The company operating the Titan submersible, which imploded in the ocean last year, killing five people on board, was plagued with equipment problems in the years before the disaster, and had fired an engineering director who would not approve a deepwater expedition, according to testimony at a Coast Guard hearing on Monday.

The Titan had experienced dozens of problems during previous expeditions, including 70 equipment issues in 2021 and 48 more in 2022, investigators revealed on Monday, the first day of two weeks of testimony on what went wrong during the submersible’s ill-fated June 2023 trip to view the Titanic shipwreck on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean.

For part of the winter before the fatal accident, the investigators said, the Titan was stored in bitterly cold temperatures outside a facility in Newfoundland, with no protection from the elements.

Then, less than four weeks before the fatal mission, the craft was tested and then found “partially sunk” two days later, following a night of high seas and fog.

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And a few days before it imploded, five people in the Titan were slammed against its wall as it was resurfacing from a mission.

The vessel’s troubled development history was detailed when the U.S. Coast Guard’s Marine Board of Investigation convened in South Carolina on Monday for the board’s first public hearing on the disaster, an attempt to begin answering the question of what went wrong on the vessel’s mission to visit the Titanic shipwreck.

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