Titan submersible hearing: Coast Guard resumes hearings after wreckage photo revealed

The OceanGate mission specialist said she paid OceanGate a deposit in April 2017 for a trip in 2018. The trip was delayed until 2021 because of ongoing testing. Some of the ongoing issues included making a new carbon-fiber hull.

“It had a lot of noise,” she said. “Stockton was very verbal about the dives he did. It was noisy and the noise was not calming down. The sub was probably not strong enough.”

“He must have gone on a different dive,” she said. “Nobody was panicking. Nobody was crying. There was definitely no swearing or yelling.”

Earlier this week, David Lochridge said Stockton Rush, OceanGate CEO, threw the vessel’s controller at him during a voyage after a passenger began to cry over alleged concerns that Rush was driving recklessly.

“He hit me on the side of my head,” Lochridge said during testimony. Rojas said she was on the vessel during the dive but did not witness the interaction.

Speaking to The New York Times, filmmaker James Cameron has said that he shouldn’t have discussed what might’ve happened to the Titan submersible after the vessel imploded.

Cameron is a prominent figure in the deep-diving community. He has taken 33 dives to the wreckage of the Titanic. Following the incident, Cameron was publicly critical of OceanGate, the company that operated the Titan submersible.

When asked about his response to the hearing this week, Cameron told the outlet: “I should not have passed on hearsay information about the weights on national TV. We have enough intentional disinformation in our world today, without adding to it with undisciplined rumor mongering.”

Rojas is a New York City banker. She said she was “obsessed” with the Titanic, even before the wreckage was found in 1985. So she became a scuba diver.

“I wanted to find the wreck but someone beat me to it,” she said, adding that she had been interested in finding a way to see the wreck. That’s how she found OceanGate.

Thursday’s hearing began with its daily opening at 8.30am ET.

Renta Rojas, OceanGate’s mission specialist, will begin her testimony at approximately 9am.

A mission specialist for the company that owned the Titan submersible that imploded in 2023 is scheduled to testify before the US Coast Guard on Thursday.

Renata Rojas is the latest person to testify who is connected to Titan owner OceanGate after an investigatory panel has listened to two days of testimony that raised questions about the company’s operations before the doomed mission.

Two more OceanGate employees are expected to testify as witnesses today, as the US Coast Guard’s public hearing returns after a break on Wednesday.

Renata Rojas, a mission specialist for the company that owned the Titan submersible, will be first up to speak in front of Titan Marine Board of Investigations panel at approximately 9.00am ET this morning. She will address the panel until about 12.30pm, with a 10 minute recess at 10.30am.

After lunch, Dr Dr Steven Ross, OceanGate’s former scientific director, will testify at approximately 1.30pm. The hearing is expected to conclude after a break down at 3.00pm before returning on Friday morning.