OceanGate’s Titan prototype was ‘amateurish,’ expert says at hearing

The CEO of a submersible manufacturing company testified Friday that he checked out a prototype of OceanGate’s Titan submersible four years before the vessel imploded near the Titanic shipwreck — killing all five people aboard — and found it “amateurish.”

Patrick Lahey, co-founder of Triton Submarines, told U.S. Coast Guard officials that he took a tour of the prototype in March 2019 at the invitation of OceanGate crew members. Although they were well-intentioned, he said, their “contraption” was not well thought out and several of their systems were not “ready for prime time.”

Lahey said he gave the crew suggestions on how to improve the Titan but left thinking: “Well that’s a relief. I don’t think that’ll ever take people on any significant dives,” he recalled.

“Obviously, I underestimated their tenacity,” Lahey added.

Friday was the fourth day of testimony in the hearing, which is being conducted by the Coast Guard’s Marine Board of Investigation — the branch’s highest level of investigation. The Coast Guard only convenes an MBI for serious maritime incidents, as they did for the Deepwater Horizon’s ecologically catastrophic oil spill and the cargo ship El Faro’s sinking that killed 33 people in 2015 during Hurricane Joaquin.

The Titan hearing is slated to last through next Friday, after which the board will publish a public report. The process could yield anything from new regulations on deep-sea diving to criminal charges.

Searchers found the Titan submersible June 22, 2023, and determined all five aboard died when the vessel imploded: OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, 61; British aviation businessman Hamish Harding, 58; retired French navy commander Paul-Henri Nargeolet, 77; British Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood, 48; and his 19-year-old son, Suleman.

OceanGate’s former director of engineering said during Monday’s hearing that he refused Rush’s request to pilot Titan missions to the Titanic wreckage because he didn’t trust Rush or the vessel’s operations crew.

Submersible safety experts have criticized OceanGate for not submitting Titan to a classification process, which is voluntary but standard in the industry. The classification company works with submersible manufacturers from the design phase and continues to inspect the crafts while they are in use.

Rush, who was piloting Titan during its final descent, in the past had argued that regulations tended to stifle innovation. OceanGate argued on its website that the classification process was unnecessary.

On Friday, Lahey vehemently disagreed, insisting that classification was essential to ensuring people’s safety during human-operated submersible dives. Lahey had been clashing with OceanGate and Rush specifically for years over the safety of OceanGate’s plans.

In 2018, he was one of several Marine Technology Society members who wrote a letter to Rush pleading with him to submit Titan to the classification process. “Our apprehension is that the current experimental approach adopted by OceanGate could result in negative outcomes (from minor to catastrophic) that would have serious consequences for everyone in the industry,” they wrote in a draft letter that they never sent to Rush or OceanGate.

But on Friday, Jason Neubauer, head of the Coast Guard investigation into the Titan implosion, said that Rush had been given a copy of the draft. Lahey said Rush reading the letter probably sparked their arguments.

“He knew I was a proponent of the certification process, and I knew he felt it was a waste of time,” Lahey told the board, “and I think he described it as an impediment to innovation, which I staunchly disagree with.”

Lahey said he began his diving career in the early 1980s and has worked with submersibles in oil and gas, tourism, film and salvage industries. He co-founded Triton in 2006, the same year he fulfilled a nearly decadelong crusade to get a yacht owner to buy into his vision to install a submersible on board.

Since then, Triton has sold about 30 submersibles and has four or five under construction, Lahey said. The fleet dives to maximum depths ranging from 100 meters to 11,000 meters. All of them have gone through the classification system, which includes submitting designs, equipment and pilots to a private third-party standards agency, Lahey said. He pointed to his company’s close work with DNV, which bills itself as the “world’s leading classification society and a recognized adviser for the maritime industry,” to build a submersible that can safely dive 11,000 meters.

“Innovation is a critical part of progress, forward progress,” Lahey said. “But innovation has to be done within the crucible of a set of rules that give you guardrails. You can’t just go freestyle.”

The biggest lesson of the Titan’s demise is the same one Lahey and his peers were trying to convey to Rush and OceanGate in 2018, he told the MBI.

“That is the most important take-away from all of this — that we need to insist upon certification as a requirement for continued human-occupied exploration of the deep sea,” he said.