Titan submersible

In 2023, the Titan (a submersible operated by a company called OceanGate) imploded deep in the North Atlantic Ocean during an attempt to reach the wreckage of the Titanic. All 5 people onboard were instantly killed, including CEO Stockton Rush, who was operating the submersible. The article below provides details. More can be found online if you’re curious.

Here are a few questions for us to tackle in our discussion board:

What are the bad decisions, and who made them? Did the decision maker(s) have enough information to make a good decision? Did they have the incentive to make a good decision? Was CEO Stockton Rush acting rationally, optimally, and self-interestedly, i.e., in response to incentives? Which psychological biases, if any, may have contributed to the bad decision(s)?

 

A former OceanGate submersible pilot said the company’s Titan vessel was a ‘lemon’ and not safe to dive, report says

Alia Shoaib

Jul 2, 2023, 8:44 AM PDT (article published in “Insider”)

• A former OceanGate employee said the company’s Titan submersible was not safe to dive in 2018.
• David Lochridge, the company’s chief submersible pilot, was fired after raising concerns.
• In an email exchange, he told an industry leader that the sub was “a lemon,” according to The New Yorker.

A former OceanGate employee said the company’s Titan submersible was a “lemon” and not safe to dive in 2018, according to The New Yorker.

The Titan imploded close to the wreckage of the Titanic on June 18, killing all five people on board.

David Lochridge was the company’s former director of marine operations and chief submersible pilot before being fired after raising concerns about OceanGate’s testing protocol.

Rob McCallum, a deep sea exploration specialist, emailed Lochridge in 2018 to ask how OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush was taking his departure.

“Stockton must be gutted,” McCallum told Lochridge. “You were the star player and the only one that gave me a hint of confidence.”

“I think you are going to [be] even more taken aback when I tell you what’s happening,”

Lochridge replied said he would be “taken aback when I tell you what’s happening,” adding that he would share his assessment of the Titan sub in private but was afraid of retaliation from Rush because of his “influence and money.”

“That sub is Not safe to dive,” Lochridge said.

“Do you think the sub could be made safe to dive, or is it a complete lemon?” McCallum responded. “You will get a lot of support from people in the industry. Everyone is watching and waiting and quietly shitting their pants.”

Lochridge responded: “It’s a lemon.”

“Oh dear,” McCallum replied. “Oh dear, oh dear.”

In 2018 Lochridge inspected OceanGate’s submersible model and found “several critical aspects to be defective or unproven,” The New Yorker reported.

He wrote a detailed report about the issues, including concerns about the vessel’s carbon-fiber hull, which experts now believe could have been what failed first.

Rush was “furious” following Lochridge’s report, according to the article, and OceanGate leadership insisted that no hull testing was necessary.

Rush ignored repeated warnings from inside and outside the company about possible issues with the vessel and refused to have it classed by an external marine certification agency, the report says, because he believed it would interfere with innovation.

 

When challenged by a friend in 2019, Rush claimed he would shut down his company before operating an unsafe vessel, according to emails obtained by Insider.

Rush was emailing his friend Karl Stanley, an expert in submersibles who had expressed serious concerns to him about the integrity of the Titan after hearing cracking noises on a dive in the Bahamas that year.

“I made it clear after our dive that I will not take nonessential crew, clients, or media in the sub until I am confident that the hull is safe,” Rush insisted in his response to Stanley. “As I told you before, I canceled last year’s expedition and will cancel this year’s, or even shut down the company, before I will operate an unsafe sub.”

All five passengers on the Titan, including Rush, were declared dead after the submersible imploded during a June 18 dive to the Titanic shipwreck, 13,000 feet below the Atlantic Ocean.