OceanGate’s Titan submersible briefly became tangled up in the wreck of the Titanic during a 2022 dive, a mission specialist who was on the sub told investigators today.
“We had a skid stuck for a minute,” Fred Hagen said during a hearing in South Carolina that focused on the causes of last year’s loss of the sub and its crew. “It wasn’t a big deal.”
The Coast Guard’s Marine Investigation Board is reviewing the history of Everett, Wash.-based OceanGate’s Titan sub development effort, with the aim of making recommendations to avoid future undersea tragedies.
Last year’s catastrophic implosion killed five people: OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, who served as the sub’s pilot; veteran Titanic explorer P.H. Nargeolet; British aviation executive and adventurer Hamish Harding; and Pakistani-born business executive Shahzada Dawood and his son, Suleman.
Hagen went on two Titan dives — one in July 2021, which was aborted when one of the sub’s thrusters malfunctioned, and the other in July 2022, which successfully reached the Titanic at a depth of 12,600 feet (3,840 meters).
Nargeolet steered the sub as the crew members took in the shipwreck’s iconic sights, including the bow of the 112-year-old wreck and the ruins of the Grand Staircase. But Hagen said he wanted to see more, and he persuaded Nargeolet to head back toward the ship’s stern section. “I’d asked him to go around where the break was, and for a few moments we had gotten stuck,” he said. “He was very quiet, and he was working the controls. … I leaned over, and I said, ‘P.H., it seems that we’re stuck.’ And he says, ‘Yes, Fred, we are.'”
Hagen said that the skid was momentarily snagged in “pipes and things” on the Titanic wreck, but that Nargeolet managed to free up the sub after no more than a minute or two. The surface support team became concerned about what was happening and “told us to come up immediately,” Hagen said.
“Obviously, when you’re down there, it feels like a big deal. I think P.H. certainly wasn’t overly concerned,” he said.
Hagen’s tale got the panel’s attention. Keith Fawcett, technical adviser to the Coast Guard Marine Board of Investigation, asked him whether OceanGate had alerted the Canadian or U.S. Coast Guard about the Titanic dive in advance, so that they could have been ready to provide assistance if the sub became entangled in wreckage.
“No,” Hagen replied. “But I did have clear conversations with at least P.H., and probably others. The conversation, as related to me, was that there were few assets on Earth capable of getting to depth, and that if something went wrong, we were all going to die.”
An attorney for OceanGate, Jane Shvets, asked whether the entanglement with the wreck was intentional on OceanGate’s part. “No, it certainly wasn’t intentional,” Hagen said. “It was completely my fault, nobody’s fault but mine. I was egging P.H. on, but it was not intentional, and it really was not a big deal.”
For what it’s worth, U.S. law prohibits people subject to U.S. jurisdiction from disturbing the Titanic wreck site without government authorization, and OceanGate’s stated policy was that it would not disturb the site. During a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” session in 2020, Stockton Rush said “we are not disturbing the wreck and just documenting it.” He acknowledged, however, that the currents in the deep ocean were “clearly challenging.”
Hagen, who owns a construction company in Pennsylvania, said he and the other Titan crew members accepted the risks that were involved in diving to the Titanic.
“You don’t do it because it’s safe,” he said. “You do it because of the adrenaline rush. … It was not a safe environment in the Titan, and it was never supposed to be safe. If it was safe, then you might as well just get in a trolley car and ride around town.”
Other highlights from the hearing
Hagen confirmed reports that a loud bang was heard when the sub was surfacing at the end of the 2022 dive — throwing a scare into the crew. “You would have to be brain-dead not to be somewhat concerned,” he said. But Hagen said those concerns were assuaged once the crew was brought out and the sub was inspected. “It turned out, after we got on the ship, that the body of the fuselage of the Titan had just jumped in its carriage, so there was no damage,” he said.
Hagen’s 2021 dive was also marked by anomalies. He said the dive had to be aborted because the sub was off-balance and started spiraling off course. When the crew tried to turn on the sub’s thrusters for a course correction, the starboard thruster failed to activate. It also took longer than expected to jettison the weights for the sub’s ascent.
When the sub resurfaced and was hoisted back onto its mothership, “it slammed down on the deck with quite a bit of force,” Hagen said. “Now, the complicating factor was that the decision had been made to only install four of the 18 bolts in the 3,500-pound titanium dome.” That decision was aimed at reducing the amount of time required to open up the dome and bring out the crew at the end of the mission, Hagen said.
The force of the sub hitting the deck caused those four bolts to shear off. “They shot off like bullets, and the titanium dome fell off,” Hagen said. After that, all 18 bolts were installed for every mission.
OceanGate’s engineering team was “a tough group to work with,” said Dave Dyer, an engineer at the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Laboratory. APL-UW provided engineering services during development of OceanGate’s Cyclops 1 submersible and in the early stages of the Titan project, starting in 2013. But the relationship cooled in the 2017-2020 time period, due to differences over issues including the potential use of glass housings on the exterior of the hull, and the integration of the carbon-fiber hull and the titanium end caps. “We were butting heads too much over that,” Dyer said.
APL-UW partnered with OceanGate in 2016 to test a one-third-scale model of the hull for Titan, which was originally known as Cyclops 2. Dyer said OceanGate continued to use a pressure chamber at UW for testing, but APL wasn’t involved in those follow-up tests.
At the time that APL-UW backed away from the Titan project, it looked as if the Titan sub’s design was “heading down the right path,” Dyer said. But he acknowledged that he “was really questioning whether they could do it.”
Dyer said APL-UW also helped OceanGate develop an acoustic monitoring system for the carbon-fiber hull. He said the plan, as he understood it, was to use such a system to determine whether the hull should undergo further testing or replacement before a subsequent dive. “We were under the impression that they were not planning to use it for real time,” Dyer said.
Certification should become a requirement for submersibles, said Triton Submarines CEO Patrick Lahey. OceanGate did not make the effort to certify the Titan sub, and argued that the process of certification, or “classing,” was too cumbersome to match the pace of innovation. But Lahey, whose company has built about 30 submersibles for its customers, said the need to require certification was “the most important takeaway from all this.”
“Yes, there’s additional cost, there’s additional time and hassle associated with it, but the end result is you’ve got a piece of machinery that meets an internationally recognized set of standards and that people can use with confidence, knowing that an independent peer review of a third-party classification society has been conducted on it,” he said.
OceanGate tech contractor Antonella Wilby told the board that the company used an “idiotic” navigation system that required coordinates to be transferred manually from one system to another. “The primary navigational map was a hand-drawn map that showed the bow of the Titanic and the debris field and the stern,” she said. “You could get a lot of error just by accidentally moving this map a few pixels off the reference point.”
Wilby said her teammates on the support ship weren’t all that supportive when she suggested streamlining the navigation system with different software, or when she expressed concerns about the loud bang that was heard toward the end of Hagen’s mission. She said she thought about escalating her concerns to OceanGate’s board of directors, but was told by a colleague that she risked running afoul of her nondisclosure agreement. “She cautioned me that the company is extremely litigious, and that matched with certain things I’d heard,” Wilby said.
When Wilby was asked whether she thought OceanGate was operating safely, she said no. “No aspect of the operations seemed safe to me,” she said.
