David Lochridge, who fulfilled the role for two years before being sacked in January 2018, has told a commission into the disaster, that \u201cthe whole idea behind the company was to make money\u201d.<\/p>\n
He backed up what other ex-employees had already said about the firm\u2019s head, Stockton Rush, that he was volatile and difficult to work with.<\/p>\n
Mr Rush was among those who died in the tragedy, along with British billionaire adventurer Hamish Harding, father and son Shahzada and Suleman Dawood and Frenchman Paul-Henri Nargeolet.<\/p>\n
<\/div>\n
In a report he wrote after inspecting the first Titan hull, Mr Lochridge said he was \u201cappalled\u201d by the O-ring \u2013 a type of seal \u2013 and described the hull as \u201cporous paper. It was disgusting\u201d.<\/p>\n
But the second Titan hull, the one used in the fateful voyage, was little better, he said, explaining that \u201cthey reused these domes. They reused these ceiling faces. Everything was reused. It\u2019s all cost.\u201d<\/p>\n
Titan, he said, was \u201can abomination of a submersible\u201d.<\/p>\n
Mr Lochridge alleged the company\u2019s lawyers wrote a \u201cthreatening\u201d letter after he raised a complaint with a US safety agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).<\/p>\n
He told the hearing he had \u201cno confidence whatsoever\u201d in the way the Titan was being built in 2017 and put shortcomings down to \u201ccost-cutting\u201d, \u201cbad engineering decisions\u201d and \u201cthe desire to get to the Titanic as quickly as they could to start making a profit\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere was a big push to get this done, and a lot of steps along the way were missed,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
CEO Stockton Rush had \u201cno experience building submersibles\u201d, and [former engineering director] Tony Nissen was hiring \u201cchildren that were coming in straight out of university. Some hadn\u2019t even been to university yet\u201d.<\/p>\n
He continued: \u201cThere was no experience across the board within that organisation. It was nothing. It was all smoke and mirrors, all the social media that you see about all these past expeditions, they always had issues with their expeditions.\u201d<\/p>\n
The submersible made its final dive on 18 June 2023,<\/strong> losing contact with its support ship around two hours later.<\/p>\nRescuers rushed ships, planes, and other equipment to an area around 435 miles (700km) south of St John\u2019s, Newfoundland.<\/p>\n
The search for the Titan attracted global attention and the wreckage was eventually found on the ocean floor around 300m from the Titanic wreck, according to officials.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
This post appeared first on sky.com<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Making money was the driving force of the company behind the doomed Titan submersible and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":4198,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4197","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tech-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tradetrovex.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4197","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tradetrovex.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tradetrovex.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tradetrovex.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4197"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tradetrovex.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4197\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tradetrovex.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4198"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tradetrovex.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tradetrovex.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tradetrovex.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}