The chief executive who was piloting the Titan submersible when it imploded underwater last year, killing him and his four passengers, once crashed another submersible into a shipwreck and then angrily threw the controls when a tearful passenger begged him to let another pilot take over, according to new testimony on Tuesday.
David Lochridge, who was in charge of marine operations at the underwater exploration company OceanGate until being fired in 2018, described the harrowing earlier trip to a U.S. Coast Guard panel that is investigating last year’s deadly implosion. He said that Stockton Rush, the chief executive and founder of OceanGate, had insisted on piloting that earlier vessel down to the Andrea Doria shipwreck in 2016, off the Massachusetts coast, over his strenuous objections.
Mr. Lochridge said he watched warily as Mr. Rush haphazardly deployed the submersible, a precursor to the Titan known as the Cyclops 1, and ignored Mr. Lochridge’s warnings to keep his distance from the deteriorating shipwreck about 250 feet under the Atlantic Ocean.
Mr. Rush “smashed straight down” when he landed the vessel, Mr. Lochridge said, and then turned it around and “basically drove it full speed” into the wreckage, jamming the submersible underneath. Then, in full view of the three additional passengers on board, Mr. Rush flew into a panic, Mr. Lochridge said, asking whether there was enough life support on board and asking how quickly a dive team could arrive.
Mr. Lochridge, an experienced submersible pilot from Scotland, said he tried to calm his boss down and asked him to hand over the PlayStation controller that was used to pilot the vessel. But Mr. Rush refused.
“Every time I went to take the controller from him, he pushed it farther and farther behind him,” Mr. Lochridge said, and described his nervousness at seeing debris from the shipwreck that was floating in the water nearby.
Finally, he said, one of the passengers who had paid for the ride shouted at Mr. Rush to give Mr. Lochridge the controller, using an expletive as tears filled her eyes. Mr. Rush obliged by throwing the controller at Mr. Lochridge, hitting him in what Mr. Lochridge described as the “starboard side” of his head.
The 2016 encounter, which was previously described in a Vanity Fair article, was laid out in full detail on the second day of a hearing by the Coast Guard Marine Board of Investigation. The board plans to call two dozen witnesses as it tries to assess what went wrong on the Titan submersible when it imploded in June 2023 on an expedition to the Titanic shipwreck.
Mr. Lochridge, who joined OceanGate in 2016 but was fired two years later after raising a series of concerns, said the company’s executives had wanted to let inexperienced civilians, “somebody that had never sat in a submersible,” pilot its submersibles deep underwater with just a day of training.
“They wanted people to basically come in, get checked out as pilots and be able to take passengers down in the sub,” Mr. Lochridge said. “That is a huge red flag.”
Since the crash, former employees and industry experts have described a fast and loose culture at OceanGate, and particularly with its hard-charging chief executive, Mr. Rush, who had often said he was willing to break rules to make advances in deep-sea exploration. A former engineering director testified that Mr. Rush was not interested in getting the Titan submersible “classed,” or certified, by outside experts. The company claimed in 2019 that the vessel was so innovative that classification could take years.
The Coast Guard has been investigating the crash for the last 15 months, but began its public hearings on Monday with testimony from three people who formerly worked with OceanGate. One, the former engineering director, said he, too, was fired from the company, when he refused to approve an earlier trip to the Titanic wreckage. At the time, he said, he believed the submersible was unsafe because it had been damaged by a lightning strike in 2018.
On Tuesday, Mr. Lochridge said that he had piloted between seven and 10 submersibles in his career and that all had been classed except for the Cyclops 1. He said he believed his role at the company was diminished after the 2016 incident at the Andrea Doria because Mr. Rush had felt embarrassed.
He said Mr. Rush had also decided to stop seeking help from a University of Washington laboratory that had been helping to develop the Titan. Instead, Mr. Rush had decided that someone at the company should handle all of the development.
When the Coast Guard panel asked Mr. Lochridge, on Tuesday, why he believed Mr. Rush and OceanGate had made that decision, he responded: “I would say arrogance.”
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