As frantic search and rescue efforts continue to attempt to locate the missing submersible Titan, which went missing on Sunday on an expedition to dive on the wreck of the Titanic, long-standing concerns about the safety of the submersible have resurfaced. 

Stockton Rush, CEO of OceanGate Expeditions, the firm that built and operated the submersible has been a vocal advocate of innovation while at times downplaying the primacy of safety in submersible design.

In an interview last year, Rush said, “‘You know, there’s a limit. At some point safety just is pure waste. I mean if you just want to be safe, don’t get out of bed.”

In a 2019 interview, where he discussed the commercial submersible industry, Rush said that there had been no injuries in the field for decades, adding: “It’s obscenely safe because they have all these regulations. But it also hasn’t innovated or grown — because they have all these regulations.”

The New York Times reports that in January 2018, the OceanGate engineering team was about to hand over the craft — named Titan — to a new crew who would be responsible for ensuring the safety of its future passengers. But experts inside and outside the company were beginning to sound alarms.

OceanGate’s director of marine operations, David Lochridge, started working on a report around that time, according to court documents, ultimately producing a scathing document in which he said the craft needed more testing and stressed “the potential dangers to passengers of the Titan as the submersible reached extreme depths.”

Two months later, OceanGate faced similarly dire calls from more than three dozen people — industry leaders, deep-sea explorers and oceanographers — who warned in a letter to Stockton Rush, that the company’s “experimental” approach and its decision to forgo a traditional assessment could lead to potentially “catastrophic” problems with the Titanic mission.

Stockton Rush was the pilot of the Titan when it went missing last Sunday.