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The ongoing public hearing into the Titan submersible disaster has revealed that part of the experimental vessel fell off before it imploded last June.
Better known as the “Titanic tourist sub”, the Oceangate submersible had a controversial design that raised concerns inside and outside of the company before it led to the deaths of five men. Former Oceangate operations director David Lochridge revealed last week that he was actually fired for raising his concerns.
It is believed that the vessel’s carbon fibre hull – considered by experts to be unsuitable for use at depth – was weakened on repeat dives to the Titanic wreck, which lies at around 12,500 feet below the North Atlantic Ocean, as testified by National Transportation Safety Board engineer Don Kramer on Wednesday.
Now, the US Coast Guard, which is investigating the sinking, has released a picture showing that the dome part of the vessel, which was used to view the doomed Titanic, fell off when it returned to the surface after a dive in 2021.
The inquest heard in an earlier session how the bolts around the dome “shot off like bullets” when the Titan hit the deck of its mother vessel.
One of the Titan’s commercial passengers, Fred Hagen, testified: “The force of the platform hitting the deck… it basically sheared off several bolts and they shot off like bullets. And the titanium dome fell off.”
This was one of over 100 technical failings that the submersible was said to have suffered, including its earlier prototype being hit by lightning, before last June’s catastrophic implosion.
It claimed the lives of Oceangate CEO Stockton Rush, 61, French Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet, 77, otherwise known as Mr Titanic, as well as commercial $250,000-a-head customers British billionaire Hamish Harding, 58; Pakistani billionaire Shahzada Dawood, 48; and his son Suleman Dawood, 19.
A mission specialist from the 2021 mission where the dome fell off, Renata Rojas, claimed in a hearing on 19 September that the Titan was “working very smoothly” before its dive.
She recalled: “There was only, I think, two bolts or four bolts on the dome. It started dripping, falling off.”
In response to the malfunction, 18 bolts were added to the dome to ensure it stayed in place, and Ms Rojas insisted that she never felt unsafe when she dived in the Titan.
“This was never sold as a Disney ride,” she said. “It was an expedition that… things happen and you have to adapt to change.”
Other controversial elements of the Titan operation included the fact that the sub was reportedly controlled by a PlayStation controller and had its movements tracked on an Excel spreadsheet, according to previous witnesses at the hearing.
“Stockton’s vision was give somebody this PlayStation controller and within an hour they’re going to be a pilot – it’s not the way it works,” Mr Lochridge said as part of his testimony.
Antonella Wilby, a former OceanGate contractor, told the hearing last week: “There were delays because there was this manual process of first writing down the lat-long coordinates and then typing them in.”
The Titan lost contact around an hour and 14 minutes into its dive to the Titanic wreck last June. What followed was an international search and rescue mission before its debris was discovered on the ocean floor.
A spokesperson for Oceangate told The Independent: “OceanGate expresses our deepest condolences to the families and loved ones of those who died in the tragic implosion of the Titan. There are no words to ease the loss endured by the families impacted by this devastating incident, but we hope that this hearing will help shed light on the cause of the tragedy.
“OceanGate, which is no longer an operating company, having ceased all business activity shortly after the tragedy, and which has no full-time employees, is a party in interest in the Coast Guard proceeding.
“The Company has been fully cooperating with the Coast Guard and NTSB investigations since they began, including at the ongoing public hearing convened by the Coast Guard. OceanGate is represented at the hearing by Jane Shvets and Adrianna Finger of Debevoise & Plimpton LLP.”
The public hearing is set to come to a close on Friday.
