Titan passenger said he understood risk if something went wrong in experimental sub: 'It wasn't supposed to be safe'

A man who went on two OceanGate deep-sea dives to see the Titanic testified during a U.S. Coast Guard hearing on the deadly implosion of the company's Titan submersible that he understood the risk and knew he could die if something went wrong, while the co-founder of another submersible company told investigators he believes such experimental vessels should not be taking people to the deep sea in the first place.

Fred Hagen, a commercial building contractor and developer, was the second mission specialist -- what OceanGate called its passengers who paid to go on the dives -- to testify during the two-week hearing about his experience on the Titan.

"It wasn't supposed to be safe. It was supposed to be a thrilling adventure," Hagen said Friday. "So in a broad sense, I didn't feel completely safe at any time."

Hagen said he understood the Titan submersible was experimental and not certified. He said in conversations with people such as French explorer Paul Henri "P.H." Nargeolet -- one of the five people who died in the June 2023 implosion -- he understood the risk if something went wrong during a dive to the Titanic shipwreck, located 3,800 meters below sea level.

"The conversation as related to me was that there were few assets on Earth capable of getting to depth, and that if something went wrong, that, you know, we were all going to die," he said. "P.H. related that repeatedly, and that was a common conversational thread, I think, on board, was that there were limited assets. They probably could not be organized logistically and scrambled in time to save anyone if something went wrong."

"That was the paradigm that we had to be comfortable with," Hagen continued.

In addition to Nargeolet, those killed in the implosion included British businessman Hamish Harding, Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son, Suleman, and OceanGate founder Stockton Rush.

Hagen remembered Rush as a "brilliant visionary" and someone he admired for his efforts to explore the deep sea.

Hagen's first dive on the Titan, in July 2021, was aborted upon reaching the bottom after the starboard thruster failed and they were not able to navigate to the Titanic, he said.

He went on the Titan again in July 2022 and was able to go to the Titanic shipwreck. Hagen recounted that they "got stuck momentarily" in the Titanic, but that Rush "was absolutely unflappable."

This particular dive has been brought up several times since the hearing started on Monday, focusing on a loud bang heard as the submersible ascended. Hagen said he heard the "cracking sound" and that everyone on board was concerned that there was a crack in the hull.

"But it turned out that, upon inspection, after we got on the ship, the body of the fuselage of the Titan had just jumped in its carriage, so there was no damage," Hagen said, who said he was "satisfied by that explanation."

Asked if he would feel safe going down to the depth of the Titanic again after the incident with the loud bang, Hagen reiterated that the voyage was inherently unsafe.

"Anyone that felt safe going to depth in the Titan was deluded, or delusional," he said. "I mean, it was an experimental vessel. It was clear that it was dangerous."

He likened it to jumping out of an airplane.

"You don't do it because it's safe. You do it because it's an adrenaline rush," he said. "And yeah, I would have gone back down again. I mean, we weren't going down in search of safety, we were going down in search of adventure and exploration."

He said Rush did make a conscious effort to "maintain a perceptible culture of safety around a high-risk environment," embodied by a detailed set of steps he took for the dives. Hagen said minor events or anomalies could add up to a "strike," or a major event could be a strike, and that after three strikes the dive was aborted.

"It was a high-risk endeavor in which a dedicated attempt was made to adhere to a culture of safety," he said. "It was not safe diving in the Titan and it was never supposed to be safe."

A former OceanGate contractor who also testified on Friday, Antonella Wilby, called the safety culture at the company "safety theater" based on her experience in the industry.

"No aspect of the operation seemed safe to me," said Wilby, an operations and engineering tech contractor who worked for OceanGate in 2022.

She testified that when she brought up a customer's concerns about the loud bang heard in the July 2022 dive, she said an OceanGate director told her, "You have a bad attitude. You don't have an explorer mindset. You know, we're innovative and we're cowboys, and a lot of people can't handle that."

