Ex-OceanGate employee was intimidated when raising safety concerns, she testifies Jameson Moyer — WCBD News 2

NORTH CHARLESTON, S.C. (WCBD) – OceanGate took a former contractor off her position after she voiced safety concerns, according to her testimony during day four of a Coast Guard inquiry into why a submersible set to explore the Titanic imploded. Former OceanGate contractor Antonella Wilby said she noticed several issues during a Titan test dive […]

NORTH CHARLESTON, S.C. (WCBD) – OceanGate took a former contractor off her position after she voiced safety concerns, according to her testimony during day four of a Coast Guard inquiry into why a submersible set to explore the Titanic imploded.

Former OceanGate contractor Antonella Wilby said she noticed several issues during a Titan test dive to the Titanic while operating as a communications navigation specialist.

She said the Titan had an acoustic position system. Navigation would look at the sonar software on a computer, manually write the coordinates, type the coordinates into Excel, and then import the Excel sheet into a location map, which would create a layer over a map of the Titanic’s remains.

According to Wilby, the maps were layered manually, which could cause issues because they weren’t fixed.

“You might be looking at this map and plotting the pings and thinking, oh, maybe the Titanic is, you know, 50 meters to the west, when in fact, it was the map itself had shifted,” Wilby explained.

She said this caused a number of issues on the test dive, specifically.

When Wilby brought her concerns to her superiors, she testified that she was taken off the navigation team. When discussing whether she should bring her concerns to OceanGate’s Board of Directors, she was told this would violate the non-disclosure agreement she signed, according to Wilby.

In previous incidents where she brought up concerns, a superior told her, “A lot of people are worried about you” and “You don’t have an explorer mindset.”

She later became frightened to bring up issues, as the late OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush would say, “If I don’t like you, I’ll just sue you,” Wilby testified.

Before Wilby, Patrick Lahey, the co-founder and CEO of Triton Submarines, spoke. He said he has and will never sell non-classed or non-certified submarines and went into depth on the safety features his submersibles contain.

The Titan was unclassed and uncertified.

On a chance run-in in the Bahamas, OceanGate employees approached him and asked him to look at an early version of the Cyclops 2 on which the team was running test jobs.

When he went to take a look, he said he was “not impressed.” He did give the team suggestions on how the vessel could be improved.

Throughout his time, Lahey maintained he was a staunch supporter of the certification process and did not think experimental vehicles should be manned.

He finished by saying that the Titan tragedy has raised skepticism about submersibles and legitimate operators who undergo the classification process.

“I think as long as we insist on certification as a requirement for continued human-occupied exploration of the deep sea, we can avoid these kind of tragic outcomes,” Lahey said.

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