to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories. Lochridge's own relationship with Rush and OceanGate collapsed by early 2018 and he was fired well before the final, fatal dive. He says he sought to speak out about the company for years, behind closed doors, starting with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. 'Even during my termination, he [Rush] said, 'You know, this could fail,' — which it did,' Lochridge says, adding, 'Unfortunately, … people were in it.' In a statement to PEOPLE, OceanGate said, 'We again offer our deepest condolences to the families of those who died on June 18, 2023, and to all those impacted by the tragedy.' In the wake of the implosion, the company said, 'OceanGate permanently wound down its operations and focused its resources on fully cooperating with the investigations being conducted.' Read the original article on People
Yahoo
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Netflix announces release date for its most divisive documentary in a long time
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Netflix is no stranger to controversy, often giving platforms to divisive public figures or airing docuseries endorsing fringe views, and its upcoming documentary movie Titan could prove one of its most talked-about films this year. We'd already heard some hints about Titan, but Netflix has newly announced a release date for the movie, and provided more pointers as to what it'll be about. It'll release on Wednesday, June 11, one week shy of two years to the day that the event took place. 10+ upcoming Netflix documentaries to add to your watchlist right now Titan or to give it its full name Titan: The Oceangate Disaster, is about the 2023 destruction of the Titan submersible, which was taking five people down to the depths of the Atlantic Ocean in order to sight-see around the wreck of the Titanic. It's very likely that you followed this closely when it took place, as we all did. When it happened, public discourse was divided on the events. Some were horrified by the loss of human life and the anticlimactic rescue, with clues suggesting early on in the search for the sub that it could have survived. But others were quick to point out that the participants of the trip were all multimillionaires who were spending loads of money on the trip, and that a simultaneous loss of a migrant boat with hundreds of people feared dead was getting far less media coverage. Netflix doesn't seem to be hiding from the controversy swirling around the Titan sub — would it ever — and instead seems to be diving deep into it. According to Netflix's blog Tudum, the 110-minute documentary movie will focus on Stockton Rush, the CEO of Titan owners OceanGate, who was one of the sub's five inhabitants. It'll look at his attempts to become a billionaire through his underwater adventure company. Given the nature of the topic and how social media discussions went down two years ago, it's inevitable that Titan will reignite these conversations. So it's all but guaranteed to be a divisive documentary no matter what side of the debate it comes down on itself. It'll likely be the most divisive documentary to come to Netflix for quite a while, too. That's because the streamer's doc slate is mainly taken up with Trainwreck, a one-movie-per-week series of docs that looks at events from the headlines and dives into them in greater detail. Having looked at the line-up, none of these are nearly as divisive as the Titan submersible implosion. The only near contender could be the streamer's upcoming doc about the British Grenfell Tower fire, expected to debut at some point in 2025. I've rounded up some of Netflix's biggest upcoming documentaries here, and you can find the current best Netflix documentaries here.