'You can't just go freestyle'

Another witness who testified on Friday said he wanted to counter the notion that diving in a submersible is unsafe and emphasized the importance of certification for the vessels.

"I think people's perception by and large is that subs are dangerous and scary and complicated, and that only crazy people get in them. But I can assure you that they're anything but," Triton Submarines co-founder and CEO Patrick Lahey said at the start of his testimony. "They're magnificent machines and they allow people to visit a part of our world they couldn't see any other way and do it safely."

Lahey said certification by an independent classification society matters because it means people can dive with confidence and the vehicles are "robust, durable, reliable." He said all of his company's submersibles are certified, including his deepest-diving vessel, which can dive to 11,000 meters -- full ocean depth.

"I insisted that the sub was certified, and that made the project more difficult, more challenging, more time-consuming and more expensive," he said. "But ultimately, I would point to that certification as the primary reason that sub is diving regularly to the deepest places in the ocean."

He said he believes any vehicle bringing people to the deep sea needs to be certified.

"I don't believe that it's negotiable," he said. "I don't believe that we should be operating experimental vehicles in the deep sea."

He testified that there haven't been any catastrophic implosions or deaths in connection with a Triton submersible.

Lahey said he is a "firm believer in innovation" for progress but that "innovation has to be done within the crucible of a set of rules that give you guardrails."

"You can't just go freestyle," he said.

He said he believes certification should be required for such exploration.

"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," he said.

In his final remarks, Hagen said he hoped the Titan could serve as a "teachable moment" and thanked the Marine Board of Investigation for the U.S. Coast Guard for their attempts to learn what happened and prevent another recurrence.

"At the same time, I think my worry is that the greater tragedy than the OceanGate tragedy is if we use this event to inhibit future innovation, and if the regulations derived from this may prevent that kind of innovative approach," he added.

OceanGate was 'tough' to work with, witness says

Investigators on Friday also heard from Dave Dyer with the University of Washington's Applied Physics Lab, which worked with OceanGate from approximately 2012 to 2017 to provide engineering support as the company built up its engineering staff.

He described OceanGate's engineers as a "tough group to work with" and that they often butted heads over the "mindset and the philosophy on engineering and developing a new product."

"We had too many conflicts on how we would go about doing that," which led to the dissolution of the relationship, he said.

One source of conflict included the use of glass spheres for the Titan, he said. The 17-inch glass spheres housed the motor controllers and were external to the pressure vessel, the Coast Guard said.

"We like glass spheres. Those are things that are used in the industry, and they're nice and reliable, but they do have some unexpected failures that most people can't explain, typically at significant depths," Dyer said. "We did not like the idea of using glass spheres on a manned vehicle, especially when they were going to the depth that they were trying to go to."

He said at that depth, if there was an implosion of the glass spheres, it would be "catastrophic."

"We didn't know what that could potentially do to the pressure vessel, to the hull," he said.

Dyer said he heard anecdotally of researchers who had used glass spheres in deep ocean work and when the glass spheres failed, "they lost the entire vehicle."

Lahey said he was also concerned by the use of glass spheres. He said he told OceanGate when he toured their prototype Titan sub in the Bahamas in approximately March 2019 that they can't have those on a human-occupied vehicle, but if they do, they need to fill them with liquid.

"I wasn't particularly impressed by what I saw and I told them," he said of his tour. "They were very nice people, and they seemed well-intentioned. I just said it looked to me like a lot of this stuff was not quite ready for prime time."

Wilby said she was concerned about Titan's primary navigational system, which she said could easily lead to errors. She said on one dive, the pilot couldn't find the bow of the Titanic due to issues with the navigation system and communications.

"I think I made a comment at some point like, this was an idiotic way to do your navigation, which wasn't the most tactful way to say it, I fully admit, but I do stand by that,” she said. "The whole system was absolutely idiotic. But that, of course, wasn't received well."

She said after that, she was taken off the communications and navigation team.

OceanGate suspended all exploration and commercial operations after the deadly implosion.

The hearing on the incident is scheduled to run through Sept. 27.