From engineering concerns to ignored warnings, we're examining the most shocking revelations that emerged following the tragic implosion of the Titan submersible. Discover the disturbing details about safety oversights, dismissed expert opinions, and crucial warning signs that preceded this devastating maritime disaster.
00:00This is an experimental sub. This is a dangerous environment. It's 6,000 PSI.
00:05Welcome to WatchMojo. And today we're looking at the most shocking things we've learned about the OceanGate Titan implosion since it happened in June 2023.
00:14Subs are safe. They are so safe that the Coast Guard has never been called. They didn't know what to do.
00:22The Logitech Controller.
00:24Hi, my name is Stockton Rush. I'm the CEO and founder of OceanGate. Let's take a look at Titan.
00:28This was one of the first things the public found out about the submersible when it initially disappeared on June 18th.
00:35You can clearly see the controller, a Logitech F710, in a lot of the promotional and news coverage of the sub before the disaster, though it's been modified.
00:44We've taken a completely new approach to the sub design, and it's all run with this game controller and these touchscreens.
00:49To the wider public, this was emblematic of janky engineering and cost-cutting.
00:54But it's not as alarming as it seems. It's actually very normal for video game controllers to be used for applications like this,
01:01and wasn't part of the design that raised red flags for anybody knowledgeable about underwater vehicles.
01:07And it's Bluetooth, so I can hand it to anybody. And it's meant for a 16-year-old to throw it around, and it's super durable.
01:12We keep a couple of spares on board just in case.
01:14Despite this, the lawsuit from Paul-Henri Nargiolet's family suing Oceangate for wrongful death has cited the controller.
01:22This is an experimental sub. People are informed that it's very dangerous down there.
01:27Waiver.
01:27As we just said, Nargiolet's family is suing Oceangate for wrongful death,
01:32despite the fact everybody on board was made to sign an extensive waiver that acknowledged they could die in a variety of ways.
01:39So here's the thing. The waiver reads, quote, any failure of the vessel while I am on board could cause severe injury or death, end quote, among other things.
01:48It's a miracle it could do what it does when you look at it there, because when you look at it, it is very small.
01:52It looks like it's put together with a piece of string, but it's not, obviously.
01:56Lawsuits are ongoing, but it seems like the waiver could itself be waived if it's proven in court that there was gross negligence
02:03and not enough was done to mitigate the risks of going on board the Titan.
02:07Investigations are also still continuing, but as we'll talk about later, Oceangate was warned many times about the sub's dangers.
02:15This four-page document may not be enough to protect the company in court.
02:19The team always says, you know, there's no guarantee you're going to see the bow, there's no guarantee you're going to get down there,
02:25because there's so many variables.
02:28Salvage.
02:28Did we change our way?
02:30Wait a second. We are starting to come up.
02:34We are?
02:34Yep.
02:35It is undeniable that corners were cut during the manufacturing of Titan, and nothing shows that more clearly than CEO Stockton Rush's insistence that they use salvage.
02:45In 2021, following 50 dives, the hole became damaged and a new one was required.
02:51But rather than build from scratch, Rush made them reuse the salvage from the previous one.
02:56We are now taking a pretty significant exoskeleton structure, having to attach it to the primary pressure hole.
03:04It seems doubtful that any other organization would have done something like this.
03:08You certainly wouldn't expect an aeronautics company to salvage and then reuse parts of a plane that had crashed.
03:14Titan had also received damage already during an incident where its batteries had failed, making it even more dangerous to use.
03:21But then he explained that, like, one of the batteries kind of went kaput, and we were having trouble using the electronic drops for the weight.
03:32Personal insult.
03:33Comparing Titan to a professionally built classed vehicle is like comparing a home-built microlight with a Boeing airliner.
03:42In 2018, over five years before the sub's implosion, a deep-sea specialist named Rob McCallum had warned Stockton Rush about the sub.
03:52These email exchanges were made public by the BBC over in the UK, and revealed that McCallum gave extensive and detailed criticisms and warnings about the safety of Titan.
04:03A carbon-fiber sub that's essentially a home-build with no independent oversight is not up for the task.
04:10Rush's responses, however, were frightening.
04:14He said, and we quote,
04:16We have heard the baseless cries of you are going to kill someone way too often.
04:20I take this as a serious personal insult.
04:23End quote.
04:24Stockton threatened me with legal action if I went any further with my course of action.
04:31McCallum spent years trying to persuade Oceangate to test the submersible properly,
04:35while Rush insisted that he didn't need to because doing so would, quote, stifle innovation.
04:42The whistleblower.
04:43Were you with Oceangate when they started Sea Trials for the Titan submersible?
04:48No, I was let go beforehand.
04:50Like Robert McCallum, David Lockridge was another person who warned Rush early.
04:55Except that Lockridge actually worked for the company as its director of marine operations.
05:00Also in 2018, but before McCallum got involved, Lockridge sent Rush a list of over two dozen flaws with Titan,
05:08refusing to approve it for further testing.
05:10That material, they genuinely purchased that from Home Depot.
05:14Rush's response was to fire Lockridge, who went on to blow the whistle on Oceangate to regulators,
05:19only to then get sued by Rush and forced to sign an NDA.
05:23In the aftermath of a disaster, all of this came to light.
