Making money was the driving force of the company behind the doomed Titan submersible and it involved “very little in the way of science”, OceanGate’s former operations director has said.
The vessel imploded on its way to the wreckage of the Titanic in June last year, killing all five people on board.
David Lochridge, who fulfilled the role for two years before being sacked in January 2018, has told a commission into the disaster, that “the whole idea behind the company was to make money”.
He backed up what other ex-employees had already said about the firm’s head, Stockton Rush, that he was volatile and difficult to work with.
Mr Rush was among those who died in the tragedy, along with British billionaire adventurer Hamish Harding, father and son Shahzada and Suleman Dawood and Frenchman Paul-Henri Nargeolet.
In a report he wrote after inspecting the first Titan hull, Mr Lochridge said he was “appalled” by the O-ring – a type of seal – and described the hull as “porous paper. It was disgusting”.
But the second Titan hull, the one used in the fateful voyage, was little better, he said, explaining that “they reused these domes. They reused these ceiling faces. Everything was reused. It’s all cost.”
Titan, he said, was “an abomination of a submersible”.
Mr Lochridge alleged the company’s lawyers wrote a “threatening” letter after he raised a complaint with a US safety agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).
He told the hearing he had “no confidence whatsoever” in the way the Titan was being built in 2017 and put shortcomings down to “cost-cutting”, “bad engineering decisions” and “the desire to get to the Titanic as quickly as they could to start making a profit”.
“There was a big push to get this done, and a lot of steps along the way were missed,” he added.
CEO Stockton Rush had “no experience building submersibles”, and [former engineering director] Tony Nissen was hiring “children that were coming in straight out of university. Some hadn’t even been to university yet”.
He continued: “There was no experience across the board within that organisation. It was nothing. It was all smoke and mirrors, all the social media that you see about all these past expeditions, they always had issues with their expeditions.”
The submersible made its final dive on 18 June 2023, losing contact with its support ship around two hours later.
Rescuers rushed ships, planes, and other equipment to an area around 435 miles (700km) south of St John’s, Newfoundland.
The search for the Titan attracted global attention and the wreckage was eventually found on the ocean floor around 300m from the Titanic wreck, according to officials.