The Titan Submersible Implosion Was "An Accident Waiting To Happen" The New Yorker

The Titan Submersible Implosion Was “an Accident Waiting to Happen”... https://www.newyorker.com/news/a-reporter-at-large/the-titan-submersi...
A Reporter at Large
The Titan Submersible Was “an

Accident Waiting to Happen”
Interviews and e-mails with expedition leaders and employees reveal how
OceanGate ignored desperate warnings from inside and outside the
company. “It’s a lemon,” one wrote.
By Ben Taub
July 1, 2023
Stockton Rush, the co-founder and C.E.O. of OceanGate, inside Cyclops I, a submersible, on July 19,
2017. Photographs by Balazs Gardi
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Save this story
he primary task of a submersible is to not implode. The second is to reach

T the surface, even if the pilot is unconscious, with oxygen to spare. The
third is for the occupants to be able to open the hatch once they surface. The
fourth is for the submersible to be easy to �nd, through redundant tracking and
communications systems, in case rescue is required. Only the �fth task is what
is ordinarily thought of as the primary one: to transport people into the dark,
hostile deep.
At dawn four summers ago, the French submariner and Titanic expert Paul-
Henri Nargeolet stood on the bow of an expedition vessel in the North
Atlantic. The air was cool and thick with fog, the sea placid, the engine
switched off, and the Titanic was some thirty-eight hundred metres below. The
crew had gathered for a solemn ceremony, to pay tribute to the more than
�fteen hundred people who had died in the most famous maritime disaster
more than a hundred years ago. Rob McCallum, the expedition leader, gave a
short speech, then handed a wreath to Nargeolet, the oldest man on the ship.
As is tradition, the youngest—McCallum’s nephew—was summoned to place
his hand on the wreath, and he and Nargeolet let it fall into the sea.
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Inside a hangar on the ship’s stern sat a submersible known as the Limiting
Factor. In the previous year, McCallum, Nargeolet, and others had taken it
around the Earth, as part of the Five Deeps Expedition, a journey to the
deepest point in each ocean. The team had mapped unexplored trenches and
collected scienti�c samples, and the Limiting Factor’s chief pilot, Victor
Vescovo—a Texan hedge-fund manager who had �nanced the entire
operation—had set numerous diving records. But, to another member of the
expedition team, Patrick Lahey, the C.E.O. of Triton Submarines (which had
designed and built the submersible), one record meant more than the rest: the
marine-classi�cation society DNV had certi�ed the Limiting Factor’s
“maximum permissible diving depth” as “unlimited.” That process was far from
theoretical; a DNV inspection engineer was involved in every stage of the
submersible’s creation, from design to sea trials and diving. He even sat in the
passenger seat as Lahey piloted the Limiting Factor to the deepest point on
Earth.
After the wreath sank from view, Vescovo climbed down the submersible hatch,
and the dive began. For some members of the crew, the site of the wreck was
familiar. McCallum, who co-founded a company called �� Expeditions, had
transported tourists to the Titanic in the two-thousands, using two Soviet
submarines that had been rated to six thousand metres. Another crew member
was a Titanic obsessive—his endless talk of davits and well decks still rattles in
my head. But it was Paul-Henri Nargeolet whose life was most entwined with
the Titanic. He had dived it more than thirty times, beginning shortly after its
discovery, in 1985, and now served as the underwater-research director for the
organization that owns salvaging rights to the wreck.
Nargeolet had also spent the past year as Vescovo’s safety manager. “When I set
out on the Five Deeps project, I told Patrick Lahey, ‘Look, I don’t know
submarine technology—I need someone who works for me to independently
validate whatever design you come up with, and its construction and
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operation,’ ” Vescovo recalled, this week. “He recommended P. H. Nargeolet,

whom he had known for decades.” Nargeolet, whose wife had recently died,
was a former French naval commander—an underwater-explosives expert who
had spent much of his life at sea. “He had a sterling reputation, the perfect
résumé,” Vescovo said. “And he was French. And I love the French.”
Thirty-six Thousand Feet Under the Sea

