120. The Descent (OceanGate)

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This episode of Swindled may contain graphic descriptions or audio recordings of disturbing events which may not be suitable for all audiences.

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I want to do things.

I want to do things that are interesting.

And especially I want those to be things that I'm personally interested in.

And I enjoy flying.

And this is what my outlet, that I want to go out and do something that's very interesting to me and will represent a personal achievement.

Steve Fawcett made millions of dollars trading commodities on the floor of the Chicago Board Options Exchange.

Still, that feeling of personal achievement paled compared to the satisfaction he gained from his post-career explorations.

By the time Fawcett was 63, he had set 115 world records in everything from gliders to sailboats.

He'd climbed Kilimanjaro and 350 other mountains.

He'd raced dogs in the Ididarod.

Steve Fawcett was the first person ever to circumnavigate Earth non-stop and alone by both airplane and hot air balloon.

I suppose I'm very ambitious and I've taken these on as

a sense for a sense of personal achievement.

Obviously these ambitions carried significant risks and Steve Fawcett had narrowly escaped death on numerous occasions like the time he experienced hypothermia while swimming in the English Channel or the time his balloon was struck by lightning and he crashed into the shark-infested Coral Sea 500 miles off the coast of Australia.

or when he ran out of fuel and was forced to land in a rural Indian village.

As for the locals, they'll remember for the rest of their lives the day Steve Fawcett dropped in on.

Many of them mistook the balloon for a floating temple and thought Fawcett was a human incarnation of their monkey god.

No matter what unforeseen circumstances occurred, Steve Fawcett would live to tell the tale before devising his next carefully planned adventure.

The man was meticulous.

He would spend months and millions combing over the finer details of every trip.

Those details were a matter of life and death, and Steve Fawcett was anything but reckless.

He was not an adrenaline junkie or daredevil.

He was methodical, which is why what happened next spawned such mystery.

Steve Fawcett and his wife, Peggy, spent Labor Day weekend 2007 at Flying M Ranch near Smith Valley, Nevada, 80 miles southeast of Reno.

Flying M was an aviators playground that at the time was owned by hotel magnet Baron Hilton.

There's a giant airfield with a runway and a hangar that housed more than a dozen historic airworthy aircraft.

Before heading home that afternoon, September 3rd, 2007, Steve Fawcett decided to take a quick morning joyride over the Sierra Nevada mountains in a small single-engine stunt plane.

Such a casual trip that he took nothing with him but a bottle of water.

No cell phone, no flight plan.

It was a walk around the block.

Steve told Peggy that he was headed south and would be back in time for lunch.

Fast forward six hours, Steve Fawcett's food sat untouched and cold.

The record-setting aviator had not returned.

His friends and family grew increasingly worried, but the absence of distress signals and transmissions from the plane's emergency locator offered glimpses of hope.

Ground crews scoured the thick brush and canyons throughout the night.

The Nevada National Guard, Civil Air Patrol, and private pilots searched from above in as many as 40 airplanes and helicopters as sonar-equipped boats combed the lakes.

Days passed, and there was no sign of Steve Fawcett.

Well, the search for Steve Fawcett is intense tonight from the ground, by air, and on the water.

And it could last two weeks, maybe longer.

The adventurer made his millions right here in Chicago and is missing four days now.

Typically, searches like this go on for a couple of weeks, and so four days in that's kind of nothing for us.

We'd like to have found him before now.

Yesterday the energy was very high because we thought we might have but no everyone's in really good spirits and still feeling quite strongly that this man can be found alive.

Four days turned into four weeks leaving volunteers and rescue workers blurry-eyed and baffled.

Steve Fawcett's simple, solitary flight resulted in the most extensive and complex search for an individual in U.S.

history, encompassing over 20,000 square miles of rugged terrain, yet revealing nothing.

Well, almost nothing.

The search had uncovered three other previously undiscovered plane crashes from decades past, but as it relates to Steve Fawcett, not a single clue.

Concern for the 63-year-old Fawcett grows with each passing day, but officials say the search will go on as long as it takes until they know for sure the fate of Steve Fawcett.

There had to be another explanation.

Theories abounded online.

Did Fawcett fake his own death?

There were rumors that a divorce was pending and that he had made catastrophic bets in the subprime mortgage sector.

Was this Steve's attempt to protect his assets?

Did he assume a new identity and run off with a mistress?

Or did he take his own life?

Maybe his marital woes pushed him to the point of no return.

Or could it be aliens?

People seriously suggested it.

Fawcett was flying toward Area 51 when he disappeared.

I'm just saying, bro.

Nah, these conspiracy theories were unfounded.

Steve Fawcett loved his life.

He loved his wife.

Steve and Peggy had been married for almost 40 years, and he was doing just fine financially, leaving behind an eight-figure estate that had remained untouched since the day he disappeared.

As for the aliens, there was proof that Steve redacted and that soon redacted.

Oh, right.

Yeah,

probably just a tragic, unexplainable accident.

An Illinois judge concurred when he declared Steve Fawcett legally deceased on February 15th, 2008.

As anyone can imagine, this is a difficult day for our family, Peggy Fawcett said in an earlier statement.

We will continue to grieve and heal, but after nearly three months, we feel now that we must accept that Steve did not survive.

Steve Fawcett's legacy, however, would live forever.

His colleagues would never lose sight of how such a humble, mild-mannered man had pursued and accomplished such extreme goals, how he pushed technology and endurance to the brink and beyond, how he did it for no reason other than simply wanting to.

It's for that reason that some people would remember Steve Fawcett less favorably.

Was he an admired adventurer or just a bored, self-indulgent millionaire obsessed with setting world records completely void of anything socially redeemable?

If anything, his critics pointed out, Steve Fawcett was a drain on public resources.

He'd been rescued numerous times all over the globe during excursions that went awry.

Privatized the glory, socialize the pain.

That was the Steve Fawcett method.

In fact, in an unprecedented move, Nevada Governor Jim Gibbons considered sending Peggy Fawcett a bill for her husband's latest, albeit unsuccessful, rescue.

The state had spent an estimated $1.4 million and reportedly planned to ask the Fawcett Fawcett estate to pay half of it.

Peggy refused, arguing that she had already spent $1 million on her own private search.

Baron Hilton sent a check to the state for $200,000, and the matter was put to rest, as was Steve Fawcett himself, eventually.

This morning, the NTSB says crews believe they have found the plane piloted by millionaire adventurer Steve Fawcett to vanish more than a year ago.

On Monday, September 29th, 2008, a little more than a year after Steve Fawcett's disappearance, a man named Preston Morrow stumbled upon something peculiar during his morning hike in the remote forest near Mammoth Lakes, California.

$100 bills.

Multiple $100 bills covered in dirt and pine needles.

Preston examined the materials closer and found a tattered fleece pullover and multiple identification cards, including an Illinois-issued Federal Aviation Administration pilot's license.

The name on it read, James Stephen Fawcett.

Preston collected the items but thought nothing of it.

When I originally found it, I looked at the name so quickly it didn't enter my head.

I'm just a hiker having a good time, he said.

Someone I had shown this stuff to Monday night got his head stirring, quickly saw the name and put the pilot's ID and the money together.

And he's like,

he probably put together.

So three of us Monday morning,

I grabbed the card, we saw the name real good, we thought of that, we went, oh, that's Stephen Fawcett.

That's the guy that's missing.

Morrow and friends reported their discovery to the local sheriff's department, which searched the area the following day.

A pilot spotted a debris field a quarter of a mile from where the cash and IDs were found, 120 miles south of Flying Elm Ranch, from where Fawcett took off.

It appeared that a small plane had slammed into the side of a mountain 10,000 feet above sea level before bursting into flames.

There was no evidence of survival.

The crash looked so severe that I doubt if someone would have walked away from it.

An examination of the area concluded that the pilot did not walk away from the crash, but was instead dragged from it by wild animals.

Cadaver dogs and search teams later found Steve Fawcett's driver's license and tennis shoes, both of which had bite marks on them.

Bone fragments were also recovered at the scene and later confirmed to belong to the missing explorer.

The cause of the crash was determined to be the result of downward winds.

A tragic accident, confirmed.

At last, some closure.

