A former OceanGate employee claims that Titan sub owner Stockton Rush wanted to let people ‘have a go at piloting it with a PlayStation controller’.

A commission in South Carolina is currently trying to determine exactly what happened to the Titan sub, which killed five people including OceanGate boss Stockton Rush when it suffered a ‘catastrophic implosion’ last year.

One of the main people to speak on the matter is David Lochridge, who used to be marine operations director for the company.

Lochridge had raised the alarm about the dangers of the Titan sub, writing in an email that he was ‘so worried [Stockton Rush] kills himself and others in the quest to boost his ego’ and said the submersible was ‘an accident waiting to happen’.

That email had been sent just days after Lochridge had inspected the Titan and supposedly found several serious problems with it.

Lochridge claimed that he’d tried to raise the alarm in a 2018 meeting, after which he was allegedly fired and sued by OceanGate for revealing confidential information, while he countersued for unfair dismissal, court documents showed as reported by the BBC.

Now he’s today (17 September) told the commission that Stockton Rusk had allegedly wanted to hand people a ‘PlayStation controller’ and get them to pilot the submersible after just one hour.

As per Sky News, he said: “Stockton’s vision was give somebody this PlayStation controller and within an hour they’re going to be a pilot. That’s not how it works. It’s like showing somebody how to fly a helicopter and then them taking passengers up.”

Lochridge also criticised OceanGate, claiming that the company only wanted to ‘make money’.
He said: “The whole idea behind the company was to make money. There was very little in the way of science.”

In the aftermath of the Titan’s destruction with all on board being killed by the implosion, footage of Rush struggling to operate the sub’s controls was found.

The sub had been featured in 2022 BBC documentary The Travel Show, where Rush discussed ‘remapping the PS3 controller’ and saying he forgot ‘which is up and down’.

Lochridge’s verdict on the Titan sub was that ‘there’s no way on earth you could have paid me to dive the thing’, but his warnings had supposedly been ignored.

Someone else who has also provided a statement to the committee was Tony Nissen, OceanGate’s former engineering director who yesterday (16 September) said that he felt pressured to get the sub ready and refused to pilot it.

Nissen said he’d told Rush he was ‘not getting in it’. One of the last messages the Titan sub sent was that things were ‘all good here’, sent shortly before the disaster.