OceanGate co-founder Guillermo Sohnlein testifies company that built Titan did not plan to build its own subs

By: CNN

Posted: Sep 23, 2024 1:57 PM CDT

OceanGate Expeditions/AP/File via CNN Newsource

By Ashley R. Williams, Graham Hurley and Dakin Andone

(CNN) — The company that built and operated the doomed Titan submersible did not originally intend to develop its own vessels, its co-founder testified Monday before a US Coast Guard panel investigating what led the craft to implode last year, killing all five people aboard.

A two-week Marine Board of Investigation hearing resumed Monday with the testimony of Guillermo Sohnlein, who cofounded OceanGate with Stockton Rush in 2009. Sohnlein – who for a time served as the company’s CEO – left the company in 2013, 10 years before the implosion killed Rush and four others during a dive to the wreck of the Titanic in the North Atlantic.

Also killed in what authorities concluded was a “catastrophic implosion” were businessman Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son, Suleman Dawood; businessman Hamish Harding; and French diver Paul-Henri Nargeolet.

Sohnlein was not involved in the Titan’s development, CNN previously reported. But his testimony shed light on OceanGate’s origins, its early years and its founders’ goals for the company: To increase humanity’s access to the deep ocean.

OceanGate first hoped to have a fleet of five submersibles capable of diving to 6,000 meters that would not need a dedicated mother ship, Sohnlein said, giving the fleet the flexibility to be chartered anywhere in the world as oceanographic research vessels. The plan was for researchers to pay to collect their data aboard one of OceanGate’s submersibles, Sohnlein said.

But as the company discussed their requirements with submersible manufacturers, none could deliver what OceanGate needed, Sohnlein said. As entrepreneurs, he and Rush were faced with two choices: “You change your business model or find a better engineering solution.”

“And Stockton, being the engineer that he was, opted to find a better engineering solution,” Sohnlein said. The company would have to build its own submersibles.

It was around this time, Sohnlein said, OceanGate first began to consider using carbon fiber to construct a pressurized hull, a component ultimately used in the Titan.

The construction of the ill-fated submersible has emerged as a key investigative thread for the Coast Guard panel, which last week heard testimony portraying Sohnlein’s former company and business partner as prioritizing profits over science and safety, while warnings were repeatedly ignored before the Titan’s implosion.

Sohnlein, however, contradicted this testimony, portraying Rush as an explorer who manned the Titan’s first dive to 4,000 meters on his own to spare anyone else from taking the risk.

“Neither Stockton nor I were ever driven by tourism,” he said, alluding to the expeditions OceanGate would eventually operate to take deep-pocketed clients to the site of the Titanic. “We were never motivated by going somewhere that people had already been before. The reason we got into this was because we both wanted to explore.”

The submersible lost contact with its support vessel, the Polar Prince, an hour and 45 minutes into its dive on June 18, 2023. The wreckage, located several hundred yards from the Titanic, was found on June 22 following an extensive search, according to the Marine Board of Investigation, which is the Coast Guard’s highest level of inquiry.

The accident marked the first time a manned deep-ocean submersible had ever imploded, according to industry experts.

‘Smoke and mirrors’

The board also heard Monday from Roy Thomas, an engineer from the American Bureau of Shipping, whose testimony highlighted the risks of using carbon fiber to construct a hull.

The bureau provides classing services, a process to ensure vessels adhere to certain standards. Thomas said OceanGate did not request classing from the bureau. OceanGate acknowledged the Titan was not classed in a 2019 blog post, CNN previously reported.

It was important the hull be constructed out of “robust materials” with a document history of “external pressure applications,” Thomas said. For the bureau, the materials include steel, aluminum, titanium and, for the windows, acrylic plastic.

Carbon fiber does not hold up well when exposed to external pressure, Thomas said, and is “susceptible to fatigue damage,” which can remain hidden. Manufacturing defects are another concern, he said.

“Currently there are no recognized national or international standards for carbon fiber pressure hulls for human occupancy,” Thomas said.

Last year, Sohnlein told “CNN This Morning” safety was always a top priority for OceanGate and Rush, whom he described as a “very strong risk manager.”

“I believe that he believed that every innovation that he created, whether technologically or within the dive operations, was to both expand the capability of humanity exploring the oceans while also improving the safety of those doing it,” Sohnlein said.

But last week’s testimony, including from key witness and former OceanGate director of marine operations David Lochridge, told a different story of Rush and his views on handling the vessel’s safety.

Lochridge, who described the company as one that focused on “making money” and offered “very little in the way of science,” testified he had raised safety concerns over OceanGate’s operations in 2018 and he had “no confidence whatsoever” in how the Titan was built.

“It was all smoke and mirrors,” Lochridge said of how the company from which he was fired in 2018 operated. “All the social media that you see about all these past expeditions. They always had issues with their expeditions.”

On Thursday, a marine scientist who dived as a crew member aboard the Titan on its fourth mission last year, testified that the submersible had suffered a platform malfunction just six days before it imploded.

Steven Ross, who said the Coast Guard did not inspect the Titan in 2021, 2022 or 2023, said the platform malfunction on June 12 caused the five passengers onboard during that trip to slam into the back of the submersible for at least an hour. The dive was piloted by Rush and was aborted according to Ross, who said no one was injured.

Others last week testified that Rush, an aerospace engineer, willingly broke rules while operating an experimental submersible that had not undergone thorough testing in an effort to appeal to wealthy tourists and researchers seeking out deep-sea voyages.

Former OceanGate engineering contractor Antonella Wilby testified Friday her repeated safety concerns about the Titan were ignored, and the submersible’s navigation and acoustic communications systems failed during a 2022 expedition.

“No aspect of the operation seemed safe to me,” said Wilby, who was eventually removed from the communications and navigation teams. “When you answer specific questions with, ‘That’s just what the company founder wants,’ instead of actual design decisions and data and analysis, it was a red flag to me.”

CNN’s Ray Sanchez, Alaa Elassar, Cindy Von Quednow, Isabelle Chapman and Curt Devine contributed to this report.