OceanGate whistleblower’s haunting prediction about deadly trip revealed

A former OceanGate employee warned safety concerns with the company’s Titanic submersible could have deadly consequences in an ominous ego calling out CEO Stockton Rush’s “ego”.

David Lochridge, OceanGate’s director of marine operations from 2015 to 2018, was asked by Rush to conduct a quality inspection after safety issues with the Titan were raised. During this process, Mr Lochridge “identified numerous issues that posed serious safety concerns” but he was allegedly “met with hostility and denial of access” to necessary documents, according to a lawsuit he brought in 2018 after he was terminated.

Bombshell emails reported by The New Yorker show Mr Lochridge’s desperate attempts to expose safety issues with the Titan, five years before it imploded while on a 12,500-foot dive to the wreck of the Titanic with five passengers, including Rush, aboard last month.

“I don’t want to be seen as a Tattle tale but I’m so worried he kills himself and others in the quest to boost his ego,” Mr Lochridge wrote in an email to expedition leader and dive master Rob McCallum. “… I would consider myself pretty ballsy when it comes to doing things that are dangerous, but that sub is an accident waiting to happen.”

“There’s no way on earth you could have paid me to dive the thing,” another email by Mr Lochridge read.

In 2018, leaders in the submarine industry wrote a letter from the Marine Technology Society to the company warning of “catastrophic” issues with the submarine’s development.

Three dozen signatories including executives, oceanographers, and explorers expressed “unanimous concern”, particularly with the company’s decision not to seek outside evaluation and testing.

“While this may demand additional time and expense,” the signatories wrote in the letter, which was obtained by The New York Times. “It is our unanimous view that this validation process by a third party is a critical component in the safeguards that protect all submersible occupants.”

In a 2019 blog post, the company defended its decision not to have its sub “classed” by an outside evaluator.

“The vast majority of marine (and aviation) accidents are a result of operator error, not mechanical failure,” it reads. “As a result, simply focusing on classing the vessel does not address the operational risks. Maintaining high-level operational safety requires constant, committed effort and a focused corporate culture – two things that OceanGate takes very seriously and that are not assessed during classification.”

That same year, Mr Rush, the CEO, told Smithsonian Magazine that submarine regulations were stifling innovation.

“There hasn’t been an injury in the commercial sub industry in over 35 years. It’s obscenely safe, because they have all these regulations,” he said. “But it also hasn’t innovated or grown – because they have all these regulations.”

Pakistani billionaire Shahzada Dawood, 48, and his 19-year-old son Suleman are pictured arm in arm and appear excited to board the sub, which suffered a “catastrophic implosion” less than two hours into a dive to the Titanic wreckage killing all five crew on board.

The beaming pair wear matching hi-vis orange jackets, vests, gloves and helmets in the photo, which was reportedly shot from the Polar Prince support ship shortly before the 18 June dive.
Christine Dawood, Shahzada’s widow, told the New York Times that she and her 17-year-old daughter Alina were on board the support ship when the Titan departed for the famous shipwreck. The $250,000-per-ticket trip had been a Father’s Day celebration, she said.

A family friend of a British billionaire who perished in the tragic implosion of the Titan last week has shared her desperate efforts to help in the failed rescue of the submersible’s crew.

Several investigations by international maritime agencies have been launched to determine the potential malfunctions that led to the deaths of OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, British pilot Hamish Harding, renowned French diver Paul-Henri Nargeolet and Pakistani businessman Shahzeda Dawood and his 19-year-old son Suleman.

Before hopes of a miracle rescue were dashed when debris from the Titan was found 1,600ft from the bow of the Titanic on 22 June, the US Coast Guard had led a frantic four-day search for the missing crew with help from American, Canadian and French deep-sea robots and ships.

The agency had warned before the tragic developments that even if the sub was located, there was no guarantee that a rescue operation would be successful due to the conditions on the ocean floor.

