OceanGate’s Titan subersible (Photo: Reuters)
A former contractor has revealed that OceanGate‘s Titan submersible used a hand-typed Excel spreadsheet to track its navigation, raising concerns about the vessel’s safety before its underwater implosion during a Titanic expedition in July last year, according to the Independent.
In a hearing held by the US Coast Guard Marine Board of Investigation, Antonella Wilby, a former OceanGate contractor, disclosed that the navigation system depended on team members manually entering data into a spreadsheet.“There were delays because there was this manual process of first writing down the lat-long coordinates and then typing them in,” she explained. Wilby described the method as “absolutely idiotic,” and said she had questioned the practice but was dismissed for not being “solution-oriented.”
An animated recreation of the incident showed the Titan losing communication at a depth of 3346 metres.
Tony Nissen, a former engineering director and employee at OceanGate, claimed that he refused to participate in a test dive of the submersible.
The Titan implosion killed all five individuals aboard including OceanGate’s CEO Stockton Rush who utilised an ultra-short baseline (USBL) acoustic positioning system that determined the submersible’s speed, depth, and position through sound pings. However, the important data was first transcribed into a notebook before being entered into the spreadsheet.
In a hearing held by the US Coast Guard Marine Board of Investigation, Antonella Wilby, a former OceanGate contractor, disclosed that the navigation system depended on team members manually entering data into a spreadsheet.“There were delays because there was this manual process of first writing down the lat-long coordinates and then typing them in,” she explained. Wilby described the method as “absolutely idiotic,” and said she had questioned the practice but was dismissed for not being “solution-oriented.”
An animated recreation of the incident showed the Titan losing communication at a depth of 3346 metres.
Tony Nissen, a former engineering director and employee at OceanGate, claimed that he refused to participate in a test dive of the submersible.
The Titan implosion killed all five individuals aboard including OceanGate’s CEO Stockton Rush who utilised an ultra-short baseline (USBL) acoustic positioning system that determined the submersible’s speed, depth, and position through sound pings. However, the important data was first transcribed into a notebook before being entered into the spreadsheet.