No conspiracies, no foul play, no secrets, simply an accident.

Actually, there was one secret.

He and I have been talking for a number of years, and his big,

big,

I don't know if it was his final thing, but his big thing that we kept secret.

So when all of this was going on, this was just kind of hidden,

but Steve and I worked on getting him to the bottom of the Meriander Trench.

That's Graham Hawkes, an engineer at the forefront of deep-sea exploration.

After Steve Fawcett's death, Mr.

Hawkes revealed that the late explorer was planning to travel to the deepest parts of the Pacific Ocean.

Steve's next goal was to be the first person to do it alone.

The only problem is that the only vessels in existence that could transport Steve to those depths were owned by national governments, not only inaccessible, but unaffordable.

Thus, the partnership with Graham Hawkes, who Fawcett bankrolled out of pocket to develop a one-of-a-kind deep-sea submersible.

Not a submarine, a submersible.

There's a difference.

Submarines, in the most basic sense, are fully autonomous crafts capable of leaving port and returning to port under their own power, like any other motorized vessel.

Submersibles, on the other hand, are typically lighter and require less fuel because they are deployed and retrieved by some type of mothership that tows or carries them to a desired destination.

Submersibles are designed to travel vertically rather than horizontally and can achieve greater depths.

The submersible designed by Hawks and Fawcett, which was named Deep Flight Challenger, would prove to be even more experimental.

Instead of oval-shaped, the hole would be cylindrical.

Instead of steel or titanium, it would be composed of carbon fiber.

fabricated by Spencer Composites in California.

The rear of the carbon fiber hole would be capped with a titanium foot.

The front would feature a glass viewport.

Titanium rings and industrial epoxy would bond the three components.

After multiple years and $3 million in development, tests were planned to see if the submersible could withstand water pressure of up to 20,000 pounds per square inch.

One month before the test date arrived, Steve Fawcett crashed into a mountain.

Life has funny twists and turns, and I think it's true to say that had Steve lived, he certainly within six months would have taken that machine to the bottom of the ocean.

We thought he had a 90% chance of coming back.

Maybe a five.

There was certainly a chance that there would be a big nasty bang, but it would be a great way to go.

He wouldn't know anything.

Instead, the deep flight challenger sat in Graham Hawks' storage collecting dust.

The engineer owned the technology but did not have enough funding to complete the project.

Eventually, the Fawcett Estate sold the submersible to a former property investor named Chris Welsh, who planned to complete Steve's journey.

Welsh ultimately partnered with one of the late Great Explorer's best friends, Sir Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group.

This world-first submarine was originally commissioned by my good friend Steve Fawcett.

Steve had intended to complete the first solo dive to the depths of the Mariana Trench.

But we intend to finish what my friend started by diving the Mariana and then to go on and explore and unlock the wonders of the oceans still unknown to humankind or science.

In April 2011, Richard Branson announced Virgin Oceanic and its five dives initiative, in which the Deep Flight Challenger submersible would travel to the deepest spots in each of the planet's five oceans.

Tickets went on sale to the public for $500,000 a piece.

Fortunately, that never happened.

Virgin's preliminary testing revealed that carbon fiber weakens after every dive and would eventually fail catastrophically.

The deep flight challenger was not suited for repeated exposure to the type of intense pressure found at the bottom of the sea.

So in August 2014, Virgin Oceanic shelved its plans for the five dives until better technology became available.

Eventually, the project was scrapped altogether.

Regardless, exploration of the deep soon reached new milestones.

By then, James Cameron, the Hollywood director and deep sea enthusiast, had already reached the bottom of the Mariana Trench in a one-person steel-based submersible built by an Australian company for $8 million.

A few years later, in 2019, Florida-based Triton submarines would set the record for deepest crude descent in its titanium-hold model.

At the same time, a small company headquartered in Washington state called OceanGate was putting the finishing touches on its own.

innovative deep-sea submersible.

Funny enough, OceanGate's founder and CEO, Stockton Rush, had tried to purchase the sub that Graham Hawks had built for Steve Fawcett, but was outbid.

Instead, Rush would more or less borrow the already proven to be flawed concept to build his own.

But in the end, nothing would prove to be more flawed than the human being behind it.

One man's hubris and greed dooms a deep-sea expedition before it even begins on this episode of Swindled.

They bribed government officials

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Well ever since I can remember I had wanted to be an astronaut.

I had an epiphany late in life that in fact that wasn't going to happen.

And I realized that really what I wanted to be was an explorer.

I wanted to be Captain Kirk.

My name is Stockton Rush, and I'm the CEO and founder of OceanGate.

Richard Stockton Rush Jr.

earned his exorbitant wealth quote the old-fashioned way.

I was born into it and then grew it, he told Bloomberg, half-jokingly.

Stockton had invested in startup companies as a venture capitalist in San Francisco, but that was never his dream.

Stockton Rush wanted to go to space.

More specifically, he wanted to be the first person to step foot on Mars.

Now, that might sound like a lofty goal to you and me, but Stockton Rush was serious and possessed the means.

He was the product of an exceptional family.

His father was president-elect of the Bohemian Club, known for its mysterious meetings of prominent men at the Bohemian Grove.

Stockton's grandfather was Ralph K.

Davies, the youngest vice president of Standard Oil.

An even deeper dive into his lineage would arrive at Dr.

Benjamin Rush and Richard Stockton, two signers of the United States Declaration of Independence.

For Stockton Rush, anything was possible.

So, as a young man, Stockton took all the steps to achieve his aeronautical goals.

He became the youngest jet transport-rated pilot in the world, spending his summer breaks from Princeton flying chartered planes in and out of the Middle East.

The next stop, after graduating with an aerospace engineering degree, was the Air Force, but he was turned away.

Stockton was informed that his visual acuity was insufficient to pilot a plane.

It was a tough pill to swallow, but he never strayed too far from the industry.

Rush worked for McDonnell Douglas as a flight test engineer.

Later, he became a trustee of the Museum of Flight in Seattle.

Stockton Rush even married a pilot, Wendy Weil, who also boasted quite the legacy.

Wendy was the great-great-granddaughter of Isador Strauss, a co-owner of Macy's department store, who was last seen holding hands with his wife Issa on the deck of the Titanic before they were swept overboard by a wave.

Stockton Rush continued to fly planes over the years, but it was strictly a hobby.

Even built his own aircraft out of fiberglass in the 90s when doing such a thing was still considered a radical new idea.

Critics said it couldn't or shouldn't be done, but Stockton Rush did it anyway.

Even still, innovation in the aerospace industry was moving too slowly for his liking.

As space tourism and commercialization inched closer to reality in the early aughts, Stockton realized his dream of exploring Mars was still light years away.

His infatuation detoured from outer space to a more accessible but just as mysterious destination, the ocean deep.

Eventually I realized, one, I wasn't going to go to space.

And two, the space has got such great views because in the vacuum of space, by definition, there is nothing.

And I wasn't going to get to Jupiter or Mars, but I did realize that all the cool stuff that I thought was out there is actually underwater.

Stockton Rush was no stranger to the sea.

His charmed life allowed him to become a certified scuba diver at 14.

Rush continued to dive as an adult in the waters of Puget Sound in northwest Washington.

His innovative mind had always suggested that there had to be a better way.

Stockton began exploring ways to explore the ocean without the limitations of scuba gear.

He landed on submersibles and purchased one of, if not the only, vehicles he could find for sale.

It was a bright yellow Kittridge 350, rated for a maximum operating depth of about 100 meters or 350 feet.

Stockton updated the controls and electronics and named it Suds.

He took his first dive in 2006 off the coast of British Columbia.

That's when Stockton caught what he described as the disease.

You see really cool stuff and you go a little deeper and you see even cooler stuff, he described to the business blog XConomy.

From then on, Stockton Rush would dedicate his life to deep-sea exploration.

The fascination was real and understandable.

More than 80% of the ocean remains unmapped, unobserved, and unexplored, according to the National Ocean Service.

There are life forms and ecosystems never before seen by the human eye.

not to mention all the shipwrecks, fighter planes, and hydrothermal vents that litter the seabed.

A more capable submersible would be required to reach those depths, so Stockton Rush shopped around.

