OceanGate CEO Used Untrained Interns to Design Submarine That Led to Fatal Implosion, According to Reports

Washington-based deep sea exploration company OceanGate suffered a major tragedy when its flagship submarine, the Titan, imploded and killed all five people onboard in June of this year. Now it has emerged that the electrical system of the submarine which was designed by college-aged interns was partly to blame for the incident. Daily Mail reports.

The founder and CEO of OceanGate, Stockton Rush, had hired interns from Washington State University, who, according to deep sea exploration specialist Rob McCallum, would “drink Kool-Aid” and use a PlayStation remote to run the Titan. McCallum claimed in an interview with The New Yorker that he had warned Rush on several occasions that the submarine was unsafe, but the CEO was determined to press ahead with the project.

OceanGate had billed the Titan as a high-tech vessel, capable of taking tourists on trips to the depths of the Atlantic to visit the wreck of the Titanic. However, industry experts had warned that the vessel was experimental and potentially catastrophic. The company, which claimed to have worked with NASA, Boeing and the University of Washington, had allegedly “overstated and misrepresented” its role in the design of the Titan in order to attract wealthy clients by assuring them that the vessel was safe.

Questions are now being asked about the ethics of charging $250,000 per ticket for a submersible that had never been independently inspected and had malfunctioned previously. The tragedy has also highlighted the dangers of allowing untrained interns to design essential components of a submarine.

Former intern Mark Walsh, who graduated from Washington State University with a degree in electrical engineering, revealed that he and his classmates had designed the entire electrical system of the Titan and implemented it. He was later hired by OceanGate to work as a lead electrical engineer and said that he had also hired more interns from his alma mater.

The disaster has devastated the family of Shahzada Dawood, a British-Pakistani billionaire who died with his 19-year-old son, Suleman, on board the Titan. Rush had flown from the US to the UK to convince the Dawood family that the submersible was safe to travel in. Mrs. Dawood has revealed that she had no idea about the dangers of the vessel before it departed for its fatal journey.