The safety warnings for the Titan that the founder of OceanGate ignored

The founder and then president of Ocean Gate Expeditions, Stockton Rush, dismissed a series of internal and external security advisories about the titan submersiblethe BBC reported that it had access to documents that prove it.

Last Sunday it stood out that five passengers -including Stockton Rush- of the Titan were left incommunicado with the control center, while they carried out a exploration of the remains of the Titanic shiplocated almost 4 thousand meters deep in the Atlantic Ocean.

OceanGate Expeditions, the company that developed the Titan, was founded in 2009 by Stockton Rushwho studied aeronautical engineering and worked at an airline in the Middle East.

“All my life I wanted to be an astronaut. I was part of the crowd that wanted to participate in (the travel program to the Moon) Apollo (…) Then I had an epiphany. It wasn't about going into space. It was about exploring (…) And I realized that the ocean is the universe. That's where life is."

This was stated by Stockton Rush in an interview given to chain CBS.

While the Titan was being searched for, the US press revealed that OceanGate received internal and external warnings about the safety of the submersible.

Missed Warnings by Stockton

BBC indicates that in 2018 the then director of maritime operations of OceanGate, David Lochridge, presented a harsh report in which he asserted that the submersible needed more tests to guarantee that it was capable of descending to a depth of 4,000 meters safely for its occupants.

Said criticisms cost Lochridge his job and a lawsuit along the waythanks to which his report ended up in the hands of the courts of the Eastern District of the state of Virginia, United States.

In the same 2018 oceanographers, explorers and submarine industry leaders criticized Stockton Rush for his refusal to submit the Titan to tests by specialized companies that would make it possible to certify that it could operate at the depths announced by its developers, the BBC points out.

However, these warnings were ignored by the businessman, who considered them a burden on innovationassured the American newspaper New York Times.

This newspaper also recalled that in 2021, during the Titan's first excursion to the area where the remains of the Titanic are, an incident was recorded.

“The submersible had a problem with the battery and had to manually connect to his tail lift,” the newspaper reported, citing a document OceanGate's legal counsel sent to a court.

Titan's Last Expedition

Last Sunday's expedition to the remains of the Titanic was the last one carried out without taking it into consideration, due to the fact that the submersible lost communication with the surface, from where They operated the Titan with a video game controller.

From Monday through Thursday, the United States, Canada, France and the United Kingdom contributed submarines, ships and aircraft to help locate Titan. The four-day search for the Titan submersible has come to a tragic end.

this past thursday OceanGate presumed all five crew members dead. “We believe that our CEO Stockton Rush; Shahzada Dawood and her son Suleman Dawood, Hamish Harding, and Paul-Henri Nargeolet have sadly been lost,” the company said in a statement.