- OceanGate's CEO Stockton Rush viewed certification as an obstacle to submersible innovation.
- But Patrick Lahey, who runs a sub manufacturing company, told Insider that the "opposite is true."
Before OceanGate's CEO Stockton Rush was killed along with four others when his sea exploration company's Titanic submersible imploded on a dive, he made it clear he was no fan of what he described as overregulation.
Rush lamented about how the rules curbed innovation, saying in a 2019 interview with The Smithsonian: "There hasn't been an injury in the commercial submersible industry in over 35 years.
"It's obscenely safe because they have all these regulations," Rush said. "But it also hasn't innovated or grown — because they have all these regulations."
But a longtime sub expert whose Florida-based company designs and manufactures submersibles told Insider in an interview on Tuesday that the "exact opposite is true."
"Certification is not an impediment to innovation," Patrick Lahey, the CEO and co-founder of Triton Submarines, said. "Certification is the crucible within which responsible innovation is possible."
Lahey was among a slew of industry leaders who signed onto a 2018 letter sent to OceanGate expressing safety concerns about the company's unconventional carbon fiber and titanium Titan sub.
"We were all concerned that an accident and incident involving this craft that OceanGate created would be harmful to all of us," said Lahey, who called last month's Titan sub disaster "an avoidable tragedy."
The "big difference" between OceanGate's now-imploded Titan "contraption" and the vessels built by Triton Submarines and others in the industry is the "accreditation aspect," Lahey said.
"There is a stark difference between an experimental craft that conforms to no rules and a carefully and thoughtfully designed and engineered machine that is fully certified and accredited," said Lahey.
The sub expert called independent oversight of deep-sea vessels "essential."
"People shouldn't be allowed to operate vehicles that have been created without any type of third-party oversight because there's no assurance that they're safe," Lahey told Insider.
OceanGate's Titan imploded on June 18 while on an expedition to the Titanic shipwreck in the depths of the North Atlantic Ocean, killing Rush, British billionaire explorer Hamish Harding; British-Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son Suleiman; and French explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet.
The Titan was never classed — the process of an independent company checking to see if it was up to industry standards.
OceanGate's co-founder Guillermo Söhnlein, who left the company in 2013, told Insider in a recent interview that "just because you're certified doesn't mean you're gonna be safe."
"At OceanGate, at least when I was there, we went way above and beyond what any other sub operator was doing when it came to safety," Söhnlein said.
OceanGate even argued in a 2019 blog post on its website on why its doomed vessel called Titan wasn't classed that the process to do so was a lengthy one that hampered innovation.
"Bringing an outside entity up to speed on every innovation before it is put into real-world testing is anathema to rapid innovation," the post read.
But Lahey told Insider: "The simple fact that classed and certified human-occupied vehicles enjoy a 50-year unblemished safety record is all the proof you need."
"If a submersible is certified," Lahey said, "That means it must have been built and is kept maintained in conditions that warrant continued certification and the certification agency's purview extends to the operation of the submersible too and the vessel it is based aboard."
The Titan, Lahey said, was a craft that "skirted the rules" and shouldn't have taken people aboard.