Taking a dive on OceanGate's Titanic sub was about the same risk as a test pilot 'putting a new aircraft through its paces,' Navy reservist said
Ocean Gate / Handout/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
- A US Navy reservist was independently hired to evaluate OceanGate's Titan sub in 2021.
- He determined a dive was about the same risk as a test pilot "putting a new aircraft through its paces."
- Risks outlined by OceanGate should be considered "sincere warnings," he wrote in the report.
A US Navy reservist independently hired by a TV production company more than two years ago as a consultant to evaluate OceanGate's deep-sea Titanic submersible wrote in a report that taking a dive on the vessel was about the same risk as a test pilot exercising the range of abilities of a new aircraft.
"The risk incurred is roughly comparable to that of a test pilot putting a new aircraft through its paces," the reservist, Dan Miles, who is now a current active-duty member of the Navy, wrote of OceanGate's Titan sub in a four-page May 2021 report, which has been obtained by Insider.
Last month, the tourist sub imploded while on an expedition to the famed shipwreck site of the Titanic in the depths of the North Atlantic Ocean, killing OceanGate's CEO Stockton Rush and all four other passengers on board the vessel.
The US Coast Guard is now leading an investigation to determine what caused the sub to implode. A mechanical and marine engineering expert previously told Insider that photos of the vessel's wreckage salvaged from the ocean floor suggest that the most likely explanation for its implosion was that the hull collapsed under the immense pressure of the ocean.
In his 2021 report, Miles called the sub's atypical carbon fiber and titanium pressure hull "the most innovative and the most controversial component of Titan" and said, "There is no other craft like it."
"There are well-founded engineering concerns that come with using composite materials in sea water over time at high pressure," Miles wrote.
He wrote that the risks outlined by OceanGate in the company's liability waiver "should be considered as sincere warnings of worst-case outcomes and not just legal jargon required for insurance purposes."
OceanGate required Titan passengers to sign a waiver that mentioned death several times, Insider has reported.
However, Miles concluded in his report that he "would have no reservation" taking the sub down to the Titanic, 12,500 feet below the ocean's surface.
"Based on the trust built through both communication and demonstration of operations during this visit, with the expectation that milestones are met as expected, and with careful regard for the various risks and abort criteria discussed herein, I would have no reservation taking this submarine to the proposed dive site," Miles wrote.
Miles, who enlisted in the Navy in 2001 and is now a command master chief, was hired at the time by Ping Pong Productions, the production company behind the Discovery Channel's "Expedition Unknown" TV show, to review the Titan.
The show's crew had planned to take the sub to the Titanic wreckage site in the summer of 2021 to film for a special episode but ultimately pulled out due to safety concerns following a rocky test dive plagued with mechanical and communications issues in Washington state's Puget Sound weeks earlier.
Miles wrote his report for the production company before the Titan made its first manned dive down to the Titanic.
He told Insider that he wrote the report "as a civilian consultant" and declined to comment further.