The US Coast Guard’s Titan submersible listening to kicked off with a startling revelation.
“I informed him I’m not getting in it,” former OceanGate engineering director Tony Nissen mentioned to a panel of Coast Guard investigators, referring to a 2018 dialog by which CEO Stockton Rush allegedly requested Nissen to behave as a pilot in an upcoming expedition to the Titanic.
“It’s the operations crew, I don’t belief them,” Nissen informed the investigators. “I didn’t belief Stockton both. You’ll be able to check out the place we began once I was employed. Nothing I obtained was the reality.”
Nissen’s testimony, which centered on the design, constructing, and testing of OceanGate’s first carbon fiber submersible, was a dramatic begin to almost two weeks of public testimony within the US Coast Guard Marine Board of Investigation’s hearings into the deadly June 2023 implosion of the Titan. Its 5 occupants, together with Rush, all possible died immediately.
Earlier than Nissen took the stand, the Coast Guard offered an in depth timeline of OceanGate as an organization, the event of the Titan submersible, and its journeys to the wreck of the Titanic, resting almost 3,800 meters down within the north Atlantic. These slides revealed new data, together with over 100 situations of kit failures and incidents on the Titan’s journeys in 2021 and 2022. An animated timeline of the ultimate few hours of the Titan additionally included the ultimate textual content messages despatched by individuals on the sub. One despatched at about 2,400 meters depth learn “all good right here.” The final message, despatched because the sub slowed its descent at almost 3,400 meters, learn “dropped two wts.”
The Coast Guard additionally confirmed reviews that the experimental carbon fiber sub had been saved in an out of doors car parking zone in temperatures as little as 1.4 levels Fahrenheit (–17 Celsius) within the run-up to final 12 months’s Titanic missions. Some engineers apprehensive that water freezing in or close to the carbon fiber might increase and trigger defects within the materials.
Nissen mentioned that just about from when he joined OceanGate in 2016, Rush stored altering the corporate’s route. A transfer to certify the vessel with an impartial third social gathering fell by the wayside, as did plans to check extra scale fashions of the Titan’s carbon fiber hull when one failed early beneath strain. Rush then downgraded titanium parts to save cash and time. “It was demise by a thousand cuts,” Nissen recollects.
He confronted robust questioning about OceanGate’s alternative of carbon fiber for a hull and its reliance on a newly developed acoustic monitoring system to offer an early warning of failure. One investigator raised WIRED’s reporting that an outdoor skilled Nissen employed to evaluate the acoustic system later had misgivings about Rush’s understanding of its limitations.
“Given the time and constraints we had,” Nissen mentioned, “we did all of the testing and introduced in each skilled we might discover. We constructed it like an plane.”
Nissen walked the Coast Guard board by deep-water testing within the Bahamas in 2018, throughout which he says the sub was struck by lightning. Measurements on the Titan’s hull later confirmed that it was flexing past its calculated security issue. When a pilot subsequently discovered a crack within the hull, Nissen mentioned, he wouldn’t log off on one other dive. “I killed it,” he testified. “The hull is completed.” Nissen was subsequently fired.