05:27Without Lockridge, crude testing of Titan went ahead,
05:30and it eventually, if temporarily, succeeded at becoming a commercial endeavor.
05:35And then would you describe Titan, based on the information that you know,
05:39as an experimental man submersible?
05:43Yeah.
05:44No classification.
05:46There was a request from Oceangate to have Titan certified.
05:51This was back in 2019, and this company denied the request to do that.
05:58There were still more experts who contacted Rush to warn him,
06:01including a large group of members of the Marine Technology Society,
06:05an organization of industry professionals.
06:07They were extremely concerned about Rush's refusal to get Titan classified by any regulatory body,
06:13with Rush instead coming up with his own way to classify Titan,
06:16by having one expert observe a dive and say, based on that alone, whether it was safe.
06:22Oceangate, on its website, had said that they had decided to forego getting registered,
06:29saying that it was standing in the way of innovation.
06:32Oceangate also refused to validate its designs to withstand pressure.
06:37Finally, Mark Negley, who worked for Boeing and had briefly helped Rush with designing Titan,
06:41also warned him that there was a, quote, high risk of significant failure.
06:46All of this was also in 2018, years before the fatal disaster.
06:51The interest in the Titanic is the reason we go there,
06:53because people are willing to fund this kind of exploration and science.
06:57Carbon fiber.
06:58Do you have any questions about what's going on, about acoustic monitoring,
07:02about carbon fiber problems we had, rumors of problems we had, actual problems we had?
07:07It wasn't the Logitech controller, horrifying engineers in the wake of the implosion,
07:13but the news that the hull of Titan was made of carbon fiber.
07:16Stockton Rush's justification for using a carbon fiber composite
07:20was that it's used in planes and works fine there.
07:23But planes are pressurized from the inside out,
07:26and also don't need to withstand the pressure of the ocean 4,000 meters deep.
07:30There's no doubt in my mind that it was the carbon fiber tube that was the mechanical part that failed.
07:36In 2022, a year before the incident, there was a loud acoustic event during Titan's ascension,
07:42which was eventually determined to have been the carbon fiber hull delaminating.
07:46On mission 4, when we got to the surface, Scott was piloting, he heard a really loud bang.
07:51Not a soothing sound, but on the surface.
07:55Essentially, this means it's already come apart inside, and it's just waiting to collapse completely.
08:00Which is exactly what happened the following year.
08:03The alarm.
08:04Everything that could go wrong was sort of going wrong.
08:06There were snagging hazards, there were important components attached with zip ties, flammable flooring.
08:12One of the most chilling details about Titan was its RTM, real-time monitoring system.
08:18According to OceanGate, this would pick up a sound like the loud acoustic event in 2022 that indicated delamination had happened,
08:26and the sub would then be able to ascend.
08:28So even baselining an alarm system based on that is already beyond the pale of anything, I would say, real sub designers would ever, you know, entertain.
08:40But as we later found out, this alarm would only sound moments, perhaps even less than a second, before a catastrophic implosion,
08:49giving nobody in the sub time to react, let alone time to reach the surface, which takes hours from the Titanic rep.
08:57We may never know for sure whether any of the passengers had time to process what was about to happen before it did.
09:03I know it's no great comfort to the families and spouses, but they did die instantaneously.
09:10They were not even aware that anything was wrong.
09:12James Cameron speaks out.
09:14You don't move fast and break things, as they say in Silicon Valley, if the thing you're going to break has got you inside it,
09:22along with other innocent people who, you know, who believe your line of BS.
09:27One person who's talked frequently about the disaster is world-famous director James Cameron,
09:32also known for his extensive interest in ocean exploration, particularly the wreck of the Titanic.
09:38Cameron was all over the news in the aftermath, talking about Ocean Gate and Stockton Rush,
09:43explaining that, unlike Rush, he's always taken regulations and safety rules extremely seriously,
09:49as do most people working in the field.
09:52But nobody could admit that they didn't have the means to go down and look.
09:55So they were running all over the surface.
09:58Cameron himself has been to the Titanic over 30 times.
10:02He also said that he and other people in the community realized extremely early into the disappearance
10:07that an implosion had almost certainly already happened.
10:11They were informed by Naval Intelligence that an implosion event was tracked to the coordinate of the Titanic wreck site.
10:20Before we continue, be sure to subscribe to our channel and ring the bell to get notified about our latest videos.
10:26You have the option to be notified for occasional videos or all of them.
10:30If you're on your phone, make sure you go into settings and switch on your notifications.
10:34We know that the Navy had tracked the implosion when it happened, but according to James Cameron,
10:46the U.S. Coast Guard was unable to investigate because it didn't actually have any remote-operated vehicles on hand.
10:53But it wasn't just the Navy that heard it.
10:55In 2024, footage was released showing Wendy Rush, Stockton's widow, monitoring the sub from the surface.
11:08It's hard to hear, but there's a small sound.
11:13And she reacts by asking the people around her what it was.
11:17Unbeknownst to everybody, that was the exact moment the submarine imploded.
11:22All of it happening in less than a second.
11:24Debris was found right in that search area on the seafloor, just 1,600 feet away from the bow of the Titanic.
11:32Let us know if you'll be watching Netflix's documentary about the Titan implosion.
11:36You don't take paying passengers without having a classification.
