OceanGate personnel ‘safety conscious,’ previous rider says

(NewsNation) — Questions are being raised about the build quality of the missing Titan submersible, but Aaron Newman says the company and people behind the watercraft are very “safety conscious.”

Newman, an OceanGate Expeditions investor who took the trip on the same sub in 2021, says there were safety briefings and trainings.

“This is a team that is very experienced and talented and did a lot of things well,” Newman said of the crew on board, including OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush. “But could they do everything perfectly? Maybe not.”

Time is running out to save the five passengers who began their descent into the ocean Sunday morning. It’s estimated there is enough oxygen supply to last until early Thursday morning.

After the vessel went missing, details began to surface about the company’s safety record, including a 2018 lawsuit alleging the vessel wasn’t prepared to handle extreme depths.

David Lochridge, OceanGate’s director of marine operations, wrote an engineering report in 2018 that said the craft under development needed more testing and that passengers might be endangered when it reached “extreme depths,” according to a lawsuit filed that year in U.S. District Court in Seattle.

But Newman said that lawsuit concerned a previous prototype of the Titan. Even then, he said, the men on board would have known and accepted the inherent risk of plunging two miles down into the Atlantic Ocean.

“This is not a Disney ride,” Newman said. “This is humans going to places that very few have been to. There are risks and dangers.”

The search-and-rescue mission is a joint effort between the U.S. and Canadian coast guards involving military ships, research vessels and planes. The U.S. Coast Guard said Wednesday that underwater noises were detected in the search area, but it’s unknown what was causing them.

If the vessel is located, the great depths will make pulling it to the surface difficult. There’s only a handful of equipment able to dive so deep.

It makes communication difficult, too.

“At that depth, a lot of the beacons, transmitters and transponders … just can’t go through 4,000 meters of water,” Newman said.

The Coast Guard stressed Wednesday that the search remains a rescue mission despite concerns over the dwindling oxygen supply.

“There comes a point when you have to make a tough decision, but we’re not there yet,” Capt. James Frederick said when asked if there was a point the operation would shift to recovery mode.