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

Three more witnesses, including a final ex-OceanGate employee, are set to testify in front of Titan Marine Board of Investigation on Friday morning.

Matthew McCoy, who worked for the submersible company, will testify at 9am ET. Captain Jamie Frederick of the Coast Guard Sector Boston will address the Coast Guard’s panel at 10.45am, before Rescue Specialist Scott Talbot is due to give testimony at 1.30pm.

Closing remarks will be made at 3.15pm before the final breakdown at 5.15pm.

New maps show just how close the Titan sub was to the Titanic wreck site before disaster hit.

While the Titan’s last known position before the implosion was 1,600ft away from the bow of the Titanic, its debris was found much closer to the bow at 300m away, Coast Guard officials said.

Maps were released on Thursday showing the distance between the two.

The US Coast Guard’s two-week long hearing into the Titan submersible is set to conclude today.

Friday’s hearing will begin with testimony from Commander Zachary Roberston of the Coast Guard Marine Safety Center.

Then, the board will hear from Captain Jamie Frederick with the Coast Guard Sector Boston. Frederick was involved with the Titan search efforts and regularly provided updates to the media last summer.

The final witness will be Scott Talbot, a search and rescue specialist with the Coast Guard.

After the final witness, the board will hear closing statements.

Follow along here for live updates when the hearing begins.

Live blog coverage of the Titan submersible investigative hearings is paused until the Coast Guard Marine Board of Investigation reconvenes on Friday morning.

The OceanGate co-founder has claimed the latest milestone in his quest to colonise Venus as the inquiry into the Titan submersible disaster continues.

Read more:

John Winters with the Coast Guard Sector Puget Sound testified today, revealing his interactions with OceanGate and Stockton Rush.

Former OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush complained to Winters several times about the Coast Guard’s regulatory processes, he testified.

“He did express on multiple occasions that regulations were stifling his innovation process,” Winters said of his conversations with Rush.

Despite this, OceanGate “never attempted to circumvent any regulations,” Winters added.

Winters worked to evaluate the safety of OceanGate’s Antipodes vessel. OceanGate wanted to obtain a small passenger vessel certification from the Coast Guard but did not receive it, Winters said.

He also revealed that OceanGate did not ask the Coast Guard to inspect the doomed Titan vessel that imploded last year.

This week’s hearings revealed that, in 2021, the dome part of the doomed Titan vessel fell off after a dive.

That vessel would go on to catastrophically fail two years later, imploding underwater and killing all five people on board.

Learn more about the 2021 malfunction from The Independent:

The final hearing in the Coast Guard Marine Board of Investigation’s inquiry into the Titan submersible will begin Friday morning.

The hearing will kick off with Commander Zachary Roberston of the Coast Guard Marine Safety Center.

Then, the board will hear from Captain Jamie Frederick with the Coast Guard Sector Boston. Frederick was involved with the Titan search efforts and regularly provided updates to the media last summer.

The witness list will end with Scott Talbot, a search and rescue specialist with the Coast Guard.

The board will then hear closing statements before the final hearing day ends.

Thursday’s hearing ended after Lieutenant Commander Jonathan Duffett of the Coast Guard Office of Commercial Vessel Compliance testified to the board about submersible regulations.

The final scheduled hearing in the investigation will take place tomorrow.

Lieutenant Commander Jonathan Duffett of the Coast Guard Office of Commercial Vessel Compliance spoke to the issue of “mission specialists” on board the Titan and other vessels.

The issue has come up repeatedly during this hearing. Other witnesses have testified that OceanGate may have been labeling passengers as ‘mission specialists’ when they did not do specialized work on board the Titan.

“It’s clearly a dodge of trying to go around US regulations with passengers,” Karl Stanley, a close friend of CEO Stockton Rush and owner of a diving company in Honduras, testified Tuesday.

A member of the Coast Guard Marine Board of Investigation asked Duffett about these mission specialists: “OceanGate, on multiple occasions, took at least three people on board who paid to become OceanGate designated as ‘mission specialists’ on missions that departed from US cities...Would these ‘mission specialists’ be considered, or would this operation be considered, a small passenger vessel operation?”

Duffett told the board that regulations state that paid passengers aren’t crew members.

“If you have paid, then you don’t qualify as a member of the crew,” Duffett testified.