He was surprised to learn that there were fewer than 100 privately owned submarines worldwide, and they were all old, and quite frankly, not very cool.

Stockton became frustrated with how inaccessible the deep ocean was for the everyday multi-millionaire.

There's got to be a market for this, he thought to himself.

as a modern, energy-saving LED light bulb illuminated over his head.

What if, he pitched to fellow aerospace entrepreneur Guillermo Sohnline, we buy some of these older submersibles, update the technology, and sell rides to tourists.

The adventure tourism market was getting ready to explode, according to analysts, he said, citing a figure of $275 billion a year.

Plus, Rush continued his pitch to Sonline, We could rent or sell our subs to more traditional industries.

Oil and gas producers could use them for repairs or drilling exploration.

Mining companies could do the same.

Pharmaceutical companies would probably also be interested in milking resources from the sea.

We're talking about hundreds of billions of dollars, Rush had calculated.

Hundreds of billions of dollars that could be used to develop modern submersible machines for future exploration or disaster mitigation or for scientific research to combat climate change.

On the surface, those might seem like conflicting missions.

You know, helping oil companies drill the ocean while promoting sustainability.

Don't worry, Stockton Rush had justification.

I view it like a needle exchange, he told an interviewer.

These things are going to happen anyway.

My name is Stockton Rush, and I'm the CEO and founder of OceanGate.

Stockton Rush founded OceanGate with Guillermo Sonline in 2009.

Soin would help establish the business before taking on a more passive investor role in 2013.

OceanGate was headquartered in Everett, Washington, while its Expedition subsidiary was based in the Bahamas.

From day one, the company set out to disrupt the industry.

Like SpaceX, but for the ocean, the founders would often say.

Rule breakers like Elon Musk, you know, before the crypto pump and dumps and sexual harassment allegations, birthing fetishes and gender-affirming hair transplants and plastic surgeries.

Anyway, this is OceanGate co-founder, Guillermo Sonline.

When I first met Stockton, he struck me as a very intelligent person.

He also struck me as a very savvy engineer.

His thoughts about breaking the rules is really about thinking outside the box and coming up with innovative solutions.

Internally, we always called ourselves SpaceX for the oceans.

Elon's doing the same thing at SpaceX, right?

We're going to colonize the ocean long before we colonize space, Stockton Rush assured Smithsonian magazine.

There was a lot of big talk coming out of OceanGate, a company that that started out much more modestly.

In 2009, they purchased a repurposed oil industry submarine named Antipodes, which was built in 1973.

Antipodes could fit five people and dive up to 300 meters, or about 1,000 feet.

Antipodes away from the dock, Antipodes away from the dock.

It was perfect for shallow expeditions, like exploring the SS Governor Shipwreck.

or locating the elusive six-gilled shark, the latter of which drew interest from at least one famous face.

The sharks are still waiting for an apology, by the way.

Excuse me, where's the uh eject button?

What do you mean there's not one?

Come on, fellas, let's innovate.

In 2012, Ocean Gate announced its next submersible project, Cyclops One, a 500-meter-rated, steel-hold, five-seater retrofitted with new technology and more straightforward controls.

Combination steering wheel and gas pedal, which is this device.

This is a Sony PlayStation PS3 gaming controller.

And with this device, we can drive the submarine, make it go up, down, left, right, forward, and backward.

Cyclops 1 debuted in 2015 and was deployed on dozens of exploratory missions in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, including the Andrea Doria shipwreck near Nantucket Island.

Cyclops was developed with the goal of being a totally new approach to manned submersibles.

Antipodes and Cyclops 1 completed 17 major expeditions between them, but OceanGate was still a far cry from reaching its original 4,000-meter goal.

Cyclops had served as a worthwhile prototype for the company's software, technology, and other equipment.

However, In order to reach the ocean floor, the hole or pressure vessel would have to be totally reimagined.

Who better to recreate from scratch something that others in the industry had already figured out than Richard Stockton Rush Jr.

The OceanGate CEO raised funding for the project from private investors, and to his credit, he sought outside engineering help from the University of Washington's Applied Physics Laboratory.

As part of a $5 million grant awarded to the school by OceanGate, the APL would assist in the development, construction, and testing of the experimental submersible.

We couldn't have done it without that partnership.

You know, the Applied Physics Lab has been effectively our engineering partner.

Meet Cyclops 2, OceanGate's new 20,000-pound, 9-foot-tall, 22-foot-long, five-person submersible capable of diving to depths of up to 3,000 meters.

It would be a wild departure from industry best practices.

Instead of oval-shaped, the hole would be cylindrical.

Instead of steel or titanium, it would be composed of carbon fiber fabricated by Spencer Composites in California.

The benefits of carbon fiber were numerous, according to Stockton Rush.

Lighter, roomier, and cheaper.

Neutrally buoyant, easier, and more cost-efficient to mobilize.

And get this, Rush told the editor of Travel Weekly.

He scored the carbon fiber at a considerable discount because it was past its shelf life for use in airplanes.

It's a very strong hull.

It's probably the safest spot on the planet.

But the odd thing is, really, the most dangerous part of the trip is on board the ship and really getting into the sub.

You're in the open ocean and the North Atlantic.

It really,

that's where I worry the most.

OceanGate also devised a patented mobile launch and recovery system called LARS that could be deployed from almost any vessel in various conditions.

Cyclops 2 would release from a trailer-like platform, submerged 30 feet below the dangerous surface conditions of wind and waves.

Other submersibles require ships with a heavy crane to pluck them from the water.

Again, the cost savings would be significant.

Look at we can use an ocean-going tug that might be $10,000 a day versus a specialized research ship that would run say $100,000 a day.

Pressure testing of a scale model of Cyclops 2's carbon fiber hole began in the summer of 2016 at UW's Applied Physics Lab.

That is the most risky part of the test and the most difficult to analyze since it's never been done.

There's no test data on how carbon fiber in a hemisphere will respond to the pressures.

How would carbon fiber respond?

Not ideal.

The end domes imploded at 3,000 meters on multiple occasions.

OceanGate responded by replacing the carbon fiber end domes with titanium end domes and by increasing the thickness of the carbon fiber used for the hole from four and a half inches to five.

All part of the process.

If you're not breaking things, you're not innovating.

If you're operating within a known environment, as most submersible manufacturers do, they don't break things.

To me, the more stuff you've broken, the more innovative you've been.

The development of Cyclops 2 had a long way to go, which was fine.

Stockton Rush was still tweaking OceanGate's business plan.

And then, after conversations with Normie's, it dawned on him.

The most in-demand excursion imaginable wasn't some trench or geothermal vent or prehistoric shark sightseeing tour with some cheesy rapper.

It was the Titanic, obviously.

The unsinkable luxury ocean liner had remained a fixture of the world's fascination ever since it sank on its maiden voyage to New York in 1912, and there was no way for the average person to see it.

Australia-based deep ocean expeditions, led by British-born explorer Rob McCallum, had chartered trips to the shipwreck for a few years, but those stopped in 2012 after Russia stopped renting out its submersibles.

The demand was still there, Stockton realized.

You couldn't write a better story, he told the travel site Frommers.

Quote, you have the rich and the poor, you have opulence, you have hubris, you have tragedy, you have death.

So it's very rare.

More people have been to space than have been to even the death of the Titanic.

OceanGate announced its first manned submersible trips to the Titanic shipwreck in March 2017, before Cyclops 2 had even been assembled.

Private citizens were invited to embark on an eight-day, one-of-a-kind active expedition to help document the wreckage, not as tourists, but as, quote, mission specialists.

The passengers would board a mothership in St.

John's, Newfoundland, where they would be joined by Ocean Gate pilots, marine biologists, and Titanic experts.

The first two days would be spent traveling to the shipwreck site, about 300 nautical miles away, allowing ample opportunity for education and training.

The next three to four days would provide diving opportunities.

Three mission specialists at a time would board the submersible with a pilot and a subject matter expert for a truly unforgettable experience, weather permitting.

Like most of the deep diving subs, it's been this very limited group of extremely wealthy individuals who buy and make their own subs and then dive where they want to go.

What Ocean Gate's about is bringing the ability to explore the oceans to everyone.

