Titan Submarine Tragedy: You'll Never Guess How Its Positioning Was Managed
During the summer of 2023, it was impossible to have missed the case surrounding the Titan submersible from the OceanGate company. To refresh your memory, because time flies, in June of last year the small submarine imploded near the wreck of the Titanic, killing its five occupants. Since then, we have regularly learned more about the device and how it was managed.
Testimonies that explain many things
Last Friday, the U.S. Coast Guard held a public hearing to investigate the accident. At that hearing, Antonella Wilby, a former OceanGate contractor, provided some interesting details that could go some way to explaining the failure of the rescue.
She claims that data from the submarine's ultra-short baseline (USBL) acoustic positioning system (which provides speed, depth and position) was not used properly. Instead of being automatically retrieved and imported into software to track the submarine's position quickly and accurately, the data was first handwritten into a notebook, then entered into an Excel spreadsheet, which was then sent to software. The software data was then handwritten onto a physical map of the wreck.
A process that is certainly long and a source of potential human errors. During the accident, the OceanGate teams tried to update the submarine's position with this method every five minutes. All while communication with the device was via a gamepad…
An accident that begins to be explained
Wilby would try to impose a more traditional and better automated system, only to be told that the firm intended to develop an in-house system, but had not had enough time. She would eventually be fired after telling her supervisors: “This is a dumb way to do navigation.“
The testimony in question can be found in the video below:
During the session, Steven Ross, former chief scientist of Oceangate, said that six days before the tragedy, during another outing, an accident had occurred. The submarine's pilot and the co-founder of the company Stockton Rush hit a bulkhead of the launch mechanism during their ascent. A ballast tank malfunction was apparently the cause, while Ross said he did not know whether an inspection of the aircraft took place after this incident.
