BBC2’s documentary Implosion reveals new information about Titan sub disaster

28 May 2025 • Written by Holly Margerrison

Day five of the US Coast Guard's public hearing: CEO Stockton Rush insists “no one dying under my watch” before implosion, engineer warns outdoor storage may have degraded Titan’s hull

Credit: US Coast Guard

Guillermo Söhnlein founded OceanGate with Rush in 2009. He left the company in 2013 when it became clear it wanted to transition to engineering. In his closing remarks, Söhnlein said: "This was not supposed to happen." He continued: "Five people should not have lost their lives."
A transcript of a meeting between Rush and Lochridge, the former director of marine operations for OceanGate who raised concerns with Rush about safety, was also made public ahead of the US Coast Guard’s hearing. In the transcript, Rush said: "I understand this kind of risk, and I'm going into [this] with eyes open and think this is one of the safest things I will ever do."
Rush told Lochridge: "So 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, [failed] 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."
Roy Thomas, a senior principal engineer with the American Bureau of Shipping (ABS), testified next. He explained the challenges of carbon fibre materials and said it is not an approved material for classification.
Thomas also testified that the ABS recommends sub owners store vessels in controlled environments. The US Coast Guard stated that OceanGate stored the submersible outside during winter. Thomas said: "To expose it to the elements could possibly lead to degradation of the materials."
Former OceanGate engineering director Phil Brooks then claimed no maintenance was done on the Titan hull between 2022 and 2023.

Day four of the US Coast Guard's public hearing: Titan called an experimental vessel with incomplete carbon fibre hull and “amateurish” execution, experts raise safety concerns

Fred Hagen testified and explained he paid OceanGate to be a mission specialist on the company’s first trip to the Titanic wreckage.
Similar to Dr Ross' testimony earlier in the week, he said he heard a "loud bang" come from the vessel during a dive in 2022. The crew discussed what may have happened to Titan and were concerned the “hull had cracked”. Asked if he had concerns about the noise, Hagen said: "You're in a submersible and there's a loud bang. You would have to be brain-dead to not be somewhat concerned".
When asked if he would've felt safe going down to depth again after the bang, he said: "Anyone that felt safe going to depths in Titan was delusional. It was an experimental vessel, it was clear that it was dangerous. Anyone that wanted to go was either delusional if they thought it wasn't dangerous, or they were embracing the sort of risk."
Hagen continued: "It's like jumping out of an aeroplane. You don't do it because it's safe. You do it because it's an adrenaline rush and, yeah, I would've gone back down again. We weren't going in search of safety. We were going down in search of adventure and exploration."
Dave Dyer, an engineer from the University of Washington, gave evidence next. The university partnered with OceanGate to produce the Titan submersible and he initially "felt like there was a very good chance it could be successful - the design looked like it was heading down the right path".
Dyer claimed the “carbon fibre hull design was not complete", explaining failures that happened while testing the Titan around 2017. He continued: “They had not figured out what had happened on those failures from my perspective, and I had not seen an effort to modify or change the design.”
Dyer explained the relationship between the university and OceanGate began to break down following disagreements about the company's approach to engineering and testing. The two ceased work together in 2017.
Patrick Lahey, CEO of Triton Submarines, was next to testify. Lahey is planning the first voyage to the Titanic wreckage since the Titan tragedy and testified about the importance of certification. Lahey said he voiced concerns to Stockton Rush (OceanGate's CEO) about Titan’s prior glass dome design when he saw the submersible in 2019 and stressed the importance of certifying the vessel. Lahey said Rush deemed classification “an impediment to innovation". Lahey said he’d never sell one without classification.
Lahey was asked about the several other issues he'd previously mentioned when he was looking at a prototype by OceanGate in the Bahamas in 2019. He quoted the execution of the parts, including the bolt that screws into the hull and the fact that it didn't have lift points. He said: "It just seemed to me that it hadn't been particularly well thought out or executed. I saw elements where they were crimping cables to hold on weights, it just looked amateurish in its execution. I left that visit thinking, 'Well, that's a relief, I don't think that will ever take people on any significant dives'. Obviously, I underestimated their tenacity."
When asked if he believed if someone could learn to pilot a submersible in a day, Lahey replied: "You might be able to make it go up and down, backwards and forwards. But that doesn't make you a pilot. To be a pilot you need to understand what to do if something goes wrong, how to fix things when they break, how to diagnose faults, and that isn't something you can accomplish in a day, no."