Footage shows OceanGate sub’s damaged tail cone on bed of Atlantic Ocean as inquiry examines doomed final descent. Video / US Coast Guard
OceanGate tried to bypass federal regulations by giving passengers the title “mission specialist,” according to testimony.
The Titan submersible, which imploded in June 2023, did not undergo standard classification processes.
Coast Guard hearings continue, with a report on the Titan's findings expected after Friday.
The submersible company that sent its chief executive and four other people on a fatal trip to see the Titanic last summer tried to skirt federal regulations by giving its passengers job titles, a fellow sub operator testified on Tuesday to Coast Guard investigators.
OceanGate charged six-figure sums to dive to the wreckage of the world’s most famous ship in its experimental vessel Titan. Passengers were given the title “mission specialist,” but the work was in no way specialised, according to testimony from people involved in past operations. Instead, mission specialists held wrenches and counted the fish they saw.
“It’s clearly a dodge of trying to go around US regulations with passengers,” Karl Stanley, who runs the Stanley Submarines tourism business in Honduras, told the panel on Tuesday.
The implosion put an international spotlight on the exclusive world of deep-sea tourism, and it spurred calls for change in the industry’s patchwork of sometimes voluntary regulations.
On Tuesday, the sixth day of hearings, Coast Guard investigators fielded testimony from Stanley and a former OceanGate employee who spoke about bringing people down 12,500 feet (3810 metres) to see the Titanic in a submersible.
The employee, Amber Bay, said passengers were more than that: they were mission specialists.
Bay said they were asked to do the menial, everyday tasks that keep a sub-operation going.
But the board peppered Bay with questions about whether mission specialists were paid by OceanGate, given shares of the company, got health benefits or required payroll taxes. In fact, they paid to be on the sub.
OceanGate co-founder Guillermo Söhnlein told the panel that submersibles fell into three categories: recreational subs that could only carry the owner and nonpaying guests, passenger subs that could carry paying customers, and research vessels that could carry owners along with crew and researchers.
In his Monday testimony, Söhnlein, who left the company in January 2013, said passenger vessels came with the most rules – which OceanGate was trying to avoid to stay profitable.
Söhnlein said they toyed with lots of ideas to get people on board without calling them passengers. One idea was to give customers a share of the company so they would technically be owners, but they quickly scrapped that idea. Another was to pay the passengers a dollar so they would be considered crew. He said they also thought of saying their sub was a research vessel because the definition was broad enough to include people in training, learning or assisting a researcher.
Stanley went down 12,000 feet in the first iteration of Titan hull. He was on the second manned crew after chief executive Stockton Rush made a solo dive. Before they dived, Rush warned those on board about a great deal of sound. As they went down, Stanley said he realised the source of the sound – the experimental carbon fibre hull was breaking under the pressure.
Stanley said it was hard to determine whether the sub was descending.
But there was one surefire way, Stanley said: “The cracking sounds would amplify when you got deeper.”
OceanGate’s outside legal counsel asked Stanley what he knew about the company’s approach to safety. The attorney asked Stanley when Rush knew about cracks in the hull, which Stanley was unable to answer.
The tail cone of the Titan on the sea floor. Photo / US Coast Guard
OceanGate did not submit Titan to a classification process, a voluntary process that is standard in the submersible tourism industry. Classification companies work with submersible manufacturers in the design phase and inspect the crafts while they are in use.
Jane Shvets, who is representing OceanGate in the hearing, declined to comment to The Washington Post about the “mission specialist” title. OceanGate has no full-time employees and, according to its website, “has suspended all exploration and commercial operations”.
This testimony is taking place in front of the Marine Board of Investigation, which reviews serious maritime incidents, such as the Deepwater Horizon’s ecologically catastrophic oil spill and the cargo ship El Faro’s sinking that killed 33 people in 2015.
The board will release a report of its Titan findings after the hearings, which are scheduled to continue through to Friday.
On June 22, 2023, the Coast Guard found the Titan submersible and determined that all five aboard died when the vessel imploded: Rush, 61; British aviation businessman Hamish Harding, 58; retired French navy commander Paul-Henri Nargeolet, 77; British Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood, 48; and his 19-year-old son, Suleman.
Stanley, who had worked with Rush on another OceanGate sub, said the aerospace engineer was obsessed with creating a legacy as a great explorer of the deep seas.
“I think the entire reason this whole operation started was Stockton had a desire to leave his mark on history,” Stanley said.
In October 2009, Rush founded OceanGate with Söhnlein in Washington state. Söhnlein testified Monday that he and Rush started experimenting with the “mission specialist” designation.
“The cracking sounds would amplify when you got deeper.”
When it came time to put their business model into action a decade later, Söhnlein asked Coast Guard sector commanders – from Miami to San Diego – to let OceanGate launch a sub for oceanographic research with passengers aboard.
“We realise we’re kind of trying to shoehorn it in,” Söhnlein recounted during his testimony.
“We never operated as a passenger vessel,” he said, because there’s “no way” OceanGate could comply with all the federal regulations of running a passenger submersible business.
But their business made dreams come true, and people were happy to pay.
Renata Rojas, a Titanic obsessive since age 11, dived down to the ruins as a mission specialist in 2022. She defended OceanGate during her testimony, at one point comparing Rush to naval test pilot and astronaut Neil Armstrong.
But Rojas did not oversell her role on the Titan mission: “It was mostly standing around until somebody needed help.”