Ben Taub’s 2020 account of an expedition to the deepest point in each ocean.
When Vescovo reached the silty bottom at the Titanic site, he recalled his
private preparations with Nargeolet. “He had very good knowledge of the
currents and the wreck,” Vescovo told me. “He briefed me on very speci�c
tactical things: ‘Stay away from this place on the stern’; ‘Don’t go here’; ‘Try and
maintain this distance at this part of the wreck.’ ” Vescovo surfaced about seven
hours later, exhausted and rattled from the debris that he had encountered at
the ship’s ruins, which risk entangling submersibles that approach too close.
But the Limiting Factor was completely �ne. According to its certi�cation from
DNV, a “deep dive,” for insurance and inspection purposes, was anything below
four thousand metres. A journey to the Titanic, thirty-eight hundred metres
down, didn’t even count.
Nargeolet remained obsessed with the Titanic, and, before long, he was invited
to return. “To P. H., the Titanic was Ulysses’ sirens—he could not resist it,”
Vescovo told me. A couple of weeks ago, Nargeolet climbed into a radically
different submersible, owned by a company called OceanGate, which had spent
years marketing to the general public that, for a fee of two hundred and �fty
thousand dollars, it would bring people to the most famous shipwreck on
Earth. “People are so enthralled with Titanic,” OceanGate’s founder, Stockton
Rush, told a BBC documentary crew last year. “I read an article that said there
are three words in the English language that are known throughout the planet.
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And that’s ‘Coca-Cola,’ ‘God,’ and ‘Titanic.’ ”
Nargeolet served as a guide to the wreck, Rush as the pilot. The other three
occupants were tourists, including a father and son. But, before they reached
the bottom, the submersible vanished, triggering an international search-and-
rescue operation, with an accompanying media frenzy centered on counting
down the hours until oxygen would run out.
McCallum, who was leading an expedition in Papua New Guinea at the time,
knew the outcome almost instantly. “The report that I got immediately after
the event—long before they were overdue—was that the sub was approaching
thirty-�ve hundred metres,” he told me, while the oxygen clock was still
ticking. “It dropped weights”—meaning that the team had aborted the
dive—“then it lost comms, and lost tracking, and an implosion was heard.”
An investigation by the U.S. Coast Guard is ongoing; some debris from the
wreckage has been salvaged, but the implosion was so violent and
comprehensive that the precise cause of the disaster may never be known.
Until June 18th, a manned deep-ocean submersible had never imploded. But,
to McCallum, Lahey, and other experts, the OceanGate disaster did not come
as a surprise—they had been warning of the submersible’s design �aws for more
than �ve years, �ling complaints to the U.S. government and to OceanGate
itself, and pleading with Rush to abandon his aspirations. As they mourned
Nargeolet and the other passengers, they decided to reveal OceanGate’s history
of knowingly shoddy design and construction. “You can’t cut corners in the
deep,” McCallum had told Rush. “It’s not about being a disruptor. It’s about
the laws of physics.”
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The submersible Antipodes at the OceanGate headquarters, in Everett, Washington, on July 19, 2017.
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S tockton Rush was named for two of his ancestors who signed the
Declaration of Independence: Richard Stockton and Benjamin Rush. His
maternal grandfather was an oil-and-shipping tycoon. As a teen-ager, Rush
became an accomplished commercial jet pilot, and he studied aerospace
engineering at Princeton, where he graduated in 1984.
Rush wanted to become a �ghter pilot. But his eyesight wasn’t perfect, and so
he went to business school instead. Years later, he expressed a desire to travel to
space, and he reportedly dreamed of becoming the �rst human to set foot on
Mars. In 2004, Rush travelled to the Mojave Desert, where he watched the
launch of the �rst privately funded aircraft to brush against the edge of space.
The only occupant was the test pilot; nevertheless, as Rush used to tell it,
Richard Branson stood on the wing and announced that a new era of space
tourism had arrived. At that point, Rush “abruptly lost interest,” according to a
pro�le in Smithsonian magazine. “I didn’t want to go up into space as a tourist,”
he said. “I wanted to be Captain Kirk on the Enterprise. I wanted to explore.”
Rush had grown up scuba diving in Tahiti, the Cayman Islands, and the Red
Sea. In his mid-forties, he tinkered with a kit for a single-person mini-
submersible, and piloted it around at shallow depths near Seattle, where he
lived. A few years later, in 2009, he co-founded OceanGate, with a dream to
bring tourists to the ocean world. “I had come across this business anomaly I
couldn’t explain,” he recalled. “If three-quarters of the planet is water, how
come you can’t access it?”
OceanGate’s �rst submersible wasn’t made by the company itself; it was built in
1973, and Lahey later piloted it in the North Sea, while working in the oil-
and-gas industry. In the nineties, he helped re�t it into a tourist submersible,
and in 2009, after it had been sold a few times, and renamed Antipodes,
OceanGate bought it. “I didn’t have any direct interaction with them at the
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time,” Lahey recalled. “Stockton was one of these people that was buying these
older subs and trying to repurpose them.”
In 2015, OceanGate announced that it had built its �rst submersible, in

collaboration with the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Laboratory.
In fact, it was mostly a cosmetic and electrical re�t; Lahey and his partners had
built the underlying vessel, called Lula, for a Portuguese marine research
nonpro�t almost two decades before. It had a pressure hull that was the shape
of a capsule pill and made of steel, with a large acrylic viewport on one end. It
was designed to go no deeper than �ve hundred metres—a comfortable cruising
depth for military submarines. OceanGate now called it Cyclops I.
Most submersibles have duplicate control systems, running on separate

