OceanGate founder and CEO Stockton Rush crashed a submersible into a shipwreck and then threw the vessel’s rudimentary controls at a more experienced employee years before he piloted the doomed Titan voyage last summer.
Rush insisted on piloting a Cyclops submersible to the Andrea Doria wreck off Massachusetts in the summer of 2016, OceanGate whistleblower David Lochridge told the US Coast Guard Marine Board of Investigation on Tuesday morning.
“He wouldn’t listen,” Lochridge recalled of Rush’s refusal to heed warnings about difficult weather and tide conditions as he deployed the sub 250 feet underwater with three paying clients on board.
Rush ignored Lochridge’s pleas for him to keep his distance from the Andrea Doria and “smashed straight down” when he landed the Cyclops — then “basically drove it full speed” and jammed the sub into the port side of the bow of the decaying ship, Lochridge told the panel.
Rush then flew into a panic and asked if there was enough life support on board, Lochridge claimed.
“It was unprofessional behavior by him,” he said of his former boss’s reaction to the crisis.
Lochridge begged Rush several times to hand him the Playstation controller that operated the sub, but Rush refused.
Rush only agreed to hand over the controls when one of the paying customers shouted at him to stand down, Lochridge claimed.
Finally, in a fit of frustration, Rush chucked the controller at Lochridge and struck him on the side of the head, he recalled.
Rush threw the controller so hard that one of the buttons flew off, which Lochridge reattached before safely raising the sub to the surface within “10 to 15 minutes.”
“It shouldn’t have got to the stage it got to. If he in any way had behaved as any other sub pilot that I know, [it wouldn’t have happened],” Lochridge told the Coast Guard panel of the near-miss.
The Andrea Doria incident was a turning point in Lochridge’s relationship with Rush, he explained.
From that point on, Lochridge claimed, he was phased out of the Titan submersible project, and his misgivings about the vessel’s safety were repeatedly ignored until he was ultimately fired in January 2018.
In June 2023, Rush and four passengers were killed when the Titan imploded near the wreck of the Titanic in the North Atlantic Ocean.
Rush was at the controls of the submersible at the time of the incident.
A cameraman who previously worked with Rush told The Post last year that Rush “didn’t want anyone telling him what he couldn’t do” — and this hubristic attitude ultimately drove OceanGate’s fiascos, Lochridge claimed.
In the years after he was dismissed from OceanGate, Lochridge frequently worried “is something gonna happen [with the sub] this year?”
“It was inevitable something was gonna happen … it was just when,” Lochridge said Tuesday afternoon.