Woke Billionaire Tourism Company Loses Sub At Titanic Wreck

The swiss cheese model of accident causation is real. Almost every time there’s a major accident, it comes to light soon afterward that there was a chain of morally and criminally negligent decisions, any one of which could have saved lives if handled differently. The missing OceanGate sub is no exception. The Titanic and the submersible Titan both sank for the same reason; because a corporation valued publicity gimmicks over proper risk management.

Not long after the Titan was reported missing in action, a lawsuit from 2018 surfaced.

The director of marine operations at OceanGate, the company whose submersible went missing Sunday on an expedition to the Titanic in the North Atlantic, was fired after raising concerns about its first-of-a-kind carbon fiber hull and other systems before its maiden voyage, according to a filing in a 2018 lawsuit first reported by Insider and New Republic.

David Lochridge was terminated in January 2018 after presenting a scathing quality control report on the vessel to OceanGate’s senior management, including founder and CEO Stockton Rush, who is on board the missing vessel.

According to a court filing by Lochridge, the preamble to his report read: “Now is the time to properly address items that may pose a safety risk to personnel. Verbal communication of the key items I have addressed in my attached document have been dismissed on several occasions, so I feel now I must make this report so there is an official record in place.”

…A day after filing his report, Lochridge was summoned to a meeting with Rush and company’s human resources, engineering and operations directors. There, the filing states, he was also informed that the manufacturer of the Titan’s forward viewport would only certify it to a depth of 1,300 meters due to OceanGate’s experimental design. The filing states that OceanGate refused to pay for the manufacturer to build a viewport that would meet the Titan’s intended depth of 4,000 meters. The Titanic lies about 3,800 meters below the surface.
The filing also claims that hazardous flammable materials were being used within the submersible.
At the end of the meeting, after saying that he would not authorize any manned tests of Titan without a scan of the hull, Lochridge was fired and escorted from the building.

Lochridge, who claimed he was discharged in retaliation for being a whistleblower, made his filing after OceanGate sued him in federal court in Seattle that June. OceanGate has accused him of sharing confidential information with two individuals, as well as with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). In the lawsuit, OceanGate characterized Lochridge’s report as false, and  accused him of committing fraud by manufacturing a reason to be fired.

And it gets worse. OceanGate was woke.

“When I started the business, one of the things you’ll find, there are other sub-operators out there but they typically have gentleman who are ex-military submariners and you’ll see a whole bunch of 50-year-old white guys,” Rush told a representative with Teledyne Marine.

“I wanted our team to be younger, to be inspirational and I’m not going to inspire a 16-year-old to go pursue marine technology but a 25-year-old you know who’s a subpilot or a platform operator or one of our techs can be inspirational,” Rush continued. “So we’ve really tried to to get very intelligent, motivated, younger individuals involved because we’re doing things that are completely new.”

“We’re taking approaches that are used largely in the aerospace industry, is related to safety and some of the the preponderance of checklists things we do for risk assessments and things like that, that are more aviation related than ocean related and we can train people to do that. We can train someone to pilot the sub, we use a game controller so anybody can drive the sub.”

Excuse me, but if I was going to climb inside a tin can and go 13,000 feet underwater, I would like the driver to be the most qualified person possible, not someone plucked off the street because he’s from an “underprivileged” ethnic group or LGBTQAWFSXYZ+.

I wonder if Stockton Rush is happy he hired a diverse person now, while he’s trapped at the bottom of the ocean.

By the way, if I was building a submarine to visit the Titanic, I wouldn’t name it Titan. That’s just begging for trouble.

This incident, as sad as it is, perfectly illustrates why I’m against billionaire tourism. The world just has too many billionaires, and there’s no way to define them except people who have too much money. These characters think they’re entitled to the adrenaline rush of visiting space or the deep ocean just because they’re rich and can afford it. Exploration is just as dangerous now as it was 100 or 200 years ago and even a small mistake can kill you. Worse still, these billionaires go on their little adventures and if/when something goes wrong, the rest of the world has to spend huge sums of money and resources to attempt, however futile, a rescue. Even if OceanGate has, say, an insurance policy that covers all these costs, that’s still dozens if not hundreds of people putting themselves at risk for five adventurers who got in over their heads.

Things like a deep sea dive to the Titanic should be left to the professionals. If the trip doesn’t have some tangible benefit to humanity, then it shouldn’t be done. If you want to see the Titanic, find a YouTube video about it. If you have an extra $200,000 you want to throw away, donate it to charity instead of trying to be a contender for the next Darwin Award.

Ian Kummer

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