A key employee who labeled a doomed experimental submersible unsafe before its last, fatal voyage testified Tuesday that he frequently clashed with the company’s co-founder and felt the company was committed only to making money.

David Lochridge, OceanGate’s former operations director, is one of the most anticipated witnesses to appear before a commission trying to determine what caused the Titan to implode en route to the wreckage of the Titanic last year, killing all five on board. His testimony echoed that of other former employees Monday, one of whom described OceanGate head Stockton Rush as volatile and difficult to work with.

“The whole idea behind the company was to make money,” Lochridge said. “There was very little in the way of science.”

Rush was among the five people who died in the implosion. OceanGate owned the Titan and used it for several dives to the Titanic going back to 2021.

Lochridge also testified that a federal safety agency did not investigate his complaint.

“I believe that if OSHA had attempted to investigate the seriousness of the concerns I raised on multiple occasions, this tragedy may have been prevented,” he said.

Eight months after he filed an OSHA complaint, a caseworker told him the agency had not begun investigating it yet and there were 11 cases ahead of his. By then, OceanGate was suing Lochridge and he had filed a countersuit.

About 10 months after he filed the complaint, he decided to walk away. The case was closed and both lawsuits were dropped.

Lochridge joined the company in the mid-2010s as a veteran engineer and submersible pilot and said he quickly came to feel he was being used to lend the company scientific credibility. He said he felt the company was selling him as part of the project “for people to come up and pay money,” and that did not sit well with him.

Lochridge referenced a 2018 report in which he raised safety concerns about OceanGate operations. He said that with all of the safety issues he saw, “there was no way I was signing off on this.”

Asked whether he had confidence in the way the Titan was being built, he said: “No confidence whatsoever.”

Employee turnover was very high at the time, Lochridge said, and leadership dismissed his concerns because they were more focused on “bad engineering decisions” and a desire to get to the Titanic as quickly as possible and start making money.

OceanGate suspended its operations after the implosion.

Lochridge also described a harrowing trip in which Rush crashed another submersible into a shipwreck.

He said Rush insisted on piloting that earlier vessel down to the Andrea Doria shipwreck in 2016, off the Massachusetts coast, over his strenuous objections.

Lochridge said he watched warily as Rush haphazardly deployed the Cyclops 1 submersible, a Titan precursor, and ignored Lochridge’s warnings to keep his distance from the shipwreck about 250 feet under the Atlantic Ocean.

Rush “smashed straight down” when he landed the vessel, Lochridge said, and then turned it around and “basically drove it full speed” into the wreckage, jamming the submersible underneath. Then, in view of the three other passengers aboard, Rush flew into a panic, asking whether there was enough life support on board and how quickly a dive team could arrive.

Lochridge, an experienced submersible pilot from Scotland, said he tried to calm his boss and asked him to hand over the PlayStation controller that was used to pilot the vessel. But Rush refused.

Finally, he said, one of the passengers who had paid for the ride shouted at Rush to give Lochridge the controller. Rush obliged by throwing the controller at Lochridge, hitting him on what he described as the “starboard side” of his head.

The New York Times contributed.