Titan Passenger: Sub Could Only 'Spin in Circles' After Malfunction

Fred Hagen, who made multiple dives as a paying customer on the Titan submersible and lived to tell the tale, described several worrying incidents Friday at the Coast Guard investigative hearing on the sub's implosion last year. Hagen was identified as a "mission specialist," a title OceanGate gave paying passengers, the AP reports. He said that on one dive, the sub's front dome fell off when it was dropped while being lifted from the water onto the ship's deck, reports the BBC. The force "basically sheared off several bolts and they shot off like bullets. And the titanium dome fell off."

• Hagen said a mission to the wreckage of the Titanic in 2021 was aborted when the submersible malfunctioned. He said the starboard thruster malfunctioned on the way to the wreck, the AP reports. "We realized that all it could do was spin around in circles, making right turns," he testified. "At this juncture, we obviously weren't going to be able to navigate to the Titanic."

• Hagen said that after the decision was made to drop weight and return to the surface in the 2021 mission, some of the weights were stuck but the Titan was eventually able to resurface.
• He testified that on a dive in 2022, a loud bang was heard and the crew was concerned the hull had cracked, the Independent reports. "We determined the hull had jumped in the carriage," he said. Steven Ross, a former OceanGate scientific director, discussed what was apparently the same incident in his testimony on Thursday. "The theory of the sound was that there was likely a shifting of the pressure hull in its metal cradle that when it popped back into place it could've made that loud noise," he said, per CNN. Ross also described a malfunction that caused passengers to "tumble about."

• The BBC notes that when Hagen described the incidents, "he didn't seem particularly worried about any of them." He said he knew diving in the experimental submersible was risky and compared the experience to the "adrenaline rush" of skydiving. "Anyone that wanted to go was either delusional if they didn't think that it was dangerous, or they were embracing the risk," he said.
• The Titan wasn't certified through a safety assessment process. Certification wasn't mandatory, but Patrick Lahey, co-founder of and CEO of Triton Submarines, said at the hearing Friday that almost all submersibles are certified and he considers the process vitally important. "I don't believe that we should be operating experimental vehicles in the deep sea," he said, per the BBC.
• Lahey said he is a "firm believer in innovation"—"but innovation has to be done within the crucible of a set of rules that give you guardrails. You can't just go freestyle." He testified that he was "not particularly impressed" when he had a tour of the Titan in 2019. "It looked to me like a lot of the stuff was not quite ready for prime time," he said.

(More Titan submersible stories.)