Everyone with six figures of disposable income, at least.

The initial ticket prices for OceanGate's Titanic expeditions started at $105,129.

That very specific amount was based on the inflation-adjusted price of first-class fare on the Titanic.

Cyclops 2's maiden voyage was scheduled for June 2018.

All 54 available spots sold out almost instantly.

Ocean Gate Expeditions offers you the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be a specially trained crew member safely diving to the Titanic wreckage site.

Get ready for what Jules Verne could only imagine: a 12,500-foot journey to the bottom of the sea.

It's the OceanGate Titanic experience.

A few months after making its Titanic expedition announcement, OceanGate moved all of its engineering of Cyclops 2 in-house.

The company filled its team with young, enthusiastic, and cheap interns.

The assembly of the carbon fiber-based Cyclops 2 was completed in August 2017.

It featured the largest viewport in deep diving submersible history, 20 inches in diameter, made from acrylic.

It would provide an unrivaled view of an unexplored world.

The next step was to install the electronic components and land creature comforts that would ensure a smoother journey.

Electric thrusters for propulsion, touchscreens on the wall that displayed various readings, all powered by one button, as Stockton Rush was always quick to point out proudly.

This is not your grandfather's submarine.

I like to tell people this is not your grandfather's submarine.

It's got one button, and that's it.

Check this out.

Would your grandfather have Bluetooth speakers in his submersible?

Didn't think so.

What about this?

Would your grandfather use a gaming controller for steering?

Yeah, maybe actually.

Gaming controllers are commonly used in the military and operating rooms because they're ergonomic and familiar.

Whatever.

Thanks for ruining my bit.

For Cyclops 2, OceanGate replaced its dusty old PlayStation controller with a more universal Logitech F710 PC gamepad.

It was wireless and durable, had decent reviews on Amazon, cost about 30 bucks.

And it's Bluetooth, so I can hand it to anybody.

And it's meant for a 16-year-old to throw it around and super durable.

We keep a couple of spares on board just in case.

The gaming controller wasn't the only off-the-shelf component featured in the interior of Cyclops 2.

Rush said he bought the grab handles on the ceiling from Camping World, the rubber flooring from a welding supply company, the toilet from the container store, I'm assuming.

Best seat in the house, you can look out the viewport, we put a privacy screen in, turn up the music, and it's very popular.

The benefit of using these mass-produced components was twofold.

For one, they were cheaper than designing something from scratch, and two, if they fail, it's easier to source and replace.

Resources were more heavily directed at the more critical carbon fiber pressure vessel, because if that failed or became stuck at the bottom of the ocean, disaster was instant or inevitable, respectively.

OceanGate built in redundant drop weight mechanism safety features to ensure that the submersible would resurface even if literally everything else stopped working, including sandbags attached to hooks that dissolve in salt water, a safeguard for if everyone on board was unconscious.

So this and all of this and all the lead down here can be dropped in an absolute emergency so you can get to the surface.

By the end of January 2018, Cyclops 2 had been assembled and the launch and recovery platform had been successfully tested.

OceanGate's engineering team handed over the submersible to the operations team, which renamed the vessel.

Titan, as it was now called, was on pace for its June Titanic expeditions.

But then, according to OceanGate, Titan was struck by lightning while test diving in the Bahamas.

The electronics on board would have to be replaced.

And, in blatant disregard of the warning signs from the gods, the June 2018 Titanic expeditions were rescheduled for the following year.

OceanGate continued testing the Titan throughout that summer.

The company reached a milestone in December 2018 when Stockton Rush completed a 4,000-meter solo dive in the submersible.

Rush was only the second person after James Cameron to complete such a feat.

This deep dive is a major milestone for OceanGate.

Not only does it mean that Titan is prepared for our upcoming 2019 Titanic survey expedition, Rush said, but it also validates our innovative engineering and the repeated use of our carbon fiber and titanium hull.

OceanGate broke another record in April 2019 when Titan completed a dive of almost the same depth with a crew of four.

They spent an hour capturing 4K images and testing the underwater laser scanner while surveying the ocean floor.

Titanic was next on the list.

So I have heading, I have depth, altitude, I have the speed, I have my thruster levels.

Unfortunately, three weeks before the Titan's maiden voyage to the Titanic, a complication arose with the support vessel OceanGate had booked for its towing.

Something about Canadian maritime laws and foreign-flagged vessels.

Long story short, the trip would have to be delayed again.

At least that's what OceanGate said publicly.

The truth was that an OceanGate pilot, inspecting the interior of the Titan with a flashlight, had discovered a crack in the carbon fiber hole.

According to a detailed internal report later obtained by Wired, at least 11 square feet of carbon fiber had delaminated, meaning the bonds between layers were breaking apart.

Not good.

Titan's entire pressure vessel would have to be rebuilt.

Luckily for OceanGate, COVID soon arrived to buy them some more time.

Stockton Rush spent 2020 raising another $16 million in equity financing.

He also announced partnerships with NASA and Boeing to develop and manufacture new carbon fiber pressure vessels.

OceanGate also used this time to install and patent a new, quote, unparalleled safety feature.

It was called the Real-Time Hole Monitoring System.

Strain gauges and acoustic emission sensors were affixed to the inside of the new hole, which would analyze the effects of changing pressure on the vessel and accurately assess its integrity.

In other words, if the carbon fiber hole were cracking, the acoustic sensors would pick it up in real time and alert the pilot.

Ingenious and foolproof.

To avoid extra costs and delays, OceanGate salvaged the two titanium rings from the old hole and affixed them to the new one.

Once everything was in place, Titan was tested at the Deep Ocean Test Facility in Maryland in March 2021 before embarking on a few short dives in Puget Sound before being trucked across Canada in time for that summer's Titanic dives.

And guess what?

It worked.

With Stockton Rush piloting, the Titan made at least six dives to Titanic depths that summer, as Paul-Henri Nargolais, a former French naval commander and expert on the shipwreck with more than 35 dives under his belt, narrated the incredible scene.

OceanGate documented the wreck site in unprecedented detail.

An Everett Mann has finally reached the Titanic.

Today we're getting some new first images from historic dive by OceanGate founder Stockton Russia.

We had to overcome tremendous engineering, operational, business, and finally COVID-19 challenges to get here, Stockton Rush said in a news release.

I'm so proud of this team and grateful for the support of our many partners.

To capitalize on the exciting news, tickets for OceanGate's 2022 Titanic expeditions went on sale in November 2021.

They were now $250,000 per person, but so worth it.

That summer from June 14th to July 25th, Titan made another seven successful dives to the shipwreck.

In two years, 46 paying customers, sorry, mission specialists had made the journey.

The passengers ranged from billionaires to lottery winners to self-described titaniacs who had mortgaged their homes to afford the fare.

Stockton Rush's vision was coming to fruition.

He was so proud of himself.

I'd like to be remembered as an innovator.

I think it was General MacArthur who said, you're remembered for the rules you break.

And, you know, I've broken some rules to make this.

I think I've broken them with logic and good engineering behind me, the carbon fiber and titanium.

There's a rule you don't do that.

Well, I did.

The Titan submersible was stored at a shoreside facility in Newfoundland without protection from the elements for more than six months.

It was retrieved in February 2023 to begin preparations for that summer's expeditions, which got off to a rocky start.

Test dives in May were plagued with minor equipment failures.

The early missions of the season were scrapped due to bad weather.

Finally, in mid-June, conditions became more favorable.

The passengers and crew of Dive 88 traveled to Newfoundland to board the Polar Prince, a privately owned Canadian icebreaker ship hired to tow the Titan Submersible to the Titanic.

As usual, 61-year-old Stockton Rush would be the pilot.

He would be joined by P.

H.

Narjali, the 77-year-old Titanic expert.

The mission specialist of Dive 88 included Shahzada Dawood, a 48-year-old British citizen and heir to one of Pakistan's most prominent family fortunes.

Mr.

Dalwood was notable for serving as the vice chairman of energy conglomerate Ingrill Corporation.

He was also listed in the Panama papers.

Also on board was Gisada Dalwood's 19-year-old son, Suleiman.

Suleiman was a university student who enjoyed science fiction and volleyball.

