Canadian officials are investigating voice recordings and data from the perished Titan’s mothership, according to reports on Saturday.
Investigators with the Transportation Safety Board of Canada (TSB) boarded the Polar Prince on Saturday and conducted interviews with the crew and family members, CNN reported.
Kathy Fox, chair of the TSB said their mission was “to collect information from the vessel’s voyage data recorder and other vessel systems that contain useful information.”
Fox said the agency is looking to “find out what happened and why and to find out what needs to change to reduce the chance or the risk of such occurrences in the future.”
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The Titan submarine lost communication with its mothership an hour and a half into its dive. However, it wasn’t reported missing by the Polar Prince to the United States Coast Guard until eight hours later, the AP reported.
The ship was required to communicate with the submarine via text messages every 15 minutes, according to the archived OceanGate website.
Following a five-day international search and rescue mission, the United States Coast Guard found a debris field floating 1,600 feet away from the bow of the Titanic, ruling that the Titan sub had “catastrophically imploded,” Breitbart reported.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) is also leading an investigation to see if “criminal, federal, or provincial laws may possibly have been broken,” CNN reported.
This photo provided by OceanGate Expeditions shows a submersible vessel named Titan used to visit the wreckage site of the Titanic. (OceanGate Expeditions via AP)
“There’s no suspicion of criminal activity per se, but the RCMP is taking initial steps to assess whether or not we will go down that road,” RCMP Superintendent Kent Osmond said at a Saturday press briefing,
The agency investigates all reportable offshore deaths. All five passengers aboard the Titan submarine are declared dead, and it is unlikely that their bodies will be recovered.
OceanGate cofounder Guillermo Sohnlein defended his late CEO to Reuters.
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“Stockton was one of the most astute risk managers I’d ever met,” Sohnlein said. “He was very risk-averse. He was very keenly aware of the risks of operating in the deep ocean environment, and he was very committed to safety.”
However, since 2018 the company has faced safety and quality allegations. David Lochridge, the Titan project’s director of marine operations, was fired after “calling for more stringent safety inspections.”
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