The US Coast Guard’s Marine Board of Investigation has issued a scathing report on the implosion of the Titan submersible in 2023, singling out OceanGate’s CEO and founder Stockton Rush for many of the company’s technical and managerial failings. It says that he made “sustained efforts to misrepresent the Titan as indestructible” and accuses the company of “glaring disparities between their written safety protocols and their actual practices.”
Jason Neubauer, who was the deputy chief of the Coast Guard’s Office of Investigations, chaired the investigation and tells WIRED: “All of the evidence pointed to a very singular leader in this operation. It all came back to Mr. Rush.”
Rush was piloting the Titan on a trip to the wreck of the Titanic in June 2023 when the submersible imploded, instantly killing all five crew. Also on board were Paul-Henri Nargeolet, a veteran submariner known as “Mr. Titanic,” and three paying passengers: entrepreneur Hamish Harding and a father and son pair, Shahzada and Suleman Dawood. The Titan had made 13 previous successful dives to the famous site.
The Coast Guard launched its investigation five days after the fatal incident and held two weeks of public hearings in September 2024. Technical testimony presented there detailed numerous flaws within the Titan’s innovative carbon-fiber hull, and highlighted operational failures on previous Titanic missions. These included one of the sub’s titanium domes falling off after the sub’s first attempt to reach the Titanic in 2021, and it being left outside in freezing conditions the winter before its final dives. Carbon-fiber composites can degrade if water freezes in small voids in the material.
Witnesses also alleged that Rush had ignored or glossed over numerous safety concerns raised by others in the submersible community and even by OceanGate’s first director of marine operations, David Lochridge. Lochridge, who has not responded to inquiries, was fired in 2018 after detailing dozens of issues in an internal report. None of OceanGate’s current senior executives testified at the hearings, nor were those responsible for managing operations of the final dive called to testify at the hearings. The new report says Rush fostered a toxic workplace environment, using the looming threat of being fired to dissuade employees from expressing safety concerns.
The Titan was not registered or flagged with any nation, and had not been inspected or certified by any Coast Guard–recognized organization. The report found that Rush himself had lied about the submersible’s specifications when applying for his Coast Guard credentials, and the company had suggested several times that the Titan was or would be flagged in the Bahamas. “The most surprising aspect of the investigation is how far outside of compliance that the Titan was operating and for how long,” says Neubauer. “That fact stands out to me above any other incident I've ever investigated.”
The new Coast Guard report stops short of finding a definitive mechanical cause for the fatal implosion, which occurred almost instantaneously at around 3,000 meters depth. However, it says that the facts strongly suggest that it was either the failure of a glue joint between the Titan’s carbon-fiber hull and a titanium ring, or a delamination within the carbon fiber itself, where layers of the materials separated from each other. The company never properly analyzed or tested the hull to understand flaws during manufacture or how long it might last, according to the Coast Guard.