Eyebrow-Raising Revelations Come to Light as Hearings Into Titan Sub's Loss Wrap Up

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Eyebrow-raising revelations come to light as hearings into Titan sub's loss wrap up

The tragic tale of OceanGate's Titan submersible took on a few added twists today as the U.S. Coast Guard concluded two weeks of public hearings into last year's catastrophic loss of the sub and its crew.

[...] OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, the sub's pilot, was among the five who died as Titan made its last descent to the wreck of the Titanic in the North Atlantic. The others were veteran Titanic explorer P.H. Nargeolet; British aviation executive and citizen explorer Hamish Harding; and Pakistani-born business magnate Shahzada Dawood and his son, Suleman.

Rush's determination to dive to the Titanic, despite the warnings he received from OceanGate employees and outside engineers, emerged as a major theme during this month's hearings in South Carolina. Matthew McCoy, a Coast Guard veteran who worked as an operations technician at OceanGate for five months in 2017, reinforced that theme today.

McCoy said that when he started the job, OceanGate "seemed to be pretty well-run," but then he learned that the company was breaking off its ties with Boeing and the University of Washington's Applied Physics Laboratory.

He was even more distressed when he found out that OceanGate's business model depended on taking paying clients on deep-ocean dives as "mission specialists." That didn't square with what he knew about Coast Guard regulations relating to passengers for hire. He discussed his qualms during a lunch with Rush and Scott Griffith, who was then OceanGate's director of quality assurance.

When McCoy brought up OceanGate's lack of Coast Guard clearances for its subs, he said Rush replied that regulations were "stifling the ingenuity" in the submersible industry. "He tried to explain the 'mission specialist' aspect to it. I talked about the 'receiving any sort of compensation' aspect," McCoy said. "He said that they were going to flag the Titan in the Bahamas and launch out of Canada, so that they wouldn't fall under U.S. jurisdiction."

McCoy said he continued to talk about how U.S. regulations could spoil Rush's plans. But he said Rush told him "if the Coast Guard became a problem, that he would buy himself a congressman and make it go away."

"I was aghast," McCoy said. "Basically after that, I resigned from the company. I couldn't work there anymore."

Read more of this story at SoylentNews.