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The deadly implosion of a submersible traveling to the wreck of the Titanic was the result of faulty engineering, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) announced on Wednesday.
The NTSB’s final report on the voyage that killed five people in June 2023 said that OceanGate, the private company that owned the Titan, did not adequately test its experimental submersible before the trip. The Washington state-based firm, which suspended operations after the catastrophic implosion, was unaware of the submersible’s true durability, the report said.
The victims, including OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, died instantly in the North Atlantic during the descent to the remains of the Titanic.
The implosion also killed French underwater explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet, known as “Mr Titanic”; British adventurer Hamish Harding; and two members of a prominent Pakistani family, Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood.
The Titan’s defective engineering “resulted in the construction of a carbon fiber composite pressure vessel that contained multiple anomalies and failed to meet necessary strength and durability requirements”, the NTSB said.
The safety board also said OceanGate had not followed standard guidance for emergency responses, and that the Titan could have been found sooner if it had. If the company had abided by expected protocols, it would have saved “time and resources”, the report said, while noting “rescue was not possible in this case”.
The report was also critical of the culture at the company, quoting a former operations technician who had raised alarms about potential coast guard regulations prior to the implosion. That technician had questioned the company’s choice to call paying passengers “mission specialists”, prompting the CEO to respond that “if the Coast Guard became a problem … he would buy himself a congressman and make it go away”, the report said, citing the technician.
The NTSB report dovetails with a coast guard report released in August that described the Titan implosion as preventable. The coast guard determined that safety procedures at OceanGate were “critically flawed” and found “glaring disparities” between safety protocols and actual practices.
A spokesperson for the company declined to comment on Wednesday.
In August, after the coast guard report was released, a company spokesperson offered condolences to the families of those who died.
The Titan’s implosion led to lawsuits and to calls for tighter regulation of private deep-sea expeditions.
The NTSB report suggested current regulations for small passenger vessels such as the Titan were inadequate and had “enabled OceanGate’s operation of the Titan in an unsafe manner”. The safety board recommended the coast guard establish a panel of experts to study submersibles and implement updated regulations.
The report also called on the coast guard to “disseminate findings of the study to the industry”, which has grown in recent years as privately financed exploration has grown.
The vessel had been making voyages to the Titanic site since 2021. Its final dive came on the morning of 18 June 2023. The submersible lost contact with its support vessel about two hours later and was reported overdue that afternoon.
A multiday search for survivors off Canada made international headlines. It soon became clear there would be no survivors, and the coast guard and other authorities began lengthy investigations into what had happened.
The sub disaster was the subject of a Netflix documentary released earlier this year.