Titan Submersible of OceanGate - All you need to know

Titan was a submersible operated by American tourism and expeditions company OceanGate. It imploded during its descent in the North Atlantic Ocean, about 370 nautical miles (690 km) off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada. It carried five people and was part of a tourist expedition to view the wreck of the Titanic. Communication with Titan was lost 1 hour and 45 minutes into its dive, and authorities were alerted when it failed to resurface at the scheduled time later that day. 

OceanGate

Founded in 2009 by Stockton Rush and Guillermo Söhnlein, OceanGate is a privately held firm. It has been using leased commercial submersibles to carry paying customers off the coast of California, in the Gulf of Mexico, and in the Atlantic Ocean since 2010. The business is based in the American city of Everett.

In 2016, Rush took customers to a shipwreck for the first time, utilizing their submersible Cyclops 1 to explore the Andrea Doria crash site. Rush realized that visiting shipwreck sites was a method to garner media attention. There is only one disaster that everyone is aware of, according to Rush, who spoke to Smithsonian magazine in 2019. Asking someone to name an undersea creature will likely result in responses like "Sharks, whales, Titanic."

Titan Submersible

Titan, formerly Cyclops 2, was a five-person submersible that was run by OceanGate Inc. 

Features

• Building Materials - Titanium, Carbon fiber
• Length - 6.7 m (22 ft)
• Weight - 10,432 kg (23,000 lb)

• Vessel - Two titanium hemispheres with corresponding titanium interface rings made up the whole pressure vessel, which was attached to a carbon fiber-wound cylinder with an internal diameter of 142 cm (56 in) and a length of 2.4 meters (7.9 ft).  

• Window - A 380 mm-diameter (15 in) acrylic window was installed in one of the titanium hemispherical end caps. 

• Hull - After exhibiting symptoms of cyclic fatigue, the hull's original depth rating of 4,000 m (13,000 ft) below sea level was reduced to 3,000 m (9,800 ft), according to Rush, in 2020. The hull was built again in 2020 or repaired in 2021.

• Speed - Titan could move at up to 3 knots (5.6 km/h; 3.5 mph) using four electric thrusters, arrayed two horizontal and two vertical.

• Steering Controls - Logitech F710 wireless game controller with modified analog sticks. The University of Washington's Applied Physics Laboratory assisted with the video game controller control design on the Cyclops 1 using a Sony brand Playstation 3 controller, which was carried over to Titan, substituting with the Logitech controller. The use of commercial off-the-shelf game controllers is not unusual among vehicles such as submarines that need more than just a steering wheel to control. For example, the United States Navy uses Xbox 360 controllers to control periscopes in Virginia-class submarines.

• Monitoring Components - The ship included monitoring equipment, according to OceanGate, to regularly check the hull's strength. Five people were kept alive on board for 96 hours. Underwater, there is no GPS; instead, the support ship, which tracked Titan's position in relation to its target, texted Titan with distances and directions.

• Backup Systems - Titan had seven backup systems, including droppable ballasts, a balloon, and thrusters, designed to bring the ship back to the surface in an emergency. Some of the backup systems, like sandbags secured by hooks that dissolve after a given amount of time in saltwater, were made to function even if everyone on board the submersible was unconscious. The sandbags should be released as a result, allowing the vessel to float. If the ship did not automatically climb after the allotted period, an OceanGate investor said that passengers on board might assist in releasing the ballast by tilting the ship back and forth to dislodge it or by utilizing a pneumatic pump to loosen the weights.

Expeditions to the Titanic

In July 2021, Titan made its first dive to the Titanic. OceanGate completed seven dives to the Titanic in 2022 and six in 2021.

Usually, a pilot, a guide, and three paying customers were aboard each dive. The hatch would be bolted shut once inside the submersible and could only be opened from the outside. Normally, it took two hours to descend to the Titanic from the surface, and the entire dive lasted around eight hours. Every 15 minutes during the trip, the submersible was supposed to send out a safety ping that the crew above the water could monitor. Short text messages were also used to communicate between the surface crew and the ship. Customers that traveled to the Titanic with OceanGate paid US$250,000 each for the eight-day excursion, which the firm referred to as sending "mission specialists".

Warnings Before The End of Titan

Titan wasn't certified as seaworthy by any regulatory agency or third-party organization. 

A 2019 article published in Smithsonian magazine referred to Rush as a "daredevil inventor". In the article, Rush is described as having said the U.S. Passenger Vessel Safety Act of 1993 "needlessly prioritized passenger safety over commercial innovation". In a 2022 interview, Rush told CBS News, "At some point, safety just is pure waste. I mean, if you just want to be safe, don't get out of bed. Don't get in your car. Don't do anything." Rush said in a 2021 interview, "I've broken some rules to make Titan. I think I've broken them with logic and good engineering behind me. The carbon fiber and titanium, there's a rule you don't do that. Well, I did."