He brought a Rubik's cube to solve at a world record-setting depth.

Christine Dalwood, Gisada's wife, was initially scheduled to dive, but she gave up her spot to her son in the weeks prior.

However, Christine and their youngest daughter would join the Dalwood men aboard the Polar Prince.

The third mission specialist was 58-year-old British billionaire adventurer Hamish Harding, holder of three Guinness World Records, including the record for the fastest circumnavigation of the Earth via the North and South Poles by aircraft.

In March 2021, Hamish had dove to the lowest depth of the Mariana Trench with explorer Victor Vescovo.

More recently, Hamish traveled to space on Blue Origin's new Shepard rocket.

When asked at the last minute if he wanted to dive to the Titanic, Hamish couldn't say no.

My next adventure, and I seem to say yes to everything and worry about later how I'm going to do it.

But the latest thing I've said yes to, somebody phoned me a couple of days ago and said, Did I want to go to the Titanic in 10 days' time on a new sub they've got that will get to the Titanic?

And of course, I said yes.

So, I appeared to be off to the Titanic in 10 days' time for a

4,000-meter dive to see the Titanic, which I always wanted to do but didn't know was going to be possible to do in the short term.

Hamish Harding posted the Facebook on June 17th, 2023.

Due to the worst winter in Newfoundland in 40 years, this mission is likely to be the first and only manned mission to the Titanic in 2023.

A weather window has just opened up, and we are going to attempt a dive tomorrow.

More expedition updates to follow, if the weather holds.

The forecast was encouraging.

After a few days of safety meetings and presentations aboard the Polar Prince and a solemn ceremony for the 1,500 passengers who perished in the Titanic disaster.

The five crew members of Dive 88 changed out of their mandated orange jackets, helmets, and steel-toed boots for the Ocean Gate-branded flight suits and warm socks.

In anticipation of boarding the Titan, mission specialists were advised to eat a low-residue diet the day before, no coffee that morning, and download their favorite songs to their phones to play on board during the descent with one caveat, no country music.

The Polar Prince arrived at the Titanic wreck site in the North Atlantic at 5.15 a.m.

Eastern Time, Sunday, June 18, 2023.

Around 8.30 a.m., the five crew members were carried to the launch and recovery system by two dinghies.

When everybody was loaded into the Titan, Stockton Rush took his usual spot in the back, game controller in hand, and the dome was secured.

At 8.55 a.m., The platform was vented, submerging itself and the Titan in 30 feet of water.

At 9.14 a.m., Titan disengaged and began its two-hour descent to almost 4,000 meters below.

Once the submersible is launched, you will begin to see alien-like lifeforms whizz by the viewport as you sink deeper and deeper into the ocean, OceanGate wrote on its website when it advertised the expedition.

It was pitch black.

The submersible's floodlights were turned off to save battery.

At 9.18 a.m., the Polar Prince sent a comms check to the Titan, signified by a simple K via text message.

44 seconds later, Titan replied with a K of its own.

The automatic pings were also being received every 5 to 10 seconds as designed.

Everything was working as intended.

Titan was 165 meters deep at this point.

Almost an hour later, and 2,000 meters deeper, the Titan sent another text to the Polar Prince.

All good here, it read.

30 minutes later, at 10.47 a.m., Titan announced via text text that it had dropped two weights, an indication that the submersible was nearing the bottom and slowing its descent.

Six seconds later, the Polar Prince received an automatic ping.

All systems working.

Then, all contact ceased.

Lost tracking, the Polar Prince alerted the Titan at 10.49.

No response.

The mothership continued messaging the Titan two to three times per minute, but never heard back.

For those on board the Polar Prince, there was nothing they could do but wait and search the surface in hopes that the submersible would reappear.

But it never did.

We begin with some breaking news.

The U.S.

Coast Guard has launched a search for a missing tourist submarine that disappeared in the Atlantic Ocean after looking at wreckage from the Titanic.

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Yesterday afternoon, we were notified by the operator of the submersible vessel that it was overdue and it had five persons on board the submersible.

So we're working very closely at this point to make sure that we're doing everything that we can do to locate the submersible and rescue those on board.

Our thoughts are with the crew members and the families

of those on board the submersible at this time, and we are doing everything that we can do to make sure that we can locate and rescue those on board.

The search for the Titan submersible began in the early morning hours of Monday, June 19, 2023.

The United States Coast Guard coordinated with the Canadian Coast Guard and Canadian Armed Forces to scan the ocean surface from above while submarines patrolled the water column.

Sonar buoys were deployed to monitor underwater activity to a depth of 13,000 feet.

Additional assets, including commercial vessels, were on the way, but it could take days before they arrived.

That was time that the five passengers of Titan did not have.

According to OceanGate engineers, the sub stored approximately 70 to 96 hours of emergency oxygen reserves on board.

Even if Titan had ascended out of sight and was bobbing on the surface, the occupants were still in danger of suffocating because the hatch was sealed from the outside with 17 bolts.

There was no emergency exit.

Finding the Titan in a timely manner was imperative, and the foggy conditions of the North Atlantic only heightened the challenge.

Not to mention the sheer size of the search area, 7,600 square miles of remote open ocean, larger than the state of Connecticut.

Monday's efforts were unsuccessful.

Visibility was much improved the following day as the U.S.

Air National Guard crews arrived.

A Bahamian research vessel also raced to the scene to deploy its remotely operated vehicle outfitted with infrared radar.

Another deep-sea diving vessel was on its way from France, and the company that co-owned the Polar Prince was sending out an additional ship to search the surface.

Yet, after 10,000 square miles had been examined, there was still no sign of the Ocean Gate's Titan.

But there was hope.

A Canadian aircraft equipped with the gear-to-trace submarines detected unusual and unidentified knocking noises at 30-minute intervals.

ROVs were relocated to the area, in quote, an attempt to explore the origin of the noises.

Morale was high, but dwindling.

Oh, this is a this is a search and rescue mission 100%.

We are smack dab in the middle of search and rescue and uh and uh we'll continue to put every available asset that we have in an effort to to find the Titan and the crew members.

The search for the missing sub in the Atlantic has shifted after noises were detected by a Canadian aircraft both yesterday and again today.

Captain Jamie Frederick says this is still a search and rescue mission.

He said the five crew members on board the Titan have limited rations of food and water.

It's not clear how much they have.

Now to a developing story in the North Atlantic where time is running out to rescue a missing crew.

Officials lost contact with a submersible on a deep-sea dive to tour the wreckage of the Titanic.

The Coast Guard estimates the Titan's oxygen supply will run out by 5 a.m.

Thursday, roughly 30 hours from now.

According to the cable news stations, some of which prominently featured countdown tickers, the Titan submersible had about 30 hours of oxygen remaining.

The story dominated media coverage and became a social media sensation.

The memes kind of wrote themselves, especially in the wake of the recent orca attacks on yachts a month earlier.

The world was glued to its screens as the search continued.

We understand this is an extremely difficult time for the families of the missing crew members aboard the Titan, and our thoughts go out to them and the crew.

Meanwhile, Christine Dahwood paced the deck of the Polar Prince with her 17-year-old daughter, waiting for any news about her beloved husband and son.

I think I lost hope when we passed the 96-hour mark, she later said.

Hamish Harding's 37-year-old stepson, Brian Saz, was dealing with the stress in a much different manner.

Brian announced on Facebook that he would be attending the Blink 182 concert in San Diego that night.

It might be distasteful, he wrote.

but my family would want me to be at the Blink 182 show, as it's my favorite band, and music helps me in difficult times.

Please keep my family in your prayers, Brian Saz wrote on Twitter, which he immediately followed with a tweet responding, yes, please, to an OnlyFans model, asking, can I sit on you?

Even Cardi B found Brian's behavior abhorrent.

This is why people hate you spoiled brat billionaires, she wrote to him.

She's like, isn't it sad that you a whole fucking billionaire and nobody gives a fuck about you?

Like

Like you missing and motherfuckers is ready to shake dicks at concert.

That's crazy.

I'd rather be broke.

I'd rather be broke than like

am poor, but knowing that I'm lost.

As high-level discourse about the situation flooded the airwaves, the disappearance of the Titan submersible also provided a perfect example of global inequality and how the world generally doesn't give a fuck.

