What went wrong and why

A report into the June 2023 Titan submersible disaster in which five people died has found that its operator had “critically flawed” safety practices and a toxic workplace culture.

The US Coast Guard’s Marine Board of Investigation two-year investigation into the fatal incident found that the American underwater-tourism company OceanGate, which created Titan as the first privately owned submersible, failed to follow established engineering protocols for safety, testing, and maintenance of their vehicle.

The Titan submersible was on a voyage to the wreck of the Titanic in the North Atlantic when it went missing on 18 June 2023, prompting a huge search effort that made global headlines.

Five days later, the debris of Titan was discovered on the seabed, around 500m from the bow of the Titanic.

The five people who died were Stockton Rush, 61, the chief executive of OceanGate, which owned the submersible; British father and son Shahzada, 48, and Suleman Dawood, 19; British billionaire Hamish Harding, 58; and French sub pilot Paul-Henri Nargeolet, 77.

The sub imploded due to a loss of “structural integrity,” which instantly killed everyone on board.

Rush, who was also the Titan‘s pilot, “exhibited negligence that contributed to the deaths of four individuals”, the report said.

The investigation “identified evidence of a potential criminal offence” and Rush “may have been subject to criminal liability”.

Had he not died, the US Coast Guard would have recommended Rush be referred to the US Department of Justice “for their consideration on whether to pursue a separate criminal investigation”.

Rush ‘ignored inspections, data analyses and preventative maintenance procedures’

The Titan’s real-time monitoring system was supposed to warn crew about safety issues, but the report found that three of its eight sensors were “likely inoperable”.

There was no audible alarm for the system as Rush “was totally against” it. He was also said to be solely responsible for setting warning thresholds, and his employees at OceanGate were unable to “explain the rationale or methodology behind” them.

The report says that Rush ignored inspections, data analyses and preventive maintenance procedures.

In 2018, he fired his then-director of operations, who is not named in the report, for providing a safety review of the Titan that he did not like.

“The message was clear to OceanGate’s remaining senior staff that opposing views needed to be completely stifled,” the report says.

Stockton Rush also chose not to put his vessel through a voluntary safety certification by an independent maritime organisation, as is usual for most submersible owners, claiming in a 2019 blog post that it would have “stifled innovation”.

The report highlighted a “toxic workplace environment” at OceanGate, which “used firings of senior staff members and the looming threat of being fired to dissuade employees and contractors from expressing safety concerns.”

The investigation found that the Titan submersible’s carbon fibre-made design was “flawed”, and that OceanGate had not acted on problems within the vehicle from previous months.

On its 80th dive in 2022, passengers heard a loud bang, which Rush said was the sub shifting in its frame. Investigators now say they believe the noise to have been the carbon fibre starting to come apart.

In 2023, OceanGate was under significant financial pressure and staff were asked to forgo their salaries with the promise of backpay.

“The company was economically very stressed, and as a result, [they] were making decisions that compromised safety,” an ex-staff member told the investigation.

OceanGate has suspended all exploration and commercial operations.

Who was on the Titan submersible?

by Joanna Whitehead

Only five people were on the 6.7-metre-long submersible, which was constructed from carbon fibre and titanium.

Shahzada Dawood, 48, was a Pakistani-British businessman of the Dawood Hercules Corporation, a philanthropist, and grandson of Pakistani industrialist Ahmed Dawood. He studied law at the University of Buckingham in 1998, later completing a master’s degree in textile marketing at the University of Philadelphia in 2000.

In a statement, Mr Dawood was described as “a loving father”.

Suleman Dawood, 19, was the son of Shahzada Dawood, and a student at the University of Strathclyde. His mother, Christine Dawood, said that her son had taken his Rubik’s Cube with him because he wanted to break a world record. The 19-year-old applied to the Guinness World Records, while his father had brought a camera to capture the moment.

Mrs Dawood added that she was initially supposed to go on the trip with her husband, before giving her place to Suleman “because he really wanted to go”.

Hamish Harding, 58, was a British businessman, aviator and space tourist. He had previously descended into the Mariana Trench, broken the Guinness World Record for the fastest circumnavigation of the Earth, and flown into space in 2022 on Blue Origin NS-21. His family said that he had died “doing something he loved”, describing him as “a guide, an inspiration, a support, and a living legend”.

Stockton Rush, 61, was the chief executive and co-founder of OceanGate. Graduating from Princeton in 1984 with a degree in aerospace engineering, he claimed that he never really grew out of his childhood dream of wanting to be an astronaut. He founded OceanGate in 2009 with a stated mission of “increasing access to the deep ocean through innovation”.

Numerous reports claim that Mr Rush was dismissive of rules and regulations, which he felt stood in the way of “innovation”, telling a reporter in 2022: “At some point, safety just is pure waste. I mean, if you just want to be safe, don’t get out of bed. Don’t get in your car. Don’t do anything.”

Paul-Henri Nargeolet, 77, was a former French Navy commander, diver, and member of the French Institute for Research and Exploitation of the Sea. Mr Nargeolet led more than 35 expeditions to the wreck and was “widely considered the leading authority on the wreck site”.

In an interview with the Irish Examiner in 2019, he said: “If you are 11 metres or 11 kilometres down, if something bad happens, the result is the same. When you’re in very deep water, you’re dead before you realise that something is wrong, so it’s just not a problem.”