OceanGate used ‘absolutely idiotic’ hand-typed spreadsheet for Titan sub-navigation, says former contractor

A former contractor has revealed that

OceanGate

's

Titan submersible

used a hand-typed

Excel spreadsheet

to track its navigation, raising concerns about the vessel's safety before its underwater

implosion

during a Titanic expedition in July last year, according to the Independent.
In a hearing held by the

US Coast Guard

Marine Board of Investigation,

Antonella Wilby

, a former OceanGate contractor, disclosed that the

navigation system

depended on team members manually entering data into a spreadsheet.

“There were delays because there was this manual process of first writing down the lat-long coordinates and then typing them in,” she explained. Wilby described the method as “absolutely idiotic,” and said she had questioned the practice but was dismissed for not being “solution-oriented.”
An animated recreation of the incident showed the Titan losing communication at a depth of 3346 metres.
Tony Nissen, a former engineering director and employee at OceanGate, claimed that he refused to participate in a test dive of the submersible.

The Titan implosion killed all five individuals aboard including OceanGate's CEO

Stockton Rush

who utilised an ultra-short baseline (USBL)

acoustic positioning

system that determined the submersible’s speed, depth, and position through sound pings. However, the important data was first transcribed into a notebook before being entered into the spreadsheet.