It's like the O-rings on the Challenger all over again.
That's right. They fired the director of marine operations who warned 5 years ago that this exact thing was likely to happen.
From TechCrunch:
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."
The report detailed "numerous issues that posed serious safety concerns," according to the filing. These included Lochridge's worry that "visible flaws" in the carbon fiber supplied to OceanGate raised the risk of small flaws expanding into larger tears during "pressure cycling." These are the huge pressure changes that the submersible would experience as it made its way and from the deep ocean floor. He noted that a previously tested scale model of the hull had "prevalent flaws."
Carbon fiber is lighter than steel, which helps with buoyancy, but it's not as good at resisting the insane pressures 2 miles under the ocean.
Lochridge recommended testing of the Titan's hull, but the company declined, saying its fancy acoustic system, which could listen for small tears in the hull and give the passengers time to resurface, would keep everyone safe.
(At this point I'm feeling some strong parallels to the Titanic being called "unsinkable.")
Lochridge, however, worried in the lawsuit that the system would not reveal flaws until the vessel was descending, and then might only provide "milliseconds" of warning before a catastrophic implosion.
Welp.
That's exactly what happened.
In one millisecond, far faster than the human brain could even perceive, the walls of the sub imploded at 2,200 feet per second, flash-boiling the air (and people) inside before the crushing pressures scattered their vaporized remains in the deep.
It was faster than catching a bullet to the head. The only way to draw a comparison would be to imagine an airplane crashing into the side of a mountain at Mach 3.
All of this horror is compounded by the fact that the CEO said he didn't like hiring "50-year-old white guys" but instead bought into at least some of the "equity" nonsense that's popular across the board these days.
Well, I guess Stockton Rush was the "quit" in "equity," because he died in his creation, like some Jurassic Park creator eaten by the work of his own hands.
Back to Lochridge's firing: As the director of marine operations, the company apparently needed his sign-off on the design for using the Titan sub. Lochridge instead filed an official report with his concerns and a recommendation to have a classification agency like the American Bureau of Shipping, inspect the sub.
A day later, he apparently had a meeting where the company leaders tried to change his mind. When he didn't, he was fired.
A day after filing his report, Lochridge was summoned to a meeting with [CEO Stockton] 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.
Goodness! People paid $250,000 for this!
I'd be less prone to believe the allegations here if the company didn't use a $30 Logitech controller for its sub!
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.
Again, this was January 2018.
I know this was "only" one sub with "just" five people.
But you need to think about how this same mentality is spreading across every industry. Modern CEOs, either woke or trying to be "cool," are firing all the "50-year-old white guys" with experience in the name of progress and equity.
All the while, they are cutting corners with untested ideas and giving jobs to people based on ideology, not skill, qualification, and merit. We need to "queer" the nukes for national safety now!
So... for the moment, this was "just" one sub.
But since most modern companies have similar mentalities (even Chick-Fil-A has a DEI statement now!), how long will it be until planes start falling out of the sky and the electric grid fails? Experts like Jordan Peterson have been warning about this breakdown since before Lochridge was blowing the whistle at OceanGate.
