In June, Stockton Rush’s OceanGate vessel imploded 3,500m below the Atlantic, instantly killing all five crew. Matthew Campbell gets to the bottom of a tragedy years in the making.

In March 2019 Patrick Lahey, an
undersea explorer, was on a yachting holiday with his family in the Bahamas. After coming ashore one evening he got into a conversation with a submarine crew at the bar. Their company, OceanGate Expeditions, had designed a submersible to take paying customers to the wreck of the Titanic and it was about to begin sea trials. They asked if Lahey would like a tour of their craft, which they had christened Titan.

Lahey, 61, a Canadian who has lived in Florida for 20 years, is held by many to be the world’s most experienced submarine pilot. The CEO of Triton Submarines, a US submersibles maker, he has explored ocean depths few others have visited.

Down in the harbour where Titan was tethered to its launch craft, he was horrified by what he saw. “Things seemed to be held together by crimped cables that looked like something you’d use on a fishing trip,” he says. “It was clear it was nowhere near ready to take people diving. It didn’t seem likely it would ever work.”

Remarkably, it did — for a while at least. Then in June this year, 370 nautical miles off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada, and about 105 minutes into a descent towards the Titanic, Titan stopped communicating with its mother ship. When the submersible failed to come up as scheduled that afternoon, the surface crew raised the alarm.

The world waited for news, gripped by the grim drama unfolding at a depth of almost two and a half miles (4km), where five people were thought to be running out of air in a cold tube about to become their tomb. Some of the passengers had paid £200,000 ($408,000) for a seat on the 6.7-metre submarine and a glimpse of the Titanic through a thick acrylic viewing portal. They were Shahzada Dawood, 48, a British-Pakistani businessman, his 19-year-old son, Suleman, and Hamish Harding, 58, a British pilot turned explorer and aviation tycoon. Acting as their guide was Paul-Henri Nargeolet, 77, a world authority on the Titanic. Richard Stockton Rush, 61, the founder and chief executive of OceanGate, was at the controls.

Four days later, mangled debris of the Titan and presumed human remains were found on the seabed not far from the bow of the Titanic. The US coast guard announced what the experts already suspected. Rush and his guests had not run out of oxygen, they had died in a catastrophic implosion, crushed so suddenly under more than 379 bar of pressure (5,500lb per square inch) they would not have known what had happened.

Six months on, what at first had seemed a tragic reminder of the risks of undersea exploration has turned into a different narrative. Titan was the first privately owned submarine to have imploded and experts in the small, close-knit world of maritime explorers blame Rush, the OceanGate CEO, for the tragedy rather than the perils of the deep.

In a tale with almost Shakespearean overtones, Rush, a scion of a wealthy San Francisco family, cut corners, broke rules and ignored warnings regardless of the risk to himself and his crew. Undersea pros had for years been worried that this maverick adventurer would bring disrepute to their industry with an experimental submarine design that was, in their view, an accident waiting to happen. They had repeatedly advised him to work with a classification society, a maritime authority that would vet his decisions. He refused. In an interview last year he said: “At some point, safety just is pure waste. If you just want to be safe, don’t get out of bed.”

“A lot of us saw this coming, we all felt it was just a matter of time before something went badly wrong,” says Terry Kirby, 74, the former chief pilot of two deep-sea subs for the Hawaii Undersea Research Laboratory at the University of Hawaii.

OceanGate’s own safety officer, David Lochridge, told a friend he feared Rush would “kill himself and others in the quest to boost his ego”; and Karl Stanley, a friend of Rush who operates a tourist submarine in Honduras, also tried to rein him in after suffering a deeply unsettling experience when he joined Titan’s second test dive in the Bahamas in 2019.

He heard hair-raising cracking sounds “like small-calibre gunshots” the deeper they went. “Nobody in there wanted to be the first one to panic,” he tells me. “I took it for granted that he [Rush] had done a lot of testing already, that he understood what was happening and that we weren’t in danger of dying. In retrospect we were a little closer to dying than I appreciated.”

