Titan sub hearing: More haunting details, photos of deadly implosion revealed

Grim details continue to emerge as part of the U.S. Coast Guard’s ongoing hearing into the doomed Titan submersible, with an engineer with the National Transportation Safety board revealing Wednesday that the sub had imperfections on its carbon fibre hull, dating back to the manufacturing process.

Engineer Don Kramer said there wrinkles, porosity and voids in the carbon fiber used for the pressure hull of OceanGate’s Titan submersible and that the vessel behaved differently after a loud bang was heard on one of the dives a year before it imploded, killing all five passengers on board.

Hull pieces recovered from the sea floor after the June 2023 tragedy showed substantial delamination of the layers of carbon fiber, which were bonded to create the hull of the experimental submersible, he said.

He also revealed a 2022 incident, in which a loud bang was heard as the Titan resurfaced from a dive. He speculated the noise could have been a change occurring in the carbon fibre of the hub.

Carbon fibre is considered to be unreliable in deep water and was a highly unconventional building material. The hearing heard that each dive taken by the Titan likely compressed and damaged the vessel, making it weaker over time.

Kramer also showed photos of the wreckage, which revealed pieces of the hull scattered on the seafloor. He noted that the vessel’s aft dome, aft segment, top rails, side rails and the aft portion of its composite hull were located together, suggesting that the issues lay in the forward part of the sub.

“Much of the forward hull had fragmented into multiple pieces spread around the ocean floor,” he said. “One segment of the hull near the top of the vessel was intact nearly along its entire length and also stayed with the