Tag: Science

The tragic tale of OceanGate’s Titan submersible took on a few added twists today as the U.S. Coast Guard concluded two weeks of public hearings into last year’s catastrophic loss of the sub and its crew.

One former employee of Everett, Wash.-based OceanGate quoted the company’s CEO as saying years earlier that he’d “buy a congressman” if the Coast Guard stood in the way of Titan’s development. And the master of Titan’s mothership told investigators that he felt a “shudder” on the sea around the time that the sub imploded on June 18, 2023.

OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, the sub’s pilot, was among the five who died as Titan made its last descent to the wreck of the Titanic in the North Atlantic. The others were veteran Titanic explorer P.H. Nargeolet; British aviation executive and citizen explorer Hamish Harding; and Pakistani-born business magnate Shahzada Dawood and his son, Suleman.

Rush’s determination to dive to the Titanic, despite the warnings he received from OceanGate employees and outside engineers, emerged as a major theme during this month’s hearings in South Carolina. Matthew McCoy, a Coast Guard veteran who worked as an operations technician at OceanGate for five months in 2017, reinforced that theme today.

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.