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OceanGate CEO Knew Sub Would Fail, Longtime Friend Says

Wreckage of the Titan at the Titanic wreck site (USCG)
Wreckage of the Titan at the Titanic wreck site (USCG / Pelagic Research)

Published Sep 25, 2024 9:51 PM by The Maritime Executive


OceanGate's sub Titan performed more than 80 dives before it imploded last year, but the company's engineering team appears to have had no idea how long they expected the hull to last, consulting engineer Bart Kemper told the Marine Board of Investigation on Wednesday. The paper trail from the company shows no sign of calculations for the sub's design lifetime, and the OceanGate engineering team operated on the principle that "if something is bad, we'll know it in time to stop," said Kemper.

When asked whether it was appropriate to operate a manned submersible without a design lifetime, Kemper called it "flat wrong."

"If you're going to bet your paycheck on it, your life on it, your friend's kids lives on it - no, absolutely not," he said. "I can't go any harder than that - I can, but I don't think it's appropriate." 

According to sub operator and longtime friend Karl Stanley, OceanGate CEO Richard Stockton Rush III actually did have a sense of the limits of the sub's design lifetime - and knew it was nearly up. In Stanley's view, Rush decided to go down with his vessel and make a name for himself. 

"This was expected by everybody that had access to a little bit of information . . . [Rush] knew that eventually it was going to end like this, and he wasn’t going to be held accountable. But he was going to be the most famous of all his famous relatives," Stanley told the board. "If it wasn’t an accident, it then has to be some degree of crime. And if it’s a crime, I think to truly understand it, you need to understand the criminal’s motive. The entire reason this whole operation started was Stockton had a desire to leave his mark on history."

Manufacturing irregularities

On Wednesday, a forensic engineer with the National Transportation Safety Board told a Coast Guard investigative panel that OceanGate's carbon fiber hull for the Titan had "wrinkles, porosity and voids" within the hundreds of layers that made up its five-inch-thick structure. The first hull developed cracking issues in service and had to be replaced; the same irregularities were also present in the second version of the hull, which was manufactured with the same material using a slightly different process. 

After the first cylindrical carbon fiber hull was retired, the replacement hull made more than 80 dives. Despite extensive warnings about its material condition, the operator continued to dispatch it on revenue-generating dives, ferrying high-paying "mission specialists" down to high-profile locations. The sub imploded at depth in June 2023 during a commercial dive to the Titanic wreck site, killing all on board. 

During construction of the second hull, OceanGate's composites contractor built up the structure with wound carbon fiber tape in five one-inch layers, testified NTSB lab director Dr. Dan Kramer. After applying each layer, the hull assembly was autoclaved to cure the epoxy, and any wrinkles in the surface were ground flat before winding on the next layer. In the fourth layer, the investigators found 24 grinds, and each cut through as many as 12 plies of the carbon in the assembly - nearly 10 percent of the 133-ply thickness.

After curing, each layer was wrapped with adhesive to make sure that the next layer stuck to it and did not separate. However, pieces of wreckage recovered from the bottom showed that at least some layers delaminated. A long piece of the first layer was recovered from the bottom, separated from the rest, with failed interlayer adhesive on one side and interior paint on the other. An examination of the trimmed ends left over from manufacturing revealed significant voids in the adhesive between each of the five layers, Kramer testified.