Tuesday, Sept. 17, is day two of the Coast Guard’s hearing into the Titan submersible implosion that killed all five people on board. Monday, Sept. 16, we learned one of the last messages sent from the doomed vessel, indicated there were no concerns.
That text message sent from the Titan to its support ship, the Polar Prince, was shown during a recreation of the submersible’s trip to the Titanic wreckage at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean in June 2023.
It came at 10:15 a.m. on June 18, 2023, not long before the watercraft imploded, leaving all five people on board dead, including Stockton Rush — the co-founder of OceanGate, the company that owned the Titan.
The final text message was received at 10:47 a.m., with the Titan crew reporting they “dropped two wts (weights).”
Former OceanGate Engineering Director Tony Nissen, the lead engineer for the vessel, testified at Monday’s hearing saying he felt pressured by Rush to get it ready for the trip.
Nissen said he stopped the submersible from going to the Titanic in 2019, telling Rush it was “not working like we thought it would.” Nissen was fired that year.
OceanGate’s co-founder, former operations director, and former scientific director are also supposed to testify in the hearing, which is expected to last about two weeks.