The recent investigation into OceanGate, the company behind the Titan Sub, has unveiled new
information about the safety practices and navigation methods employed by OceanGate.
During a series of hearings that are being conducted by the U.S. Coast Guard’s Marine Board of investigation in late September, former OceanGate employees and contractors provided testimonies that have raised serious questions about the company’s operational procedures. One of the significant reports came from David Lochridge, a former engineer at OceanGate, who testified that he had warned the company about the submersibles safety issues prior to its final voyage. During the hearing, when asked about his confidence in the way that the sub was being built back in 2017, Lochridge stated he had “no confidence whatsoever, and I was very vocal about that, and still am.” He was subsequently fired in 2018 after filing a report where he stated his concerns with the carbon fiber hull.
The investigation also revealed that OceanGate’s navigation methods were alarmingly basic. Antonella Wilby, a former contractor for OceanGate, testified that the company relied on a combination of pen, paper, and Microsoft Excel to track the submersibles location. “There were delays because there was this manual process of first writing down the lat-long coordinates and then typing them in,” Wilby said. Once they put the data into excel, it was then imported into a special mapping software, which they tried to do every 5 minutes, but it was a lot to do.”
The disclosure of this information has sparked outrage and concern within the maritime and engineering communities. The Titan submersible, which was on a mission on June 18th 2023 to explore the wreckage of the Titanic, tragically exploded, killing all five people on board. The victims included the CEO Stockton Rush, British billionaire Hamish Harding, French diving expert, Paul-Henri Nargeolet, and Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son, Suleman.
It appears the implosion of the Titan submersible was caused by a sequence of errors in the engineering process, and cost cutting measures that resulted in the death of five individuals, but the investigation is still ongoing.