Stanley thinks Rush knew the hull would disintegrate at some point — he calls the submarine a “mousetrap for billionaires”, saying: “Rush had no business bringing that thing out into the north of the Atlantic with passengers. With each dive the hull was getting mashed up. He knew how the story would end.”

‘I wanted to be Captain Kirk’

Born in 1962, Richard Stockton Rush III was a descendant of two famous forebears who signed the 1776 Declaration of Independence, Richard Stockton and Benjamin Rush. He appears to have inherited an adventurous spirit from his father, also called Richard Stockton Rush — or “Tock” to his friends — a marine commando and big-game hunter. An overachiever who grew up in San Francisco, Rush Jr started scuba diving in his early teens and got his air pilot’s licence aged 19, before graduating in aerospace engineering from Princeton University in 1984.

He was, by all accounts, determined to make an even greater mark on the world than his illustrious ancestors. He wanted to become a fighter pilot but his eyesight was not perfect, so he went to business school instead. Then he became passionate about space, intent on becoming the first person on Mars. But when Richard Branson announced a new era of space tourism with his SpaceShipOne project in 2004, Rush lost interest. “I didn’t want to go up into space as a tourist,” he told an interviewer in 2019. “I wanted to be Captain Kirk on the Enterprise, I wanted to explore.”

Switching his focus to the ocean, he built a single-person mini-submersible and piloted it around the shallows near his home in Seattle, on the west coast of America. Then in 2009 he co-founded OceanGate with Guillermo Söhnlein, an Argentina-born businessman whose other venture is an eccentric project to colonise Venus.

“We wanted to be SpaceX for the ocean,” says Söhnlein, 57. The problem, in his view, was that most deep-diving subs were operated by governments or oligarchs. The deep needed democratising with a new type of submersible that could fit in more passengers than the small titanium spheres currently used at the greatest depths. By spring 2015, OceanGate had refitted a submersible built more than 20 years earlier. Cyclops 1 took customers to shipwrecks and was designed to go no deeper than 500m.

But Rush’s ambition was to bring tourists to the most famous wreck of all, that of the Titanic, which lies at a depth of almost 4,000m. He needed a submarine capable of withstanding much greater pressure.

He was fascinated by the story of the ocean liner that sank on its inaugural voyage in 1912. By a strange coincidence, his wife’s great-great-grandparents Isidor and Ida Straus were among the wealthiest people who went down on the ship in what seemed to some a cosmic rebuke to privilege.

James Cameron, the Titanic film-maker, depicted Isidor, a retail magnate who was the co-owner of Macy’s, and Ida hugging one last time in their cabin as water rose to their bunk. An accomplished deep-sea explorer himself, the director was the first to draw a parallel between the supposedly unsinkable Titanic and the Titan. He found it grimly ironic that “we now have another wreck that is based on unfortunately the same principles of not heeding warnings”. He went on: “OceanGate were warned.”

The name of the OceanGate sub was not the most auspicious: Titan was a ship in a novel by Morgan Robertson published in 1898 called Futility. It was supposed to be unsinkable but went down after hitting an iceberg in the North Atlantic — an uncanny premonition of the Titanic disaster 14 years later. But it wasn’t just the name that raised eyebrows. The choice of a cylindrical carbon-fibre hull went against all the advice — titanium spheres are the tried and trusted method of carrying humans into the deep. The electronics system was also unusual: it had been designed by interns from Washington State University. They had come up with the idea of using PlayStation controllers to direct the sub.

“To be honest I’m surprised that thing lasted as long as it did,” says Rob McCallum, the first person to lead paid tourist dives to the Titanic, who has visited the wreck seven times. “With carbon fibre, every time you apply stress and release it you are weakening it … You’re not able to predict when it’s going to fail.”

In December 2015 Rush tested a one-third scale model in a pressure chamber. It imploded at the equivalent of a depth of only 2,740m. Yet OceanGate trumpeted this as a success, demonstrating that “the benefits of carbon fibre are real”.

