An engineer for the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said during a hearing on Wednesday that the Titan submersible that imploded on a 2023 expedition to the wreckage of the Titanic showed flaws in its pressure hull.
In June 2023, the experimental submersible owned and operated by Washington state-based OceanGate Expeditions imploded near the site of the Titanic shipwreck in the Atlantic, killing the five people on board, including OceanGate cofounder Stockton Rush.
NTSB engineer Don Kramer said on Wednesday that there were wrinkles, porosity and voids in the carbon fiber used for the Titan‘s pressure hull. A pressure hull is the inner hull of a submersible that maintains its structural integrity.
Kramer said that recovered hull pieces showed substantial delamination (the separation of laminate materials) of the layers of carbon fiber bonded to create the submersible’s hull.
Previous witnesses also testified about hearing a “loud acoustic event” on an earlier dive in July 2022. Kramer said two different types of sensors on the Titan recorded the event.
Kramer’s testimony is part of a public hearing that the Coast Guard opened earlier this month as part of a high-level investigation into the cause of the submersible’s implosion.
The hearing also focused on OceanGate, the submersible’s unusual carbon fiber construction, and the company’s suspension of operations after the Titan incident. The company has no full-time employees and was represented by an attorney during the hearing.
Coast Guard officials said at the hearing that Titan has not been independently reviewed as is the standard practice.
Meanwhile, former OceanGate operations director David Lochridge said earlier in the hearing that he frequently clashed with cofounder Rush and felt that the company was only committed to making a profit. Lochridge and other witnesses depicted a company impatient to get its submersible into the water.
Guillermo Sohnlein, the cofounder of OceanGate who left the company before the Titan implosion, said during the hearing Monday that he hoped the silver lining of the incident would be that it sparks a renewed interest in exploration, including deepwater exploration.
“This can’t be the end of deep ocean exploration. This can’t be the end of deep-diving submersibles, and I don’t believe that it will be,” he said.
The hearing is set to continue through Friday, and several more witnesses, including those who were closely connected to OceanGate, will testify.
Titan‘s expedition to the Titanic wreckage started on June 18, 2023, and by June 22, the Coast Guard announced that debris from the Titan had been found roughly 1,600 feet from the Titanic.
Rush, two members of a prominent Pakistani family, Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood, British adventurer Hamish Harding and Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet were killed on board the Titan.
“These men were true explorers who shared a distinct spirit of adventure, and a deep passion for exploring and protecting the world’s oceans,” OceanGate said in a statement at the time. “We grieve the loss of life and joy they brought to everyone they knew.”
This article includes reporting from The Associated Press.
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