Whistleblower Raises Alarms About Titan Submersible Following Devastating Collapse
Former Oceangate Employee Raises Alarms Over Titan Submersible's Safety Before Disaster
David Lochridge, a seasoned mariner with a background in the Royal Navy, served as the Director of Marine Operations for Oceangate, a company specialising in deep-sea exploration. In 2018, Lochridge raised serious safety concerns about the Titan submersible, a vessel designed for exploring the Titanic wreck, which later imploded in 2023, taking five lives with it.
Lochridge's warnings centred around several critical areas. He highlighted the carbon-fiber hull's critical flaws, questioning its structural integrity due to inadequate design, testing, and inspection processes. He urged the company to have the Titan assessed and certified by the American Bureau of Shipping, but his recommendations were ignored, with OceanGate opting for a less stringent classification by Lloyd's Register instead.
Another concern was the transparent viewport, which was uncertified for the depth of Titanic dives. The viewport was rated only to about 650 to 1300 meters, while expeditions went much deeper. Lochridge also expressed worry over OceanGate's reliance on a real-time monitoring (RTM) system, which could only detect imminent failure milliseconds before an implosion and could not identify existing hull flaws ahead of time.
Additionally, Lochridge believed that the company did not perform nondestructive testing on the hull to check for delaminations, porosity, or glue adhesion quality before crewed dives. He described a "deficient equipment," "toxic safety culture," and a disconnect between written safety protocols and actual practices, creating a scenario where an incident was inevitable if things continued as they were.
After submitting a report outlining these issues in January 2018, Lochridge was fired shortly afterward. In public hearings conducted by the US Coast Guard, Lochridge reiterated his belief that the tragedy could have been avoided.
Following the Titan's disappearance in June 2023, the US Coast Guard released a report identifying significant safety and operational failures by Oceangate as key contributors to the disaster. Lochridge stated that much could have been done differently in the initial design, build, and operations of the Titan.
Oceangate has since ceased operations and is cooperating fully with ongoing investigations. Despite facing legal threats from the company, Lochridge, as a whistleblower, detailed extensive safety shortcuts, lack of oversight, and engineering risks, all of which were documented as contributing factors in the US Coast Guard report.
- Concerns about the Titan submersible's safety, including the questionable structural integrity of its carbon-fiber hull, inadequate transparent viewport certification, and potential issues with the real-time monitoring system, were raised by former Oceangate employee David Lochridge in 2018, long before the vessel's catastrophic implosion in 2023.
- In light of the disaster that claimed five lives, Lochridge, the former director of marine operations at Oceangate, argued that improvements in health-and-wellness standards, medical-condition considerations, technology advancements, and general-news reporting on safety protocols within the exploration industry could have prevented the Titan's failure.
