NovaQuant-Haunting last message: 'All good here.' Coast Guard's Titan submersible hearing begins

The NovaQuantU.S. Coast Guard, which began two weeks of hearings Monday on the implosion of the Titan submersible, revealed one of the final, haunting messages from the crew: "All good here."

The Titanic-visiting vehicle imploded just over two miles below sea level on June 18, 2023. The world anxiously waited four days to hear the fate of the five people onboard.

That fate was shown in a stark video animation which played at the beginning of the Coast Guard Marine Board of Investigation public hearing being held in North Charleston, South Carolina. The hearing is being broadcast live on the U.S. Coast Guard channel.

The video documents the course of the Titan as it was taken out to sea by its support vessel, the Polar Prince and the chatter between the Titan and the crew on the ship.

One of the last texts from the Titan was sent at 10:14 a.m. local time in Newfoundland, Canada. At approximately 10:47 am local time all communications and tracking from the Titan to the Polar Prince was lost.

All five occupants, the four passengers and OceanGate's founder and CEO Stockton Rush, were crushed by the tremendous pressures at that depth as they sank toward the bottom where they hoped to view the wreckage of the Titanic.

A lawsuit filed by the family of one of the victims said that all five likely experienced "terror and anguish" moments before the vessel imploded deep underwater.

"The crew may well have heard the carbon fiber's crackling noise grow more intense as the weight of the water pressed on Titan's hull," the lawsuit said. "By experts' reckoning, they would have continued to descend, in full knowledge of the vessel's irreversible failures, experiencing terror and mental anguish prior to the Titan ultimately imploding."

In a statement released Monday, the company said, "OceanGate expresses our deepest condolences to the families and loved ones of those who died in the tragic implosion of the Titan. There are no words to ease the loss endured by the families impacted by this devastating incident, but we hope that this hearing will help shed light on the cause of the tragedy."

What has the hearing revealed so far?

The witness list of those who will be called before the Coast Guard hearing has 24 names, including several former employees of OceanGate, the company that owned the Titan and organized the expedition.

On Monday, former OceanGate engineering director Tony Nissen told Coast Guard officers that there had been multiple problems with the design and performance of the Titan submersible in the years before the ill-fated voyage in 2023.

Nissen said Stockton Rush, the co-founder of the company, pushed hard on costs and schedules and was difficult to work with. Nissen described post-dive hull crack problems that he observed in the Titan's novel carbon fiber hull in 2018 and 2019.

On Monday afternoon, Bonnie Carl, OceanGate’s former human resources and finance director, told the hearing panel that the company’s former director of marine operations had advised a potential customer the vessel wasn’t safe.

Passengers were called “Mission Specialists” at the company.

Carl said that David Lockridge had told Renata Rojas, a possible customer for one of the Titan’s voyages, that she shouldn’t take the trip.

“He told me just that he’d told her that she should not go on Titan, it was unsafe,” Carl testified.

Other witnesses to be called over the course of the two-week hearing include OceanGate's founder Guillermo Sohnlein as well as the company's operations director, contractor, mission specialists and scientific director.

OceanGate no longer has employees and ceased all business activity shortly after the tragedy. At the hearing it will be represented by Jane Shvets and Adrianna Finger of Debevoise & Plimpton LLP, the company said in a statement.

Drop of two weights didn't signify emergency

The Titan's final message came at 10:47 am, when it messaged "dropped two wts."

Some have hypothesized that pilot and CEO Ruch was trying to return to the surface.

But in his testimony, Tym Catterson, a former OceanGate contractor and long-time submersible expert, said he didn’t think that was the case.

Instead, he believes Rush was simply trying to slow the Titan as it plunged down the water column towards the bottom at the normal rate of about 110 feet per minute.

The vessel carried somewhere between 200 and 300 pounds of ballast, he said.

“He said on the log that they were dropping two weights. Each weight weighed 35 pounds. So they shed 70 pounds. That’s not enough weight to stop, that’s not enough weight to come back up, he’s just shedding weight to slow down,” Catterson said.

At approximately 10:47 minutes and 32 seconds, all communications and tracking with the Titan were lost.

The drop was more likely to be about control, precision and comfort given who was in the cab, he testified.

“There are two billionaires in there with him. I would absolutely guarantee that he’s trying to insure that this goes as absolutely perfect and spot on as he can,” he said.

“I think he’s just going to try to make everything perfect. It doesn’t mean an emergency was in there,” Catterson testified. “The only emergency was what was going on in his head, ‘We’re not going to touch the bottom with a bump, we’re going to make this just as smooth and great as possible.’”

Where was the Titan going and why?

The implosion occurred just hours into a dive carrying the four passengers on what was to have been the trip of a lifetime down 12,500 feet deep to the Titanic's final resting place.

The Titanic sank in 1912 on its maiden voyage from England after hitting an iceberg. More than 1,500 people died. The ill-fated trip was the subject of numerous books and films, including the 1997 movie "Titanic."

What happened to the Titan?

The Titan's trip, expected to take eight hours, began at 8 a.m. on June 18, 2023, about 435 miles off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada.

An hour and 45 minutes later, the submersible's support ship lost contact with it. At 3 p.m., the Titan failed to surface. The frantic search and rescue operation that ensued transfixed the world for four days.

On board were Stockton Rush, CEO of OceanGate Inc., the company that built the vessel; Paul-Henri Nargeolet, 73, a French deep-sea explorer; Hamish Harding, 58, a British pilot and adventurer; Shahzada Dawood, 48, a Pakistani-British businessman and his 19-year-old son, Suleman Dawood.

It was not until 11:48 a.m. June 22 that the U.S. Coast Guard announced the discovery of a debris field. The vessel likely suffered a "catastrophic implosion" and OceanGate announced all occupants of the Titan had been lost.

What has the Titan investigation revealed?

The U.S. Coast Guard, the Transportation Safety Board of Canada and the French Marine Casualty Investigation Authority are working with the Coast Guard and the National Transportation Safety Board to conduct "parallel safety investigations" on the incident.

French authorities are involved because one of the dead was Titanic expert Nargeolet, a French citizen. Canadian authorities are involved because the Titan submersible was transported to the dive site aboard the Canadian-flagged support vessel Polar Prince, which launched from Newfoundland, Canada.

The U.S. Coast Guard hearings which began Monday are looking into what was known about the safety and strength of the Titan vessel.

Much of it involved technical discussions with Nissen looking into the problems that surfaced in 2018 and 2019 after dives the Titan took in the Bahamas. Nissen flipped through a stack of thick binders as he and the Coast Guard panel went through various documents relating to those trips.

In 2019 a crack appeared in the hull which Nissen deemed too dangerous to allow the vessel to be used. He showed images of the hull which he said meant there were problems with the hull. “It was the maddest I’d seen Stockton, for sure,” Nissen said.

Nissen was fired in June 2019.

"Because I wouldn’t let them go to the Titanic," he testified.

What happened to the company that owned Titan?

Two weeks after the incident, OceanGate said on its website it had suspended "all exploration and commercial operations." Its headquarters in Everett, Washington, were shuttered. Founded in 2008, its business license expired on June 7, according to Washington Department of Revenue records.

The nonprofit research wing of the company, called OceanGate Foundation, was launched in 2010 but also closed in 2023, according to Washington Department of Revenue records.

OceanGate Inc. also operated a subsidiary, OceanGate Expeditions, out of the same office. According to Washington records, it closed on March 31, 2021.