‘Absolutely idiotic’: An Excel spreadsheet was used for tragic OceanGate Titan submersible’s navigation

Remember the Titan submersible? 

Stockton Rush, founder and owner of the underwater tourism company OceanGate, took himself, a Titanic expert, and three tourists on a trip down to the infamous ship’s remains on board the submersible in June 2023. However, the crew on the ground lost contact and the wreckage of the Titan submersible was later discovered. The sub had imploded and all five on board died.

New information about the tragedy is now being uncovered, thanks to an investigation by the U.S. government. Just last week, new footage was released showing the wreckage of the Titan submersible. 

Now, according to former OceanGate contractor Antonella Wilby, we know more about how the now heavily scrutinized OceanGate ran its underwater tourism operation. 

The Titan submersible depended on an Excel spreadsheet

During a recent US Coast Guard Marine Board of Investigation hearing, Wilby revealed that OceanGate relied on an Excel spreadsheet to map the submersible’s navigation. Furthermore, the data was manually entered by hand into the Excel spreadsheet.

According to Wilby, the Titan’s ultra-short baseline positioning system pulled data on the submersible using sound pings. This included attributes such as the sub’s velocity, depth, and positioning. 

As The Verge points out, typically, this information would then be automatically collected and compiled into mapping software in order to keep tabs on the location of the submersible. 

OceanGate, however, would write down the data in a notebook and then type it into an Excel spreadsheet. 

Wilby called OceanGate’s system “absolutely idiotic.”

“There were delays because there was this manual process of first writing down the lat-long coordinates and then typing them in,” she explained in the hearing. “We tried to do that every five minutes, but it was a lot to do.”

The Coast Guard’s investigation into the Titan submersible implosion continues this week.