Tracy Ryan, a close friend of Harding’s wife Linda, has now revealed that she was “working behind the scenes” trying to get a remote-operated submarine capable of reaching the Titanic wreck to join the search for the doomed Titan.

“When I heard it was Hamish my heart dropped to my stomach,” Ms Ryan told People, in an exclusive interview. “I had been working behind the scenes for four days to get the Magellan sub there and get their permits approved because they did have the capabilities to dive all the way down to the site.”

The widow of a Pakistani tycoon who lost both her husband and son after their submersible imploded in the depths of the Atlantic Ocean has opened up about her grief.

More than a week after all five passengers on an expedition aboard the Titan sub were killed, their families continue to reel from the tragedy as international marine authorities have launched multi-agency probes to determine what caused the catastrophic implosion.

Speaking at a televised memorial last week, Christine Dawood, whose husband Shahzada Dawood and 19-year-old son Suleman Dawood were among the victims, said the expedition to the Titanic meant the world for father and son, who she described as true explorers who bonded over their love for adventure.

“These two best friends embarked upon this last voyage, their final journey together,” Ms Dawood told Sky News through tears. “These past few days have been incredibly challenging as a family … Emotions from excitement to shock to hope and finally despair and grief.”

The owners of Titanic sought to limit liability following the ship’s sinking by petitioning under 1851 legislation.

The owners of the submersible lost on its dive to visit that famed ship’s wreckage may do the same thing, legal experts tell The Independent’s Sheila Flynn:

OceanGate Expeditions CEO Stockton Rush dismissed concerns about a “really loud bang” during a previous dive on the doomed Titan submersible.

Rush was filmed speaking to passengers for an episode of BBC’s The Travel Show in 2022 when he mentioned that a crew member had heard a troubling sound come from the sub while it was on the ocean surface.

He said the noise was “not a soothing sound” but downplayed the danger, adding that “almost every deep-sea sub makes a noise at some point.”

It’s unclear what caused the noise, but former OceanGate employees and industry experts have said they repeatedly raised concerns about the Titan’s construction since it imploded on a dive to the Titanic wreckage, killing Rush and four others on board.

The sub’s “experimental” carbon-fibre hull wasn’t suitable for extreme depths in deep-sea exploration, and glue had leaked from the seams of ballast bags, whistleblowers said.

The Titan had not been independently certified.

The trend of the world’s wealthiest paying above the odds for high-risk adventures is nothing new.

Gabriella Le Breton investigates the elite’s age-old obsession with discovering the furthest – and most dangerous – corners of the globe:

The search for the missing Titan submersible fully captured the world’s attention, from reports of mysterious “banging” noises to estimates of how much oxygen may have been left in the underwater vessel.

On 18 June, the OceanGate Expeditions submersible Titan was beginning its trip to visit the Titanic wreckage at a depth of 12,500ft. About one hour and 45 minutes into its deep dive, the submersible lost communications with its surface ship, the Polar Prince, and was believed to have suffered a “catastrophic implosion”.

The search for the submersible captured the attention of millions, as phrases such as “Titan” and hashtags like #OceanGate dominated Twitter’s top trending and TikTok For You Pages. According to Dr Justin D’Arienzo – a clinical psychologist in Jacksonville, Florida and former US Navy psychologist – the reason the public has been so invested is down to our desire to relate to others that sustains our obsession.

“We all can relate to that feeling of being trapped somewhere or being in the water or experiencing that level of uncertainty,” he tells The Independent. “What makes it so relatable is that we all could imagine being helpless with other humans and not know what to do.”

Of course, many people would argue the opposite. OceanGate Inc, the company that owns and operates OceanGate Expeditions, offers people the chance to join a crew in a five-person submersible for the price of $250,000 – a number that very few people have just lying around.

“People paying $250,000 to go into a tube that’s going to go underwater, there is some obsession with rich and famous people. We’re sensitized to voyeurism in that regard,” says D’Arienzo. “We quickly follow people who we see are powerful; we give them more leeway. There’s a reason that we follow the lifestyles of the rich and famous.”