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, which shut down permanently in the wake of the incident, 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, and 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 debate 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 spotted debris from Titan on the seafloor four days after the sub’s disappearance. “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 a definitive answer.
“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,” Frederick recalled. “And two, they were 100% certain that it was not human in nature or someone knocking on a hull of a vessel.”
He 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.
Frederick was surprised to hear a statement that was given to investigators last October by the master of the Polar Prince, which served as the mothership for OceanGate’s Titan operations.
The master 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 what was felt on the Polar Prince, “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 over the past few weeks has already led to changes in procedures at the Coast Guard. For example, he said the information shared by whistleblowers like David Lochridge, an OceanGate employee who was fired after he raised concerns, would be passed along to the Coast Guard more quickly in the future.
Neubauer said further investigative work remained to be done, and that further hearings could be conducted if they were warranted. “It’s difficult to say at this point.” 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 the 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.”