A week before Titan disappeared, a fishing boat carrying an estimated 750 migrants from Pakistan, Egypt, Syria, Afghanistan, and Palestine capsized off the coast of Greece, killing over 500 people.

There was no international rescue effort, no unified command with sonar technology.

In fact, a Greek Coast Guard vessel was following the migrant ship when it sank and watched them drown.

And yet, barely a peep from the media.

It was an obscene contrast to the wall-to-wall coverage the missing billionaires were receiving.

Even Barack Obama took a break from tallying up all the innocent civilians he blew up in drone strikes to speak out.

Obscene inequality.

You think about news of the day.

Generally, we're not talking about news of the day, but right now we have

24-hour coverage,

and I understand it, of this submarine, the submersible

that tragically is right now lost at the bottom of the sea.

At the same time, right here, in that, just off the coast of Greece, we had 700

people dead, 700 migrants who were apparently being smuggled into

here.

And

it's made news, but it's not dominating in the same way.

And in some ways, it's indicative of the degree to which people's life chances

have grown so disparate.

Damn, that is gross.

Someone should make a podcast about that or something.

Who, me?

I'm busy.

Anyway, back to the billionaires.

Stockton felt like he was pushing the edge.

You want to push the envelope, use some new materials.

That's Liz Taylor, a deep-sea engineer and president of DOER Marine Operations in Alameda, California.

She's one of the many in the small, tight-knit submersible community who was not surprised by the Ocean Gate news in the slightest.

Taylor had expressed her concern about Titan's carbon fiber hold of Stockton Rush back in 2015, before he had even built it.

The composite nature of the material would lend itself to weakening with each successive dive, she warned.

The layers would delaminate and pull apart.

That was the consensus among everyone who knew anything about submersibles.

It was a really bad idea, Taylor warned.

We all told him, you know, someone is going to be killed in this thing, and you've got to not do it.

Stockton thumbed his nose at Liz Taylor's concern.

I've done the math, he wrote.

I'm confident in my engineering.

Three years later, Rob McCallum, the man who had led the Australian trips to the Titanic and actually consulted with the Ocean Gate in the early days, shared the same warning with Stockton.

Carbon fiber is not an acceptable material to use on a deep-sea submersible.

I think you are potentially placing yourself and your clients in a dangerous dynamic, McCallum wrote in an email to Rush.

In your race to Titanic, you are mirroring that famous catch cry.

She is unsinkable.

Rob McCallum practically begged Stockton to get the Titan classed by an independent agency, like every single other chartered vessel.

Classification is proof of due diligence and assures ship owners, insurers, regulators, and passengers that a vessel is designed, constructed, and inspected to acceptable standards.

This is the only submersible in the world that's doing commercial work that was unclassed.

That is to say, it's not certified by an independent agency.

And those two things together go hand in hand.

The reason it wasn't classed or certified is because no class society, no certifying agency is going to sign off on carbon fiber as a building product for a submersible.

Again, Stockton Rush refused to listen.

We have heard the baseless cries of, you are going to kill someone, way too often, he wrote to McCallum.

I take this as a serious personal insult.

Rush said he was tired of industry players using the safety argument to stifle innovation and prevent new entrants into their existing market.

Getting Titan certified would take too long, Stockton wrote on the Ocean Gate blog.

Quote, new and innovative ideas often have a multi-year approval cycle due to the lack of pre-existing standards.

Plus, as Stockton Rush was quick to remind, the vast majority of marine and aviation accidents result from operator error, not mechanical failure.

There hasn't been an injury in the commercial sub-industry in over 35 years, he shared with Smithsonian magazine.

It's obscenely safe because they have all these regulations, but it also also hasn't innovated or grown because they have all these regulations.

There's a limit.

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.

At some point, you're going to take some risk.

And it really is a risk-reward question.

I said, I think I can do this just as safely by breaking the rules.

Stockton Rush was supremely confident in carbon fiber.

He had hired engineers.

He had had it tested.

According to Dr.

Stephen Ross, OceanGate's scientific director, Russ was convinced that Titan's carbon fiber hole would last indefinitely.

Carl Stanley, who owns and operates a deep sea exploration company in Honduras, was convinced that it would not.

In 2019, Stanley took a 12,000-foot plunge in the Titan with Stockton Rush near the Bahamas and heard a loud cracking sound emanating from the hole during the two-hour dive.

I think that hole has a defect near the flange that will only get worse.

The only question in my mind is, will it fail catastrophically or not?

Carl Stanley wrote to Stockton afterward.

It needs more testing.

I don't think if you push forward with dives to the Titanic this season, it will be succumbing to financial pressures.

I think it will be succumbing to pressures of your own creation, in some part dictated by ego to do what people said couldn't be done.

Again, Stockton Rush blew off the concerns and criticism.

After all, he had partnered with the University of Washington's Applied Physics Lab, Boeing, and NASA to design this thing, remember?

Or did he?

Even though OceanGate bragged about its partnership's non-stop in marketing materials and interviews, and statements to ABC News, every single one of those entities diminished its role in the design and construction of the Titan Submersible.

UW's Applied Physics Lab said it was not involved in the design, engineering, or testing of the Titan Submersible used in the most recent Titanic expeditions.

Its partnership with OceanGate ended prematurely, it said, over engineering disagreements after only $650,000 of the $5 million grant was completed.

It was a tough group to work with.

They had a different mindset on how to proceed with the program than we did.

NASA confirmed it consulted with OceanGate on materials and manufacturing, but did not conduct any testing as the company had claimed.

Boeing said it had no involvement in the project's design whatsoever.

In fact, Wired reported that Mark Negley, a material and process engineer at Boeing, shared that familiar dire warning about carbon fiber to rush, complete with data and a graph that contained a skull and crossbones below 4,000 meters.

We think you are at a high risk of significant failure at or before you reach 4,000 meters, Negley wrote.

We do not think you have any safety margin.

Be cautious and careful.

Believe it or not, in addition to the carbon fiber hole, Titan had other glaring design and process flaws.

For instance, the cylinder shape of the hole was a poor choice because it subjects the submersible to more external pressure.

According to those who've spent their lives studying these things, a sphere is the perfect shape of a submersible hole because pressure is exerted equally across all areas.

This stuff had already been figured out.

Also, the hatch bolted from the outside with no other means of escape was probably a bad idea, as was diving alone.

Typically, submersibles travel in tandem because there's safety in numbers, you know.

Do they not teach that in kindergarten at private schools?

And then there was the gaming controller, which, on its own, wasn't necessarily a bad idea, but the fact that it was wireless could lead to trouble, as Rob McCallum succinctly summed up to the New Yorker, quote, Every sub in the world has hard-wired controls for a reason, that if the signal drops out, you're not fucked.

Noted.

For these reasons and more, Rob McCallum signed his name next to about 40 others on a March 2018 letter addressed the Stockton Rush that was drafted by the Marine Technology Society, expressing unanimous concern on behalf of the industry regarding the development of the Titan Submersible and its planned Titanic expedition.

The International Committee of Ocean Engineers, Technologists, Educators, and Policymakers was worried that something catastrophic could happen that would blacken the eyes of the entire industry.

Please, Stockton Rush, won't you reconsider?

As your brothers in arms in this industry, you think this is very risky.

This is a dangerous path you're taking.

That's William Conan, the MTS committee chair and author of the letter.

Conan is the CEO and founder of Hydrospace, the company that manufactured Titan's acrylic viewport.

He said he became concerned after discovering what Rush planned to do, even sharing analysis by an independent expert that the viewport was only rated for one-sixth of the depth of the Titanic and may fail after only a few 4,000-meter dives.

Stockton installed the viewport anyway.

As for that warning letter, The board of the Marine Technology Society never approved it to be sent.

However, Rush still managed to get a copy of the draft.

He called Will Conan on the phone to discuss.

He says, well, Will, I am leaving the association.

Upset says, well, you can't.

And he says, why not?

I says, because Stockton, you never paid to be part of the association.

You are a member of the brotherhood.

You belong to the community.

You have a responsibility to everybody.

The truth was, behind the scenes, Stockton Rush had explored getting the Titan class by an internationally credited registrar called DNV, but ultimately balked at the price.

