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OceanGate’s ill-fated Titan sub relied on a hand-typed Excel spreadsheet
‘This is an idiotic way to do navigation.’
A former OceanGate contractor, Antonella Wilby, testified before a U.S. Coast Guard panel on Friday that the company’s Titan submarine, which imploded last year during a dive to the Titanic’s wreckage, relied on an incredibly convoluted navigation system. As Wilby described it during the US Coast Guard Marine Board of Investigation hearing, the Titan’s GPS-like ultra-short baseline (USBL) acoustic positioning system generated data on a sub’s velocity, depth, and position using sound pings. The OceanGate team tried to perform these updates at least every five minutes, but it was a slow, manual process done while communicating with the gamepad-controlled sub via short text messages.
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