Titan sub malfunctioned days before doomed Titanic mission

On day four of the US Coast Guard‘s hearing over the implosion of OceanGate’s Titan sub,

Dr Steven Ross spoke about a frightening mission that left him and other passengers at the surface unable to get out of the 6.7 metre vessel.

He told the panel a malfunction caused the sub to crash into bulkheading, leaving one passenger “hanging upside down” and others hanging on inside.OceanGate’s founder and pilot Stockton Rush, who was one of five killed in the dive last June, was also behind the controller of the mission days before.

“After we reached the surface, the platform had a valve malfunction and the bow of the platform submerged, tilting the platform and the sub to about a 45 degree angle,” Mr Ross said.

“The pilot crashed into the rear bulkhead, the rest of the passengers tumbled about.

“I ended up standing on the rear bulkhead. One passenger was hanging upside down and the other two managed to wedge themselves into the bow end cap.”

He described it as “uncomfortable and unpleasant”.

“[It] took considerable time to correct the problem,” he said, adding there were multiple issues the surface team had to deal with.

He explained the bow of the sub became detached from the platform and “thus was partly decoupled”.

“They corrected the tilt of the platform so we can re-establish the sub on the platform and remove the passengers.”

Dr Ross, a marine scientist of more than 45 years, said Rush was “upset this had happened”, adding it took a support crew more than an hour to get the sub out of the water after the malfunction in June 2023.

He also told the panel he was unaware if the Titan’s hull was inspected for damage after the incident.

It comes as an OceanGate whistleblower told the panel on Tuesday that Rush had previously crashed another submersible into a shipwreck.

David Lochridge, who was in charge of marine operations at the underwater exploration company until being fired in 2018, said that despite his strenuous objections, Rush insisted on piloting a Cyclops submersible to the Andrea Doria wreck off Massachusetts in 2016, with three paying clients on board.

“He wouldn’t listen,” Lochridge recalled of Rush’s refusal to heed warnings about difficult weather and tide conditions as he deployed the sub.

He claimed Rush “basically drove it full speed” and jammed the sub into the port side of the bow of the decaying shipwreck about 250 feet under the Atlantic Ocean.

 

 

Rush then allegedly flew into a panic in front of the three additional passengers and asked if there was enough life support on board and how quickly a dive team could arrive, Lochridge told the panel.

The experienced submersible pilot from Scotland said he tried to calm his boss down and begged several times for him to hand over the PlayStation controller that operated the sub, but Rush allegedly refused.

It wasn’t until a paying customer shouted at Rush to hand over the controller, that he agreed.

He allegedly threw the controller at Lochridge, hitting him in what Lochridge described as the “starboard side” of his head.

The former director of marine operations was able to safely raise the sub to the surface within “10 to 15 minutes”, adding that “it shouldn’t have got to the stage it got to”.

Rush was reportedly warned about safety concerns ahead of the trip on June 18 last year.

Lochridge stated he had “no confidence whatsoever” with the Titan’s construction.

“It was inevitable something was going to happen. It was just a [question of] when,” the whistleblower said.

Meanwhile, on Thursday, Renata Rojas, the mission specialist at OceanGate, broke down as she described the loss of life.

She said she felt the company was sufficiently transparent during the run-up to the Titanic dive.

“I knew what I was doing was very risky. I never at any point felt unsafe by the operation,” Rojas said.

On board the doomed Titan sub were British explorer Hamish Harding, British-Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman, French deep-sea explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet and OceanGate’s chief executive Stockton Rush, who was piloting the vessel.