batteries—that way, if one system fails, the other still works. But, during the
re�t, engineers at the University of Washington rigged the Cyclops I to run
from a single PlayStation 3 controller. “Stockton is very interested in being able
to quickly train pilots,” Dave Dyer, a principal engineer, said, in a video
published by his laboratory. Another engineer referred to it as “a combination
steering wheel and gas pedal.”
Around that time, Rush set his sights on the Titanic. OceanGate would have
to design a new submersible. But Rush decided to keep most of the design
elements of Cyclops I. Suddenly, the University of Washington was no longer
involved in the project, although OceanGate’s contract with the Applied
Physics Laboratory was less than one-�fth complete; it is unclear what Dyer,
who did not respond to an interview request, thought of Rush’s plan to
essentially reconstruct a craft that was designed for �ve hundred metres of
pressure to withstand eight times that much. As the company planned Cyclops
II, Rush reached out to McCallum for help.
“He wanted me to run his Titanic operation for him,” McCallum recalled. “At
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the time, I was the only person he knew who had run commercial expedition
trips to Titanic. Stockton’s plan was to go a step further and build a vehicle
speci�cally for this multi-passenger expedition.” McCallum gave him some
advice on marketing and logistics, and eventually visited the workshop, outside
Seattle, where he examined the Cyclops I. He was disturbed by what he saw.
“Everyone was drinking Kool-Aid and saying how cool they were with a Sony
PlayStation,” he told me. “And I said at the time, ‘Does Sony know that it’s
been used for this application? Because, you know, this is not what it was
designed for.’ And now you have the hand controller talking to a Wi-Fi unit,
which is talking to a black box, which is talking to the sub’s thrusters. There
were multiple points of failure.” The system ran on Bluetooth, according to
Rush. But, McCallum continued, “every sub in the world has hardwired
controls for a reason—that if the signal drops out, you’re not fucked.”
One day, McCallum climbed into the Cyclops for a test dive at a marina.
There, he met the chief pilot, David Lochridge, a Scotsman who had spent
three decades as a submersible pilot and an engineer—�rst in the Royal Navy,
then as a private contractor. Lochridge had worked all over the world: on
offshore wind farms in the North Sea; on subsea-cables installations in the
Atlantic, Indian, and Paci�c oceans; on manned submarine trials with the
Swedish Navy; on submarine-rescue operations for the navies of Britain and
Singapore. But, during the harbor trial, the Cyclops got stuck in shallow water.
“It was hilarious, because there were four very experienced operators in the sub,
stuck at twenty or twenty-�ve feet, and we had to sit there for a few hours
while they worked it out,” McCallum recalled. He liked and trusted Lochridge.
But, of the sub, he said, “This thing is a mutt.”
Rush eventually decided that he would not attempt to have the Titanic-bound
vehicle classed by a marine-certi�cation agency such as DNV. He had no
interest in welcoming into the project an external evaluator who would, as he
saw it, “need to �rst be educated before being quali�ed to ‘validate’ any
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innovations.”
That marked the end of McCallum’s desire to be associated with the project.
“The minute that I found out that he was not going to class the vehicle, that’s
when I said, ‘I’m sorry, I just can’t be involved,’ ” he told me. “I couldn’t tell him
anything about the Five Deeps project at that time. But I was able to say,
‘Look, I am involved with other projects that are building classed subs’—of
course, I was talking about the Limiting Factor—‘and I can tell you that the
class society has been nothing but supportive. They are actually part of our
innovation process. We’re using the brainpower of their engineers to feed into
our design.
“Stockton didn’t like that,” McCallum continued. “He didn’t like to be told that
he was on the fringe.” As word got out that Rush planned to take tourists to
the Titanic, McCallum recalled, “people would ring me, and say, ‘We’ve always
wanted to go to Titanic. What do you think?’ And I would tell them, ‘Never
get in an unclassed sub. I wouldn’t do it, and you shouldn’t, either.’ ”
I n early 2018, McCallum heard that Lochridge had left OceanGate. “I’d be
keen to pick your brain if you have a few moments,” McCallum e-mailed
him. “I’m keen to get a handle on exactly how bad things are. I do get reports,
but I don’t know if they are accurate.” Whatever his differences with Rush,
McCallum wanted the venture to succeed; the submersible industry is small,
and a single disaster could destroy it. But the only way forward without a
catastrophic operational failure—which he had been told was “certain,” he
wrote—was for OceanGate to redesign the submersible in coördination with a
classi�cation society. “Stockton must be gutted,” McCallum told Lochridge, of
his departure. “You were the star player . . . . . and the only one that gave me a
hint of con�dence.”
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“I think you are going to [be] even more taken aback when I tell you what’s
happening,” Lochridge replied. He added that he was afraid of retaliation from
Rush—“We both know he has in�uence and money”—but would share his
assessment with McCallum, in private: “That sub is Not safe to dive.”
“Do you think the sub could be made safe to dive, or is it a complete lemon?”
McCallum replied. “You will get a lot of support from people in the
industry . . . . everyone is watching and waiting and quietly shitting their
pants.”
“It’s a lemon.”
“Oh dear,” McCallum replied. “Oh dear, oh dear.”
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David Lochridge, OceanGate’s former director of marine operations, pilots Cyclops I during a test dive in
Everett, on July 19, 2017.
L ochridge had been hired by OceanGate in May, 2015, as its director of

marine operations and chief submersible pilot. The company moved him
and his family to Washington, and helped him apply for a green card. But,
before long, he was clashing with Rush and Tony Nissen, the company’s
director of engineering, on matters of design and safety.
Every aspect of submersible design and construction is a trade-off between

strength and weight. In order for the craft to remain suspended underwater,
without rising or falling, the buoyancy of each component must be offset
against the others. Most deep-ocean submersibles use spherical titanium hulls
and are counterbalanced in water by syntactic foam, a buoyant material made
up of millions of hollow glass balls, which is attached to the external frame. But
this adds bulk to the submersible. And the weight of titanium limits the
practical size of the pressure hull, so that it can accommodate no more than two
or three people. Spheres are “the best geometry for pressure, but not for
occupation,” as Rush put it.
The Cyclops II needed to �t as many passengers as possible. “You don’t do the

coolest thing you’re ever going to do in your life by yourself,” Rush told an
audience at the GeekWire Summit last fall. “You take your wife, your son, your
daughter, your best friend. You’ve got to have four people” besides the pilot.
Rush planned to have room for a Titanic guide and three passengers. The
Cyclops II could �t that many occupants only if it had a cylindrical midsection.
But the size dictated the choice of materials. The steel hull of Cyclops I was
too thin for Titanic depths—but a thicker steel hull would add too much
weight. In December, 2016, OceanGate announced that it had started
construction on Cyclops II, and that its cylindrical midsection would be made
of carbon �bre. The idea, Rush explained in interviews, was that carbon �bre
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was a strong material that was signi�cantly lighter than traditional metals.
“Carbon �bre is three times better than titanium on strength-to-buoyancy,” he
said.
A month later, OceanGate hired a company called Spencer Composites to

build the carbon-�bre hull. “They basically said, ‘This is the pressure we have
to meet, this is the factor of safety, this is the basic envelope. Go design and
build it,’ ” the founder, Brian Spencer, told CompositesWorld, in the spring of
2017. He was given a deadline of six weeks.
oward the end of that year, Lochridge became increasingly concerned.

