The CEO of the doomed Titanic exploration company whose submarine imploded last year, killing all five onboard including him, eerily joked “what could go wrong?” Just weeks before the the ill-fated expedition.
OceanGate boss Stockton Rush, whose company built the Titan submersible that suffered a “catastrophic implosion” last June, made the chilling remarks on a Canadian radio show.
During the interview with St John’s Radio, Rush also revealed he had specifically chosen to do the expedition in June because that’s when the waters around the wreck of the Titanic are supposedly the “calmest.”
“So with the Polar Prince [the vessel that carried the submarine out to sea], that ice capability, we thought, let’s move the mission a little earlier this year,” he said. “We specifically designed the submersible for this mission.”
His spooky comments are included in a new Channel 5 documentary about the disaster, Minute by Minute: The Titan Sub Disaster.
‘That sub is not safe to dive,’ experts warned
Remarkably, Rush was reportedly warned about the safety (or lack thereof) of the Titan but continued to run voyages on it anyway.
At least 46 people traveled on OceanGate’s cylinder-shaped cabin made of carbon fiber for its $250,000 trip to the Titanic wreckage in 2021 and 2022.
In that time, the video-game-controller steered sub-vessel had a series of mishaps and was likened to a suicide mission by one of the company’s first customers.
Still, on the morning of June 18, 2023, the Titan’s five final passengers descended on their doomed mission before losing contact with its mothership. The world was gripped as rescuers spent days urgently tracking down the missing sub before oxygen was expected to run out.
But the company’s chief executive—along with French Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet, 77; British billionaire Hamish Harding, 58; prominent Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood, 48; and his 19-year-old son, Sulaiman Dawood—had already died at sea.
In the weeks after, former OceanGate employees and industry experts revealed that they repeatedly raised concerns about the Titan’s construction.
David Lochridge, the firm’s former director of marine operations and chief submersible pilot, warned his colleagues after allegedly being fired for raising concerns about the Titan’s capacity to safely dive to the depths at which the Titanic ruins lie.
“That sub is not safe to dive,” he wrote in a series of leaked emails. “I don’t want to be seen as a tattletale, but I’m so worried [Rush] kills himself and others in the quest to boost his ego.”
British millionaire Chris Brown similarly revealed that he had pulled out of the doomed expedition after paying a deposit as he was concerned OceanGate had “cut too many corners.”
But Rush dismissed warnings of killing passengers as ‘a serious personal insult’
Even more disturbingly, Rush even boasted about “bending the rules” when building the ill-fated sub.
In a 2021 interview, he said: “I have broken some rules to make this. The carbon fiber and titanium… there is a rule that you don’t do that. Well, I did.”
Meanwhile, in an episode of BBC’s The Travel Show in 2022, Rush dismissed concerns about a “really loud bang” during a previous dive on the Titan sub.
He said the noise was “not a soothing sound” but downplayed the danger, adding that “almost every deep-sea sub makes a noise at some point.”
What’s more, leaked emails suggest that the American businessman and engineer brushed aside safety warnings from his team.
“You are wanting to use a prototype un-classed technology in a very hostile place,” Rob McCallum, who was involved in the development of OceanGate’s Titanic expeditions, reportedly told his boss in an email. “As much as I appreciate entrepreneurship and innovation, you are potentially putting an entire industry at risk.”
Four days later, Rush reportedly replied that he understood his practices flew “in the face of the submersible orthodoxy, but that is the nature of innovation.”
Rush added he had “grown tired of industry players who try to use a safety argument to stop innovation and new entrants from entering their small existing market.”
“We have heard the baseless cries of ‘You are going to kill someone’ way too often,” he concluded. “I take this as a serious personal insult.”