American coast Guard’s Titan The submersible hearings began with startling revelations.
“I told him I wasn’t going to be there,” Tony Nissen, Ocean Gate’s former director of engineering, told the Coast Guard investigative committee, referring to a 2018 conversation in which CEO Stockton Rush allegedly asked Nissen to serve as a pilot on an upcoming expedition to Antarctic waters. Titanic.
“The problem was the operations team. I didn’t trust them,” Nissen told investigators. “I didn’t trust Stockton either. Look where I started when I was hired. There was no truth in any of the information I was given.”
Nissen’s testimony will focus on the design, construction and testing of OceanGate’s first carbon fiber submersible and will last approximately two weeks. Public Testimony At a U.S. Coast Guard Marine Investigation Board hearing into the fatal June 2023 explosion TitanAll five crew members, including Rush, are believed to have died instantly.
Before Nissen took the stand, the Coast Guard provided a detailed timeline of Ocean Gate as a company and Titan A trip to the submarine and its wreck TitanicIt is submerged at a depth of about 3,800 meters in the North Atlantic Ocean. The slides revealed new information, including more than 100 instances of equipment failure and accidents. TitanTravel in 2021 and 2022. Animation Timeline The last few hours Titan Also included were the final text messages sent by those aboard the submarine: “We’re OK,” sent at a depth of about 2,400 meters, and “We’ve dropped 2 deadweight tons,” sent as the sub slowed its descent at about 3,400 meters.
The Coast Guard also confirmed reports that the experimental carbon-fiber submarine was stored in an outdoor parking lot at temperatures as low as 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 17 degrees Celsius) before its test voyage last year. Titanic Mission: Some engineers were concerned that water frozen in or near the carbon fiber could expand and cause defects in the material.
Nissen said Rush had continued to change the company’s direction since joining Ocean Gate in 2016. Moves to have an independent third-party certify the vessel stalled, as did plans to further test a scale model of the ship. TitanWhen parts of the ‘s carbon-fiber hull prematurely failed under pressure, Rush downgraded the titanium parts to save money and time. “It was death by a thousand cuts,” Nissen recalls.
He was grilled about Ocean Gate’s choice of carbon fiber for the hull and its reliance on a newly developed acoustic monitoring system to provide early warning of malfunctions, with one investigator pointing to a WIRED report that an outside expert hired by Nissen to evaluate the acoustic system later questioned whether Rush understood the system’s limitations.
“Given the time and constraints we were given, we did every test and brought in every expert we could find. We built it like an aircraft,” Nissen said.
Nissen told a Coast Guard board in 2018 about deep-sea tests in the Bahamas during which the submarine was struck by lightning. TitanThe hull of the was later found to have sagged beyond the calculated safety factor. The pilot then found a crack in the hull, but Nissen said he would not allow it to continue on another dive. “I broke it. The hull is gone,” he testified. Nissen was subsequently fired.