T OceanGate would soon begin manned sea trials for Cyclops II in the
Bahamas, and he believed that there was a chance that they would result in
catastrophe. The consequences for Lochridge could extend beyond
OceanGate’s business and the trauma of losing colleagues; as director of marine
operations, Lochridge had a contract specifying that he was ultimately
responsible for “ensuring the safety of all crew and clients.”
On the workshop �oor, he raised questions about potential �aws in the design
and build processes. But his concerns were dismissed. OceanGate’s position was
that such matters were outside the scope of his responsibilities; he was “not
hired to provide engineering services, or to design or develop Cyclops II,” the
company later said, in a court �ling. Nevertheless, before the handover of the
submersible to the operations team, Rush directed Lochridge to carry out an
inspection, because his job description also required him to sign off on the
submersible’s readiness for deployment.
On January 18, 2018, Lochridge studied each major component, and found
several critical aspects to be defective or unproven. He drafted a detailed report,
which has not previously been made public, and attached photographs of the
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elements of greatest concern. Glue was coming away from the seams of ballast
bags, and mounting bolts threatened to rupture them; both sealing faces had
errant plunge holes and O-ring grooves that deviated from standard design
parameters. The exostructure and electrical pods used different metals, which
could result in galvanic corrosion when exposed to seawater. The thruster cables
posed “snagging hazards”; the iridium satellite beacon, to transmit the
submersible’s position after surfacing, was attached with zip ties. The �ooring
was highly �ammable; the interior vinyl wrapping emitted “highly toxic gasses
upon ignition.”
To assess the carbon-�bre hull, Lochridge examined a small cross-section of

material. He found that it had “very visible signs of delamination and
porosity”—it seemed possible that, after repeated dives, it would come apart.
He shone a light at the sample from behind, and photographed beams
streaming through splits in the midsection in a disturbing, irregular pattern.
The only safe way to dive, Lochridge concluded, was to �rst carry out a full
scan of the hull.
The next day, Lochridge sent his report to Rush, Nissen, and other members of
the OceanGate leadership. “Verbal communication of the key items I have
addressed in my attached document have been dismissed on several occasions,
so I feel now I must make this report so there is an official record in place,” he
wrote. “Until suitable corrective actions are in place and closed out, Cyclops 2
(Titan) should not be manned during any of the upcoming trials.”
Rush was furious; he called a meeting that afternoon, and recorded it on his
phone. For the next two hours, the OceanGate leadership insisted that no hull
testing was necessary—an acoustic monitoring system, to detect fraying �bres,
would serve in its place. According to the company, the system would alert the
pilot to the possibility of catastrophic failure “with enough time to arrest the
descent and safely return to surface.” But, in a court �ling, Lochridge’s lawyer
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wrote, “this type of acoustic analysis would only show when a component is
about to fail—often milliseconds before an implosion—and would not detect
any existing �aws prior to putting pressure onto the hull.” A former senior
employee who was present at the meeting told me, “We didn’t even have a
baseline. We didn’t know what it would sound like if something went wrong.”
OceanGate’s lawyer wrote, “The parties found themselves at an impasse—Mr.

Lochridge was not, and speci�cally stated that he could not be made
comfortable with OceanGate’s testing protocol, while Mr. Rush was unwilling
to change the company’s plans.” The meeting ended in Lochridge’s �ring.
Soon afterward, Rush asked OceanGate’s director of �nance and

administration whether she’d like to take over as chief submersible pilot. “It
freaked me out that he would want me to be head pilot, since my background is
in accounting,” she told me. She added that several of the engineers were in
their late teens and early twenties, and were at one point being paid �fteen
dollars an hour. Without Lochridge around, “I could not work for Stockton,”
she said. “I did not trust him.” As soon as she was able to line up a new job, she
quit.
“I would consider myself pretty ballsy when it comes to doing things that are
dangerous, but that sub is an accident waiting to happen,” Lochridge wrote to
McCallum, two weeks later. “There’s no way on earth you could have paid me
to dive the thing.” Of Rush, he added, “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.”
M cCallum forwarded the exchange to Patrick Lahey, the C.E.O. of Triton

