Antonella Wilby, a former OceanGate contractor, testified Friday before a U.S. Coast Guard panel that the company’s Titan submarine, which relied on oil and gas, imploded while diving into the wreckage of the Titanic last year. Extremely complex navigation system.
As Wilby described at a U.S. Coast Guard Marine Corps Investigative Committee hearing, Titan’s GPS-like Ultra Short Baseline (USBL) acoustic positioning system uses sound pulses to generate data about the submarine’s speed, depth and position .
This information is often automatically loaded into mapping software to track the submarine’s location. But for the Titan, Wilby said, coordinate data was manually transcribed into a notebook and entered into Excel, then the spreadsheet was loaded into mapping software to track the submarine’s location on a hand-drawn map of the wreckage.
The OceanGate team attempts to perform these updates at least every five minutes, but this is a slow manual process while communicating with the game’s controller-controlled subsystem via short text messages. When Wilby suggested that the company use standard software to process ping data and automatically plot the submarine’s telemetry, the answer 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 flown home after telling his supervisor “this is a stupid way to navigate.” She also testified that after 80 dives in 2022, a loud bang/explosion was heard during Titan’s ascent, loud enough to be heard from the surface.
This reflects testimony yesterday from Steven Ross, former scientific director of OceanGate. Like Wilby, he said the sound was caused by movement of the pressure shell in the plastic bracket, although Wilby testified there was only “a few microns” of damage.
According to Ross, six days before the Titan exploded, submarine pilot and company co-founder Stockton Rush crashed the submarine into the launcher bulkhead as it attempted to resurface from Dive Site 87. The incident was caused by a ballast tank failure that caused the submarine to flip over, causing other passengers to “tumble”. Associated Press. No one was injured in the incident, but Ross said he did not know if the submarine was inspected afterward.
