Titan sub hearings live: OceanGate CEO said he would ‘buy a congressman’ to make problems vanish, witness says

Captain Jamie Frederick, the US Coast Guard employee who oversaw the rescue mission of the Titan submersible, has begun giving testimony to the Titan Marine Board of Investigation.

Matthew McCoy, a former OceanGate employee who worked at the company between April and September in 2017, has finished with his testimony.

When asked if OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush understood the regulations in place at that moment of time, ex-employee Matthew McCoy, who worked at the submersible company for a short stint from April 2017, replied that “I absolutely do”.

McCoy then testified that he “doesn’t believe” there was a professional engineer on staff. He added that he believes there was no safety officer working at OceanGate at the time.

Ex-OceanGate employee Matthew McCoy testified that the submersible’s “engineering department didn’t seem overly qualified,” while he worked at the company in 2017.

He again said he was concerned after learning that OceanGate had broken ties with Boeing and the University of Washington’s engineering department.

“Who is the qualified individual making these decisions?,” he added. McCoy claimed that OceanGate engineers consisted of “college interns” during the summer of 2017.

Matthew McCoy testified that after handing in notice following his lunch with OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush (as per previous post), he “didn’t think they’d dive Titan”. 

Matthew McCoy said he had lunch with OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush and OceanGate’s director of quality assurance Scott Griffith and raised concerns about an alleged lack of certificate of inspection for the first Titan sub in 2017.

“I would buy a congressman” and make the problems go away, McCoy said that Rush told him.

“He was either trying to intimidate me or impress me,” he testified.

McCoy said that he handed in his notice the following day.

“During my time there [at OceanGate], I learned that the company had basically broken ties with the applied physics lab at the University of Washington,” and the “explanation wasn’t clear” as to why, OceanGate employee Matthew McCoy testified.

He referred to this as his “first alarm bell”.

McCoy said that the second alarm bell was that “Boeing wasn’t going to be doing the carbon fiber” for the first Titan sub hull.

Matthew McCoy, a former member of the US Coast Guard before working for OceanGate for six months from April 2017 to September 2017, is the first witness of the day to begin testifying at approximately 9.05am ET.

“I had zero experience with any sort of underwater vehicle at the time,” he testified, before saying he helped support on test dives and training.

Jason Neubauer of the Office of Investigations and Casualty Analysis Deputy Chief began the hearing’s final daily opening at 9am ET.

The inquiry at Charleston County Council Building, South Carolina, was predicted to be delayed due to Hurricane Helene making landfall in Florida on Thursday evening.

Despite a power outage, Neubauer says, the hearing is now under way.

A member of the US Coast Guard who oversaw the rescue mission of the Titan submersible in June 2023 is set to testify today.

Captain Jamie Frederick will give testimony at approximately 10.45am ET in front of Titan Marine Board of Investigation’s panel.

Frederick, of the First Coast Guard District Response Department, regularly spoke to press to provide information on the search for the Titan and its five passengers on board.