Submarines, whose response was emphatic: if Lochridge “genuinely
believes this submersible poses a threat to the occupants,” then he had a moral
obligation to inform the authorities. “To remain quiet makes him complicit,”
Lahey wrote. “I know that may sound ominous but it is true. History is full of
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horri�c examples of accidents and tragedies that were a direct result of people’s
silence.”
OceanGate claimed that Cyclops II had “the �rst pressure vessel of its kind in
the world.” But there’s a reason that Triton and other manufacturers don’t use
carbon �bre in their hulls. Under compression, “it’s a capricious fucking
material, which is the last fucking thing you want to associate with a pressure
boundary,” Lahey told me.
“With titanium, there’s a purpose to a pressure test that goes beyond just seeing
whether it will survive,” John Ramsay, the designer of the Limiting Factor,
explained. The metal gradually strengthens under repeated exposure to
incredible stresses. With carbon �bre, however, pressure testing slowly breaks
the hull, �bre by tiny �bre. “If you’re repeatedly nearing the threshold of the
material, then there’s just no way of knowing how many cycles it will survive,”
he said.
“It doesn’t get more sensational than dead people in a sub on the way to
Titanic,” Lahey’s business partner, the co-founder of Triton Submarines, wrote
to his team, on March 1, 2018. McCallum tried to reason with Rush directly.
“You are wanting to use a prototype un-classed technology in a very hostile
place,” he e-mailed. “As much as I appreciate entrepreneurship and innovation,
you are potentially putting an entire industry at risk.”
Rush replied four days later, saying that he had “grown tired of industry players
who try to use a safety argument to stop innovation and new entrants from
entering their small existing market.” He understood that his approach “�ies in
the face of the submersible orthodoxy, but that is the nature of innovation,” he
wrote. “We have heard the baseless cries of ‘you are going to kill someone’ way
too often. I take this as a serious personal insult.”
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In response, McCallum listed a number of speci�c concerns, from his “humble

perch” as an expedition leader. “In your race to Titanic you are mirroring that
famous catch cry ‘she is unsinkable,’ ” McCallum wrote. The correspondence
ended soon afterward; Rush asked McCallum to work for him—then
threatened him with a lawsuit, in an effort to silence him, when he declined.
By now, McCallum had introduced Lochridge to Lahey. Lahey wrote him, “If
Ocean Gate is unwilling to consider or investigate your concerns with you
directly perhaps some other means of getting them to pay attention is
required.”
Lochridge replied that he had already contacted the United States Department
of Labor, alleging to its Occupational Safety and Health Administration that
he had been terminated in retaliation for raising safety concerns. He also sent
the �� investigator Paul McDevitt a copy of his Cyclops II inspection report,
hoping that the government might take actions that would “prevent the
potential for harm to life.”
A few weeks later, McDevitt contacted OceanGate, noting that he was looking
into Lochridge’s �ring as a whistle-blower-protection matter. OceanGate’s
lawyer Thomas Gilman soon issued Lochridge a court summons: he had ten
days to withdraw his �� claim and pay OceanGate almost ten thousand
dollars in legal expenses. Otherwise, Gilman wrote, OceanGate would sue him,
take measures to destroy his professional reputation, and accuse him of
immigration fraud. Gilman also reported to �� that Lochridge had
orchestrated his own �ring because he “wanted to leave his job and maintain
his ability to collect unemployment bene�ts.” (McDevitt, of ��, noti�ed the
Coast Guard of Lochridge’s complaint. There is no evidence that the Coast
Guard ever followed up.)
Lochridge received the summons while he was at his father’s funeral. He and
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his wife hired a lawyer, but it quickly became clear that “he didn’t have the
money to �ght this guy,” Lahey told me. (Lochridge declined to be
interviewed.) Lahey covered the rest of the expenses, but, after more than half a
year of legal wrangling, and threats of deportation, Lochridge withdrew his
whistle-blower claim with �� so that he could go on with his life. Lahey was
crestfallen. “He didn’t consult me about that decision,” Lahey recalled. “It’s not
that he had to—it was his �ght, not mine. But I was underwriting the cost of
it, because I believed in the idea that this inspection report, which he wouldn’t
share with anybody, needed to see the light of day.”
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Stockton Rush inside Cyclops I, on July 19, 2017.
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few weeks after Lochridge was �red, OceanGate announced that it was
A testing its new submersible in the marina of Everett, Washington, and
would soon begin shallow-water trials in Puget Sound. To preëmpt any
concerns about the carbon-�bre hull, the company touted the acoustic
monitoring system, which was later patented in Rush’s name. “Safety is our
number one priority,” Rush said, in an OceanGate press release. “We believe
real-time health monitoring should be standard safety equipment on all
manned-submersibles.”
“He’s spinning the fact that his sub requires a hull warning system into
