Not that this is terribly shocking considering they used a friggin Xbox controller to pilot the goddamned thing, but on Tuesday a contractor for imploded undersea expedition company OceanGate testified to a Coast Guard inquiry that she saw the surface team for the Titan sub track its location manually using a pen and notebook along with an Excel spreadsheet, Insider reports.
“There were delays because there was this manual process of first writing down the lat-long coordinates and then typing them in,” said former OceanGate contract employee Antonella Wilby, adding that they then imported data from the spreadsheet into a mapping program. “We tried to do that every five minutes, but it was a lot to do,” she said was fired after calling the system “idiotic.”
Wilby admitted it wasn’t “the most tactful way” to communicate her concerns. “But I do stand by that. It was. It just – the whole system was absolutely idiotic. But that, of course, wasn’t received well after the dive. Wendy Rush told me, ‘Well, we can retrain you so that you understand how the mapping works, because we’ve had this foremost expert design it for us,'” Wilby continued, referring to now-imploded OceanGate founder Stockton Rush’s widow, who apparently worked there too.
You’d think that for $250,000 a ticket that maybe OceanGate could have had the “foremost expert” design a system that would automatically receive the data and spit out the coordinates so they didn’t need to use a friggin Excel spreadsheet to track where their “state of the art” sub was.