Antonella Wilby, a former OceanGate contractor, testified before a U.S. Coast Guard panel on Friday that the company's Titan submarine, which imploded during a dive to the wreck of the Titanic last year, relied on an incredibly complicated navigation system.
As Wilby described it during the hearing before the U.S. Coast Guard's Marine Board of Investigation, the Titan's GPS-like ultra-short baseline (USBL) acoustic positioning system used sound signals to generate data on a submarine's speed, depth and position.
This information is usually automatically loaded into mapping software to track a submarine's position. But Wilby said the coordinate data for the Titan was hand-typed 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 wreck.
The OceanGate team tried to perform these updates at least every five minutes, but it was a slow, manual process, performed while communicating with the gamepad-controlled submarine via short text messages. When Wilby recommended that the company use off-the-shelf software to process ping data and automatically record the submarine's telemetry, the response was that the company wanted to develop its own system but didn't have enough time.
Wilby was later removed from the team and flown home after telling superiors, “This is an idiotic way of navigating.” She also testified that after dive 80 in 2022, during Titan's ascent, a loud bang/explosion was heard and that it was loud enough to be heard from the surface.
This echoes testimony from former OceanGate chief science officer Steven Ross yesterday. Like Wilby, he said the noise was due to the pressure hull shifting in its plastic mount, although Wilby said the damage was only “a few microns”.
According to Ross, six days before the Titan submarine imploded, the submarine's pilot and company co-founder Stockton Rush crashed into a launch mechanism bulkhead while the vessel was attempting to resurface from dive 87. The incident was caused by a ballast tank malfunction that caused the submarine to tip over, “tossing around” other passengers, according to the Related PressNo one was injured in the incident, but Ross said he did not know whether an inspection of the submarine was conducted afterward.