Titan Disaster Hearing Upends Earlier Expert Theories on Crew Deaths

Two days of reporting and testifying by experts during a U.S. Coast Guard inquiry challenge the idea that the submersible’s passengers knew they were facing death.

Did the five Titan divers know they were in mortal danger and likely to die before their submersible imploded 15 months ago?

Public experts have long answered that question in the affirmative.

But the first two days of a formal hearing by a Coast Guard panel into the disaster, which began Monday, have raised basic questions about that grim conclusion and taken detailed testimony that supports an unsensational finding.

“Throughout the descent,” the opening report of the Marine Board of Investigation states, the crew sent “no transmissions which indicated trouble or any emergency.”

That finding centers on the official examination of the communications between the submersible and its mother ship, as well as expert analysis of the submersible’s last known act — the dropping of its weights.

In normal times, the Titan relied on a large rack of weights attached to its underside to make the submersible heavy and speed its descent. Upon nearing the seabed, the craft would shed some of the weights to make itself neutrally buoyant — that is, going neither up nor down. Then, at the dive’s end, it would shed yet more weights to make itself positively buoyant, beginning the slow ascent.

In an emergency, the submersible could also jettison all its weights at once, which would send it racing to the surface.

In the tragedy’s immediate aftermath, news and social media outlets quoted top experts who argued for such a crisis scenario. The pundits said that the weight drop indicated that the crew members knew they were in grave danger and were struggling to make an emergency ascent.

Robert D. Ballard, an American oceanographer often credited with the Titanic’s 1985 discovery, told ABC News that the crew members “began to drop their weights and ascend to the surface — they never made it.” He added, “I’m sure they were attempting to get light and go home but the hull itself imploded.”

James Cameron, a submersible maker and pilot known for his 1997 movie “Titanic,” also lent his voice to that theory. “We understand from inside the community,” he told ABC News, referring to his oceanographic peers, “that they had dropped their ascent weights, and they were coming up, trying to manage an emergency.”

The same claim appears in the $50 million lawsuit brought in August against OceanGate, the submersible’s maker, by the family of Paul-Henri Nargeolet, a French explorer who was among the dead. The lawsuit said the “dropped weights” meant the team had aborted, or was trying to abort, the dive. The five crew members, it added, “were well aware they were going to die,” and further noted that those aboard had “full knowledge of the vessel’s irreversible failures, experiencing terror and mental anguish.”

The Coast Guard hearing made public important new details that contradict the grim scenario. In particular, it revealed a terse final communication between the submersible and its mother ship stating that Titan had “dropped two wts,” shorthand for weights.

In testimony on Monday, Tym Catterson, a contractor for OceanGate who helped launch the submersible shortly before it imploded, testified under oath that he was certain that the two weights — totaling just 70 pounds — had been dropped to achieve neutral buoyancy and help the craft better control its movements as it neared the seabed, not to return to the surface.

“It’s not enough weight to come back up,” Mr. Catterson said of the two dropped weights. The craft remained quite heavy, he added, because the combined weights carried aboard Titan on a typical dive ranged from about 200 to 300 pounds — a quantity much larger than the 70 pounds.

At the end of his testimony, Mr. Catterson said the news media outlets that had reported on the Titan disaster “had a field day with misinformation and speculation.” His own judgment, he added, was that the deep voyagers “had no idea” that a catastrophic implosion was imminent.

The hearings are scheduled to continue until Friday, Sept. 27, and it seems possible that new information may come to light.

But the expert judgment up to this point in the proceedings is that, as Mr. Catterson put it, no crew member “was suffering” mental anguish as the craft violently imploded on its last dive.

Mr. Cameron, the filmmaker, asked Wednesday about his response to the hearing testimony, said: “I should not have passed on hearsay information about the weights on national TV. We have enough intentional disinformation in our world today, without adding to it with undisciplined rumor mongering.”

He added, however, that a main point he was trying to make in the ABC interview was accurate and relevant at the time — that the Titan disaster was a “grotesque anomaly” from the perfect and ongoing record over a half century of no other fatalities in deep crewed submersibles.

Dr. Ballard did not reply to a request for comment on his earlier remarks.

In June, months before the Coast Guard formal hearings, Jason D. Neubauer, who is leading the investigation, upended an earlier viral claim that the crew members knew they were facing death.

He declared in an interview that a log seemingly from the fatal dive was fake. The bogus transcript, viewed online millions of times, told of a heart-pounding crisis in which the five voyagers struggled in vain to return to the surface.