The Titan Submersible Hearing’s biggest revelations yet

The ill-fated submarine Titan is back in the spotlight this week as the U.S. Coast Guard holds an investigative hearing into the circumstances surrounding last year’s implosion of the OceanGate deep-sea vessel, a tragedy that killed all five people on board.

The first two days of testimony have painted an alarming picture of how OceanGate founder Stockton Rush, who died while piloting the ship, allegedly ran his company, addressed employee safety concerns, kept outsiders away from the project and rushed to take his employees away. submersible to the wreck of the Titanic.

Here are the biggest new pieces of information revealed so far during the hearing, including new images of the ship’s wreckage and details about the crew’s last communications.

One of the last messages the crew sent to Polar Prince was “all good here,” according to a visual reconstruction shown by the Coast Guard on the first day of the hearing.

The actual last message the crew sent was “dropped two wts,” a reference to the ship’s weights used for ascent and descent, researchers revealed. Contact was lost six seconds later.

Rob McCallum, a former advisor to OceanGate, spoke about that message last summer shortly after the implosion and said that indicated that something had gone wrong and the submarine attempted to return to the surface.

The Coast Guard shared the first image of Titan’s debris on the ocean floor, with the tail cone submerged in sand and surrounded by other fragments from the submarine. It was taken by a remotely operated vehicle, or ROV.

That loose tail cone, which is not part of the crew’s fuselage, was the “decisive evidence” the Coast Guard needed to know that the Titan had suffered a catastrophic implosion due to water pressure.

Tony Nissen, who hired OceanGate as technical director in 2016, gave some of the most alarming testimonies on Monday.

The Titan’s original hull was struck by lightning during a 2018 test mission, causing severe damage to the experimental carbon fiber hull, Nissen testified. He later discovered a crack in the hull that he believed could not be repaired, so he declined to approve a planned 2019 mission to the Titanic wreck. Ultimately, a new hull was placed on the submarine that imploded last year.

Coast Guard investigators also said the Titan was exposed to the elements for about seven months during storage in 2022 and 2023.

Bonnie Carl, OceanGate’s former director of finance and human resources, testified Monday that director of operations David Lochridge described the Titan as “unsafe.” Lochridge testified Tuesday that he had “no confidence whatsoever” in the submarine’s design.

“I knew the hull was going to fail,” he said. “It’s an absolute mess.”

Nissen said he had so little confidence in OceanGate’s leaders that he declined when Rush asked him to pilot Titan’s missions to the Titanic wreck.

“I told him, ‘I’m not going to go along with it,’” Nissen testified, saying he did not trust the operations crew or Rush, and that there was no designated safety officer at OceanGate.

Nissen added that he sparred with Rush over the language revealing the Titan’s “experimental” design, saying he “made him include that word” in the waivers passengers were required to sign before going on the mission. Carbon fiber is commonly used in aerospace, but it is an unusual material for use in deep-sea exploration. Maritime experts and former OceanGate employees all warned against its use years before the fatal implosion.

Nissen and Lochridge both testified that they lost their jobs after speaking to Rush about the safety of OceanGate’s designs.

“I wouldn’t sign up for it,” Nissen said of a planned trip in 2019. “So I got fired.”

Lochridge said he was fired in 2018 after opposing Rush’s decisions.

“I didn’t want to lose my job,” Lochridge said. ‘I wanted to go to the Titanic. It was on my bucket list. I wanted to dive with this, but dive safely.”

Both men describe Rush as volatile, impatient and pushy. Lochridge said he liked “doing things cheaply” and was driven by a “desire to get to the Titanic as quickly as possible and make a profit.” Nissen said he often fought with Rush behind the scenes and that “most people would just end up returning to Stockton. It was almost death by a thousand cuts.”

Even with its experimental design, the Titan never underwent the standard third-party safety review, Coast Guard investigators said Monday.

Reports last summer revealed that the Marine Technology Society, an organization made up of ocean engineers and policymakers, expressed concerns about the lack of a safety check. The Associated Press also reported this at the time OceanGate criticized the third-party certification process as time-consuming and innovation-restricting in a 2019 company blog post.

Lochridge also testified about Rush’s opposition to outside help. He said he shut down a University of Washington lab that had helped develop it and decided to keep everything in-house because of his own “arrogance.”

Lochridge, an experienced submarine pilot, testified about a harrowing trip in 2016 when Rush refused to hand over the controls after crashing a submarine into a shipwreck with passengers on board.

Lochridge said he strongly objected to Rush piloting the voyage to the Andrea Doria shipwreck off the coast of Massachusetts, but Rush insisted. Lochridge joined the voyage, saying that Rush deployed the submarine in a chaotic manner, ignored Lochridge’s pleas to stay a safe distance from the shipwreck, “slammed straight down” upon landing and then “basically hit it at full throttle.” speed’ drove into the wreckage of the ship.

Rush’s actions blocked the submarine beneath the shipwreck, and he immediately began to panic, Lochridge testified, adding that Rush asked him about life support supplies and the possibility of a dive team rescuing them in front of the passengers. When Lochridge asked Rush to hand over control, he became irritated and refused.

Lochridge said it was only when one of the three passengers on board tearfully begged Rush to hand over the reins that he finally complied and threw the controller at Lochridge’s head.

The disturbing incident was also told in a Vanity Fair article last year.