OceanGate’s ill-fated Titan sub relies on a handwritten Excel spreadsheet

Former OceanGate contractor Antonella Wilby testified before a US Coast Guard panel on Friday that the company’s submarine Titan, which exploded last year while diving on the Titanic disaster, relied on an incredibly confusing navigation system.

As Wilby explained during a US Coast Guard Marine Board of Inquiry hearing, the Titan’s GPS-like ultra-short acoustic positioning system (USBL) generated data on speed, depth, and location using sound waves.

That information is usually automatically loaded into the mapping software to track the sub’s location. But Wilby said on Titan, coordinate data was written in a notebook by hand and entered into Excel before uploading a spreadsheet into mapping software to track the sub’s location on a hand-drawn map of the wreckage.

The OceanGate team tried to make these updates at least every five minutes, but it was a slow process, done manually while communicating with the gamepad-controlled sub via short text messages. When Wilby recommended that the company use standard software to process ping data and automate the sub’s telemetry, the response was that the company wanted to develop an internal system, but didn’t have enough time.

Wilby was later dropped from the team and flown home after telling management, “This is a stupid way to go.” He also testified that after Dive 80 in 2022, there was a loud noise/explosion during Titan’s ascent and that there was a loud boom that could be heard.

This includes evidence presented yesterday by OceanGate’s former science director, Steven Ross. Like Wilby, he attributed the noise to the deformation of the pressure hull in its plastic cradle, although Wilby testified that there was only a few “microns” of damage.

According to Ross, six days before the launch of the Titan submarine, the pilot of the sub and the founder of the company, Stockton Rush, crashed the ship in the area where the ship was trying to get up from Dive 87. The incident was caused by a malfunction of the ballast tank, which overturned the submarine, causing some passengers to “overturn,” according to the statement The Associated Press. No one was injured during the incident, but Ross said he did not know if an inspection of the sub was conducted afterward.