The CEO 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 Sept 17.

David Lochridge, who was in charge of marine operations at the underwater exploration company OceanGate until being fired in 2018, described the harrowing trip to a US Coast Guard panel that is investigating last year’s deadly implosion. He said Stockton Rush, the CEO and founder of OceanGate, had insisted on piloting that earlier vessel down to the Andrea Doria shipwreck in 2016, off the Massachusetts coast, over Lochridge’s strenuous objections.

Lochridge said he watched warily as Rush haphazardly deployed the submersible, a precursor to the Titan known as the Cyclops 1, and ignored Lochridge’s warnings to keep his distance from the deteriorating shipwreck about 250 feet under the Atlantic Ocean.

Rush “smashed straight down” when he landed the vessel, 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, Rush flew into a panic, Lochridge said, asking whether there was enough life support on board and asking how quickly a dive team could arrive.

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 Rush refused.

“Every time I went to take the controller from him, he pushed it farther and farther behind him,” 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 Rush to give Lochridge the controller, using an expletive as tears filled her eyes. Rush obliged by throwing the controller at Lochridge, hitting him in what 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 in North Charleston, South Carolina. 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.

Lochridge, who joined OceanGate in 2016 but was fired two years later after raising a series of concerns, was one of the most highly anticipated witnesses.

He testified that the company’s executives often seemed to cut corners. At one point he said, they wanted to let people with little experience, “somebody that had never sat in a submersible,” pilot the company’s 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,” Lochridge said. “That is a huge red flag.”

After he left the company, he said, he would see OceanGate promote missions to the Titanic and wonder if they would end in catastrophe.

“They bypassed it all,” he said of the authorities and rules meant to keep submersibles safe. “It was inevitable something was going to happen. And it was just when.”

He said he had gone to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to describe the dangers of the company’s plans and to complain that he had been fired for raising his concerns.

He said OSHA told him that the workplace safety agency wanted to involve the Coast Guard, but that he never heard from them.

Soon after he contacted OSHA, Lochridge said, lawyers for OceanGate sent him and his wife a letter demanding that he pay the company US$10,000 to cover its legal fees for responding to OSHA’s inquiries; in exchange, the lawyers said in the letter, OceanGate would agree not to contact his previous employers, spouses or an immigration agency. Lochridge said he considered the letter a threat.

OceanGate sued Lochridge later in 2018, saying he had shared confidential company information and had deliberately tried to get fired. The two sides settled the lawsuit later that year, with no money exchanged, promising not to pursue claims against each other, Lochridge said.

He said that the stress of the lawsuit and hiring lawyers had become too much for him and his family. He viewed the agreement as essentially barring him from contacting the Coast Guard unless he was subpoenaed.

Since the crash, a variety of former employees and industry experts have described a fast and loose culture at OceanGate, particularly with its hard-charging CEO, Rush, who often said he was willing to break rules to make advances in deep-sea exploration. A former engineering director at the company testified that 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.

OceanGate said in a statement this week that it was no longer operating and was extending its condolences to relatives of the victims. “There are no words to ease the loss endured by the families impacted by this devastating incident, but we hope that this hearing will help shed light on the cause of the tragedy,” the company said.

The Coast Guard has been investigating the crash for the last 15 months, but began two weeks of public hearings 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 on the Titan to the Titanic wreckage.

At the time, he said, he believed the submersible’s hull was unsafe because it had been damaged by a lightning strike in 2018. That hull was not used after 2019 and a new hull was used for the Titanic expeditions, including the fatal one last year.

On Tuesday, Lochridge said 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 Rush had felt embarrassed.

He said Rush had also decided to stop seeking help from a University of Washington laboratory that had been helping to develop the Titan. Instead, Rush had decided that someone at the company should handle all of the development.

When the Coast Guard panel asked Lochridge, on Tuesday, why he believed Rush and OceanGate had made that decision, he responded: “I would say arrogance.”

 - NY Times