The many warning signs

By January 2018 Titan was almost complete and Lochridge, OceanGate’s safety officer, was invited to pronounce it fit to dive before sea trials. Instead he presented Rush with a ten-page report documenting his concerns. There were missing bolts, loose seals, improperly secured batteries, components “tied” to the outside of the sub. Even worse, a highly flammable, petroleum-based material had been used for Titan’s flooring. There was hosing running around the sub’s exterior — an entanglement risk. Most worryingly, the carbon fibre was visibly coming apart, full of air gaps, Lochridge wrote, recommending a scan of the hull before test dives began. It never happened.

Rush had every reason to be grateful to Lochridge, not only for the report. The Scotsman had saved him once before on a relatively shallow dive, when Rush got Cyclops 1 stuck under the bow of a shipwreck. In an episode recounted by Susan Casey, author of The Underworld, a book about undersea exploration, Lochridge offered to take the controls but Rush refused, trying in a growing panic to free Cyclops himself. After an hour, one of the clients shouted: “Give him [Lochridge] the f***ing controller!” Rush then hurled the video-game joystick at Lochridge’s head. Lochridge got the sub out in no time.

But instead of thanking him for his safety report, Rush fired him, taking him and his wife, Carole — who had nothing to do with OceanGate — to court. According to the complaint, Lochridge had “repeatedly refused to accept the veracity of information by the company’s lead engineer”. Lochridge later sent his report to the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which passed it on to the US coast guard. He declined to comment for this article.

Another warning in 2018 had come from Will Kohnen, the CEO of Hydrospace Group, an engineering firm that makes submarines (among other things), and chairman of the Marine Technology Society’s Manned Underwater Vehicles Committee. Kohnen sent Rush a letter warning that OceanGate’s “experimental” approach could lead to “catastrophic” consequences. It was signed by dozens of experts, among them Lahey and McCallum.

“Rush was trying to go deeper with more people, faster and cheaper than anyone else,” Kohnen says. “And OK, this is good, but there is a process.” The son of a farmer who grew up milking cows in Canada, Kohnen believes Rush’s rule-breaking was rooted in his family background. “I really think Stockton was trying to live up to some image of his father, who had all sorts of adventures throughout his life. How do you surpass that? Stockton grew up in a very privileged position … If you feel you can behave with impunity, it causes trouble.”

Rush was furious about the criticism. “I have grown tired of industry players who try to use a safety argument to stop innovation and new entrants from their small, existing market,” he wrote to McCallum in a 2018 email. “Since I started OceanGate we have heard the baseless cries of ‘you are going to kill someone’ way too often. I take this as a serious personal insult.”

But McCallum urged him to take care. “As much as I appreciate entrepreneurship and innovation, you are potentially putting an entire industry at risk,” he wrote to Rush. “I implore you to take every care in your testing and sea trials and to be very, very conservative. There are bold pilots and there are old pilots.” He added: “You can’t cut corners in the deep. It’s not about being a disruptor. It’s about the laws of physics.”

Rush went ahead with testing in the Bahamas. Stanley, the friend who accompanied him on the second test dive — and witnessed the blood-curdling cracking sounds — ended up sending him a barrage of emails afterwards urging him to carry out unmanned testing rather than risking his passengers’ lives. He believed there was a defect near a flange “that will only get worse”. The only question in his mind was: “will it fail catastrophically or not”. Rush disagreed, telling Stanley: “Keep your opinions to yourself.”

By then, Rush was already signing up customers for Titanic trips. Casey, the author, was determined to experience the deep at first hand — she planned to record the experience in her book. “I wanted to get as deep as I could. I didn’t care about Titanic, but going to 4,000 metres would be great.”

She called OceanGate. “It was basically, like, ‘Yeah, we’re doing this, it’s going to be great, we’re not going to stop at 4,000 metres, we’re going to go even deeper — you’ll be lucky to get a seat.’ “

Before she booked, though, she called Kirby, the Hawaii University pilot, to ask his advice. “He told me that it was unclassed and said, ‘Never, ever, ever go on that sub.’” Speaking to me from Hawaii, Kirby adds: “She called me afterwards to thank me.”

By 2021 Rush was ready to take his first passengers to the Titanic. Brian Weed, a cameraman for the Discovery Channel’s Expedition Unknown documentary series, was lined up to film the first dive in the summer. He is no stranger to risk: “I’ve trekked through Siberia in minus 50 degrees, I’ve rappelled down cliffs and dived with tiger sharks in the Caribbean.” He was very excited to go in a submarine.