On its website, OceanGate claimed Titan would meet or exceed DNV's certification anyway.

In reality, they would never bother to try.

Furthermore, Titan was not bound by U.S.

regulations because Titan was not registered as a U.S.

vessel.

OceanGate Expeditions was established in the Bahamas and operated in international waters.

Avoiding regulations was also the reason why Titan's passengers were given minor jobs and called mission specialists.

As Rob McCallum explained to the New Yorker, it is illegal to transport passengers in an unclassed experimental submersible, but not a crew.

Plus, there's far less trouble if the crew dies.

Stockton Rush was pulling out all the stops to realize his sketchy dive operation.

And if the government decided to intervene, he had a plan B.

He said I would buy a congressman and make

basically the problems would go away at that point in time.

That's Matthew McCoy, a former OceanGate employee and Coast Guard member, who asked Rush about safety and regulatory concerns related to the Titanic expeditions.

I've never had anybody say that to me directly, and I was aghast, McCoy added.

Basically, after that, I resigned from the company.

Matthew McCoy was far from the only OceanGate employee to express concern about the company's culture.

Tony Neeson, OceanGate's former engineering director, said his relationship with the CEO turned sour after Neeson refused to dive in the titanova's safety concerns.

He was fired soon after.

Stockton would fight for...

He would fight for what he wanted.

And what he wanted,

even if it changed from day to day, right?

Like

he would fight for what he wanted, and

he wouldn't give an inch much at all.

Other employees spoke of OceanGate's financial issues and how the company would ask them to forego paychecks during certain periods with the promise of catching up later.

Many theorize that these financial pressures are what propelled Stockton Rush to ignore all warnings and common sense and push ahead with the Titanic expeditions.

Every dive to the Titanic generated nearly $1 million in revenue.

Stockton was insistent that they happen.

Cost cutting,

bad engineering decisions.

I'd say that's the two main things.

The desire to get to the Titanic as quickly as they could to start making profit.

I knew nothing about the financials side of things, but

yeah, there was a big push to get this done.

That's David Lockridge, OceanGate's former director of marine operations.

Part of Lockridge's job was to inspect the company's submersibles to ensure that they were safe to dive.

In January 2018, during a quality control inspection of Titan, he found a litany of issues, most notably the carbon fiber hole, quote, very visible signs of delamination and porosity.

Lockridge was worried that it would come apart after repeated dives and recommended non-destructive testing and a full scan of the hole.

You have to have the confidence in the equipment to do the job.

It's like every other industry.

If you don't have the confidence in it, you don't do it.

That's it.

And did you have confidence in the way that the Titan was being built at this time?

No confidence whatsoever.

And I was very vocal about that and still am.

David Lockridge's verbal warnings were ignored.

Stockton Rush wasn't worried about the carbon fiber.

He was confident that his patented real-time acoustic hole monitoring system was all that was needed.

Plus, there was no way to scan the hole, as Lockridge had suggested, because the outside of the submersible had been coated in rhino-liner.

Pretty cool, huh?

Every recommendation David Lockridge made was met with hostility.

The director of marine operations was even denied access to documentation that should have been freely available as part of the inspection process.

So Lockridge took a different approach.

He prepared a detailed quality control inspection report to record his concerns in writing.

In it, Lockeridge listed more than two dozen items that required immediate attention and included appropriate corrective action and recommendations for each.

Until suitable corrective actions are in place and closed out, he wrote, Cyclops 2, which became the Titan, should not be manned during any of the upcoming trials.

David Lockridge filed his report on January 18th, 2018.

He was called into a meeting with Stockton Rush on January 19th, 2018.

It was clear that Stockton was unconcerned about the findings.

Quote, I have no desire to die, and I'm not going to die.

What may easily happen is we will fail.

We will get down there, and we will find that the acoustic monitoring has, you know, fails after 10 hours or gives false too many false positives or...

that the thing is noisy or the dome is creaking because we're going to be measuring that or it starts to craze.

I can come up with 50 reasons why we have to call it off and we fail as a company.

I'm not dying.

No one is dying under my watch, period.

I have no desire to die.

I've got a nice granddaughter.

I'm going to be around.

I understand this kind of risk and I'm going into it with eyes open.

And I think this is one of the safest things I will ever do, you know?

In conclusion, the men agreed that working together was not the path forward.

David Lockridge was fired on the spot.

and given approximately 10 minutes to clear out his desk and leave Ocean Gate headquarters.

Honestly, he was surprised it had taken this long.

The writing had been on the wall for David Lockridge ever since he publicly embarrassed Stockton Rush during a dive in Cyclops 1 two years earlier.

The plan was to make a 3D model of the Andrea Doria shipwreck.

Stockton insisted on piloting.

This made Lockridge uneasy because the Andrea Doria, which sank in 1956, is a notoriously dangerous shipwreck, often called the Everest of wreck diving.

It's in relatively shallow water, but it's covered in an invisible web of fishing lines.

More than 20 scuba divers have died trying to explore it.

David Lockridge insisted that he tag along.

Took it down, I kept saying, please keep your distance.

Don't tell me what to do.

That was the conversation.

Throwing caution to the wind, as he is wont to do, Stockton Rush slammed Cyclops 1 straight down onto the Andrea Doria shipwreck.

And without surveying the surroundings, he turned the submersible around 180 degrees and basically drove it full speed into the wreckage, obscured by debris.

They were stuck, wedged underneath.

Stockton was panicking.

Is there enough life support on board?

How long will it take for a dive team to get here?

Stockton, calm down.

Give me the PlayStation controller, Lockridge asked gently.

What are we going to do?

It's stuck.

How much time do we have?

Stockton.

It will be okay.

Hand me the controller.

Stockton Rush refused and continued to melt down for the next hour.

Finally, one of the mission specialists on board pleaded, Stockton, give him the fucking controller.

Stockton obliged by throwing it at David Lockridge's head when he wasn't looking.

I was, I had my head up inside the tower, so I'm still looking at a wreck, and he clattered it off the right side of my head.

The controller landed on the deck plate.

One of the buttons came off, the robust

PlayStation controller.

And I picked it up, repaired it, and had his out 10-15 minutes.

Back on dry land, David Lockridge was heralded as a hero as Stockton Rush sulked.

Lockridge said he spent the next two years being phased out from the company, the silent treatment essentially, until he filed that quality control inspection report.

Then he was fired.

After his termination, David Lockridge contacted OSHA in February 2018 and enrolled in the whistleblower protection program.

When Stockton Rush was made aware, Ocean Gate sued Lockeridge and his wife, alleging breach of contract, fraud, and misappropriation of trade secrets.

The company demanded repayment of legal fees related to OSHA's inquiries and threatened to contact immigration since Lockeridge and his family had moved from Scotland when he went to work for the company.

Lockeridge filed a counterclaim alleging a series of safety concerns.

The case was settled out of court in November 2018 and no money was exchanged.

David Lockridge could not afford a legal battle with a billionaire, and after no progress was made from OSHA, he decided to walk away.

It became too much for his family to deal with, Lockridge claimed.

I would consider myself pretty ballsy when it comes to doing things that are dangerous, but that sub is an accident waiting to happen, Lockridge later wrote to Rob McCallum.

There's no way on earth you could have paid me to dive the thing.

I don't want to be seen as a tattletale, but I'm so worried he kills himself and others in the quest to boost his ego.

It was inevitable something was going to happen,

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This morning, an ROV or remote operated vehicle from the vessel Horizon Arctic discovered the tail cone of the Titan submersible approximately 1,600 feet from the bow of the Titanic on the seafloor.

The ROV subsequently found additional debris.

In consultation with experts from within the Unified Command, the debris is consistent with the catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber.

Upon this determination, we immediately notified the families.

On behalf of the United States Coast Guard and the entire Unified Command, I offer my deepest condolences to the families.

I can only imagine what this has been like for them

and I hope that this discovery provides some solace during this difficult time.

On June 22, 2023, Around 7 a.m.

Eastern Time, the Canadian vessel Horizon Arctic deployed an ROV to search the sea floor near where Ocean Gate's Titan had submerged.

