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 to the Titanic’s wreckage, relied on an incredibly convoluted navigation system.
As Wilby described it during the US Coast Guard Marine Board of Investigation hearing, the Titan’s GPS-like ultra-short baseline (USBL) acoustic positioning system generated data on a sub’s velocity, depth, and position using sound pings.
Usually, mapping software loads the data automatically in order to follow the position of a sub. However, Wilby said that in order to follow the sub’s location on a manually created map of the debris, the coordinate data for the Titan was manually copied into a notepad, uploaded into Excel, and then loaded into mapping software.
The OceanGate crew attempted to update the gamepad-controlled sub at least once every five minutes, but it was a laborious manual operation that took time. Short text messages were exchanged with the sub. The argument was that the business planned to construct an in-house system but didn’t have enough time when Wilby suggested using conventional software to handle ping data and visualize the sub’s telemetry automatically.
Wilby later informed managers that “this is an idiotic way to do navigation,” and he was removed from the squad and sent home. She further stated in her testimony that, following Dive 80 in 2022, there was a tremendous explosion or sound that could be heard from the surface of the Titan during its ascent.
This aligns with the testimony that Steven Ross, the former scientific director of OceanGate, provided yesterday. Although Wilby testified that there were just “a few microns” of damage, he concurred that the sound was explained by a displacement of the pressure hull in its plastic cradle.
Ross claims that as the Titan submarine was trying to surface from Dive 87, its pilot and co-founder Stockton Rush collided with a launch mechanism bulkhead six days before the sub’s implosion. The Associated Press reports that a malfunctioning ballast tank led the submarine to invert, resulting in passengers “tumbling about” as a result of the event. While no one was hurt in the event, Ross stated he was unsure whether the sub was inspected afterward.
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