The chief engineer of the sunken Titan submersible said Monday he felt “100 percent” pressured to keep the vessel in the water.
Tony Nissen, the lead witness at Coast Guard hearings into the deadly 2023 submarine explosion at the Titanic's sinking site, said he frequently clashed with CEO Stockton Rush over his boss's reckless and dangerous efforts to get the high-tech subs up and running.
Asked by investigators whether he felt pressured to put the titanium and carbon fiber vessel in the water as a lucrative linchpin of Rush's Ocean Gate deep-sea diving business, Nissen replied, “100 percent.”
Rush and four others – adventurer Hamish Harding, Titanic explorer Paul-Henri Narjolet, billionaire Shazada Daoud and her teenage son Suleiman Daoud – died when the ship imploded under enormous water pressure on June 18, 2023.
Tim Catterson, a former Ocean Gate contractor, testified late Monday that the fateful day seemed like a “perfect dive day” after bad weather had ruined a planned dive.
Since the disaster, widespread reports have emerged about Rush's alleged negligence, including omissions in safety measures on his aircraft and in his businesses.
Nissen recalled that a few years ago he refused to even set foot on a submersible.
“I'm not participating,” he told Rush at the time, explaining at Monday's committee meeting that he was uneasy about the level of expertise of other staff helping run it.
Nissen added that he had called off the submarine's voyage to the Titanic in 2019, telling Rush that the submarine was “not performing as we wanted it to.”
He was fired later that year.
The testimony was accompanied by eerie new photos of Titan's severed tail cone lying on the ocean floor after the tragedy.
