As CEO of OceanGate, Stockton Rush was known for breaking rules and disregarding safety
regulations.
But with so many red flags prior to the Titan sub's deadly voyage, some are wondering if
it could have been prevented.
Stockton Rush was enamored with the Titanic wreck.
He spoke about it in reverent terms, and his determination to make the wreck accessible
to tourists was matched only by his passion for innovation.
The Titan was an experimental craft.
It had not been evaluated or classed by any regulatory body, and some of the materials
used in its construction were unconventional.
In particular, the craft had a hull constructed from carbon fiber — a material which has
not been extensively tested or graded for use in submersibles.
In 2015, while Rush was designing the Titan, he consulted with submersible company DOER
Marine Operations.
Its president, Liz Taylor, spoke with ABC News in the aftermath of the Titan's implosion,
and what she had to say was astonishing.
She told the outlet:
"We all told him, someone is going to be killed in this thing and you've got to not do it."
She also had this to say about the carbon fiber used to construct the hull:
"It's not… not the right material."
Taylor explained that the Marine Technology Society echoed her concerns in a 2018 letter
to Rush, but the CEO failed to heed their advice.
After repeated dives, the hull was even rebuilt in 2020 due to fatigue — and yet, the expeditions
to the Titanic continued.
Its carbon fiber hull was far from the only questionable aspect of the Titan's design.
A November 2022 report by CBS Sunday Morning also revealed some eye-popping details about
the craft.
Correspondent David Pogue, who had signed on to take the journey to the Titanic, stated
outright that he was nervous about the many components of the sub that seemed "improvised."
For the cameras, Rush pointed out parts of the vessel that he had purchased from RV outlet
Camper World.
He also outed the craft's "off-the-shelf" electronics, and showed Lodge that the Titan
was piloted with a video game controller.
Moreover, the controller interfaced with the steering and propulsion system using Bluetooth,
as opposed to hard wiring.
In the piece's interview segment, Pogue good-naturedly pointed out to Rush,
"It seems like this submersible has some elements of MacGyver-ing jerry-riggedness."
Rush took issue with that description, and characterized the craft's more unconventional
design elements as irrelevant to its capacity for keeping its occupants alive.
During that conversation with CBS Sunday Morning, Rush got relatively explicit when talking
about the level of engineering that had gone into the Titan's design.
Following up on Pogue's assertion that the craft seemed kind of slapped together, Rush
said,
"There's certain things that you want to be buttoned down.
So, the pressure vessel ... is where we worked with Boeing and NASA and the University of
Washington."
This was not the first time that Rush had invoked those institutions in touting the
safety of his design.
In fact, a now-defunct page on the company's website asserted that the Titan had been designed
and engineered "in collaboration" with those very entities.
This, however, was not accurate.
As the search for the Titan was ongoing, all three of those institutions issued public
statements distancing themselves from the design and engineering aspects of OceanGate's
endeavors.
As the Titan was nearing its maiden voyage, one of OceanGate's employees issued a report
that should have been a major roadblock to its deployment.
David Lochridge carried the title of Director of Marine Operations and was the submersible's
chief pilot.
In his report, he took Rush to task for failing to properly test the carbon fiber hull.
He pointed out that a scale model had displayed "prevalent flaws."
His report also noted that the carbon fiber of the hull was visibly stressed in a way
that could easily lead to catastrophic failure under the enormous pressures of the deep sea.
He further stated that the sub's acoustic monitoring system for detecting impending
failure was insufficient, and would not provide enough advance warning to make a difference.
Alarmingly, Lochridge opened his report by stating that its purpose was to establish
a written record of his concerns, seeing as they were "dismissed" when he expressed them
verbally.
Rush's response to the report was swift.
He fired Lochridge and filed a lawsuit against him.
The lawsuit claimed that Lochridge had violated his non-disclosure agreement by raising his
concerns with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
Lochridge promptly filed a countersuit, and while the dueling suits were eventually settled,
those concerns were never properly addressed.
"OceanGate shouldn't have been doing what it was doing.
I think that's pretty clear."
The assertions made by David Lochridge about the Titan's safety issues were downright diplomatic
compared to those made by his former co-worker, Rob McCallum.
McCallum had previously owned a company that conducted Titanic expeditions, and helped
plan the Titan's expeditions.
However, he departed the company after Rush decided to not have the craft evaluated by
classing agencies.
In 2018, after hearing of Lochridge's departure, McCallum shot him an email.
And what Lochridge had to say floored him.
Lochridge wrote:
"That sub is not safe to dive.
It's a lemon."
An alarmed McCallum then emailed Rush to state his concerns.
He wrote:
"You are wanting to use a prototype un-classed technology in a very hostile place.
You are potentially putting an entire industry at risk."
Rush's response was both shocking and, in light of the Titan's eventual fate, tragic.
He wrote back:
"We have heard the baseless cries of 'you are going to kill someone' way too often.
I take this as a serious personal insult."
If the claims of another unnamed former OceanGate employee are accurate, Stockton Rush's unwillingness
to listen to anybody who had anything negative to say about the Titan was symptomatic of
a cavalier attitude toward all aspects of the project.