something positive,” Jarl Stromer, Triton’s regulatory and class-compliance
manager, reported to Lahey. “He’s making it sound like the Cyclops is more
advanced because it has this system when the opposite is true: The submersible
is so experimental, and the factor of safety completely unknown, that it requires
a system to warn the pilot of impending collapse.”
Like Lochridge, Triton’s outside counsel, Brad Patrick, considered the risk to
life to be so evident that the government should get involved. He drafted a
letter to McDevitt, the �� investigator, urging the Department of Labor to
take “immediate and decisive action to stop OceanGate” from taking
passengers to the Titanic “before people die. It is that simple.” He went on, “At
the bottom of all of this is the inevitable tension betwixt greed and safety.”
But Patrick’s letter was never sent. Other people at Triton worried that the
Department of Labor might perceive the letter as an attack on a business rival.
By now, OceanGate had renamed Cyclops II “Titan,” apparently to honor the
Titanic. “I cannot tell you how much I fucking hated it when he changed the
goddam name to Titan,” Lahey told me. “That was uncomfortably close to our
name.”
“Stockton strategically structured everything to be out of U.S. jurisdiction” for
20 of 35 7/4/2023, 1:02 PM
its Titanic pursuits, the former senior OceanGate employee told me. “It was
deliberate.” In a legal �ling, the company reported that the submersible was
“being developed and assembled in Washington, but will be owned by a
Bahamian entity, will be registered in the Bahamas and will operate exclusively
outside the territorial waters of the United States.” Although it is illegal to
transport passengers in an unclassed, experimental submersible, “under U.S.
regulations, you can kill crew,” McCallum told me. “You do get in a little bit of
trouble, in the eyes of the law. But, if you kill a passenger, you’re in big trouble.
And so everyone was classi�ed as a ‘mission specialist.’ There were no
passengers—the word ‘passenger’ was never used.” No one bought tickets; they
contributed an amount of money set by Rush to one of OceanGate’s entities, to
fund their own missions.
“It is truly hard to imagine the discernment it took for Stockton to string
together each of the links in the chain,” Patrick noted. “ ‘How do I avoid
liability in Washington State? How do I avoid liability with an offshore
corporate structure? How do I keep the U.S. Coast Guard from breathing down
my neck?’ ”
But OceanGate had a retired Coast Guard rear admiral, John Lockwood, on its
board of directors. “His experiences at the highest levels of the Coast Guard
and in international maritime affairs will allow OceanGate to re�ne our client
offerings,” Rush announced with his appointment, in 2013. Lockwood said
that he hoped “to help bring operational and regulatory expertise” to
OceanGate’s affairs. (Lockwood did not respond to a request for comment.)
Still, Rush failed to win over the submersible industry. When he asked Don
Walsh, a renowned oceanographer who reached the deepest point in the ocean,
in 1960, to consult on the Titanic venture, Walsh replied, “I am concerned that
my affiliation with your program at this late date would appear to be nothing
more than an endorsement of what you are already doing.”
21 of 35 7/4/2023, 1:02 PM
That spring, more than three dozen industry experts sent a letter to
OceanGate, expressing their “unanimous concern” about its upcoming Titanic
expedition—for which it had already sold places. Among the signers were
Lahey, McCallum, Walsh, and a Coast Guard senior inspector. “OceanGate’s
anticipated dive schedule in the spring of 2018 meant that they were going to
take people down, and we had a great deal of concern about them surviving
that trip,” Patrick told me. But sea trials were a disaster, owing to problems
with the launch-and-recovery system, and OceanGate scuttled its Titanic
operations for that year. Lochridge broke the news to Lahey. “Lives have been
saved for a short while anyway,” he wrote.
O ceanGate kept selling tickets, but did not dive to the Titanic for the next
three years. It appears that the company spent this period testing
materials, and that it built several iterations of the carbon-�bre hull. But it is
difficult to know what tests were done, exactly, and how many hulls were made,
and by whom, because Rush’s public statements are deeply unreliable. He
claimed at various points to have design and testing partnerships with Boeing
and ��, and that at least one iteration of the hull would be built at the
Marshall Space Flight Center, in Huntsville, Alabama. But none of those
things were true. Meanwhile, soon after Lochridge’s departure, a college
newspaper quoted a recent graduate as saying that he and his classmates had
started working on the Titan’s electrical systems as interns, while they were still
in school. “The whole electrical system,” he said. “That was our design, we
implemented it, and it works.”
By the time that OceanGate �nally began diving to the Titanic, in 2021, it had
re�ned its pitch to its “mission specialists.” The days of insinuating that Titan
was safe had ended. Now Rush portrayed the submersible as existing at the very
fringe of what was physically possible. Clients signed waivers and were
informed that the submersible was experimental and unclassed. But the
22 of 35 7/4/2023, 1:02 PM
framing was that this was how pioneering exploration is done.
“We were all told—intimately informed—that this was a dangerous mission

