A hearing into OceanGate’s Titan sub, which imploded during an expedition to the wreck of the Titanic last year, revealed that its navigation system allegedly relied on team members manually inputting the coordinate data into a spreadsheet in order to track the vessel.
The incident last July killed all five people on board, including OceanGate’s CEO and co-founder Stockton Rush.
“There were delays because there was this manual process of first writing down the lat-long coordinates and then typing them in,” Antonella Wilby, a former OceanGate contractor, told the hearing held by the US Coast Guard Marine Board of Investigation.
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She described the system as “absolutely idiotic”, adding that she had raised concerns about the method with OceanGate but was dismissed for not being “solution-oriented”.
The ultra-short baseline (USBL) acoustic positioning system used sound pings to determine the submersible’s speed, depth and position, however rather than being automatically loaded into mapping software, the coordinate data was transcribed into a notebook before being typed into a spreadsheet on a computer.
The use of the game controller, Excel, etc. all goes to document a pattern of cutting corners. True, these corners are tiny compared to the issues of the overall design of the sub, but it demonstrates a long pattern of overall behavior.
This reminds me a bit of when I was a juror on a criminal trial. The prosecutor detailed a long string of seemingly small/inconsequential things that ultimately helped demonstrate a long pattern of behavior. That pattern definitely helped with our deliberations.