Fifteen months after the Titan vessel tragically imploded, killing all five aboard, OceanGate contractor Tym Catterson gave testimony to the US Coast Guard Marine Board of Investigation on September 16, 2024.
His account was a part of the two-week hearing into the incident and offered insight into how he believed the passengers spent their final moments. He concluded by saying that the implosion occurred instantaneously.
Catterson was present when Titan set off for its dive from the Polar Prince on June 18, 2023. In his testimony, he said he didn’t believe the windows and portholes to be the cause of the failure, noting the absence of shards.
Instead, he suggested the failure occurred at the forward glue line at the ring, which would have happened extremely quickly. However, he added:
“So, this had to happen extraordinarily fast which means the people in there had no idea this was coming and I just want to make sure that you know, you let them, you let the public know that nobody was suffering in there. As a matter of fact, they were probably happy and they were all waiting to see the Titanic when this happened.”
On the day it went missing, Catterson recalled assisting with the vessel's departure as a platform operator before heading off to have breakfast.
The five passengers who lost their lives were OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, British-Pakistani billionaire Shahzada Dawood, his 19-year-old son Suleman Dawood, British billionaire Hamish Harding, and Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet.
Tym Catterson was off duty when Titan lost contact with the surface
Catterson mentioned that after returning to the Polar Prince, he took a shower and later learned that the vessel had lost contact with the surface around 9:45 AM. He explained that he was off duty at that point, describing himself as merely a bystander. Although efforts were made to determine if the issue was related to communications or not, he discovered both the tracking and communications had ceased.
On the first day of testimony, it was revealed that the final messages from the Titan submersible indicated communication problems the five passengers experienced before its implosion. Just before 10 AM, the Polar Prince repeatedly asked the submersible if it could see the ship on its display.
After approximately 15 minutes, a response came that mentioned "lost system and chat settings." When asked again about their status, the onboarders replied "yes" and "all good here" at 10:15 AM. By 10:47 AM, at a depth of about 3,350 meters and a pressure of 4,900 lbs. per square inch, the submersible reported they had "dropped two weights" resulting in a loss of contact.
The search for the missing submersible began shortly after it lost all communication with the Canadian expedition vessel Polar Prince, about 1 hour and 45 minutes into its dive on the morning of Sunday, June 18, 2023.
On Thursday, June 22, 2023, it was confirmed that debris from the submersible had been discovered 1,600 feet from the bow of the Titanic.
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