A pair of reports by the National Transportation Safety Board found evidence of imperfections in the carbon-fiber hull that was made for OceanGate’s Titan submersible — plus indications that the hull behaved differently after a loud bang was heard at the end of a dive in mid-2022.
At the time, OceanGate team determined that the loud bang was not a serious problem, but less than a year afterward, the sub and its crew were lost in a catastrophic implosion during a trip to the wreck of the Titanic in the North Atlantic,
Donald Kramer, an senior materials engineer who presented NTSB’s findings today at a Coast Guard hearing in South Carolina, declined to go beyond the data and speculate on whether the imperfections or the bang figured in Titan’s doom. But one leading theory for the sub’s failure suggests that weaknesses in the hull gave way under the extreme pressure of the deep ocean.