Titan submersible sent its final message 6 seconds before contact was lost, investigators say at US Coast Guard hearing

The Titan submersible sent its final message just six seconds before it lost contact with the surface during its ill-fated dive to the Titanic, according to a US Coast Guard body probing the vessel’s implosion in June 2023, which killed all five people on board.

“dropped two wts,” the Titan’s text to its mother ship read, referring to weights the submersible could shed in hopes of returning to the surface. A lawsuit by the family of one of the victims has claimed the message, sent about 90 minutes into the vessel’s dive, was an indication the crew might have known something was wrong and were trying to abort the mission.

Instead, seconds later, the Titan was “pinged” for the last time, according to the opening presentation Monday, on the first day of a two-week hearing held by the Marine Board of Investigation tasked with reviewing the tragedy. The mother ship, the Polar Prince, then lost track of the vessel.

Days later, authorities found its wreckage resting on the floor of the North Atlantic Ocean, several hundred yards from the location of the Titanic.

Confirmation of the Titan’s final communications came early in the hearing by the Marine Board of Investigation, which also called its first witnesses: Former employees of OceanGate, the company based in Everett, Washington that developed and operated the 23,000-pound submersible, charging about $250,000 per ticket. The company has faced mounting scrutiny of its operations amid reports of safety concerns.

The Marine Board of Investigation, the highest level of inquiry by the Coast Guard, was convened within days of the submersible’s disappearance and tasked with reviewing the cause of the tragedy and offering recommendations, including about potential civil penalties and criminal prosecution.

“Over the past 15 months, our team has worked continuously in close coordination with multiple federal agencies, international partners and industry experts to uncover the facts surrounding this incident,” Jason Neubauer, the chair of the Marine Board of Investigation, said in a news conference Sunday.

“The upcoming hearings will allow us to present our findings and hear directly from key witnesses and subject matter experts in a transparent forum,” said Neubauer, adding the proceedings “are a critical step in our mission to understand the contributing factors that led to the incident and, even more importantly, the actions needed to prevent a similar occurrence.”

The submersible lost contact with its mother ship during its dive to the Titanic on June 18, 2023. When it failed to resurface, an international search and rescue mission unfolded in the remote waters several hundred miles southeast of Newfoundland, Canada.

Ultimately, authorities concluded the vessel had suffered a “catastrophic implosion” – a sudden inward collapse caused by immense pressure. Debris from the submersible was found on the sea floor several hundred yards from the Titanic, and authorities recovered “presumed human remains” believed to belong to the victims.

Stockton Rush, the founder and CEO of the vessel’s operator; businessman Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son, Suleman Dawood; businessman Hamish Harding; and French diver Paul-Henri Nargeolet were all killed. Those remains were matched to the five men on board through DNA testing and analysis, the Marine Board of Investigation confirmed in its presentation Monday.

The Coast Guard previously said the hearing would include “pre-accident historical events, regulatory compliance, crew member duties and qualifications, mechanical and structural systems, emergency response and the submersible industry.”

A list of witnesses includes a slate of one-time employees of OceanGate, the Everett, Washington-based company that developed and operated the 23,000-pound vessel, charging about $250,000 per ticket. The company has faced questions about its operations amid reports of safety concerns, with particular attention paid to the development and construction of the submersible’s carbon fiber hull.

The first of those employees testified on Monday, including former engineering director Tony Nissen, who claimed he was fired from OceanGate in mid-2019 because he refused to sign off on an expedition around that time, citing concerns about the integrity of a prototype carbon fiber hull the company was building for the Titan submersible.

Nissen worked at OceanGate beginning in March 2016, at a time when the company was working on that prototype, MBI Chair Neubauer said Tuesday. That hull, which Nissen called “Serial 1,” was not used during expeditions to the Titanic, Neubauer said, and the company did not use it after 2019. OceanGate subsequently manufactured the new carbon hull, “Serial 2,” which was used during Titanic expeditions.

Nissen described often being at odds with Rush, saying the two had “fights” that took place “behind closed doors” so other members of the engineering team wouldn’t “know that the two people on top are in solid disagreement.”

“He would fight for what he wanted and he wouldn’t give an inch, much at all,” Nissen said of Rush.

Counsel for the company are present at the hearing and are able to cross-examine witnesses but they declined to do so in Nissen’s case. At the start of Monday’s hearing, Jane Shvets, one of the company’s attorneys, offered its condolences to the families of those who died.

“There are no words to ease the loss endured by the families impacted by this tragic incident,” she said, “but we hope that this hearing will help shed light on the cause of the tragedy and prevent anything like this from happening again.”

Tym Catterson, a former contractor for OceanGate, testified Monday he raised concerns to Rush about the integrity of the vessel’s carbon fiber hull “no less than a dozen times.”

“I wasn’t positive about what was going to happen but I just said that I can’t make my numbers equal what your numbers are saying,” Catterson said. “I told him I think it’s underbuilt, I can’t make the numbers work.”

Catterson said Rush assured him he had several engineers on the project who said otherwise.

“I’m like, ‘Well, OK, there it is. We agree to disagree,’” Catterson said.

He said he believes the implosion that led to the deaths of everyone inside happened “instantly.”

“The failure happened at the forward glue line at the ring,” Catterson said. “That thing was sheared off smooth, so this had to have happened extraordinarily fast, which means the people in there, they had no idea this was coming.”

Bonnie Carl, a former director of human resources and pilot in training at the company, said a few things she witnessed at the company gave her “pause.”

“There were some young engineers, and by young, I mean late teens, early twenties, without any experience that we were aware of, wrenching on the sub and without supervision,” Carl said. “That made me nervous because I know I don’t know what I am doing.”

She explained David Lochridge, the former director of marine exploration at the company, voiced similar concerns and he was fired after raising the concerns in a report to Rush.

She said she left the company soon after a meeting where Lochridge raised those concerns.

“It became abundantly clear to me that OceanGate was not the place I wanted to work, if that was their attitude towards safety,” she said. “I had full trust in David Lochridge and if he wasn’t there, I could not be a pilot there.”

She also testified Rush ran board of director meetings like a “sales pitch” or “marketing-type meeting” and he called the shots.

“In the end, inside or outside of that meeting, all decisions were made by Stockton,” she said.

The MBI is made up of numerous Coast Guard officials and at least two from the National Transportation Safety Board, according to a list provided by the Coast Guard. Other anticipated witnesses include regulatory officials, search and rescue specialists, experts on deep sea exploration and engineers from NASA and Boeing.

While the chief aim of the hearing is to “uncover the facts surrounding the incident,” Neubauer acknowledged the board is also tasked with identifying “misconduct or negligence by credential mariners.”

“And if there’s any detection of a criminal act, we would make a recommendation to the Department of Justice,” he said.

The Marine Board of Investigation is the highest level of Coast Guard inquiry: Approximately one MBI hearing is convened each year, Neubauer said, adding, “out of thousands of investigations conducted, less than one rise to this level.”

The hearing is being held in North Charleston, South Carolina, and is expected to take place over nine days between Monday and Friday, September 27. It is being streamed live on the Coast Guard’s YouTube page.

When the investigation is complete, the US Coast Guard and the National Transportation Safety Board will each conduct an independent analysis and complete reports, Neubauer said Sunday. He cautioned additional hearings could be held in the future, and he would not provide an estimated timeline for the conclusion of the investigation.

This story has been updated with additional information.