() – Four days of hearings into the 2023 implosion of the Titan submersible that killed all five people on board concluded this week with more damning testimony recounting multiple safety incidents over the years.
Patrick Lahey, CEO of Triton Submarines, testified at Friday’s hearing that he was concerned about the submersible’s lack of certification.
Lahey said he saw the Titan in March 2019 while in the Bahamas and was “not impressed,” which he reported to OceanGate staff.
“It didn’t seem to me to have been particularly well thought out or executed. I saw evidence that they were crimping cables to hold weights, it just looked amateurish in its execution,” he said. “I came away from that visit thinking, well, that’s a relief, I don’t think that leads people to significant dives and I obviously underestimated their tenacity.”
OceanGate purchased several submersibles from Triton Submarines.
Lahey said he believes manned vehicles should be accredited and was concerned that Stockton Rush, founder and CEO of OceanGate, did not evaluate the submersible objectively and did not seek outside opinions to ensure the craft was safe.
Lahey also said he was aware that Rush viewed the certification process as “a waste of time” and “an impediment to innovation.”
“The certification process works, we know it works. Our safety record proves it,” Lahey continued. “We need to insist on continued human exploration of the deep sea in certified and accredited machines, not experimental ones – there is no place for experimental machines in the deep sea.”
Diving on Titan “was never supposed to be safe,” OceanGate mission specialist Fred Hagen said during testimony Friday.
“Anyone who felt safe going down to depths on the Titan was either deluded or delusional, it was an experimental craft, it was clearly dangerous,” Hagen said. “You don’t do it because it’s safe, you do it for the adrenaline rush.”
Hagen said “there was an incident” in 2021, just days before a dive he participated in, in which, as the Titan was being lifted onto the ramp, rocking back and forth, the crane operator abruptly let go and the submersible crashed onto the deck.
The force of the impact sheared off several bolts that “flew out like bullets” and the titanium dome came off. Only four of the 18 bolts in the 3,500-pound (1,587.5-kilogram) titanium dome had been installed.
During that dive, they realized the Titan was off-balance and spiraled down, free-falling for about two and a half hours.
Communications were erratic and they veered off course, and when they activated thrusters to get back on course, the starboard ones failed and they spun in circles, he said.
On another dive during the 2022 Titanic expedition, they became entangled in the ship’s wreckage for about a minute or two, he added.
Antonella Wilby, a former OceanGate engineering contractor, testified Friday that she repeatedly raised concerns and was repeatedly ignored.
During Dive 79 of the 2022 Titanic expedition in July, Wilby was working on navigation when parts of the Titan’s navigation and acoustic communications systems malfunctioned.
When Wilby expressed her concerns about the breakdown, she was told she did not have an “explorer mentality.” She was worried that escalating her concerns to the board would break her confidentiality agreement.
She was also told she was not a “solutions-oriented” person and was eventually removed from the communications and navigation teams. At one point, Wilby told them, “This is an idiotic way to do your navigation.”
“No aspect of the operation felt safe to me,” he said. “When you answer specific questions with that’s what the founder of the company wants, rather than actual design decisions and data and analytics, that was a red flag for me.”
Steven Ross, a marine scientist and former chief scientific officer at OceanGate, said during testimony Thursday that the Titan submersible suffered a failure six days before it imploded in June 2023.
A platform failure during Dive 87 on Titan’s fourth mission in 2023 caused all five people on board to crash against the submersible’s stern for at least an hour, Ross said.
Ross also mentioned two incidents during the 2022 Titanic expedition dives, including a loud bang, heard as they ascended on Dive 80. On Dive 81, Ross said there was a failure with the thrusters.
Triton Submarines and other members of the Marine Technology Society (MTS) wrote a letter to OceanGate expressing their concerns about the Titan’s development. An MTS member shared a draft of the letter with OceanGate. Rush and the MTS president spoke and agreed to disagree on the draft. The full, finalized version of the letter was never formally sent to OceanGate.
David Lochridge, a former director of marine exploration at OceanGate who raised safety concerns about the Titan submersible, said during testimony earlier this week that the Titan tragedy could have been prevented if U.S. safety authorities had investigated his complaints. He also criticized OceanGate’s corporate culture for being focused on “making money” and offering “very little in terms of science.”
“I believe that if the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) had attempted to investigate the seriousness of the concerns I raised on multiple occasions, this tragedy could have been prevented,” Lochridge said.
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