But on a preparatory dive off the American coast in May, Weed “got the willies”, as he puts it. The first thing to go wrong were communications with the surface crew. The computer had to be rebooted several times. Then the sub lost propulsion. “We couldn’t move, the sub was dead in the water,” Weed says. After three hours they managed to surface by jettisoning the ballast. But Weed thought: “This is too dangerous for me.”

Everything about the sub seemed “glitchy”. But there was also something about Rush that made him uneasy. The vessel had no escape hatch — passengers were bolted in from the outside and the sub could be opened only from the exterior. This was “a serious deviation from any and all submersible design safety guidelines”, Hydrospace’s Kohnen says.

When Weed asked Rush what would happen if they needed to abort a dive and surfaced far from the mother ship with only four or five days of oxygen on board, he replied dismissively: “Well, if you’re not found in five days, you’re dead anyway.” He seemed to be avoiding the point that, once the sub had surfaced, a hatch would allow air in, giving those on board more time to be found. “It rather shocked me,” Weed says. “It was a rather cavalier answer that left a bad taste.” He withdrew from the project.

The ‘mission specialists’

The businessman Shahzada Dawood seemed to Christine, his wife, like a “vibrating toddler” in his enthusiasm to get a shot of the Titanic through the submarine’s 53cm porthole with his Nikon camera.

She was watching with her 17-year-old daughter, Alina, from the deck of the Polar Prince, the mother ship, as her husband and son, Suleman, waited to be ferried out to Titan on June 18, Father’s Day. One of the last pictures of 19-year-old Suleman shows him holding a Rubik’s Cube in one hand while clasping his father’s shoulder with the other. He had sent his last WhatsApp messages earlier that day, one to a favourite aunt, Shahzada’s sister Azmeh Dawood, who lives in Amsterdam: “Love you and miss you like crazy.”

According to Azmeh, Suleman would have preferred to stay on the mother ship but went on Titan to please his father. He had confided in a relative the night before that he was “completely terrified”, the aunt says. “But backing out was not an option. He kept the lid on it — it’s not a done thing in Asian families to disobey your father.”

Suleman’s aunt was closer to him than she was her brother, with whom she had fallen out five years earlier. The Dawoods are one of the world’s wealthiest families, with homes in various cities, including London, and a science museum in Karachi.

“Shahzada should have done due diligence,” his sister says. The waivers he, Suleman and the other passengers signed before boarding Titan mentioned death “three times on page one, twice on page two, twice on page three and once on the last page … He [Shahzada] stood there and watched as his son signed it.” She believes her brother’s attitude was: “If it’s expensive enough, it must be good, right? It wouldn’t be rubbish.” Suleman, she says, was “a new adult at the start of everything, with so many hopes, plans and dreams” — not “some rich asshole who didn’t know better”.

He and his father wore waterproof trousers and orange jackets, along with steel-toe boots, life jackets and helmets. They were weighed before boarding the sub. “I’m looking quite fat,” Shahzada remarked. “I’m boiling up already.”

Suleman went down the ladder to get into the boat that would shuttle passengers to a floating platform to which Titan was tethered. Shahzada needed help getting down “because the boots were very clunky”, his wife said later. “Alina and I were, like, ‘Oh, God, I hope that he doesn’t fall into the water.’ ” They were still watching as divers sealed the men in. The bolts were tightened.

The Dawoods had become fascinated with the Titanic after seeing an exhibition in Singapore in 2012 marking the 100th anniversary of the sinking. Then, after a visit to Greenland in 2019, Christine saw an OceanGate advert. Suleman was too young to go then — OceanGate required passengers to be at least 18. So Christine had planned to accompany her husband. The pandemic put paid to that.

Earlier this year, the Dawoods renewed contact with OceanGate and Rush himself flew to London to meet them with his wife, Wendy, to explain the workings of his submersible at a café near Waterloo.

