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OceanGate’s submarine relied on ‘idiotic’ Excel spreadsheet (www.independent.co.uk)

submitted 3 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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A hearing into OceanGate’s Titan sub, which imploded during an expedition to the wreck of the Titanic last year, revealed that its navigation system allegedly relied on team members manually inputting the coordinate data into a spreadsheet in order to track the vessel.

The incident last July killed all five people on board, including OceanGate’s CEO and co-founder Stockton Rush.

“There were delays because there was this manual process of first writing down the lat-long coordinates and then typing them in,” Antonella Wilby, a former OceanGate contractor, told the hearing held by the US Coast Guard Marine Board of Investigation.

...

She described the system as “absolutely idiotic”, adding that she had raised concerns about the method with OceanGate but was dismissed for not being “solution-oriented”.

The ultra-short baseline (USBL) acoustic positioning system used sound pings to determine the submersible’s speed, depth and position, however rather than being automatically loaded into mapping software, the coordinate data was transcribed into a notebook before being typed into a spreadsheet on a computer.

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[–] RedWeasel 76 points 3 days ago (3 children)

While not efficient, one of the least worrisome things about the sub. Even the game controller being wireless really is not that big a deal as it is not going to experience external interference as the water will block signals.

The most problematic part is the design and structure that are bearing the weight of the water pressure.

[–] SzethFriendOfNimi 63 points 3 days ago

You’re absolutely right. Excel isn’t the issue, controllers aren’t the issue.

The controls and navigation were proverbial canaries in the coal mine to the bargain basement approach to design and materials purchasing for components that were under pressure.

Destructive Stress Testing, redundancies? “That stuff costs money. I know better than any ‘bloated’ established and experienced agency or company because I can save a dime”. That attitude is what killed them and doomed the entire venture from the beginning.

[–] Canopyflyer 37 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Agreed, not sure why everyone focuses on the game controller, when the hull was never certified in the first place. The viewport was only certified to 1000 meters, or something like that. The controller was the least of the issues.

The whole, we don't need to follow safety regulations because submersibles don't implode, mentality is utterly bizarre. It's like the people of Oceangate had no concept of causation and correlation. Or that CEO just had a suicide wish.

[–] IphtashuFitz 20 points 3 days ago

The use of the game controller, Excel, etc. all goes to document a pattern of cutting corners. True, these corners are tiny compared to the issues of the overall design of the sub, but it demonstrates a long pattern of overall behavior.

This reminds me a bit of when I was a juror on a criminal trial. The prosecutor detailed a long string of seemingly small/inconsequential things that ultimately helped demonstrate a long pattern of behavior. That pattern definitely helped with our deliberations.

[–] Dkarma 0 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

Because "can't surface because of trash controller" is second only to "sub going pop cuz bad engineering".

UK it was a mad catz too...smh

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago

They dive and surface by dropping weights, which they could do completely manually. The weights would also release by themselves after a period of time.

It's one of the few systems on the sub that was actually thought through.

[–] BluesF 5 points 2 days ago

You mean the most problematic part was the part that catastrophically failed and killed them? Colour me surprised 😉