The lead engineer on the doomed Titan submersible mentioned Monday that he “100%” felt stress to get it within the water.
Tony Nissen — testifying as the primary witness at a Coast Guard listening to into the sub’s lethal 2023 implosion on the website of the Titanic — described typically clashing with firm chief Stockton Rush over what he noticed as his boss’s reckless, harmful push to get the high-tech underwater car up and operating.
Nissen, requested by the investigators whether or not he felt warmth to get the titanium and carbon-fiber vessel within the water because the profitable linchpin of Rush’s OceanGate deep-sea-dive enterprise, replied, “100%.”
Rush and 4 others — adventurer Hamish Harding, Titanic explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet and multimillionaire Shahzada Dawood and his teen son Suleman Dawood — died when the craft imploded underneath monumental water stress June 18, 2023.
Former OceanGate contractor Tym Catterson testified later Monday that the doomed date had regarded just like the “excellent diving day” — after awful climate situations had ruined earlier tried scheduled dives.
For the reason that disaster, widespread accounts of Rush’s alleged negligence, together with involving security shortcuts with the craft and his enterprise, have surfaced.
Nissen recalled how he as soon as refused to even step foot into the submersible a number of years in the past.
“I’m not getting in it,” he mentioned he instructed Rush on the time — explaining to Monday’s panel that he was anxious concerning the stage of experience of the opposite staffers serving to to function it.
Nissen added that he stopped one of many sub’s journeys to the Titanic in 2019, telling Rush that the craft was “not working like we thought it will.’’
He was fired later that yr.
The testimony got here as an eerie new photograph additionally emerged of the Titan’s severed tail cone resting on the ocean ground after the tragedy.
Supply hyperlink