Before Implosion, “Titan ”Pilot and CEO Had Panicked Meltdown When He Crashed Into a Shipwreck: Ex-Employee
“It was unprofessional behavior of him, he started to panic,” David Lochridge testified of Stockton Rush
Wilfredo Lee/AP; Getty
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Years before he piloted the Titan submersible more than 2 miles beneath the surface of the Northern Atlantic Ocean on a doomed voyage to see the wreckage of the Titanic, Stockton Rush took another small group of passengers to see another famed ship beneath the waves — but fell into “panic” due to a lack of experience, a former employee claims.
David Lochridge, who worked as operations director at OceanGate, which Rush co-founded and ran as CEO, testified on Tuesday, Sept. 17, at an ongoing U.S. Coast Guard hearing about the implosion of Titan while on its way to the Titanic last summer, killing all five people aboard, including Rush.
Lochridge did not mince words about his views on Rush or OceanGate.
“The whole idea behind the company was to make money,” he said at one point. “That’s it.”
He was no less blunt in recounting a previous voyage, reportedly in 2016, in which Rush insisted on piloting another of OceanGate’s submersibles, called the Cyclops 1, down to see the remains of the Andrea Doria ocean liner.
Lochridge said he had expected to be the pilot, as the “most experienced” such member of OceanGate’s team.
“Unfortunately, the CEO decided that he wanted to take it down,” Lochridge said. “I objected because I knew sometimes he could do things to please himself.”
But, according to Lochridge, Rush essentially pulled rank: “Just remember I’m the CEO, you’re just an employee.”
At Lochridge’s urging, Rush let him still join the trip on the Cyclops, along with three paying passengers, Lochridge said.
Almost immediately, however, there were issues, according to his testimony.
Related: Final Message from Doomed Titan Sub Revealed, Sent Seconds Before Losing Contact with the Surface
Wilfredo Lee/AP; Getty
Stockton Rush (left) and the Andrea Doria
Rush ignored concerns about the weather, and how the currents in the Atlantic, off the coast of Massachusetts, were buffeting the dive platform to and fro.
Later, Rush, at the helm of the Cyclops, struggled to begin the dive, Lochridge said: “He attempted to take it off, he didn’t do it very well.”
As they descended, Lochridge said, he reminded Rush that they had planned to keep some distance from the wreckage because of the danger it poses to divers who get too close. But Rush rebuffed him, he said, with “don’t tell me what to do.”
The Andrea Doria lies relatively close to the surface, only about 250 feet deep — compared to the Titanic, at 2-plus miles — and the Cyclops crew had a “clear sonar image,” Lochridge said.
Still, Rush “smashed straight down on the bottom,” seriously limiting visibility, as two of the passengers remarked, “Oh my god, we are right on the wreck,” Lochridge said.
Lochridge advised Rush to assess their surroundings and wait for better visibility before continuing the journey, “which is standard practice for any competent submersible pilot,” he said.
“He just kept arguing with me in the sub, very unbecoming of a submersible pilot,” Lochridge testified. “I’m trying to give the best course of action to get him out of it, [but Rush responded with], ‘No matter what, I’m doing this.’ “
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Rush then decided to do an unusual maneuver, Lochridge said, turning the Cyclops about 180 degrees while moving and ended up going “full speed into the port side of the bow and we could hear the cracking … as he got us jammed in underneath.”
“I’m not going to say how foul my language was,” Lochridge told Coast Guard investigators on Tuesday, “but it wasn’t good.”
“At that point, it was unprofessional behavior of him, he started to panic and the first thing was [asking], ‘Do we have enough life support on board?’ “ Lochridge said, remembering what happened next. “I was like, ‘Stockton of course we have enough life support. We need to get out of here.’ “
Rush asked about getting a support dive team from the surface to help, but Lochridge asked to take the controls, he said. Instead, Rush just kept repeating, “We’re stuck, we’re stuck, we’re stuck,” Lochridge said.
“Every time I went to take the controller from him, he pushed it further and further behind him,” he testified of Rush. (Elsewhere in his testimony, he commented wryly on the widely discussed fact that OceanGate submersibles were controlled via Playstation controller.)
Lochridge said that during the dive to the Andrea Doria, while he had gone to look out into the ocean, from inside the sub, to assess the situation, Rush “never once got out of the seat in the back of the sub.”
“Eventually it took one of the paying clients … she shouted at Stockton to ‘give me the f—ing controller.’ She had tears in her eyes,” Lochridge said.
Rush obliged, in his way, Lochridge said: He threw the controller at Lochridge and it “clattered it off the right side of my head,” then hit the ground and “one of the buttons came off.” (“Robust,” he quipped of the technology.)
Lochridge said he quickly fixed the controller, took the helm and “had us out 10-15 minutes.”
Xinhua/Shutterstock
The Titan submersible
Once he had pulled the Cyclops back about 160 feet, he admonished Rush, “This is what we’re supposed to do,” he said.
Rush, he said, was apologetic, telling him, “I owe you one, anything I can do for you.”
Back at the surface, the others celebrated Lochridge for intervening, he said. But more importantly, more dangerously, he testified on Tuesday, “It shouldn’t have gotten to the stage it got to. If he [Rush] had in any way behaved like any other submersible pilot I know and looked at your surroundings, talked on the radio, on the communications, let the top-side know … he didn’t do it.”
Their relationship never recovered from that, Lochridge said.
“Because people were cheering and the passengers were obviously very grateful for what I did, which to me is just my job, at that point he stopped talking to me,” he said, “and it went on from there.”
In the wake of the Andrea Doria incident, Lochridge was “phased out of the project completely,” he testified. He said he had “embarrassed” Rush even if “I didn’t mean to.”
Publicly, Rush touted the Andrea Doria trip as a success.
He said in the press at the time that “given the conditions, we got as much time on the wreck as we could. We have great respect for harsh ocean conditions, and for the history of this infamous wreck, so ensuring the safety of our crew is always our top priority.”
According to The New York Times, Lochridge was fired from OceanGate in 2018 as part of a falling-out after he expressed his concerns about the company’s approach to diving, in particular its development of the Titan sub.
Lochridge subsequently filed a complaint with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, ABC News reported.
“It was inevitable something was going to happen, and it was just when,” he said on Tuesday.
Lochridge and OceanGate were tangled in dueling lawsuits that were later settled, the Times reported.
The Coast Guard this week opened what is expected to be a two-week hearing into the Titan implosion that will “review testimony from technical experts, crew members, and other relevant parties, and will examine evidence related to the submersible’s design, operation, and safety protocols,” the Coast Guard has said.
Afterward, investigators will submit a final report.
OceanGate has since suspended its operations amid the ongoing investigation into what happened.
According to the Associated Press, the company says it has cooperated fully with the government probes.
Attorney Jane Shvets, representing OceanGate at the hearing, read a brief opening statement on Monday, Sept. 16, in which she said they “offer our deepest condolences to the families and loved ones, among them those here today, of those who died on June 18, 2023.”
“There are no words to ease the loss endured by the families impacted by this tragic incident,” she said, “but we hope that this hearing will help shed light on the cause of the tragedy and prevent anything like this from happening again.”
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