A former OceanGate contractor, Antonella Wilby, testified before a U.S. Coast Guard panel on Friday that the company's Titan submarine, which imploded last year during a dive toward the wreck of the Titanic, relied on an incredibly complicated navigation system.
As described by Wilby during the U.S. Coast Guard's Marine Board of Inquiry hearing, the Titan's GPS-like ultra-short baseline (USBL) acoustic positioning system generated data on a submarine's speed, depth and position using sound signals.
That information is typically automatically loaded into mapping software to track the submarine’s position. But Wilby said that in the case of the Titan, the coordinate data was transcribed by hand into a notebook and then entered into Excel before the spreadsheet was loaded into mapping software to track the submarine’s position on a hand-drawn map of the wreckage.
The OceanGate team attempted to perform these updates at least every five minutes, but it was a slow, manual process that was done while communicating with the gamepad-controlled subwoofer via short text messages. When Wilby recommended the company use off-the-shelf software to process the ping data and plot the subwoofer’s telemetry automatically, the response was that the company wanted to develop an in-house system but didn’t have enough time.
Wilby was later removed from the team and flew home after telling supervisors, “This is an idiotic way to do navigation.” She also testified that after dive 80 in 2022, a loud bang/explosion was heard during the Titan's ascent and that it was loud enough to be heard from the surface.
This is in line with testimony given yesterday by former OceanGate chief scientist Steven Ross. Like Wilby, he said the sound was attributed to a shifting of the pressure hull on its plastic support, although Wilby testified there was only “a few microns” of damage.
According to Ross, six days before the Titan submarine imploded, the submarine's pilot and company co-founder Stockton Rush crashed the vessel into a launching mechanism bulkhead as the vessel attempted to resurface from dive 87. The incident was caused by a ballast tank malfunction, which turned the submarine upside down, causing other passengers to “spin around.” According to the Associated PressNo one was injured during the incident, but Ross said he did not know whether an inspection of the submarine was conducted afterward.
