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Arthur T Knackerbracket [soylentnews.org] 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.

One former employee of Everett, Wash.-based OceanGate quoted the company's CEO as saying years earlier that he'd "buy a congressman" if the Coast Guard stood in the way of Titan's development. And the master of Titan's mothership told investigators that he felt a "shudder" on the sea around the time that the sub imploded on June 18, 2023.

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.

Frederick said one of the operation's biggest challenges involved getting ROVs capable of diving to Titanic depths on the scene. The required robots, plus tons of supporting equipment, were rushed to the scene — and four days after the sub's disappearance, the ROVs spotted debris from Titan on the seafloor, confirming the loss of the crew.

A year ago, some questioned whether the deep-sea ROVs could have arrived earlier, but Frederick said the operation was a logistical tour de force. "I've talked quite a bit with some of the experts ... and they will say that they consider that as unprecedented," Frederick said.

At the time, there was a lot of discussion about banging noises that sensors were picking up at sea. Were they coming from trapped crew members? Frederick said the U.S. Navy provided definitive answers. "One was that the sounds were not coming in regular intervals, as was being reported. There was a lot of reports of 30-minute intervals. The Navy looked at that data and said that that wasn't the case," he recalled. "And two, they were 100% certain that it was not human in nature or someone knocking on a hull of a vessel."

Frederick acknowledged that the Navy did pick up an acoustic anomaly at about the time that Titan disappeared. "That information, at the time, was classified," Frederick said. "It wasn't for us to share with the family or with the public. It was one piece of data. It wasn't definitive."

He said the team decided to continue the search because there was so much conflicting information.

Given all that, Frederick was surprised to hear a statement that was made to investigators last October by the master of the Polar Prince, which served as the mothership for OceanGate's Titan operations. The master (which is a title comparable to captain) was quoted as saying, "With the benefit of hindsight, I believe I felt the Polar Prince shudder at around the time communication was lost, but at the time we thought nothing of it. ... It was slight."

If the search team had known about that slight shudder, "it certainly would have changed the equation," Frederick said. But he said he didn't know exactly how that would have affected the search operation.

The chair of the Coast Guard Marine Board of Investigation, Jason Neubauer, said at the conclusion of the hearings that the evidence presented to the board has already led to changes in procedures at the Coast Guard. For example, Neubauer said the information shared by whistleblowers like David Lochridge, an OceanGate employee who was fired after he raised concerns, would be distributed more widely within the Coast Guard in the future.

"If I determine that there's something immediate from what we've heard during these two weeks, I'm going to go back to Coast Guard headquarters and make sure that we get that information out to the marine industry immediately," he said.

Neubauer said that further investigative work remains to be done, and that further hearings could be conducted if they were warranted. "It's difficult to say at this point." he said. He also said it was too early to provide a timeline for completing a report laying out the causes of the Titan tragedy.

The National Transportation Safety Board will issue a separate report, "which will include our official determination of the probable cause of the accident," said Marcel Muise, marine accident investigator for the NTSB's Office of Marine Safety.

If investigators come to the conclusion that criminal charges might be warranted, those recommendations would be passed along to the Justice Department.

Neubauer offered assurances to the families and friends of those who died.

"Please rest assured that the end of this hearing session does not indicate the end of our investigative efforts," he said. "The marine board will continue to press forward with finalizing our evidence collection, conducting an analysis of everything collected, and then pressing for any changes necessary in the form of recommendations to the commandant of the Coast Guard, to help ensure that nobody has to endure a future similar occurrence."

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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