Titan: The Oceangate Disaster: A Shocking and Revealing Netflix Documentary 

Mark Monroe-directed Titan: The Oceangate Disaster opens from the point of view of a dinghy approaching the infamous deep-sea tourism submarine (also named Titan). The vessel bobs on the surface where it rests on its floating launch platform, a thick fog casting the scene in an ominous ambiance. A passenger crew is bolted inside the capsule where Stockton Rush, founder and CEO of Oceangate, shares words.

“There’s really nothing that happens that requires an immediate response. If you hear an alarm, just don’t worry about it. Best thing you can do is don’t do anything.”

The screen fades to black as the submersible is bolted shut and the descent begins. Crack! A short, sharp crack pings from the dark. Almost like the sound of stressed glass close to breaking. Crack! Crack! Another and another. 

“I hear something,” a voice protests. Crack! Crack! The pace of the clicks increases, presumably with depth. Ice loudly spiderweb fracturing underfoot comes to mind. As a viewer you know how the story ends and are filled with dread. The footage is of course not from the actual June 18, 2023 fatal wreck, but one is experiencing the sounds and sights that those passengers would have. 

CEO Stockton Rush: When the Main Character is Not the Hero

While the documentary is at its core a journalistic deep dive into the Oceangate implosion that gathered worldwide attention, the story is ultimately about the man behind it all—Oceangate founder and CEO Stockton Rush. Timewise, the documentary begins in the earlier years of the company’s existence in 2013 to 2016. Perspectives from about a dozen primary witnesses are presented in their own words. Because this timeline predates my interview at Oceangate in 2021, it made me realize that I could easily have been an unwitting participant in the project—not knowing, like others involved, key points of the history that ultimately led to the disaster.

Stockton Rush had, as they say, the pedigree. Princeton graduate with an engineering degree. Built his own airplane and submersible from kits. Related to two signers of the United States Declaration of Independence—Benjamin Rush and Richard Stockton. Especially square jaw and piercing blue eyes. Confidant, articulate speaker both in a conference room and on the stage of the Explorer’s Club. 

“[Stockton Rush was a] humble human being but arrogant scientist for sure,” says videographer Joseph Assi. “He knew he was smart, a genius even. Just the way he was talking, he was a very confident person. He says things with conviction. He tells you what he’s going to do. And he tells you why it works. The way he says it, makes you say this guy knows what he’s going to talk about.”

The entire thrust of the tale is watching, with increasing dread, as Rush’s various deceptions deepen and unfold as the years approach 2023.

“The Titan was not flagged by any foreign nation or US state,” says overseeing US Coast Guard investigator captain Jason Neubauer. “That was very usual, never seen that before.” Never? asks the interviewer. “No, in 24 years of doing investigations.” How do you think that happens? “I think it happens by design.” 

Cult of Carbon Fiber

The film is almost two hours long, but a key point of disaster in my analysis is a cultlike devotion not just to Rush but the CEO’s carbon fiber hull concept. For whatever reason, the slavish adherence to pulling off the deep-sea tourism vision with this material—a first—was uncompromising. But problems were immediately apparent a decade before the disaster when Oceangate was testing the concept at the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Lab as early as 2013. The documentary vividly features pressure tests at UW in which the carbon fiber explosively fails with bangs and booms when approaching Titanic wreck depth pressure. Boeing engineers were involved in these UW tests at some point, even issuing written warnings as a third party.

“We think you are at a high risk of significant failure at or before you reach 4,000 meters,” a March 30, 2018 email reads. The Boeing engineers even produced a chart with a skull and crossbones at about 4,300 meters depth. For reference, the Titanic sits at about 3,800 meters depth.

One physical phenomenon that adds intensity to the primary dive footage scenes is the acoustic monitoring detecting the micro-tears in the carbon fiber structure. Oceangate, clearly aware that they had an inherent weakness to their design, utilized this in-house system for the hull. The theory was that one could listen for trouble during a dive—if the acoustics picked up too much activity, it was time to ascend to safety. However, as interviewees state, this reasoning doesn’t hold up. To use an analogy, just because my wineglass is cracked doesn’t mean I can predict when it will shatter. In fact, I should toss the cracked wine glass and use a different one—not resolutely commit to my cracked wineglass until it fails. And, to torture the metaphor further, if my entire wineglass set immediately cracks after first use, I really ought to ditch that whole brand and go with a stronger designer.

“He wanted to be a Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk,” says Bonnie Carl, director of finance and administration. “He called them big swinging dicks. He loved that term and used it all the time. He was saying Oceangate was different than everyone in the whole industry with the carbon fiber. If he could pull this off, he’d be a big swinging dick too.”

How one’s ego could be so intertwined with a building material is one of the great mysteries of the whole tragedy. Of course, besides the more ephemeral striving to be perceived as some kind of innovation guru, one could speculate that some of this carbon fiber worship was cost related. However, generally in my impression, building with metal is cheaper than carbon fiber most of the time. An exception to this could be titanium, which is of what many deep-sea submarines are made. But carbon fiber is not widely regarded as a cheap material, so it’s not as if Oceangate would’ve revolutionized a common plastic.

My mind can’t help but connect some dots on the carbon fiber question. There was a craze in the 2010s around carbon fiber in marine applications that treated the new material as a magical solution to everything versus just another building option with its own lists of pros and cons. The many demastings and woes of American sailboat maker Gunboat from that era come to mind. Rush’s carbon fiber worship feels very of that time, the difference being that when a submarine’s integrity fails, the mast doesn’t just fall down—everyone dies.

David Lochridge: “The Whistleblower” is the Protagonist

In a documentary like this that flirts with elements of the true crime genre, usually a fairly large cast of characters exist in a morally neutral space. But in the case of Titan, Oceangate director of marine operations David Lochridge stands out as not merely “The Whistleblower” as introduced in the graphic slide but as the nearest thing we get to a hero in this horrifying saga. 

