When You Hear How the Doomed Titanic Sub's Sonar System Worked, You May Die of Secondhand Embarrassment

"This is an idiotic way to do navigation."

The Notebook

During the ongoing US Coast Guard hearings into last year's OceanGate Titanic submersible disaster, a former contractor revealed a shockingly inadequate navigation system the company's Titan vessel used to rely on.

During her testimony, former contractor Antonella Wilby described how the submersible's ultra-short baseline (USBL) acoustic positioning system — which uses sonar pings to measure its velocity, position, and depth — actually worked.

Instead of automatically feeding the positioning data into a mapping software, Wilby noted that the Titan's coordinates were written down by hand into a notebook before being entered into an Excel spreadsheet. From there, the data was fed into mapping software — a stunningly convoluted system that doesn't instill much confidence.

"We tried to do that every five minutes," Wilby said during her testimony, as quoted by the Independent, "but it was a lot to do."

The company claimed that it was working on an in-house navigation system, but had run out of time.

"This is an idiotic way to do navigation," she reportedly told supervisors before being sacked by OceanGate.

Scribble Quibble

We've already seen startling revelations come out of the Coast Guard's ongoing hearings, including footage of the submersible wreck's tail cone and its imploded crew compartment.

Besides relying on Excel spreadsheets to manually enter coordinate data, news also emerged last year that the Titan used a wireless off-the-shelf Logitech gamepad for steering. During a CBS News segment at the time, reporter Joseph Frandino referred to the "MacGyver jury-riggedness" of the submersible.

During her testimony, Wilby also recalled hearing a deafening bang when the Titan surfaced after a dive in 2022, which was loud enough to be audible above the ocean's surface.

According to a separate testimony by OceanGate's former director of marine operations David Lochridge, former OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush had already crashed a Titan predecessor, dubbed Cyclops 1, in 2016. Rush was one of the five passengers on board the Titan when it imploded last year.

In short, the more we find out about the events that led up to the Titan's surmise in early June of last year, the less surprised we are.

It's starting to look more and more like Rush's well-documented disregard for safety regulations — he once bragged that safety was a "waste" — may have played a big role in the disaster, an unfortunate and likely avoidable event that was steeped in controversy from the start.

"I saw what I would classify as safety theatre," Wilby said during her testimony when asked about the safety culture at OceanGate.

"Don't worry it'll be fun," she said she was once told after raising questions about basic safety. "You'll have fun."

More on OceanGate: New Footage Shows Imploded Crew Compartment of Doomed Titanic Sub