00:00This is an experimental sub. This is a dangerous environment. It's 6,000 PSI.
00:05Welcome to WatchMojo. And today we're looking at the most shocking things we've learned about the OceanGate Titan implosion since it happened in June 2023.
00:14Subs are safe. They are so safe that the Coast Guard has never been called. They didn't know what to do.
00:22The Logitech Controller.
00:24Hi, my name is Stockton Rush. I'm the CEO and founder of OceanGate. Let's take a look at Titan.
00:28This was one of the first things the public found out about the submersible when it initially disappeared on June 18th.
00:35You can clearly see the controller, a Logitech F710, in a lot of the promotional and news coverage of the sub before the disaster, though it's been modified.
00:44We've taken a completely new approach to the sub design, and it's all run with this game controller and these touchscreens.
00:49To the wider public, this was emblematic of janky engineering and cost-cutting.
00:54But it's not as alarming as it seems. It's actually very normal for video game controllers to be used for applications like this,
01:01and wasn't part of the design that raised red flags for anybody knowledgeable about underwater vehicles.
01:07And it's Bluetooth, so I can hand it to anybody. And it's meant for a 16-year-old to throw it around, and it's super durable.
01:12We keep a couple of spares on board just in case.
01:14Despite this, the lawsuit from Paul-Henri Nargiolet's family suing Oceangate for wrongful death has cited the controller.
01:22This is an experimental sub. People are informed that it's very dangerous down there.
01:27Waiver.
01:27As we just said, Nargiolet's family is suing Oceangate for wrongful death,
01:32despite the fact everybody on board was made to sign an extensive waiver that acknowledged they could die in a variety of ways.
01:39So here's the thing. The waiver reads, quote, any failure of the vessel while I am on board could cause severe injury or death, end quote, among other things.
01:48It's a miracle it could do what it does when you look at it there, because when you look at it, it is very small.
01:52It looks like it's put together with a piece of string, but it's not, obviously.
01:56Lawsuits are ongoing, but it seems like the waiver could itself be waived if it's proven in court that there was gross negligence
02:03and not enough was done to mitigate the risks of going on board the Titan.
02:07Investigations are also still continuing, but as we'll talk about later, Oceangate was warned many times about the sub's dangers.
02:15This four-page document may not be enough to protect the company in court.
02:19The team always says, you know, there's no guarantee you're going to see the bow, there's no guarantee you're going to get down there,
02:25because there's so many variables.
02:28Salvage.
02:28Did we change our way?
02:30Wait a second. We are starting to come up.
02:34We are?
02:34Yep.
02:35It is undeniable that corners were cut during the manufacturing of Titan, and nothing shows that more clearly than CEO Stockton Rush's insistence that they use salvage.
02:45In 2021, following 50 dives, the hole became damaged and a new one was required.
02:51But rather than build from scratch, Rush made them reuse the salvage from the previous one.
02:56We are now taking a pretty significant exoskeleton structure, having to attach it to the primary pressure hole.
03:04It seems doubtful that any other organization would have done something like this.
03:08You certainly wouldn't expect an aeronautics company to salvage and then reuse parts of a plane that had crashed.
03:14Titan had also received damage already during an incident where its batteries had failed, making it even more dangerous to use.
03:21But then he explained that, like, one of the batteries kind of went kaput, and we were having trouble using the electronic drops for the weight.
03:32Personal insult.
03:33Comparing Titan to a professionally built classed vehicle is like comparing a home-built microlight with a Boeing airliner.
03:42In 2018, over five years before the sub's implosion, a deep-sea specialist named Rob McCallum had warned Stockton Rush about the sub.
03:52These email exchanges were made public by the BBC over in the UK, and revealed that McCallum gave extensive and detailed criticisms and warnings about the safety of Titan.
04:03A carbon-fiber sub that's essentially a home-build with no independent oversight is not up for the task.
04:10Rush's responses, however, were frightening.
04:14He said, and we quote,
04:16We have heard the baseless cries of you are going to kill someone way too often.
04:20I take this as a serious personal insult.
04:23End quote.
04:24Stockton threatened me with legal action if I went any further with my course of action.
04:31McCallum spent years trying to persuade Oceangate to test the submersible properly,
04:35while Rush insisted that he didn't need to because doing so would, quote, stifle innovation.
04:42The whistleblower.
04:43Were you with Oceangate when they started Sea Trials for the Titan submersible?
04:48No, I was let go beforehand.
04:50Like Robert McCallum, David Lockridge was another person who warned Rush early.
04:55Except that Lockridge actually worked for the company as its director of marine operations.
05:00Also in 2018, but before McCallum got involved, Lockridge sent Rush a list of over two dozen flaws with Titan,
05:08refusing to approve it for further testing.
05:10That material, they genuinely purchased that from Home Depot.
05:14Rush's response was to fire Lockridge, who went on to blow the whistle on Oceangate to regulators,
05:19only to then get sued by Rush and forced to sign an NDA.
05:23In the aftermath of a disaster, all of this came to light.
