Cosmic Log

The U.S. Coast Guard took a deep dive into the regulations governing submersibles today at a public hearing looking into the causes of last year’s loss of OceanGate’s Titan sub and its crew. And the issues raised sometimes got as murky as the depths of Puget Sound, where Titan underwent its first tests.

Among the witnesses who testified at the hearing in South Carolina was John Winters, the master marine inspector for Coast Guard Sector Puget Sound. For more than a decade, Winters worked with OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush on the regulatory requirements for two of the Everett, Wash.-based company’s subs, known as the Antipodes and Cyclops 1. But today he told the Coast Guard’s Marine Board of Investigation that he had nothing to do with Titan.

Winters recalled a time, about two years ago, when he was at OceanGate’s headquarters on the Everett Marina to check on one of the two submersibles in the Coast Guard’s records. He said he saw the three subs on a barge, and someone told him, “We finally got our submarine to go to the Titanic.”

“But that was the only thing in passing,” Winters said. “Nothing about what it was constructed to, who witnessed it. None of that stuff. Just, ‘Here it is, look at the outside.’ … That’s as far as it went.”

In the wake of the Titan tragedy, the Coast Guard is likely to go further. One of the objectives of this month’s hearings is to lay the groundwork for regulatory changes that would help head off future fatal incidents involving submersibles.

In the run-up to last year’s implosion of OceanGate’s Titan submersible, cost concerns played a role in decisions that may have contributed to the catastrophe, a former director of engineering for the Everett, Wash.-based company told investigators today at a Coast Guard hearing.

Phil Brooks, who headed up the engineering team starting in 2021, said OceanGate’s financial woes contributed to his decision to leave the company in early 2023, just months before the sub and its crew were lost during a dive to the wreck of the Titanic, 12,600 feet down in the North Atlantic.

“It was clear that the company was economically very stressed, and as a result, that they were making decisions and doing things … I felt that the safety was just being compromised way too much,” Brooks told the Coast Guard Marine Board of Investigation, which is due to wrap up a series of public hearings this week.

OceanGate’s Titan submersible briefly became tangled up in the wreck of the Titanic during a 2022 dive, a mission specialist who was on the sub told investigators today.

“We had a skid stuck for a minute,” Fred Hagen said during a hearing in South Carolina that focused on the causes of last year’s loss of the sub and its crew. “It wasn’t a big deal.”

The Coast Guard’s Marine Investigation Board is reviewing the history of Everett, Wash.-based OceanGate’s Titan sub development effort, with the aim of making recommendations to avoid future undersea tragedies.

Last year’s catastrophic implosion killed five people: OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, who served as the sub’s pilot; veteran Titanic explorer P.H. Nargeolet; British aviation executive and adventurer Hamish Harding; and Pakistani-born business executive Shahzada Dawood and his son, Suleman.

Hagen went on two Titan dives — one in July 2021, which was aborted when one of the sub’s thrusters malfunctioned, and the other in July 2022, which successfully reached the Titanic at a depth of 12,600 feet (3,840 meters).

Nargeolet steered the sub as the crew members took in the shipwreck’s iconic sights, including the bow of the 112-year-old wreck and the ruins of the Grand Staircase. But Hagen said he wanted to see more, and he persuaded Nargeolet to head back toward the stern section.

“I’d asked him to go around where the break was, and for a few moments we had gotten stuck,” he said. “He was very quiet, and he was working the controls. … I leaned over, and I said, ‘P.H., it seems that we’re stuck.’ And he says, ‘Yes, Fred, we are.’”

Hagen said that the skid was momentarily snagged in “pipes and things” on the Titanic wreck, but that Nargeolet managed to free up the sub after no more than a minute or two. The surface support team became concerned about what was happening and “told us to come up immediately,” Hagen said.

“Obviously, when you’re down there, it feels like a big deal. I think P.H. certainly wasn’t overly concerned,” he said.

Video views from the search for OceanGate’s Titan submersible show mangled components from the craft — and tell the tale of last year’s dramatic implosion, which led to the loss of the sub and its five-person crew.

The U.S. Coast Guard released two videos this week in support of technical testimony that’s expected to be given during this month’s hearings into the cause of the incident, taking place in North Charleston, S.C.

The hearings began Sept. 16 and will continue on Sept. 19 with testimony from Renata Rojas, who was a mission specialist on an earlier Titan dive to the wreck of the Titanic in the North Atlantic; and from Steven Ross, a marine biologist who served as OceanGate’s scientific adviser. Technical testimony is likely to come later.

Both videos were captured on June 22, 2023, by a camera mounted on a remotely operated vehicle that took part in the search for the sub. The ROV came upon the scene four days after Titan went missing, and provided the conclusive evidence confirming that the sub had come apart amid the deep ocean’s crushing pressure.

One video shows Titan’s aft titanium dome and ring, plus remnants of the hull and carbon-fiber debris. The forward titanium dome and its viewport can also be seen, not far away. The other video shows Titan’s tail cone, emblazoned with the OceanGate logo.

Whistleblower David Lochridge said today that his concerns about OceanGate and its approach to undersea exploration began long before the company built the submersible that imploded last year during a dive to the Titanic shipwreck.

Lochridge referred back to 2016, when OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush crashed a different submersible called Cyclops 1 into the wreck of the Andrea Doria while Lochridge watched.

“He basically drove it full speed into the port side of the bow, and we could hear the cracking of the fairing as he got us jammed in underneath,” Lochridge recalled. “I’m not going to say how foul my language was, but it wasn’t good.”

At the time, the Andrea Doria expedition was hailed as a momentous achievement for OceanGate. But for Lochridge, a veteran submersible pilot who had joined the company months earlier, it was the start of a sour relationship with Rush.

During the second day of Coast Guard hearings into last year’s loss of OceanGate’s Titan submersible and its five-person crew, Lochridge traced how he tried to sound the alarm about what he saw as lapses in Titan’s design and construction — and how he ran into resistance at the Everett, Wash.-based company.