In a piece by The New Yorker, the former employee, who was OceanGate's director of finance and
administration, revealed that after Lochridge was terminated, she was approached by Rush
to take over as the vessel's lead pilot.
She told The New Yorker:
"It freaked me out that he would want me to be head pilot, since my background is in accounting."
She added that at this point, OceanGate was also largely staffed with engineers who were
also unqualified.
As she noted, some staffers were just teenagers making 15 dollars per hour.
Alarmed by the absence of anyone willing to challenge Rush, she began searching for another
job.
As soon as she got an offer, she quit OceanGate.
There are few more hostile environments than the depths of the ocean.
So in building vessels capable of exploring those depths, there are no corners to be cut.
That, however, didn't seem to stop Stockton Rush from cutting a few anyway — notably
in the design of the Titan's electronics.
In fact, those systems were designed not by experienced engineers, but by a team of interns
composed of recent graduates of the University of Washington's School of Engineering.
Unbelievably, though, this was far from the most significant corner to be cut.
In a Travel Weekly blog post, editor-in-chief Arnie Weissman revealed that Rush admitted
to him that the carbon fiber used in the Titan's hull was acquired from Boeing at a steep discount.
Rush then told him he was able to get the carbon fiber for a cheaper price because it
was past its shelf life for use in aircraft.
Rush made the revelations to Weissman ahead of his participation in a planned 2023 Titanic
expedition, which was ultimately canceled due to bad weather.
It should be noted that private companies that build marine vessels are in no way exempt
from regulatory oversight.
In order to avoid such oversight, Stockton Rush had to go to some pretty extreme lengths.
He did this by taking precautionary measures to ensure that OceanGate would not face serious
repercussions even if its clients were to face injury or death.
Those measures, as described in The New Yorker piece, were wide-ranging and numerous.
Although the Titan was constructed in the United States, it was registered in the Bahamas,
and operated only in international waters.
So it was outside the jurisdiction of U.S. law.
Furthermore, OceanGate's clients did not purchase its services.
They made contributions, so they were not classified as passengers.
According to Rob McCallum, the reason for this is simple, as it virtually absolved OceanGate
of liability even if the worst were to happen.
He told The New Yorker:
"Under U.S. regulations, you can kill crew.
[...] But, if you kill a passenger, you're in big trouble.
And so everyone was classified as a 'mission specialist.'"
"And we're funded by, we call mission specialists, who support the mission."
One blatant sign of trouble that might have compelled any of the doomed "mission specialists"
to bail on the Titan's final trip was the large number of folks who did just that.
In the years leading up to the disaster, several potential customers canceled their trips,
with virtually all of them citing safety concerns as the primary reason.
And in the wake of the Titan's disappearance, they began to come forward.
Speaking with CNN, Chris Brown explained why he gave up his seat on an expedition after
signing on in 2018.
He told the network:
"I ... had some reservations about the way it was being constructed.
When they weren't even intending to get certification by calling it an experiment, that's when I
thought there's just too many red flags here, so I pulled out."
Former U.S. Marine Robert Mester also turned down a seat on the Titan, citing the untested
nature of its carbon fiber hull.
And Las Vegas business mogul Jay Bloom, despite being offered a steep discount on the standard
$250,000 admission fee, also declined.
"I feel like this is, this was such a preventable tragedy."
The Titan's fateful final mission was not the first time that something had nearly gone
terribly wrong.
In 2022, as detailed by The New Yorker, a BBC documentary crew was present for one of
those missions.
On that particular mission, OceanGate director of logistics Scott Griffith was piloting the
craft with four others aboard, while Rush stayed behind on the surface vessel.
A diver accompanying the sub for the initial stage of its descent noted that something
seemed off with one of its thrusters.
However, Rush allowed the dive to continue.
Once it touched down on the ocean floor, it became quickly apparent that the diver had
been correct — the thruster had been installed improperly.
So as the Titan sat in the middle of the Titanic's highly dangerous debris field, all Griffith
could do was spin it in circles.
From the surface vessel, Rush sent down a solution: to "remap" the video game controller,
or make the buttons do different things.
Rush worked out a new configuration for the controller to make the Titan finally move
forward and backward again.
The gambit worked, and somehow, Griffith managed to pilot the craft over to the remains of
the Titanic.
Amazingly, the mission was completed without any more serious difficulty.
Of all the glaring red flags presented by Stockton Rush and his company in advance of
the Titan tragedy, perhaps the most obvious was Rush's repeated insistence that breaking
the rules is a good thing.
At a GeekWire summit in 2022, he summed up that philosophy succinctly, saying,
"If you're not breaking things, you're not innovating."
"To me, the more stuff you've broken, the more innovative you've been."
However, Rush's most egregious comments came during a November 2022 interview with David
Pogue on the Unsung Science podcast.
He said:
"You know, at some point, safety is just pure waste.
I mean, if you just want to be safe, don't get out of bed, don't get in your car, don't
do anything ... I think I can do this just as safely while breaking the rules."
Rush was obviously proven quite wrong.