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Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Eyebrow-raising revelations come to light as hearings into Titan sub's loss wrap up

The tragic tale of OceanGate's Titan submersible took on a few added twists today as the U.S. Coast Guard concluded two weeks of public hearings into last year's catastrophic loss of the sub and its crew.

[...] OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, the sub's pilot, was among the five who died as Titan made its last descent to the wreck of the Titanic in the North Atlantic. The others were veteran Titanic explorer P.H. Nargeolet; British aviation executive and citizen explorer Hamish Harding; and Pakistani-born business magnate Shahzada Dawood and his son, Suleman.

Rush's determination to dive to the Titanic, despite the warnings he received from OceanGate employees and outside engineers, emerged as a major theme during this month's hearings in South Carolina. Matthew McCoy, a Coast Guard veteran who worked as an operations technician at OceanGate for five months in 2017, reinforced that theme today.

McCoy said that when he started the job, OceanGate "seemed to be pretty well-run," but then he learned that the company was breaking off its ties with Boeing and the University of Washington's Applied Physics Laboratory.

He was even more distressed when he found out that OceanGate's business model depended on taking paying clients on deep-ocean dives as "mission specialists." That didn't square with what he knew about Coast Guard regulations relating to passengers for hire. He discussed his qualms during a lunch with Rush and Scott Griffith, who was then OceanGate's director of quality assurance.

When McCoy brought up OceanGate's lack of Coast Guard clearances for its subs, he said Rush replied that regulations were "stifling the ingenuity" in the submersible industry. "He tried to explain the 'mission specialist' aspect to it. I talked about the 'receiving any sort of compensation' aspect," McCoy said. "He said that they were going to flag the Titan in the Bahamas and launch out of Canada, so that they wouldn't fall under U.S. jurisdiction."

McCoy said he continued to talk about how U.S. regulations could spoil Rush's plans. But he said Rush told him "if the Coast Guard became a problem, that he would buy himself a congressman and make it go away."

"I was aghast," McCoy said. "Basically after that, I resigned from the company. I couldn't work there anymore."

Earlier sessions have traced how OceanGate first developed a carbon-fiber hull for Titan that cracked during deep-sea testing in the Bahamas in 2019, and then commissioned a second hull that was used for dives to the Titanic starting in 2021.

The rest of today's hearing focused on the Coast Guard's response after authorities learned that the sub had gone missing a year ago. Capt. Jamie Frederick, who was one of the leaders of the search effort and is now the commander of Coast Guard Sector Boston, recapped the effort to find Titan.

[...] Other highlights from the hearing:
OceanGate has permanently wound down its operations, an attorney for the company told the investigative board. "The company's primary task has been to cooperate fully with the investigations conducted by the Coast Guard and the NTSB, including in connection with this public hearing," said the attorney, Jane Shvets. "Our law firm, Debevoise & Plimpton, was engaged by OceanGate shortly after the tragedy to assist with that process."

Just after the Titan sub implosion, OceanGate said it was suspending all exploration and commercial operations, but Shvets' comments made clear that the Everett-based company's shutdown is permanent.

The Coast Guard doesn't have the resources needed for conducting a subsurface search-and-rescue operation on its own, said Scott Talbot, a search-and-rescue specialist at the Coast Guard.."We only have the capability to do surface search and rescue," Talbot told the board. He is part of a team that reviewed the Titan case to determine how the Coast Guard's capabilities could be improved.

"This is a field that, obviously, the DOD [Department of Defense] is an expert in, but even they don't operate at some of these depths that these commercial companies are doing exploration at," Talbot said. "So to say the Coast Guard is going to effect subsurface search and rescue at these depths ... I don't see it happening."

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