Final messages revealed from the Titan sub before tragic implosion
The anticipated two-week-long hearings kicked off with testimony from a former OceanGate engineer, who said he was fired after warning about the ship’s carbon fiber hull years before its catastrophic voyage
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Your support makes all the difference.“All good here.”
Those were some of the final words that the doomed Titan submersible crew communicated before the submersible imploded on its mission to the Titanic wreckage site in June 2023.
The message, revealed as part of the Coast Guard’s Monday hearing into the circumstances of the failed mission, was sent to support vessel Polar Prince on June 18, 2023, shortly before the submersible imploded, killing all five of its crew members. It was an incident that captivated both sides of the Atlantic as crews made a mad dash to save the crew after the sub lost contact with the surface - with the world unaware that the lives had been lost.
The Coast Guard played an animated re-enactment of the Titan’s voyage that captured the submersible’s final, spotty exchange with the Polar Prince, during the Monday hearing that shed new light on the sub’s final mission.
Around 10am on June 18, Polar Prince asked the Titan crew whether they were able to see the support vessel on the submersible’s display. The support vessel asked the crew the same question seven times over the course of seven minutes. The Titan crew then sent “k,” meaning it was asking for a communications check.
The Polar Prince then repeated its question three more times before writing: “I need better comms from you.” The crew finally replied “yes” at 10.14am before adding: “All good here.”
At 10.47am, the communication between the two vessels was lost.
All five of its crew members later died as a result of the implosion: founder Stockton Rush, 61, French explorer Paul Henri Nargeolet, 77, British explorer Hamish Harding, 58, UK-based Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood, 48 and his 19-year-old son Suleman.
In its presentation on Monday, the Coast Guard also revealed a pattern of failures that the Titan experienced during its test dives long before it set out to the wreckage site.
Test dives in 2021 revealed 70 equipment issues while dives the following year revealed 48 equipment issues, including drop weights malfunction. On top of those issues, after the last test dive in 2022 until February 6, 2023, the vessel was stored uncovered in a dock “without protection from the elements.”
The first witness before the panel, Tony Nissen, former OceanGate engineering director, took the stand on Monday, pulling back the curtain on the internal dynamics of the company as well as some disagreements between Stockton Rush and OceanGate employees.
When Nissen was hired, he wasn’t directly told that the submersible was going to the wreckage site. He testified: “I was never told they were going to the Titanic.”
Nissen also said he was “struggling to find the professional words” to describe Rush.
“Stockton would fight for what he wanted...And he wouldn’t give an inch much. At all,” he said. “Most people would eventually back down from Stockton. It was like death by a thousand cuts.”
The submersible was struck by lightning in 2018, partially damaging the hull, Nissen testified. The following year, after finding that the accoustic tests were not coming out “clean,” he objected an expedition to the Titanic site, since he found the hull was compromised. After refusing to give his approval, he was fired. He told the panel: “I wouldn’t sign off on it. So I got terminated.”
When asked if there was “pressure” to start operations, Nissen said: “100 percent.”
The Coast Guard is investigating the circumstances surrounding the loss of the submersible, Marine Board of the Investigation chair Jason Neubauer said.
The investigation will look for “factors” that led to this catastrophe and try to learn how to prevent them in the future as well as examine whether the “acts of misconduct, negligence, or willful violation of the law” contributed to these casualties. The hearings, expected to span two weeks, will also investigate the Coast Guard’s search and rescue operations.
After the hearing, it was clarified that Tony Nissen was referring to a prototype carbon fiber hull created in 2016, which was never used on Titanic expeditions. After Nissen left OceanGate in 2019, the company manufactured a new carbon fiber hull, which was used on the Titanic expeditions.
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