OceanGate co-founder defends safety record, says Titan development ‘led to successful science expeditions’

The co-founder of OceanGate on Friday defended the company’s commitment to safety.
Guillermo Söhnlein said the Titan submersible was put through a “very robust” development program.
Development of the Titan “certainly led to successful science expeditions to the Titanic,” he said.

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Years before it imploded beside the wreck of the Titanic, experts were warning that the Titan submersible — and its maker’s decision to bypass safety certification for the vessel and its experimental, carbon-fiber hull — could meet a catastrophic demise.

But on Friday, a co-founder of OceanGate was defiant even in the wake of the accident that killed the company’s CEO, Stockton Rush, and four others who were aboard its craft.

Speaking to the BBC, Guillermo Söhnlein argued that such incidents were inevitable and not an indictment of the company, which began selling trips to the Titanic in 2021, charging $250,000 a person to see the sunken ship, located about 700 miles from the coast of Newfoundland.

“Anyone who operates in that depth of the ocean, whether it’s human-rated submersibles or robotic submersibles, knows the risk of operating under such pressure and that at any given moment, on any mission, with any vessel, you run the risk of this kind of implosion,” Söhnlein, who has no day-to-day involvement in the company, told the broadcaster.

But that claim is disputed by experts and others, such as James Cameron. In recent interviews, the “Titanic” director, who has himself made several trips to the famous wreckage, has criticized OceanGate for failing to have its vessel certified. Members of the Marine Technology Society also criticized OceanGate’s lack of certification back in 2018.

OceanGate officials have characterized the safety certification process as stifling innovation, with the Titan submersible having had a claimed diving depth of up to 4,000 meters, deeper than its certified competitors.

“I think one of the issues that keeps coming up is everyone keeps equating certification with safety and is ignoring the 14 years of development of the Titan sub,” Söhnlein told the BBC. “Any expert who weighs in on this, including Mr. Cameron, will also admit that they were not there for the design of the sub, for the engineering of the sub, for the building of the sub, and certainly not for the rigorous test program that the sub went through.”

The development program was indeed “very robust,” Söhnlein said, “and certainly led to successful science expeditions to the Titanic.”

However, William Kohnen, head of the Marine Technology Society’s committee on manned submersibles, said that OceanGate had designed an accident waiting to happen.

“It’s just terribly sad. This has never happened in our industry, this level of fatalities. And in the end, the experts in this field certainly are unanimous that this could have been prevented,” Kohnen told the BBC.

He pointed to the company’s use of carbon fiber, noting that the US military, with a much larger research budget, has been unable to successfully deploy the material in underwater vessels. Parts of the Titan that were made out of titanium appear to be lying on the sea bed — but the rest is missing. That is an indication of what failed, he said.

“It seems quite clear that the carbon fiber cylindrical hull just imploded catastrophically,” Kohnen said.

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