OceanGate Employee Resigned After Co-Founder Said He’d ‘Buy a Congressman’

An OceanGate employee resigned after a co-founder of the company allegedly said he’d “buy himself a congressman” to cut through red tape on his Titan submersible expedition to the Titanic wreckage.
In June 2023, the Titan submersible, owned and operated by Washington state-based OceanGate Expeditions, imploded near the site of the Titanic shipwreck in the Atlantic Ocean, killing the five people on board, including co-founder Stockton Rush.
During the last day of a hearing about OceanGate’s devastating expedition, Matthew McCoy, a U.S. Coast Guard veteran who served as the company’s operations technician for several months, detailed a meeting he had with Rush before the expedition.
McCoy said Rush told him the Titan would be flagged in the Bahamas and launched from Canada to avoid U.S. regulations. When McCoy noted there could be U.S. regulatory concerns if the submersible went to a U.S. port, Rush allegedly told him he’d buy off a congressman to help him, McCoy recalled.
“If the Coast Guard became a problem, then he would buy himself a congressman and make it go away,” Rush said, according to McCoy’s testimony.
The former OceanGate employee said his conversation with Rush was “tense” and that he was “aghast” by it.
McCoy also said he had safety concerns when he learned OceanGate parted with the University of Washington’s applied physics lab, that Boeing, a leading global aerospace company, wasn’t going to construct the Titan’s pressure hull, and that the hull thickness had been reduced.
He also had concerns about the expedition’s financial model when he learned that paying passengers would be on board. Each passenger paid $250,000 to be on the expedition.
McCoy’s testimony is part of a public hearing that the Coast Guard opened earlier this month as part of a high-level investigation into the cause of the submersible’s implosion.
On Wednesday, an engineer for the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) testified that there were flaws in the Titan’s pressure hull.
NTSB engineer Don Kramer said that there were wrinkles, porosity and voids in the carbon fiber used in the hull. A pressure hull is the inner hull of a submersible that maintains its structural integrity.
Kramer said that recovered hull pieces showed substantial delamination (the separation of laminate materials) of the layers of carbon fiber bonded to create the submersible’s hull.
OceanGate co-founder Guillermo Sohnlein said using carbon fiber for the hull was hardly novel.
Titan’s expedition to the Titanic wreckage started on June 18, 2023, and by June 22, the Coast Guard announced that debris from the Titan had been found roughly 1,600 feet from the famed ship.
Rush, two members of a prominent Pakistani family, Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood, British adventurer Hamish Harding and Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet were killed on board the Titan.
“These men were true explorers who shared a distinct spirit of adventure, and a deep passion for exploring and protecting the world’s oceans,” OceanGate said in a statement at the time. “We grieve the loss of life and joy they brought to everyone they knew.”
This article includes reporting from The Associated Press.