Lochridge is a veteran of the UK’s Royal Navy and claims over 20 years of professional manned submersible diving experience. When seeing him working a VHF or submarine controls with his accented brogue, it’s hard not to think of Scotty from Star Trek. Lochridge states in the documentary that one of the draws of joining Oceangate was the commitment to getting “classed”. In this context, getting classed means being certified by official third-party agencies and regulators as a legal paying passenger-carrying vessel. This high bar of quality assurance would have established Oceangate’s manned submarines as Bonafide commercial craft that met critical safety benchmarks.

Lochridge and Rush were fated to clash, the major inciting incident on a much earlier dive to the wreck of the Andrea Doria. Rush insisted on piloting the submarine and got them wedged into the decaying debris of the wreck. Lochridge regained control and got the craft to safety. For his professionalism, he was immediately pushed out of the inner circle of the company.

“With Stockton, it was a complete turnaround for me,” says Lockridge after the dive. “He didn’t really speak to me the whole trip. The dynamic changed.”

It all goes to hell after this. Lochridge was locked out of leadership emails, meetings, and generally everything. For the director of marine operations of a manned submarine company actively building their vessel, this isn’t rational or sustainable.

“Every single piece had an issue,” says Lochridge of the in-house components. “It [the carbon fiber] was like Swiss cheese. You could actually see the porosity. You could see the delamination. You could see the voids.” Loudly protesting Lochridge was given the greenlight to conduct his own series of tests. He compiled his findings in an email sent January 18, 2018. He was canned the next day after being chewed out by Rush—who was so angry he was shaking. Bonnie Carl left around that time. Rush ultimately revealed that Oceangate was not going to pursue third party classifications, leading to resignations from others.

For me, this showdown between the Musk-wannabe and Navy trained professional sealed the fate of Oceangate. Rush was going to stick with the unclassed carbon fiber hull. He wasn’t going to flag it properly and called his paying customers “mission specialist” crew to avoid regulations. The days of listening to any internal objections from employees were over. No more third-party entities like the Boeing engineers. From this moment on, there are more dives through the years as the acoustic monitoring system catches those sharp cracking sounds. One winces and squirms in his seat, the voice of Rush in the footage reassuring you everything is just fine all the while from the dark.

Truly. Terrifying.

“The unsung hero in this is Dave Lochridge,” says Rob McCallum, expedition leader of EYOS (another expedition company). “He was perhaps alone in the room that realized how bad things really were… he refused to compromise his professional standards.”

Takeaways

There are other threads and people to the story of course, but the anti-input Stockton Rush persona, carbon fiber hull or bust religious extremism, and Lockridge’s noble dissent are the major revelations that drive the disaster in my estimation. I’m left with the same emotions most people will feel when watching this documentary. Confusion. Frustration. Shock. Bemusement. 

As I’ve written in the past, I interviewed for an Oceangate job in 2021 and even toured the Everett, Washington facility. I came away from the documentary feeling all the more grateful that I didn’t get the gig—which stung at the time. I, like most of the public who didn’t have access to the behind-the-scenes drama, saw them as a sort of SpaceX of the sea. How could an inherently noble desire to explore the deep, and make such trips accessible to the public, go so wrong? 

To the documentary’s credit, it doesn’t reach for grand messages. I personally love the heavy-handed editorializing narration of documentarians like Verner Herzog, but I appreciate how Titan just sticks to the primary sources. Weaving all the information, video footage, court testimonies, and interviews into an effortless narrative like this takes a lot of directorial skill people take for granted so hats off to Monroe. I did leave wanting to know more about the passengers themselves. Five died in the implosion: Stockton Rush, Paul-Henri (PH) Nargeolet, Hamish Harding, Shahzada Dawood, and Suleman Dawood. PH Nargeolet gets some attention as a famous underwater explorer, but Hamish and the Dawoods remain a complete mystery. Perhaps they would distract from the main narrative thread; also it’s possible they were sidelined out of respect (or potential for legal trouble).

If I were to reach for higher meaning, I would say that Oceangate’s saga feels very much of our time. I write this after yet another Boeing disaster (Air India 787 Dreamliner down) in the wake of multiple suddenly dead whistleblowers. Washington State Ferries, traditionally a gold standard in American public ferry systems, has been floundering for years for self-inflicted reasons. Here in Ballard, we’re slotted to get our light rail stop in 2039—I’ll be fifty and you know it won’t happen on schedule. Musk’s Starship keeps blowing up with no successful launch in sight. Both Amazon and Microsoft have unveiled artificial intelligence products that have been revealed to actually be hundreds of Indians in digital sweatshops abroad monitoring us and pretending to be AI instead. These are our biggest companies, mind you, not small-time scammers. Cryptocurrency is one of our major contemporary genius ideas and it’s just fake money with its high-profile thieving proponents getting chucked in jail. I could go on forever. We’re awash in a sea of dysfunctional societal systems and tech washed scams. I’m not sure what to do about it besides avoiding the Kool-Aid and not hopping in the unflagged submarine. 

Bottom line, Best4Boats heartily recommends Titan: The Oceangate Disaster on Netflix. You don’t have to have a personal Oceangate experience like I did to appreciate this excellent documentary.

Norris Comer Editorial Director

Ahoy! I'm thrilled to lead the Best4Boats editorial. From Alaska greenhorn to oceanographer and R2AK racer to award-winning writer, I'm passionate about aquatic experiences and marine journalism. Follow along to stay informed and afloat.

See Full Bio

Fishing Boating Sailing Motorboats Yachts Marine Electronics Oceanography fisheries science