Catastrophic Implosion Aboard ‘Titan’ Raises Wider Questions About the Submersible’s Experimental Design
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
The five members of the OceanGate Titan submersible were most likely killed instantly in a catastrophic “implosion” at a depth of about 3,500 meters (11,482 feet) as the vessel descended to the wreck of the Titanic. The wreck site is about 400 miles in the Atlantic south of St. John’s, Newfoundland.
The five-day drama, considered the first catastrophic disaster of a submersible in 60 years, prompted a frantic, multi-national rescue effort that included the Canadian and US Coast Guards, the US Navy and a French private firm with a remote operated vehicle (ROV) to scour the seabed. International news agencies reported any scrap of news, using Titan’s 96-hour oxygen capacity as a countdown against time.
The passengers included Hamish Harding, 58, an adventurer and owner of Action Aviation, Paul Henri Nargeoloet, 77, a veteran Titanic explorer from France, British-Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood, 48, and his 19-year-old son Suleman, and Stockton Rush, co-founder of OceanGate, the company that owned and operated the lost sub.
The US Navy says it recorded a sound “consistent with an implosion,” just after Titan lost communications with its support ship on Sunday. Banging noises reported during the week have been dismissed by rescuers as other vessels in the area. A debris field with five major pieces of Titan was spotted on a seabed by a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) operating near the Titanic. The Coast Guard has wound down operations, though it is leaving several vessels behind to complete the investigation.
Click here to read the full article.
Only about 10 submersibles can dive to these extreme depths. The majority of submersibles are designed for tourism, with the ability to dive to 500 meters or less.
The small circle of submersible makers and underwater adventurers were saddened by the news. Several personal submersible manufacturers declined to speak to Robb Report, saying they knew some of Titan’s guests and crew.
Others said they were not surprised. Hollywood director James Cameron, who has dived the wreck of the Titanic 33 times, said he was not surprised when he first heard the news. “You can’t lose navigation and comms [communications] together without an extreme catastrophic event,” he told BBC. “The first thing that popped to mind was an implosion.”
Cameron said the rest of the week felt “like a prolonged nightmarish charade,” as the search continued. “People are talking about banging noises and oxygen, and the Coast Guard was out with airplanes. I knew that sub was sitting under its last known position and that’s exactly where they found it.”
The Titan is the only one of the deep-diving submersibles not certified by industry third parties such as the American Bureau of Shipping or DNV, Will Kohnen, chairman of Marine Technology Society’s (MTS) committee on manned submersibles, told Reuters.
Measuring 22 feet in length, Titan made its first dive to 13,100 feet in 2018 and then dove the Titanic in 2021. It planned to make 18 deep dives this year.
The cylindrical-shaped Titan was considered an experimental design, made of a combination of titanium and composite carbon fiber. Most of the other submersibles capable of reaching extreme depths are made from pure titanium or thick steel in a spherical shape to withstand the crushing pressures at 3,800 meters (12,467 feet) where the Titanic is situated on the ocean floor.
The pressure around the Titanic is about 375 atmospheres. That means that every square inch of an object’s surface will experience the equivalent of 5,500 pounds of force. The bite of a Great White shark, considered one of the world’s most crushing forces, is about 4,000 pounds. Experts believe Titan’s crew died within milliseconds of the implosion.
Kohnen told Reuters that his committee wrote a letter to OceanGate expressing concerns about Titan’s experimental design and the company’s decision not to certify the submersible.
“Bringing an outside entity up to speed on every innovation before it is put into real-world testing is anathema to rapid innovation,” Rush wrote in a blog post on his company’s website, defending the decision not to certify.
Titan, Cameron told the BBC, “didn’t get certified because they knew they wouldn’t pass.” He added: “I was very suspect of the technology that they were using. I wouldn’t have gotten in that sub.”
Cameron later told Reuters if a submersible is taking passengers, it should be certified. But he added that every country where a submersible operates would need to pass the same regulations.
George Rutherglen, a professor of admiralty law at the University of Virginia, expects the US will respond with tighter regulations. “I would just be surprised if any incident with all of these costs involved—wrongful death, expensive rescue—would not lead to some initiatives,” he told the AP.
Best of Robb Report
