More shocking information about the OceanGate submersible has come out.
Ever since news broke of the sub going missing while carrying five passengers to the Titanic shipwreck, there has been some intense scrutiny of the company. Details have come out showing concerns about the vessel’s safety, including from director and fellow deap-sea diver James Cameron! The man who made the film Titanis says he knows experts in the field warned the business about the dangers of their deep-sea venture beforehand. While OceanGate Expeditions co-founder Guillermo Söhnlein has been defending the safety of the Titan sub, it turns out his partner — the late CEO Stockton Rush — previously admitted years ago to defying guidelines when building the vessel!
Related: Former OceanGate Passengers Reveal How Scary Titanic Expeditions Really Were!
An interview from 2021 has resurfaced this week of Rush — one of the five men who died following the catastrophic implosion of the Titan — confessing to YouTuber Alan Estrada he had “broken some rules” with the sub’s design. He revealed in the clip that he was inspired by General Douglas MacArthur, whom he quoted as saying “You’re remembered for the rules you break.”
And the rules OceanGate broke? Stockton shared:
“I think I’ve broken them with logic and good engineering behind me. Carbon fiber and titanium? There’s a rule you don’t do that. Well, I did.”
What?! Apparently, Titan’s hull was made from aerospace-grade carbon fiber – which was made under an agreement with NASA. But according to Insider, submersible hulls are typically made with steel or titanium. In fact, it’s the rule James Cameron thinks cost Rush and his passengers their lives. He told Reuters he believes that was the critical failure, calling carbon fiber for a hull a “horrible idea” that “just sounded bad on its face.” The filmmaker explained how the carbon fiber would withstand the first tests — but was gradually taking more damage and getting weaker:
“And so we all knew that the danger was delamination and progressive failure over time with microscopic water ingress and … what they call cycling fatigue. And we knew if the sub passed its pressure test it wasn’t gonna fail on its first dive … but it’s going to fail over time, which is insidious. You don’t get that with steel or titanium.”
Cameron laid it out even more plainly on Good Morning America on Friday:
“You don’t use composites for vessels that are seeing external pressure. They’re great for internal pressure vessels like scuba tanks, for example, but they’re terrible for external pressure. This was trying to apply aviation thinking to a deep-submergence engineering problem. We all said that it was, you know, a flawed idea and they didn’t go through certification. I think that was a critical failure.”
And here Stockton was bragging about it, thinking he was being a cool maverick. He continued in the resurfaced interview:
“It’s picking the rules that you break that are the ones that will add value to others and add value to society. And that really, to me, is about innovation.”
But those rules he broke potentially had deadly consequences — and not just for him. Because two years later, Stockton, Hamish Harding, Shahzada Dawood, Suleman Dawood, and Paul-Henri Nargeolet were killed when the vessel imploded during the trip to the Titanic’s wreckage.
But that wasn’t the only time Rush made questionable statements about his business. During a conference hosted by GeekWire last year, Stockton further opened up about starting OceanGate, saying:
“One of the reasons I started the business was because I didn’t understand why we were spending 1,000 times as much money to explore space as we were to explore … the oceans. There is no private access to the deep ocean, and yet there’s all this life to be discovered.”
He then noted that some submarine safety programs were “over the top in their rules and regulations.” He noted they had zero experience with carbon fiber — was his implication that he knew better than those who made the regulations?? He added:
“One of the things I learned is when you’re outside the box, it’s really hard to tell how far outside the box you are. We were pretty far out there.”
Despite breaking the rules with the vessel’s construction, Greg Stone, former executive vice president and chief scientist for Conservation International, told the Associated Press that the CEO insisted he repeatedly checked that the designs were safe:
“I remember him telling me that they didn’t have any way to evaluate his designs, although from an engineering point of view, they worked on paper and he tested them over and over again.”
Testing on paper isn’t enough though, is it?
Wow. Who knows if these five passengers would have survived the voyage if OceanGate didn’t break these rules when it came to building a submersible? What are your thoughts, Perezcious readers? Let us know in the comments below.
[Image via OceanGate/YouTube]
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