At that point, the submersible had been missing for almost four whole days.

By most calculations, the oxygen reserves on board had been exhausted.

Almost four hours later, the U.S.

Coast Guard tweeted an update.

A debris field was discovered within the search area.

Experts were evaluating the information.

An afternoon press conference confirmed the worst.

Significant chunks of the Titan submersible had been located at the bottom of the ocean, about 1,600 feet from the bow of the Titanic.

According to Rear Admiral John Mauger of the 1st Coast Guard District in Boston, the debris was consistent with a catastrophic implosion of the pressure vessel.

In retrospect, that was always the most likely scenario.

The instant loss of communications, the shudder reportedly felt by the passengers and crew of the Polar Prince around the same time.

Also, it wasn't publicly shared while the search was taking place, but the U.S.

Navy's underwater acoustic detection system had found an anomaly in its data that was, quote, consistent with an implosion or explosion in the general vicinity of where the Titan submersible was operating when communications were lost.

The data wasn't definitive at the time, so the search and rescue mission continued.

If there was any silver lining to the tragedy, it was the implosion itself.

It was instantaneous.

happened in milliseconds, like the god of Neptune stomping on a soda can at 6,000 pounds per square inch.

The Titan crew likely never saw it coming, likely felt nothing, as the space in which it once occupied transformed into a cloud of carbon-fiber particulates and human meat.

Unless a cracking noise preceded it, perhaps there was a split second of panic, but even that is preferable to the alternative demise, you know, bobbing around on the ocean's surface for days on end, gasping for air.

while some guy named Stockton uses his last breath to tell you how much he trusts his engineering.

The sea has no patience or pity for man's overconfidence.

I'm struck by the similarity of the Titanic disaster itself, where the captain was repeatedly warned about ice ahead of his ship.

And for a very similar tragedy where warnings went unheeded to take place at the same exact site, it's really quite surreal.

And here we are again and at the same place.

You know, now there's one wreck lying next to the other wreck for the same damn reason.

James Cameron, the filmmaker and explorer, had been critical of Titan's design, calling it fundamentally flawed.

He also criticized the extensive search and rescue, claiming those in the submersible community knew what happened instantly and knew the debris would be found exactly where the vessel submerged, like it was.

Yet, a unified international search spent four days scouring 13,000 square miles of open ocean using 11 surface vessels, 5 subsurface assets, and 4 aircraft.

The U.S.

Coast Guard declined to provide a cost estimate on how much it spent, but the Washington Post estimated it to be about $1.2 million.

The Canadian government's efforts were even more extensive, but who's counting?

Meanwhile, former and prospective passengers were counting their blessings.

Arthur Loibel, a 61-year-old adventurer from Germany, spent 10 and a half hours aboard the Titan in 2021 because of equipment malfunctions.

He later likened the dive to a suicide mission.

I was a bit naive, he told the Associated Press.

Brian Weed, a camera operator for a Discovery Channel show, told the AAP that he, quote, 100% knew this was going to happen.

Weed's test dive on the Titan in Puget Sound was also plagued with mechanical issues.

After the experience, he and his colleagues pulled out of a planned dive to the Titanic for a TV show.

However, Jay Bloom, a Las Vegas real estate developer, and his son, might claim the closest call.

They were invited on what proved to be Titan's final dive, but withdrew over safety concerns, even after Stockton Rush tried to convince them that the expedition was safer than crossing the street.

Josada and Suleiman Dawood would claim those empty spots.

And I look at that picture of the

father and son that took our place and think, but for the grace of God, that could be my son and myself.

So it's really, really upsetting.

Salvage crews spent several weeks after the implosion removing Titan debris from the ocean floor, wads of cables, chunks of exterior panels, and, quote, presumed human remains.

The wreckage was transported back to St.

John's, Newfoundland for further analysis.

Ocean Gate, the owner of that submersible that imploded during a voyage to the Titanic, says it has now suspended its exploration and commercial operations.

On July 6, 2023, OceanGate announced that it had suspended all exploration and commercial operations.

The company scrubbed its digital footprint and hired a new CEO, Gordon Gardner, to help navigate the looming litigation and inquiries, including a Marine Board of Investigation, the highest level of investigation conducted by the Coast Guard.

for maritime casualties.

After the on-scene evidence collection efforts conclude, the MBI will typically hold a formal hearing to gather additional witness testimony and evidence in a setting that is available to the public.

That formal hearing would take place over two weeks in Charleston, South Carolina, starting September 16th, 2024, 15 months after Titan catastrophically imploded.

The purpose was to uncover the facts related to the disaster and to make recommendations to prevent something similar from happening in the future.

The hearing would also examine whether there was any evidence of misconduct or criminal acts in connection with the incident.

Two dozen witnesses would testify, including former employees and contractors, such as David Lockridge, Tony Neeson, and Dr.

Stephen Ross.

They recounted the red flags and alarm bells that went ignored leading up to the tragedy.

Ocean Gate's co-founder, Guillermo Sonline, also made an appearance.

You know, as I think back through everything that's happened over the last year,

this was not supposed to happen, right?

This shouldn't have happened.

Five people should not have lost their lives.

Four families should not be mourning their loved ones.

None of this is going to bring our friends back.

Several members of the Deep Sea Exploration Brotherhood, as they called it, would also speak, including Will Conan, the man who authored the Marine Technology Society letter, addressed the Stockton Rush, and Carl Stanley, who warned Rush about the carbon fiber hole after taking a dive in the Titan.

Stanley, in particular, had an interesting theory on Stockton Rush's motivations.

The entire reason this whole operation started was

Stockton had a desire to leave his mark on history.

He was living in the shadow of 250 years of historically significant figures.

And his father was extremely well accomplished, Marine, big game hunter, president of elect of Bohemian Club.

He definitely knew it was going to end like this.

He quite literally and figuratively went out with the biggest bang in human history that you could go out with.

And

who was the last person to murder two billionaires at once and have them pay for the privilege?

To discuss the technical aspects of the implosion, Bart Kemper, the principal engineer of Kemper Engineering, presented preliminary findings.

However, the root cause of the implosion was, quote, indeterminate at this time, because there were simply too many points of failure to pinpoint precisely what went wrong.

The prevailing theory is that the three dissimilar materials

tore apart at their adhesive seams after more than two dozen deep-sea dives.

Then again, it could have been the viewport itself that failed or maybe the carbon fiber hole delaminated and crushed.

The National Transportation Safety Board is set to make an official determination of the probable cause of the accident at a future date.

Nevertheless, the information revealed at the Coast Guard's MBI hearings was already eye-opening and disturbing enough.

This is G.

Michael Harris, world-renowned adventurer and explorer.

Had no idea the depth of how bad it was.

This man, Stockton Rush, was a complete, unequivocal narcissist and in the end, a murderer.

He killed those people.

He knew better.

He knew better.

The board of directors knew better.

The employees of the company knew better.

The attorneys knew better.

They all should have said something.

In October 2024, the U.S.

Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York began contacting former OceanGate employees and expedition members as part of an investigatory probe.

They've enlisted the U.S.

Postal Inspection Service and a forensic accountancy expert.

Criminal charges may be on the way.

Additionally, the family of Paul Henri Narjolais has filed a wrongful death lawsuit against OceanGate, seeking $50 million.

The suit alleges company officials failed to disclose the Titan's flaws and purposely concealed its shortcomings from Narjolais, who died in terror as a result.

Court documents allege the crew started to drop weight about 90 minutes into their dive to the Titanic, indicating the team knew that something was wrong and tried to abort the dive.

It says the crew likely knew that they were going to die as the Titan continued to descend.

The lawsuit says that this caused terror and mental anguish prior to the implosion.

More lawsuits are expected, but plaintiffs face tremendous hurdles.

For one, establishing jurisdiction for an incident that happened in international waters is easier said than done.

And two, all passengers and crew signed extensive waivers that warned of the myriad of ways they could die.

Furthermore, even if those lawsuits do succeed, Does Ocean Gate have the financial ability to pay damages?

Doubtful.

Then again, for Stockton Rush, anything is possible.

Swindled is written, researched, produced, and hosted by me, a concerned citizen, with original music by Trevor Howard, aka Deformer, aka Suds.

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