At the start of their big adventure in June the family flew to Newfoundland, the easternmost province of Canada, where they boarded the Polar Prince, an icebreaker hired by OceanGate for its expeditions. On board they met the renowned Paul-Henri Nargeolet. No one knew the wreck of the Titanic better: he had spent years diving to it on a different submarine as director of underwater research for a company that owns the rights to the wreck and recovers its artefacts. “Friends had warned him to steer clear of OceanGate, but my best guess is that, even knowing how risky it was, he could not stay away from the Titanic. It was his passion,” Casey says.

Also on board was Harding, founder and chairman of Action Aviation, a sales and air operations company based in Dubai. The father of two was a seasoned explorer who had previously flown to space with Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin. He had also dived in another submarine to the Mariana Trench in the Pacific, in March 2021.

The language of space travel was used on board the mother ship — there was a “command central”, a “mission director” and a “countdown to launch”. OceanGate insisted its guests be called “mission specialists” rather than tourists, passengers or customers. They were given shirts and jackets embroidered with their names, their national flags and the words “Titanic Survey Exploration Crew”.

Clients typically spent eight days aboard the mother ship, attending lectures by Rush, Nargeolet or other customers, including archaeologists and astronauts. Sometimes they would watch the film Titanic. The days were filled with safety meetings and briefings about the “mission”. Participants were told that they would be conducting valuable scientific experiments.

“This is not a thrill ride for tourists, it’s much more,” says a deep male voice in a promotional video. “Get ready for what Jules Verne could only imagine, a 12,500ft journey to the bottom of the sea.”

A dozen or so dives had successfully been made to the Titanic in Titan. But many more had been aborted because of mishaps or bad weather. On a dive in 2021 the sub lost its propulsion system on one side. Rush tried to ascend but could not get the “drop-weight mechanism” to release ballast.

Bill Price, a former travel agent from California, was among the passengers that day. He described later how they all had to move from one side of the sub to the other to make it rock. “After several rolls, we got momentum going. Then we heard a clunk, and we all collectively knew one [of the weights] had dropped off. So we continued to do that, until the weights were all out.” Despite what must have been a terrifying experience, they repeated the dive the next day, finally seeing the Titanic and celebrating back at the surface with glasses of cider.

On June 17 this year, Harding shared a few pictures from the Polar Prince on social media, reporting that the group was preparing to dive the following morning. “More expedition updates to follow IF the weather holds!” he wrote in his last post.

Late in the morning of June 18, Christine Dawood overheard someone saying that communication with the sub had been lost. On the control deck she was assured that the link was often patchy. If the blackout lasted more than one hour the sub would drop its weights and ascend. In the late afternoon someone told her they did not know what had become of Titan and its crew. Four days later it was official. Her husband and son were not coming home.

Innovator or maverick?

Agencies from various countries joined an investigation led by the US coast guard to determine what happened.

Söhnlein, the OceanGate co-founder, who left the company in 2013, insists that no US laws were broken because Titan was operating outside US territorial waters.

Furthermore, he tells me, “I don’t think people should necessarily take an interest in this. The five people on board that sub knew what they were getting into when they went on board. It’s their families that are dealing with it — it is what it is.”

He continues to regard Rush as an innovator “like Thomas Edison — or any of these guys who just found a way of pushing humanity forward for the good of humanity”. He believes Rush was vindicated by the few successful dives he made to the Titanic: “They said he couldn’t dive to 4,000 metres with a carbon-fibre hull — but he did.” He imagines a future where some “bright young engineer picks up where Stockton left off”.

This fills the small club of deep-sea explorers with dismay. In the aftermath of the disaster, Lahey, the Triton CEO, has been fielding calls from anxious clients who want to know what makes his submarines different from the one that imploded.

“People won’t differentiate between those who diligently go through a certification process and those who do not,” he says. “Titan really should have never carried human beings. It hadn’t met the high bar of certification that is essential for anyone carrying people into the deep sea.”

For Weed, the adventure cameraman, “it all comes down to hubris. The ocean will always make a fool of you if you don’t have proper respect for it.”

Lahey takes the same view: “The ocean is an amazing place, but you must approach it with reverence and humility. It requires anyone to be respectful, to acknowledge the tremendous forces at work. There is no room for arrogance.”

Written by: Matthew Campbell

© The Times of London