that could result in death,” an OceanGate “mission specialist” told Fox News
last week. “We were versed in how the sub operated. We were versed in various
protocols. But there’s a limit . . . it’s not a safe operation, inherently. And that’s
part of research and development and exploration.” He went on, “If the Wright
brothers had crashed on their �rst �ight, they would have still left the bonds of
Earth.” Another “mission specialist” wrote in a blog post that, a month before
the implosion, Rush had confessed that he’d “gotten the carbon �ber used to
make the Titan at a big discount from Boeing because it was past its shelf-life
for use in airplanes.”
“Carbon �bre makes noise,” Rush told David Pogue, a CBS News
correspondent, last summer, during one of the Titanic expeditions. “It crackles.
The �rst time you pressurize it, if you think about it—of those million �bres, a
couple of ’em are sorta weak. They shouldn’t have made the team.” He spoke of
signs of hull breakage as if it were perfectly routine. “The �rst time we took it
to full pressure, it made a bunch of noise. The second time, it made very little
noise.”
Fibres do not regenerate between dives. Nevertheless, Rush seemed

unconcerned. “It’s a huge amount of pressure from the point where we’d say,
‘Oh, the hull’s not happy,’ to when it implodes,” he noted. “You just have to
stop your descent.”
It’s not clear that Rush could always stop his descent. Once, as he piloted
passengers to the wreck, a malfunction prevented Rush from dropping weights.
Passengers calmly discussed sleeping on the bottom of the ocean, thirty-eight
hundred metres down; after twenty-four hours, a drop-weight mechanism
would dissolve in the seawater, allowing the submersible to surface. Eventually,
23 of 35 7/4/2023, 1:02 PM
Rush managed to release the weights manually, using a hydraulic pump. “This
is why you want your pilot to be an engineer,” a passenger said, smiling, as
another “mission specialist” �lmed her.
Last year, a BBC documentary crew joined the expedition. Rush stayed on the
surface vessel while Scott Griffith, OceanGate’s director of logistics and quality
assurance, piloted a scientist and three other passengers down. (Griffith did not
respond to a request for comment.) During the launch, a diver in the water
noticed and reported to the surface vessel that something with a thruster
seemed off. Nevertheless, the mission continued.
More than two hours passed; after Titan touched down in the silt, Griffith �red
the thrusters and realized something was wrong.“I don’t know what’s going on,”
he said. As he �ddled with the PlayStation controller, a passenger looked out
the viewport.
“Am I spinning?” Griffith asked.
“Yes.”
“I am?”
“Looks like it,” another passenger said.
“Oh, my God,” Griffith muttered. One of the thrusters had been installed in
the wrong direction. “The only thing I can do is a three-sixty,” he said.
They were in the debris �eld, three hundred metres from the intact part of the
wreck. One of the clients said that she had delayed buying a car, getting
married, and having kids, all “because I wanted to go to Titanic,” but they
couldn’t make their way over to its bow. Griffith relayed the situation to the
ship. Rush’s solution was to “remap the PS3 controller.”
24 of 35 7/4/2023, 1:02 PM
Rush couldn’t remember where the buttons were, and it seems as though there
was no spare controller on the ship. Someone loaded an image of a PlayStation
3 controller from the Internet, and Rush worked out a new button routine.
“Yeah—left and right might be forward and back. Huh. I don’t know,” he said.
“It might work.”
“Right is forward,” Griffith read off his screen, two and a half miles below.
“Uh—I’m going to have to write this down.”
“Right is forward,” Rush said. “Great! Live with it.”
Shipwrecks are notoriously difficult and dangerous to dive. Rusted cables drape
the Titanic, moving with the currents; a broken crow’s nest dangles over the
deck. Griffith piloted the submersible over to the wreck, and passengers within
feet of it, while teaching himself in real time to operate a Bluetooth controller
whose buttons suddenly had different functions than those for which he had
trained.
25 of 35 7/4/2023, 1:02 PM
Various models of Cyclops II are exhibited alongside a model of the Titanic, at the OceanGate headquarters,
26 of 35 7/4/2023, 1:02 PM
on July 19, 2017.
“I f you’re not breaking things, you’re not innovating,” Rush said, at the
GeekWire Summit last fall. “If you’re operating within a known
environment, as most submersible manufacturers do—they don’t break things.
To me, the more stuff you’ve broken, the more innovative you’ve been.”
The Titan’s viewport was made of acrylic and seven inches thick. “That’s
another thing where I broke the rules,” Rush said to Pogue, the CBS News
journalist. He went on to refer to a “very well-known” acrylic expert, Jerry D.
Stachiw, who wrote an eleven-hundred-page manual called “Handbook of
Acrylics for Submersibles, Hyperbaric Chambers, and Aquaria.” “It has safety
factors that—they were so high, he didn’t call ’em safety factors. He called ’em
conversion factors,” Rush said. “According to the rules,” he added, his viewport
was “not allowed.”
It seemed as if Rush believed that acrylic’s transparent quality would give him
ample warning before failure. “You can see every surface,” he said. “And if
you’ve overstressed it, or you’ve even come close, it starts to get this crazing
effect.”
“And if that happened underwater . . .”
“You just stop and go to the surface.”
“You would have time to get back up?” Pogue asked.
“Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s way more warning than you need.”
John Ramsay, who has designed several acrylic-hulled submersibles, was less
sure. “You’ll probably never be able to �nd out the source of failure” of the
Titan, he told me, in a recent phone call from his cottage in southwest
England. But it seems as though Rush did not understand how acrylic limits
27 of 35 7/4/2023, 1:02 PM
are calculated. “Where Stockton is talking about those things called conversion
factors . . .”
Ramsay grabbed a copy of Stachiw’s acrylic handbook from his spare bedroom.
When Stachiw’s team was doing its tests, “they would pressurize it really fast,
the acrylic would implode, and then they would assign a conversion factor, to
tabulate a safe diving depth,” he explained. “So let’s say the sample imploded at
twelve hundred metres. You apply a conversion factor of six, and you get a
rating of two hundred metres.” He paused, and spoke slowly, to make sure I
understood the gravity of what followed. “It’s speci�cally not called a safety
factor, because the acrylic is not safe to twelve hundred metres,” he said. “I’ve
got a massive report on all of this, because we’ve just had to reverse engineer all
of Jerry Statchiw’s work to determine when our own acrylic will fail.” The risk
zone begins at about twice the depth rating.
According to David Lochridge’s court �lings, from 2018, Cyclops II’s viewport
had a depth rating of only thirteen hundred metres, approximately one-third of
Titanic’s depth. It is possible that this had changed by the time passengers
�nally dived. But, Lochridge’s lawyer wrote, OceanGate “refused to pay for the
manufacturer to build a viewport that would meet the required depth.”
I n May, Rush invited Victor Vescovo to join his Titanic expedition. “I turned
him down,” Vescovo told me. “I didn’t even want the appearance that I was
sanctioning his operation.” But his friend—the British billionaire Hamish
Harding, whom Vescovo had previously taken in the Limiting Factor to the
bottom of the Mariana Trench—signed up to be a “mission specialist.”
On the morning of June 18th, Rush climbed inside the Titan, along with
Harding, the British Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood, and his
nineteen-year-old son, Suleman, who had reportedly told a relative that he was
28 of 35 7/4/2023, 1:02 PM
terri�ed of diving in a submersible but would do so anyway, because it was

