OceanGate Expeditions’ Titan submersible.
OceanGate Expeditions via AP, File
A former OceanGate contractor said that the company used a partially manual system to track the submersible.They would first transcribe the details into a notebook and then transfer it to Excel, she said.She said she was removed from the team shortly after calling the navigation system “idiotic.”
A contractor for OceanGate’s ill-fated Titan submersible says that the team tracked the vessel’s position using a system that involved a notebook and an Excel spreadsheet.
Antonella Wilby, a former OceanGate contractor, said during a Friday hearing on the Titan submersible’s implosion that the team would manually update the vessel’s coordinate data.
According to Wilby’s testimony, OceanGate’s team would first transcribe the details into a notebook and then transfer the numbers to Microsoft Excel.
She said the data was then imported into a mapping software to track the submersible’s position.
“There were delays because there was this manual process of first writing down the lat-long coordinates and then typing them in,” Wilby, who testified virtually, said.
“We tried to do that every five minutes, but it was a lot to do,” she added.
Wilby said that she made a comment to the team about the system, during which she told OceanGate that she thought it was “an idiotic way to do your navigation.”
Wilby said she recognized calling the method “idiotic” wasn’t “the most tactful way” to communicate her concerns.
“But I do stand by that. It was. It just — the whole system was absolutely idiotic,” Wilby added. “But that, of course, wasn’t received well after the dive.”
“Wendy Rush told me, ‘Well, we can retrain you so that you understand how the mapping works, because we’ve had this foremost expert design it for us,'” Wilby added, referring to OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush’s wife.
Wilby testified during the hearing that she was removed from the navigation team after she raised concerns about the safety of the company’s procedures. Wilby added that she was told that she “wasn’t being solution-oriented.”
According to her LinkedIn profile, Wilby has worked on several projects involving underwater remotely operated vehicles.
She worked as a robotics engineer for a maritime exploration company. She was also a exploration roboticist and conservation technologist for a National Geographic program, per her LinkedIn bio and a listing on the National Geographic website.
Wilby is not the only former OceanGate employee who raised concerns about the vessel’s readiness for diving.
OceanGate’s former engineering director, Tony Nissen, testified in a Thursday hearing that he had refused to take a dive in it.
According to a press release by the US Coast Guard, the OceanGate hearings aim to “uncover the facts surrounding the incident and develop recommendations to prevent similar tragedies in the future.”
It started on September 16, and is expected to last for two weeks.
The hearings come more than a year after the Titan submersible set off on June 18, 2023, to explore the wreckage of the RMS Titanic, nearly 13,000 feet underwater.
But less than two hours after the dive started, the submersible went off the radar, sparking a frantic search and rescue operation.
The US Coast Guard and OceanGate announced on June 22 that debris found on the sea bed confirmed that the submersible had imploded and that the five men on board were dead.
The victims were Stockton Rush, British billionaire Hamish Harding, British-Pakistani multimillionaire Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son Suleman, and the former French navy diver Paul-Henri Nargeolet.
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