(NewsNation) — The U.S. Coast Guard on Monday is holding a public investigative hearing over the Titan submersible that imploded last year while on a mission to the wreckage of the Titanic.
The Coast Guard’s Marine Board of Investigation, which is responsible for probing the cause of marine disasters, will question witnesses and review key evidence from the incident that killed the five passengers on board.
The goal of the hearing is to determine what led to the deadly implosion during the dive and to examine possible regulatory failures regarding the submersible’s design, operation and safety protocols.
Titan submersible implosion
The Titan, owned by OceanGate, made its last dive June 18, 2023. The craft lost contact with its support vessel an hour and 45 minutes into the dive. Five people were on board, diving 12,000 feet below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean.
The loss of communication launched a four-day search for the vessel, which ended when evidence of an implosion was found on the ocean floor. Officials concluded that the craft had been destroyed and all five people on board were killed.
Few vessels dive that deep into the ocean, and engineers and experts in the field noted previous problems with the Titan as well as warnings that the submersible was unsafe.
The search-and-recovery mission is estimated to have cost up to $1.6 million.
The U.S. Coast Guard quickly convened a high-level investigation into what happened. Concerns leading up to the investigation included the Titan’s unconventional design and its creator’s decision to forgo standard independent checks.
The investigation into the Titan implosion originally had a 12-month timeline but has been extended multiple times.
In addition to OceanGate co-founder Stockton Rush, the implosion killed two members of a prominent Pakistani family, Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood; British adventurer Hamish Harding; and Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet.
The Titanic expedition
In 2021, OceanGate Expeditions began what it expected to be an annual voyage to track the rate of decay of the Titanic, according to the tour group’s now-defunct website.
The purpose of the Titanic expedition was to chronicle the decay of the iconic ocean liner that sunk in 1912 after hitting an iceberg, killing all but about 700 of the 2,200 passengers and crew on board. The ship’s wreckage was discovered in 1985 and has been slowly deteriorating to metal-eating bacteria.
Tickets for the five-person submersible cost $250,000 a seat, with the vessel being the only one of its size capable of reaching the Titanic wreck.
Titan submersible missteps: Report
The CEO of OceanGate overstated how far along the project was and lied about issues with the vessel’s hull, a Wired investigation revealed.
Concerns about the Titan go back at least to 2016. That June, a test tank that evolved into the Titan imploded thousands of miles ahead of the company’s safety margin during a smaller-scale test run.
Rather than ordering new models to continue testing after the 2016 incident, OceanGate began work on its full-sized model, and the vessel first successfully ventured to the Titanic shipwreck in 2021, Wired reported.
Wired’s investigation revealed that Boeing and the University of Washington contributed early on to OceanGate’s carbon-fiber submersible project, but their work wasn’t included in the final design.
Documents, emails and interviews also pointed to a company culture that was dismissive of employees who were cautious of or questioned decisions along the way. Some were fired.
The report also accuses Rush of overstating OceanGate’s progress and lying about issues with the vessel’s hull.
According to Wired, the hull was warping under compression about 37% more than it should. When an engineer voiced concerns, however, OceanGate’s director of engineering suggested in an email that the employee simply didn’t “have the stomach for this type of engineering,” reporters found.
The Associated Press, NewsNation’s Steph Whiteside, Caitlyn Becker and Katie Smith contributed to this report.