Researchers remember red flags and discoveries on OceanGate submersible

SEATTLE – H. Gary Greene has taken hundreds of dives in underwater submersibles, including to depths greater than the north Atlantic Ocean floor where the Titanic – and now, the doomed Titan craft – rest. Among Greene’s excursions was a 2018 dive near San Juan Island that left him with some “qualms.”

For his research about the habitats of forage fish, the marine geology professor had won passage in Cyclops 1, the Everett-based OceanGate’s predecessor to Titan, which caught the world’s attention when it vanished and apparently imploded on June 18. The Cyclops, which was built with assistance from the University of Washington, struggled below water with propulsion, communication and navigation, according to Greene and other participants who took part in dives that September.

“This was a bit different,” Greene said of the San Juan dive. “This was definitely a sort of experimental type of thing.”

At the time, Cyclops’ deployment off Friday Harbor – with OceanGate founder Stockton Rush as the pilot – was heralded as an exciting moment for scientific exploration. Its dives produced useful discoveries, including that red urchin can live in much deeper waters than previously thought. For several participants, the operation felt safe and well run; one person enjoyed his trip so much he asked for a free ride on Titan.

To others, the expeditions raised red flags. The first dive was delayed because of issues with the propulsion system, a recurring problem that forced one crew to resurface, researchers aboard said this week. Communication cut out at least once. Greene said the navigation system, which was based on direct communication to the mothership above, didn’t work on his first dive. On another occasion, the ship bumped into an underwater wall in the strong San Juan currents.

The sub, like Titan, was uncertified, meaning it had not gone through a series of voluntary inspections, which worried Greene at the time.

The issues were so concerning that one experienced underwater researcher who was scheduled for a dive refused to go.

In the end, the expeditions were viewed as a success, leading to the publication of several scientific papers. But the Titan’s disappearance has spurred some of its participants to reflect on that experience and question the intersection of scientific research with for-profit ventures.

“If you’re honest with yourself,” said Dr. Aaron Galloway, one of the divers that day, “you can say that was a bad decision I made.”

Brief UW collaboration

Rush, who also piloted Titan, founded OceanGate in 2009 when he bought a submersible, Antipodes, from a private owner. He soon formed collaborations with some of the region’s preeminent scientific organizations, which burnished the company’s reputation.

From 2013 to 2020, the University of Washington’s applied physics lab lent engineering expertise to help design OceanGate’s own vessel, the shallow-diving Cyclops ship – a steel-hulled submersible designed to travel as deep as 1,640 feet.

The lab initially signed a $5 million research collaborative agreement with OceanGate, but only $65,000 worth of work was completed before the two organizations “parted ways,” UW spokesperson Victor Balta said in a statement Thursday. That work resulted in Cyclops.

The university did not work on the Titan submersible because its “expertise involved only shallow water implementation,” lab executive director Kevin Williams said.

OceanGate also worked with Boeing as part of the 2013 UW collaboration. At the time, a Boeing executive said in a news release the aerospace company would work on the “development of the pressure hull of OceanGate’s next-generation manned submersible.”

The university’s School of Oceanography’s also contracted with OceanGate to perform nine tests between 2015 and 2021, according to Balta. UW researchers and personnel did not provide any verification or validation of OceanGate equipment as part of those tests, he added.

San Juan dives

As it built its brand, OceanGate conducted dozens of dives in Puget Sound, including one with the rapper Macklemore in 2014 that was documented by the Discovery Channel.

The seven dives over five days in the San Juans were organized by The SeaDoc Society, a program of the University of California, Davis, School of Veterinary Medicine based on Orcas Island. The group contracted with OceanGate to use the submersible, and solicited research proposals, said Joe Gaydos, science director at SeaDoc.

The OceanGate submersible was “exactly the tool” the researchers needed, said Adam Summers, a professor in the UW’s School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences. His research team still uses the videos collected from those missions in their work today.

He enjoyed the missions so much that he asked OceanGate for a free ride on Titan, but wasn’t able to secure one.

“What I can tell you is Stockton seemed like an exceptionally careful person to me,” Summers said of Rush, the then-OceanGate CEO.

Gaydos said the university’s boating safety officer accompanied the team and “was satisfied” with the vessel and the dive plans. The researchers and OceanGate staff met each morning and evening for operational briefings.

“It was a very methodical checks and balances process that we went through,” Gaydos said. “Everything was very serious, very well done, and a very close attention to detail.”

On one of the dives on the west side of San Juan Island, while searching for red sea urchins, Cyclops hit an underwater wall, Gaydos said: “There is a lot of current down there.”

But the team wasn’t concerned about damage to the hull, Gaydos said, or that the pilot approached the wall at an inappropriate distance. “It wasn’t a cause for concern,” he said.

Alex Lowe, a UW graduate student at the time researching sea urchins, agreed it was an amazing experience. Unlike scuba diving, traveling in the submersible allowed him to more fully share the experience with his colleagues, marveling at their finding red sea urchins at a record 931 feet within minutes of their descent.

But some moments of the trip felt dicey.

The first dive had to be delayed because the propulsion system wouldn’t work. The pause pushed them into a tight window for when a dive would make sense with the tides and there was some discussion about scrapping it.

They forged on, but the problem persisted and they also lost communication at around 300 feet deep, forcing them to resurface.

Lowe had knowledge of the “crazy” currents in the San Juan Islands from previous work and he remembers lacking confidence that the sub’s propulsion was strong enough to fight them.

“There were some concerns over just how things were being run, how decisions were being made,” he said.

Galloway was on the same trips with Lowe. As an experienced research scuba diver and associate professor at the Oregon Institute of Marine Biology, for him the operation from Friday Harbor stood in contrast to excursions organized by the government for research.

“The vibe from OceanGate, they were really nice people, but you could feel that this was like a startup that would be for wealthy people,” he said.

Greene’s issues were with navigation, which was based on direct communications to the surface – the same system aboard Titan, according to media reports. The approach didn’t work on the first dive and they instead used “dead reckoning,” or calculating their location based on previous position and speed.

“I really thought that their navigation system should be better,” he said.

Greene was also concerned that the sub hadn’t gone through the steps to be certified, which he said he specifically asked about. Of his many below-water trips, few have been on uncertified submersibles; when he worked for the United States Geological Survey, the department wouldn’t let him dive in an uncertified vessel.

The concern was shared by a group of industry experts that drafted a letter to Rush in 2018, urging him to put his boats through the voluntary certification process.

OceanGate never did, saying their safety protocols were stronger than even those demanded.

“I did have some qualms to begin with and I did question them about it,” Green said.

When Greene heard of Titan’s disappearance, he felt sick. Waters the depths of the Titanic are familiar territory and he could imagine their journey. He once dived into the nearly 5-mile-deep New Hebrides trench near Tonga in a Nautile submarine.

Asked if he’d hesitate to go to that depth again, he said in general, no, but with OceanGate, he felt differently.

“Would I hesitate to go down in Titan? Well, I probably would have asked a hell of a lot of questions.”