US Coast Guards titanium The underwater interrogation began with a surprising discovery.
“I told him I wouldn’t be a part of it,” Tony Nissen, former OceanGate engineering director, told a Coast Guard investigative panel, referring to a 2018 conversation in which CEO Stockton Rush allegedly asked Nissen to serve as a pilot on an upcoming expedition to Titanic.
“They’re a task force, I don’t trust them,” Nissen told investigators. “I didn’t trust Stockton either. You can look at where we started when I was hired. Nothing I was given was true.”
Nissen’s testimony, which focused on the design, construction and testing of OceanGate’s first carbon fiber underwater vehicle, was a dramatic start to nearly two weeks public testimony at the U.S. Coast Guard Board of Inquiry hearings into the fatal implosion in June 2023. titanium.Five passengers, including Rush, were likely killed instantly.
Before Nissen spoke, the Coast Guard provided a detailed timeline for OceanGate’s development, titanium submarine and its expeditions to the wreck Titanicresting at a depth of almost 3,800 meters in the North Atlantic. These slides revealed up-to-date information, including more than 100 cases of equipment failures and incidents on titaniumtravel in 2021 and 2022. animated timeline the last few hours titanium It also contained the last text messages sent by the men on the submarine. One, sent at a depth of about 2,400 meters, said, “Everything is OK here.” The last message, sent as the submarine slowed to almost 3,400 meters, said, “I dropped two wts.”
The Coast Guard also confirmed reports that the experimental carbon fiber submarine was stored in an off-site parking lot in temperatures as low as 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit (–17 degrees Celsius) in the run-up to last year’s mission. Titanic missions. Some engineers worried that freezing water in or near the carbon fiber could expand and cause material failures.
Nissen said that almost since joining OceanGate in 2016, Rush has been constantly changing the company’s direction. A decision to have the vessel certified by an independent third party was put on the back burner, as were plans to test more scale models titaniumcarbon-fiber hull when one initially failed under pressure. Rush then downgraded the titanium components to save money and time. “It was death by a thousand cuts,” Nissen recalls.
He faced arduous questions about OceanGate’s choice of carbon fiber for the hull and its reliance on a newly developed acoustic monitoring system that would provide early warning of failure. One investigator raised WIRED’s report that an outside expert hired by Nissen to evaluate the acoustic system later questioned Rush’s understanding of its limitations.
“Given the time and constraints we had,” Nissen said, “we did all the testing and brought in every expert we could find. We built it like an airplane.”
Nissen led the Coast Guard board through deep-sea tests in the Bahamas in 2018, during which he says the submarine was struck by lightning. Measurements at titaniumLater, the plane’s fuselage showed signs of flexing beyond the calculated safety factor. When the pilot found a crack in the fuselage, Nissen said he did not want to sign off on another dive. “I killed him,” he testified. “The fuselage is finished.” Nissen was subsequently fired.