Father’s Day. He carried with him a Rubik’s Cube so that he could solve it in
front of the Titanic wreck. The �fth diver was P. H. Nargeolet, the Titanic
expert—Vescovo’s former safety adviser, Lahey and McCallum’s old shipmate
and friend. He had been working with OceanGate for at least a year as a wreck
navigator, historian, and guide.
The force of the implosion would have been so violent that everyone on board
would have died before the water touched their bodies.
For the Five Deeps crew, Nargeolet’s legacy is complicated by the circumstances
of his �nal dives. “I had a conversation with P. H. just as recently as a few
months ago,” Lahey told me. “I kept giving him shit for going out there. I said,
‘P. H., by you being out there, you legitimize what this guy’s doing. It’s a tacit
endorsement. And, worse than that, I think he’s using your involvement with
the project, and your presence on the site, as a way to fucking lure people into
it.’ ”
Nargeolet replied that he was getting old. He was a grieving widower, and, as
he told people several times in recent years, “if you have to go, that would be a
good way. Instant.”
“I said, ‘O.K., so you’re ready to fucking die? Is that what it is, P. H.?’ ” Lahey
recalled. “And he said, ‘No, no, but I �gure that, maybe if I’m out there, I can
help them avoid a tragedy.’ But instead he found himself right in the fucking
center of a tragedy. And he didn’t deserve to go that way.”
“I loved P. H. Nargeolet,” Lahey continued. He started choking up. “He was a

brilliant human being and somebody that I had the privilege of knowing for
almost twenty-�ve years, and I think it’s a tremendously sad way for him to
have ended his life.”
29 of 35 7/4/2023, 1:02 PM
Lahey dived the Titanic in the Limiting Factor during the Five Deeps
expedition, back in 2019. I remember him climbing out of the submersible and
being upset at the fact that we were even there. “It’s a mess down there,” he
recalled, this week. “It’s a tragic fucking place. And in some ways, you know,
people paying all that money to go and �y around in a fucking graveyard . . .”
He trailed off. But the loss of so much life, in 1912, set in motion new
regulations and improvements for safety at sea. “And so I guess, on a positive
note, you can look at that as having been a difficult and tragic lesson that
probably has since saved hundreds of thousands of lives,” he said.
OceanGate declined to comment. But, in 2021, Stockton Rush told an

interviewer that he would “like to be remembered as an innovator. I think it
was General MacArthur who said, ‘You’re remembered for the rules you break.’
And I’ve broken some rules to make this.” He was sitting in the Titan’s hull,
docked in the Port of St. John’s, the nearest port to the site where he eventually
died. “The carbon �bre and titanium? There’s a rule you don’t do that. Well, I
did.” ♦
30 of 35 7/4/2023, 1:02 PM
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The Titan Submersible Was “an

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he primary task of a submersible is to not implode. The second is to reach

Sign up for The Daily.

operation,’ ” Vescovo recalled, this week. “He recommended P. H. Nargeolet,

Thirty-six Thousand Feet Under the Sea

And that’s ‘Coca-Cola,’ ‘God,’ and ‘Titanic.’ ”

In 2015, OceanGate announced that it had built its �rst submersible, in

Most submersibles have duplicate control systems, running on separate

“Oh dear,” McCallum replied. “Oh dear, oh dear.”

L ochridge had been hired by OceanGate in May, 2015, as its director of

Every aspect of submersible design and construction is a trade-oﬀ between

The Cyclops II needed to �t as many passengers as possible. “You don’t do the

A month later, OceanGate hired a company called Spencer Composites to

oward the end of that year, Lochridge became increasingly concerned.

To assess the carbon-�bre hull, Lochridge examined a small cross-section of

OceanGate’s lawyer wrote, “The parties found themselves at an impasse—Mr.

Soon afterward, Rush asked OceanGate’s director of �nance and

M cCallum forwarded the exchange to Patrick Lahey, the C.E.O. of Triton

In response, McCallum listed a number of speci�c concerns, from his “humble

Stockton Rush inside Cyclops I, on July 19, 2017.

“Stockton strategically structured everything to be out of U.S. jurisdiction” for

framing was that this was how pioneering exploration is done.

“We were all told—intimately informed—that this was a dangerous mission

Fibres do not regenerate between dives. Nevertheless, Rush seemed

“Am I spinning?” Griﬃth asked.

“Looks like it,” another passenger said.

“Right is forward,” Rush said. “Great! Live with it.”

on July 19, 2017.

“And if that happened underwater . . .”

“You just stop and go to the surface.”

“You would have time to get back up?” Pogue asked.

terri�ed of diving in a submersible but would do so anyway, because it was

“I loved P. H. Nargeolet,” Lahey continued. He started choking up. “He was a

OceanGate declined to comment. But, in 2021, Stockton Rush told an

New Yorker Favorites

• How the World’s 50 Best Restaurants are chosen.

• Linda Ronstadt has found another voice.

• A wedding ring that lost itself.

• The foreign students who saw Ukraine as a gateway to a better life.

• An essay by Haruki Murakami: “The Running Novelist.”

More: Titanic Ocean Accident Submarines Innovation Whistle-Blowers

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Iphigenia in Forest Hills

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