Five people lost their lives on a deep-sea expedition to the Titanic wreckage last year. They were aboard the Titan submersible, designed and built by OceanGate, an adventure tourism company. The company’s CEO, Stockton Rush, was also present when the sub imploded catastrophically. Its debris field was found 500 meters away from the bow of the Titanic after a four-day search.

A former OceanGate contractor, Antonella Wilby, testified before a US Coast Guard panel on Friday. The Titan’s GPS-like ultra-short baseline (USBL) acoustic positioning system utilized sound pings to gather data on the sub’s velocity, depth, and position. Normally, this information is automatically integrated into mapping software for accurate tracking. However, Wilby stated that for the Titan, the coordinate data was manually transcribed into a notebook before being entered into Excel, which was then uploaded into mapping software to track the sub's position on a hand-drawn map of the wreckage. The OceanGate team intended to update this information every five minutes, but the process was slow and labor-intensive, relying on short text messages to communicate with the gamepad-controlled sub. When Wilby suggested using standard software to automate the processing of ping data and plot the sub’s telemetry, the company expressed a desire to create an in-house system but cited a lack of time to implement it.

“This is an idiotic way to do navigation,” She also testified that after dive 80 in 2022, a loud bang or explosion was heard during the Titan’s ascent, audible even from the surface.

The Verge notes, that this revelation comes after OceanGate's former scientific director, Steven Ross, confirmed that a sound heard from the Titan was linked to the pressure hull shifting in its plastic cradle, although Wilby noted only “a few microns” of damage. Ross revealed that six days before the Titan imploded, pilot and cofounder Stockton Rush crashed the vessel into a launch mechanism bulkhead while attempting to resurface from dive 87. This incident was caused by a ballast tank malfunction that inverted the submarine, causing passengers to "tumble about." While no injuries occurred, Ross was uncertain if an inspection of the sub was conducted afterward.

This is not the first whistleblow concerning safety practices employed by OceanGate. During a CBS News Sunday Morning segment by David Pogue last summer, a reporter chuckled while observing the sub’s controls, which OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush described as being operated entirely with a game controller. “We run the whole thing... with this game controller.” The reporter pointed out the “MacGyver jury-riggedness” of the whole thing, using many off-the-shelf parts, as Rush said, “certain things, you want to be button down,” referring to collaborations with Boeing and NASA.

Gamepads are wireless, versatile, comfortable, and familiar to use. The US Navy utilizes gamepads to control submarine periscopes and the photonic masts that have replaced them. Additionally, The Boring Company has previously demonstrated an Xbox One controller steering one of its massive drilling machines. However, there have been instances where controllers have malfunctioned during intense FIFA matches. How reliable could they be for a vessel harboring humans?