'Titan' Sub Pilot, Who Led Trip That Killed 5, Was Like the 'Emperor Who Had No Clothes': Former Colleague (Exclusive)

Two years since OceanGate's Titan sub imploded — killing five people — and a fuller picture is now emerging about what really happened before and during tragedy
"The emperor had no clothes when I arrived," former employee David Lochridge says of working with OeanGate co-founder Stockton Rush
The company tells PEOPLE in a statement: "We again offer our deepest condolences to the families of those who died"David Lochridge doesn't mince words when it comes to describing his time working for Stockton Rush at the experimental diving company OceanGate, which eventually launched a doomed quest down to the Titanic in 2023 — and five people died.
'I didn't realize that they were so good at cutting corners until I actually got across there,' Lochridge tells PEOPLE in a new interview, marking one of the fist times he is speaking publicly.
In the two years since OceanGate's Titan sub imploded — killing Rush, the company's co-founder, and four passengers — a fuller picture is now emerging about what really happened before and during tragedy.
The U.S. Coast Guard is preparing to release a final report, after lengthy investigation.
Some of those close to Rush and the victims, like Lochridge, are also speaking out, including in Netflix's new documentary Titan: The Oceangate Disaster, which premieres on Wednesday, June 11.
Lochridge also appeared on the Today show on Friday, June 6.
A former diver in the U.K.'s Royal Navy, he worked as OceanGate's operations director until early 2018 and says he was closely involved in the training and preparation for what the company promised to potential explorers (for a hefty fee): trips to wondrous undersea artifacts like the wreck of the Titanic off the coast of Canada.
"The company needed a lot of I would say my experience put into it to be able to create this competent team, to be able to actually go out and perform this job that they wanted me to do,' Lochridge says.
But 'the emperor had no clothes when I arrived."
"I'll never forget this. It was Day 1 [working at OceanGate in 2016]. We landed. … Stockton, I think he was at home or at [the lab], and he stated that the new submersible Titan would not be having any underwater communications in it,' Lochridge recalls.
'I honestly thought he was joking,' he says of Rush, 'but he was deadly serious.'
In the roughly two years that Lochridge was a top official at OceanGate, 'I was always met with a lot of resistance,' he says. 'But at the same time, I had to watch what I was doing. I was the new boy in the company.'
He says safety warnings included more than an initial lack of concern over underwater communication. Lochridge cites the monitoring system for the Titan's novel carbon fiber hull — the same system that showed eerie cracking noises.
'If I had heard noises like that in a sub, I would never go on it again,' Lochridge says. 'Nobody would ever go on it again.'
He also says some of the glue used to put components together was applied merely with spatulas.
'There was nobody there verifying that there were no voids,' he says. 'And it's like somebody putting icing on a birthday cake.'
Amid the scrutiny and criticism from people like Lochridge, however, Rush and OceanGate do have defenders for the work they were attempting. (And another person who went on OceanGate dives previously pushed back on Lochridge.)
"I believe that it was a noble effort," Fred Hagen, a developer who made two successful trips to the Titanic on Titan, tells PEOPLE.
"The goals were to enable mankind to access the depths of the abyss and to further our understanding and to foster a sense of connectivity to the bottom of the sea, which is integral to the future of life on Earth," Hagen continues. "And Stockton took some risk and lived outside the box and paid for it with his life."
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Lochridge's own relationship with Rush and OceanGate collapsed by early 2018 and he was fired well before the final, fatal dive. He says he sought to speak out about the company for years, behind closed doors, starting with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
'Even during my termination, he [Rush] said, 'You know, this could fail,' — which it did,' Lochridge says, adding, 'Unfortunately, … people were in it.'
In a statement to PEOPLE, OceanGate said, 'We again offer our deepest condolences to the families of those who died on June 18, 2023, and to all those impacted by the tragedy.'
In the wake of the implosion, the company said, 'OceanGate permanently wound down its operations and focused its resources on fully cooperating with the investigations being conducted.'
Read the original article on People

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