05:27Without Lockridge, crude testing of Titan went ahead,
05:30and it eventually, if temporarily, succeeded at becoming a commercial endeavor.
05:35And then would you describe Titan, based on the information that you know,
05:39as an experimental man submersible?
05:43Yeah.
05:44No classification.
05:46There was a request from Oceangate to have Titan certified.
05:51This was back in 2019, and this company denied the request to do that.
05:58There were still more experts who contacted Rush to warn him,
06:01including a large group of members of the Marine Technology Society,
06:05an organization of industry professionals.
06:07They were extremely concerned about Rush's refusal to get Titan classified by any regulatory body,
06:13with Rush instead coming up with his own way to classify Titan,
06:16by having one expert observe a dive and say, based on that alone, whether it was safe.
06:22Oceangate, on its website, had said that they had decided to forego getting registered,
06:29saying that it was standing in the way of innovation.
06:32Oceangate also refused to validate its designs to withstand pressure.
06:37Finally, Mark Negley, who worked for Boeing and had briefly helped Rush with designing Titan,
06:41also warned him that there was a, quote, high risk of significant failure.
06:46All of this was also in 2018, years before the fatal disaster.
06:51The interest in the Titanic is the reason we go there,
06:53because people are willing to fund this kind of exploration and science.
06:57Carbon fiber.
06:58Do you have any questions about what's going on, about acoustic monitoring,
07:02about carbon fiber problems we had, rumors of problems we had, actual problems we had?
07:07It wasn't the Logitech controller, horrifying engineers in the wake of the implosion,
07:13but the news that the hull of Titan was made of carbon fiber.
07:16Stockton Rush's justification for using a carbon fiber composite
07:20was that it's used in planes and works fine there.
07:23But planes are pressurized from the inside out,
07:26and also don't need to withstand the pressure of the ocean 4,000 meters deep.
07:30There's no doubt in my mind that it was the carbon fiber tube that was the mechanical part that failed.
07:36In 2022, a year before the incident, there was a loud acoustic event during Titan's ascension,
07:42which was eventually determined to have been the carbon fiber hull delaminating.
07:46On mission 4, when we got to the surface, Scott was piloting, he heard a really loud bang.
07:51Not a soothing sound, but on the surface.
07:55Essentially, this means it's already come apart inside, and it's just waiting to collapse completely.
08:00Which is exactly what happened the following year.
08:03The alarm.
08:04Everything that could go wrong was sort of going wrong.
08:06There were snagging hazards, there were important components attached with zip ties, flammable flooring.
08:12One of the most chilling details about Titan was its RTM, real-time monitoring system.
08:18According to OceanGate, this would pick up a sound like the loud acoustic event in 2022 that indicated delamination had happened,
08:26and the sub would then be able to ascend.
08:28So even baselining an alarm system based on that is already beyond the pale of anything, I would say, real sub designers would ever, you know, entertain.
08:40But as we later found out, this alarm would only sound moments, perhaps even less than a second, before a catastrophic implosion,
08:49giving nobody in the sub time to react, let alone time to reach the surface, which takes hours from the Titanic rep.
08:57We may never know for sure whether any of the passengers had time to process what was about to happen before it did.
09:03I know it's no great comfort to the families and spouses, but they did die instantaneously.
09:10They were not even aware that anything was wrong.
09:12James Cameron speaks out.
09:14You don't move fast and break things, as they say in Silicon Valley, if the thing you're going to break has got you inside it,
09:22along with other innocent people who, you know, who believe your line of BS.
09:27One person who's talked frequently about the disaster is world-famous director James Cameron,
09:32also known for his extensive interest in ocean exploration, particularly the wreck of the Titanic.
09:38Cameron was all over the news in the aftermath, talking about Ocean Gate and Stockton Rush,
09:43explaining that, unlike Rush, he's always taken regulations and safety rules extremely seriously,
09:49as do most people working in the field.
09:52But nobody could admit that they didn't have the means to go down and look.
09:55So they were running all over the surface.
09:58Cameron himself has been to the Titanic over 30 times.
10:02He also said that he and other people in the community realized extremely early into the disappearance
10:07that an implosion had almost certainly already happened.
10:11They were informed by Naval Intelligence that an implosion event was tracked to the coordinate of the Titanic wreck site.
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10:34We know that the Navy had tracked the implosion when it happened, but according to James Cameron,
10:46the U.S. Coast Guard was unable to investigate because it didn't actually have any remote-operated vehicles on hand.
10:53But it wasn't just the Navy that heard it.
10:55In 2024, footage was released showing Wendy Rush, Stockton's widow, monitoring the sub from the surface.
11:08It's hard to hear, but there's a small sound.
11:13And she reacts by asking the people around her what it was.
11:17Unbeknownst to everybody, that was the exact moment the submarine imploded.
11:22All of it happening in less than a second.
11:24Debris was found right in that search area on the seafloor, just 1,600 feet away from the bow of the Titanic.
11:32Let us know if you'll be watching Netflix's documentary about the Titan implosion.
11:36You don't take paying passengers without having a classification.
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