OceanGate’s ill-fated Titan sub relied on a hand-typed Excel spreadsheet

A former OceanGate contractor, Antonella Wilby, testified earlier than a U.S. Coast Guard panel on Friday that the corporate’s Titan submarine, which imploded final yr throughout a dive to the Titanic’s wreckage, relied on an extremely convoluted navigation system.

As Wilby described it through the US Coast Guard Marine Board of Investigation listening to, the Titan’s GPS-like ultra-short baseline (USBL) acoustic positioning system generated information on a sub’s velocity, depth, and place utilizing sound pings.

That data is usually routinely loaded into mapping software program to maintain monitor of a sub’s place. However Wilby stated that for the Titan, the coordinate information was transcribed right into a pocket book by hand after which entered into Excel earlier than loading the spreadsheet into mapping software program to trace the sub’s place on a hand-drawn map of the wreckage.

The OceanGate staff tried to carry out these updates at the very least each 5 minutes, but it surely was a sluggish, guide course of performed whereas speaking with the gamepad-controlled sub by way of brief textual content messages. When Wilby really helpful the corporate use commonplace software program to course of ping information and plot the sub’s telemetry routinely, the response was that the corporate wished to develop an in-house system, however didn’t have sufficient time.

Wilby was later taken off the staff and flew house after telling supervisors, “That is an idiotic approach to do navigation.” She additionally testified that after Dive 80 in 2022, a loud bang / explosion was heard through the Titan’s ascent and that it was loud sufficient to be heard from the floor.

This mirrors testimony given yesterday by OceanGate’s former scientific director, Steven Ross. Like Wilby, he stated that the sound was attributed to a shifting of the stress hull in its plastic cradle, though Wilby testified that there have been solely “a number of microns” of harm.

In accordance with Ross, six days earlier than the Titan submarine imploded, the sub’s pilot and the corporate’s co-founder, Stockton Rush, crashed the vessel right into a launch mechanism bulkhead whereas the vessel was trying to resurface from Dive 87. The incident was brought on by a malfunction with a ballast tank, which inverted the submarine, inflicting different passengers to “tumble about,” in line with the Related Press. Nobody was injured through the incident, however Ross stated he didn’t know if an inspection of the sub was carried out afterward.