The hearing on the U.S. Coast Guard’s Titan submarine began with a startling revelation.
“I told him I wasn’t going to get on,” former OceanGate engineering director Tony Nissen told a panel of Coast Guard investigators, referring to a 2018 conversation in which CEO Stockton Rush allegedly asked Nissen to act as pilot on an upcoming expedition to the Titanic.
“I don’t trust the operations team,” Nissen told investigators. “I didn’t trust Stockton either. You can take a look at where we started when I was hired. Nothing I got was the truth.”
Nissen’s testimony, which focused on the design, construction and testing of OceanGate’s first carbon fiber submersible, was a dramatic start to nearly two weeks of public testimony at the U.S. Coast Guard Marine Board of Inquiry hearings into the Titan’s fatal implosion in 2023. Its five occupants, including Rush, likely died instantly.
Before Nissen took the stand, the Coast Guard presented a detailed timeline of OceanGate as a company, the development of the Titan submersible and its voyages to the Titanic wreck, which lies nearly 12,000 feet deep in the North Atlantic. These slides revealed new information, including more than 100 instances of equipment failures and incidents on Titan’s voyages in 2021 and 2022. animated timeline The last message from the Titan’s final hours also included the last text messages sent by the people on the submarine. One sent at about 8,000 feet (2,400 meters) said “all good here.” The last message, sent as the submarine slowed to nearly 11,000 feet (3,400 meters), said “two wts dropped.”
The Coast Guard also confirmed reports that the experimental carbon-fiber submarine had been stored in an outdoor parking lot in temperatures as low as -17 degrees Celsius (-6 degrees Fahrenheit) during the run-up to last year’s Titanic missions. Some engineers feared that water frozen in or near the carbon fiber could expand and cause defects in the material.
Nissen said that almost from the time he joined OceanGate in 2016, Rush kept changing the direction of the company. An initiative to certify the vessel with an independent third party fell by the wayside, as did plans to test more scale models of the Titan’s carbon fiber hull when one failed at first under pressure. Rush then downgraded the titanium components to save money and time. “It was a death by a thousand cuts,” Nissen recalls.
He faced tough questions about OceanGate’s choice of carbon fiber for the hull and its reliance on a newly developed acoustic monitoring system to provide early warning of failure. One investigator cited WIRED’s report that an outside expert Nissen hired to evaluate the acoustic system had doubts about Rush’s understanding of its limitations.
“Given the time and constraints we had,” Nissen said, “we did all the testing and brought in all the experts we could find. We built it like an airplane.”
Nissen accompanied the Coast Guard through deep-water trials in the Bahamas in 2018, during which he says the submarine was struck by lightning. Measurements on the Titan’s hull later showed it was flexing beyond its calculated safety factor. When a pilot subsequently found a crack in the hull, Nissen said, he did not authorize another dive. “I killed it,” he testified. “The hull is finished.” Nissen was later fired.