Rickover was an absolute beast about safety, yet took military necessity into account when necessary, in ways that I can’t discuss but that are a major reason why the U.S. Navy’s submarine force is such a force to be reckoned with. As Wikipedia says about the Cold War, “U.S. submarines far outperformed the Soviet ones in the crucial area of stealth, and Rickover’s obsessive fixation on safety and quality control gave the U.S. nuclear Navy a vastly superior safety record to the Soviet one.” Of note: Rickover had seven rules that seem mostly applicable to OceanGate. They are:

Rule 1: You must have a rising standard of quality over time, and well beyond what is required by any minimum standard.

Rule 2: People running complex systems should be highly capable.

Rule 3: Supervisors have to face bad news when it comes and take problems to a level high enough to fix those problems.

Rule 4: You must have a healthy respect for the dangers and risks of your particular job.

Rule 5: Training must be constant and rigorous.

Rule 6: All the functions of repair, quality control, and technical support must fit together.

Rule 7: The organization and members thereof must have the ability and willingness to learn from mistakes of the past. //

During my time, which was mostly after Rickover’s passing, another feature that became embedded in submarine culture was the concept of “forceful backup,” meaning that junior members of a watch team were empowered, encouraged, and required to speak up when something didn’t seem right, even if they were the newest person on the ship and the action being taken was the Captain’s. //

Reading the dozens of stories about the OceanGate disaster, the things that stand out to me are that Stockton Rush, OceanGate’s CEO, employed personnel not based on merit, refused to have the Titan inspected by a third-party, and did not like to hear bad news. None of those are good. //

A submarine pilot hired to assess the now-missing Titanic submersible warned in 2018 that its hull monitoring system would only detect failure “often milliseconds before an implosion.”

David Lochridge, a submarine pilot and inspector from Scotland, said in court filings that he was fired after expressing concerns about the safety of the Titan — a 22-foot submersible that disappeared on Sunday while carrying five people to see the wreck of the Titanic.