The chief executive officer who piloted 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 down the controls when a tearful passenger begged him to let another pilot take over, new testimony showed Tuesday.
David Lochridge, who was head of marine operations at the deep-sea exploration company OceanGate until he was fired in 2018, described the harrowing journey he made to a U.S. Coast Guard panel investigating last year’s deadly implosion. He said Stockton Rush, OceanGate’s chief executive and founder, insisted on piloting the ship to the 2016 sinking of the Andrea Doria off the coast of Massachusetts, despite his strenuous objections.
Mr Lochridge said he watched cautiously as Mr Rush haphazardly deployed the submersible, a Titan precursor known as Cyclops 1, and ignored Mr Lochridge’s warnings to keep his distance from the deteriorating wreckage, about 250 feet beneath the Atlantic Ocean.
Mr. Rush “hit the ground” when he landed the boat, Mr. Lochridge said, then turned around and “ran full speed” into the wreck, pinning the submersible underneath. Then, seeing the three other passengers on board, Mr. Rush panicked, Mr. Lochridge said, asking if there was enough survival gear on board and how soon a dive team could arrive.
Mr Lochridge, an experienced submarine pilot from Scotland, said he tried to calm his boss down and asked him to hand over the PlayStation controller used to pilot the ship. But Mr Rush refused.
“Every time I went to take the lever from him, he would push it further and further behind him,” Mr Lochridge said, describing his nervousness as he saw debris from the wreckage floating in the water nearby.
Eventually, he said, one of the female passengers who had paid for the ride yelled at Mr Rush to give the controller to Mr Lochridge, using an expletive as her eyes filled with tears. Mr Rush complied by throwing the controller at Mr Lochridge, hitting him in what Mr Lochridge described as the “starboard side” of his head.
The 2016 incident, previously described in a Vanity Fair article, was detailed during the second day of a hearing by the Coast Guard’s Maritime Board of Inquiry. The board plans to call two dozen witnesses to try to assess what happened aboard the Titan submersible when it imploded in June 2023 during an expedition to the sinking of the Titanic.
Mr Lochridge, who joined OceanGate in 2016 but was fired two years later after raising a series of concerns, said company executives wanted to let inexperienced civilians, “someone who had never sat in a submersible”, pilot its deep-sea submersibles with just a day of training.
“They wanted people to come in, be trained as pilots and be able to take passengers on the submarine,” Mr Lochridge said. “That’s a huge wake-up call.”
Since the crash, former employees and industry experts have described a culture of freedom and speed at OceanGate, particularly with its chief executive, Mr. Rush, who had often said he was willing to break rules to advance deep-sea exploration. A former technical director testified that Mr. Rush was not interested in “classifying,” or having the Titan submersible certified by outside experts. The company said in 2019 that the vessel was so innovative that classification could take years.
The Coast Guard has been investigating the accident for 15 months, but began its public hearings Monday with testimony from three people who worked for OceanGate. One of them, the former technical director, said he too was fired from the company after refusing to approve an earlier voyage on the Titan to the Titanic wreck.
At the time, he said, he believed the submersible’s hull was unsafe because it had been damaged by lightning in 2018. That hull was not used after 2019 and a new hull was used for Titanic expeditions, including last year’s deadly one.
On Tuesday, Mr Lochridge said he had piloted between seven and 10 submersibles during his career and all had been classified, except the Cyclops 1. He said he believed his role within the company had been diminished after the 2016 Andrea Doria incident because Mr Rush had felt embarrassed.
He added that Mr. Rush had also decided to no longer seek help from a University of Washington lab that had helped develop the Titan. Mr. Rush had instead decided that someone within the company should handle all development.
When the Coast Guard Commission asked Mr. Lochridge on Tuesday why he thought Mr. Rush and OceanGate made the decision, he said: “I would say it was arrogance.”
