OceanGate boasted on Instagram in 2020 that its Titanic submersible would detect hull defects with 'incredible accuracy' and 'well before the safety of the crew is threatened'

• OceanGate boasted in 2020 that its Titanic submersible could detect hull failure accurately.
• The company said its warning system would alert the pilot to hull flaws long before an implosion.

OceanGate, the company that ran tours to the Titanic in its now-imploded submersible, in 2020 touted its ability to assess potential issues in the vessel's carbon fiber hull with "incredible accuracy."

In an April 2020 Instagram post, the firm wrote that "acoustic emission sensors" mounted to the submersible's hull would sense and record changes to the carbon fiber as the vessel was diving.

"This real-time monitoring system samples sound waves through the hulls many times per second, providing incredible accuracy and allowing us to assess the health of the hull during the dive," OceanGate wrote.

The company said it conducted "extensive testing" and relied on 20 years of prior research that showed "increased acoustic activity always occurs well before the structure fails."

If the hull is damaged "during transportation or surface operations" or through repeated dives, the defects would be "detected by the advanced system, and the dive terminated well before the safety of the crew is threatened," OceanGate wrote.

"Real-time hull health monitoring is a key safety feature of Titan. We do not dive if it is not operating," the company added.

But OceanGate's "acoustic monitoring system" was criticized in 2018 by the company's then-director of marine operations, David Lochridge, a veteran submarine pilot who said he was fired after raising "serious safety concerns" about the submersible.

Lochridge said he warned OceanGate that the system could only detect when a component was about to fail "often milliseconds before an implosion," according to a lawsuit he filed against the company.

The system also couldn't detect if existing flaws were already affecting the hull, he said in his lawsuit.

In response to Lochridge's qualms, OceanGate had said the submersible's warning system would alert the pilot to potential hull failure "with enough time to arrest the descent and safely return to the surface," per The New Yorker.

After being fired, the submarine pilot told another submersible expert, Rob McCallum, that there was "no way on earth you could have paid me to dive the thing," according to the outlet.

It's unclear if OceanGate had tweaked the submersible's design to address Lochridge's concerns when the company posted this claim on Instagram in 2020. OceanGate did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Insider sent outside regular business hours.

OceanGate manufactured the hull of the submersible, called the Titan, using a combination of carbon fiber and titanium — an unorthodox mix for submersibles, which typically are constructed purely out of solid metal.

While OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush believed the Titan was pushing the boundaries of innovation, he was also documented repeatedly ignoring pleas from other safety experts to reconsider his experimental approach.

An internal report from Triton Submarines, a rival to OceanGate, also said it was a red flag that the Titan's warning system even existed, per The New Yorker.

Rush was "spinning the fact" that the Titan needed a warning system "into something positive," Jarl Stromer, a regulatory and class-compliance manager at Triton, the outlet reported.

"He's making it sound like the Cyclops is more advanced because it has this system when the opposite is true: The submersible is so experimental, and the factor of safety completely unknown, that it requires a system to warn the pilot of impending collapse," Stromer told Triton's CEO, per The New Yorker. The Cyclops was the initial name given to the Titan and its predecessor when the submersible was being tested.

The Titan went missing on June 18 while diving 13,000 feet to the wreck of the Titanic. All five people on board, including Rush, were declared dead on June 23 by US authorities after debris from the submersible was found on the ocean floor.

The debris field points to the submersible suffering a "catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber," the US Coast Guard said, which would have instantly killed everyone within. It's still unclear if those within the submersible knew the vessel was about to implode, or if they detected any hull flaws.

While Rush's attitude toward the Titan's safety has come under public scrutiny, he has also been defended by colleagues and close friends, who said that while the CEO had lofty ambitions, he was also deeply committed to safety.

He died alongside British billionaire and adventurer Hamish Harding, wealthy French diver Paul-Henri Nargeolet and British-Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son, Suleman.