Public hearings on the U.S. Coast Guard’s Titan submersible have begun with some startling revelations.
“I told him I wasn’t going to be there,” Tony Nissen, Ocean Gate’s former director of engineering, told the Coast Guard investigative committee, referring to a 2018 conversation in which CEO Stockton Rush allegedly asked Nissen to serve as a pilot on an upcoming expedition to Antarctic waters. Titanic.
“The problem was the operations team. I didn’t trust them,” Nissen told investigators. “I didn’t trust Stockton either. Look where I started when I was hired. There was nothing true about the information I was given.”
Nissen’s testimony, which focused on the design, construction and testing of Ocean Gate’s first carbon fiber submersible, marked a dramatic start to nearly two weeks of public testimony at the U.S. Coast Guard Board of Oceanographic Investigation hearings into the fatal Titan explosion in June 2023. All five crew members, including Rush, likely died instantly.
Before Nissen took the stand, the Coast Guard provided a detailed timeline of Ocean Gate as a company, the development of the Titan submersible and the voyage to the wreck. TitanicThe submarine is anchored at a depth of about 3,800 meters in the North Atlantic Ocean. The slides revealed new information, including more than 100 equipment failures and accidents that occurred during Titan’s 2021 and 2022 voyages. An animated timeline of Titan’s final hours also included the last text messages sent by those aboard the submarine. A message sent at a depth of about 2,400 meters read, “All is well here.” A final message sent as the submarine slowed its descent at a depth of about 3,400 meters read, “We’ve dropped 2 deadweight tons.”
The Coast Guard also confirmed reports that the experimental carbon-fiber submarine was stored in an outdoor parking lot at temperatures as low as 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 17 degrees Celsius) before its test voyage last year. Titanic Mission: Some engineers were concerned that water frozen in or near the carbon fiber could expand and cause defects in the material.
Since joining Ocean Gate in 2016, Nissen says, Rush has continued to change the company’s direction. An independent, third-party certification of the vessel fell through, and plans to further test a scale model of Titan’s carbon-fiber hull were halted after it prematurely fractured under pressure. Rush then downgraded the titanium parts to save money and time. “It was death by a thousand cuts,” Nissen recalls.
He was grilled about Ocean Gate’s choice of carbon fiber for the hull and its reliance on a newly developed acoustic monitoring system to provide early warning of malfunctions, with one investigator pointing to a WIRED report that an outside expert hired by Nissen to evaluate the acoustic system later questioned whether Rush understood the system’s limitations.
“Given the time and constraints we were given, we did every test, we brought in every expert we could find. We built it like an aircraft,” Nissen said.
Nissen told the Coast Guard committee about a deep-sea test in the Bahamas in 2018, during which the submarine was struck by lightning. Measurements of the Titan’s hull later showed it had flexed beyond a calculated safety factor. When pilots later found a crack in the hull, Nissen said he did not consent to another dive. “I broke it. The hull is no good,” he testified. Nissen was subsequently fired.
