Were there any safety concerns regarding the Titan submarine? The former director of maritime operations at OceanGate, the company that owns the Titan submarine that disappeared after diving to the wreck of the Titanic, had raised safety concerns before being fired. The US media report it citing a lawsuit from 2018. The doubts of David Lochridge about the safety of the missing submarine, the Titan, are contained in a response he submitted to a lawsuit filed against him by OceanGate. Lochridge, a Scottish submarine pilot and diver, joined OceanGate in May 2015 as an independent contractor before being promoted to director of maritime operations.
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In the lawsuit filed in Washington state five years ago, Oceangate accused Lochridge of violating a confidentiality agreement by disclosing confidential information. In a countersuit, Lochridge said he was fired from OceanGate in January 2018 after “raising critical safety concerns regarding OceanGate’s experimental and untested Titan design.” “Lochridge initially expressed verbal concerns about safety and quality control issues affecting Titan’s executive management,” the documents read. “These verbal communications were ignored.” The pilot was concerned “in particular by OceanGate’s refusal to conduct critical, non-destructive testing of the experimental hull design.” And he accused Oceangate of having “refused to pay the builder to build a porthole hatch that met the required depth of 4,000 meters”, stopping at a certification of 1300 meters.
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Meanwhile, only yesterday it emerged that the Titan had had problems with its own communication equipment during a mission last year. “I’ve interviewed Stockton Rush several times. Not only him, but also his staff and crew” said CNN journalist Gabe Cohen on the CNN This Morning program referring to the number one of the company that owns the boat – OceanGate Expeditions – who is on board the bathyscaphe. “They talked about safety all the time and how confident they were in the technology of this vessel and the other vessels they had designed over time, but we have since learned that the Titan has had some communications issues,” he added. In particular, Cohen cited a CBS report according to which last year the submersible lost contact with the surface for more than two hours, effectively lost in the abyss because there is no GPS on board and the Titan is based on the messages it receives from the mothership to follow its course.