Stunning new deep-sea footage shows the sunken Titan submersible’s severed tail cone resting on the ocean floor after its doomed voyage last June.
The Coast Guard Marine Board of Investigation released the never-before-seen footage on Tuesday as part of the ongoing public hearing over the wreck, which killed all five passengers on a foolhardy voyage to see the wreckage of the Titanic around 2.5 miles below sea.
The eerie footage shows a fragment of the sub’s tail cone wedged into the sand, with the remotely operated camera marking it as being more than 3,775 meters — around 12,500 feet — deep.
“This video led to the conclusive evidence of the catastrophic loss of the submersible Titan and the death of all five members aboard,” the Coast Guard Marine Board of Investigation wrote alongside the video.
The footage was released amid a deluge of new information about the doomed vessel revealed in the ongoing public hearings.
Over 100 issues were recorded on the vessel in the years leading up to the Titan’s implosion, investigators shared Monday, adding that the ship suffered 70 equipment issues in 2021 and 48 issues in 2022.
Tony Nissen, OceanGate’s former engineering director, testified that if he or other staffers would bring up the issues with CEO Stockton Rush, who was among those killed in the implosion, the chief would brush their concerns aside after heated arguments.
Nissen, who was fired in 2019 after refusing to sign off on an expedition, was one of 10 former OceanGate employees set to be interviewed in the hearing.
Veteran diver and submersible pilot David Lochridge, who was hired by OceanGate in 2016, said Tuesday that he repeatedly clashed with Rush over how the CEO liked to “do things on the cheap.”
Along with Stockton, the implosion killed British adventurer Hamish Harding, French explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet, and Pakistani father and son Shahzada and Suleman Dawood.
The hearing aims to “uncover the facts surrounding the incident and develop recommendations to prevent similar tragedies in the future,” the Coast Guard said in a statement.