In 2018, David Lochridge, OceanGate's director of marine operations, filed a report on safety concerns about Titan. Lochridge urged the company to have Titan assessed and certified by an agency, but OceanGate declined due to unwillingness to pay. He also alleged that the transparent viewport on Titan's forward end was only certified for 1,300 m, a third of the depth required for Titanic. OceanGate claimed Lochridge refused safety approvals and that the company's evaluation of Titan was stronger than Lochridge believed necessary. The two parties settled a few months later.

In 2018, the Marine Technology Society expressed concern about the development of 'TITAN' and the planned Titanic Expedition, stating that the experimental approach could lead to negative outcomes.

Rob McCallum, a deep sea exploration specialist, warned Rush that he was risking his clients' safety and advised against commercial use until the submersible was independently tested and classified. This led to OceanGate's lawyers threatening McCallum with legal action.

In 2022, British actor and television presenter Ross Kemp planned to mark the 110th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic by recording a documentary using Titan, but the project was shelved due to Atlantic Productions deeming the submersible unsafe and not "fit for purpose."

" It was January 2018, and the company’s engineering team was about to hand over the craft — named Titan — to a new crew who would be responsible for ensuring the safety of its future passengers. But experts inside and outside the company were beginning to sound alarms. OceanGate’s director of marine operations, David Lochridge, started working on a report around that time, according to court documents, ultimately producing a scathing document in which he said the craft needed more testing and stressed “the potential dangers to passengers of the Titan as the submersible reached extreme depths.”

Two months later, OceanGate faced similarly dire calls from more than three dozen people — industry leaders, deep-sea explorers and oceanographers — who warned in a letter to its chief executive, Stockton Rush, that the company’s “experimental” approach and its decision to forgo a traditional assessment could lead to potentially “catastrophic” problems with the Titanic mission.", New York Times.

The End of Titan

Beginning

On 16 June 2023, the expedition to the Titanic departed from St. John's, Newfoundland, aboard the research and expedition ship MV Polar Prince. The ship arrived at the dive site on 17 June. One of the occupants, Hamish Harding, posted on Facebook: "Due to the worst winter in Newfoundland in 40 years, this mission is likely to be the first and only crewed mission to the Titanic in 2023. A weather window has just opened up and we are going to attempt a dive tomorrow." He also indicated the operation was scheduled to begin around 04:00 EDT (08:00 UTC).

Diving

The dive operation began on June 18th at 9:30 a.m. (Newfoundland Daylight Time (NDT), or 12:00 UTC). For the first hour and a half of the descent, Titan communicated with Polar Prince every 15 minutes, but Titan's communication with Polar Prince stopped after 11:15 a.m. The submersible was expected to resurface at 4:30 p.m. Even though only at 7:10 p.m. (21:40 UTC) The U.S. Coast Guard was notified of the missing vessel. Titan had 96 hours of breathable air supply, which would have expired on June 22nd, 2023. A U.S. Navy acoustic detection system detected an implosion hours after Titan submerged, leading to the Navy reviewing its data and passing it to the Coast Guard.

Rescue Operations

Operation Parties

• United States Coast Guard
• United States Navy
• Canadian Coast Guard 
• Aircraft from the Royal Canadian Air Force and United States Air National Guard
• A Royal Canadian Navy ship
• several commercial and research ships and remotely operated underwater vehicle (ROVs)

The U.S. Coast Guard indicated that the search and rescue mission was difficult because of

remote location,

• weather
• darkness
• sea conditions
• water temperature

Rear Admiral John Mauger said that they were "deploying all available assets". While many submersibles are equipped with an acoustic beacon that emits sounds that can be detected underwater by rescuers, Titan did not have such a device.

A Canadian CP-140 Aurora's sonar detected underwater noises while searching for the missing vessel. The U.S. Coast Guard acknowledged the sounds but reported no results. The source of the noise is unknown and may come from metal objects at the wreck site. The noises were later described by the U.S. Coast Guard as being apparently unrelated to the missing vessel.

Despite rising concerns about depletion of air supplies on Titan if it were intact, a U.S. Coast Guard spokesperson said at a press conference that "This is a search and rescue mission 100%", rather than a wreckage recovery mission.

Evidence

On 22 June, the U.S. Coast Guard discovered a debris field near the Titanic wreck, confirmed to be part of the submersible. The debris, located by Pelagic Research Services' Odysseus 6k ROV five hours into its search was later confirmed to be part of the submersible. The loss of the submersible was due to an implosion of the pressure chamber, and pieces of Titan were found on the sea floor about 1,600 feet from the bow of Titanic. The debris field was concentrated in two areas, with the aft end bell lying separate from the front end bell and the tail cone. Rear Admiral John Mauger of the Coast Guard said the debris was consistent with a catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber. Mauger stated that he did not have an answer as to whether the bodies of those on board would be recovered, but he did say that it was "an incredibly unforgiving environment".

Fatalities

• Shahzada Dawood (48), a Pakistani-British businessman of the Dawood Hercules Corporation and philanthropist, a grandson of Pakistani industrialist Ahmed Dawood.
• Suleman Dawood (19), the son of Shahzada Dawood. He was a student at the University of Strathclyde.
• Hamish Harding (58), a British businessman, aviator, and space tourist. He had previously descended into the Mariana Trench, broken the Guinness World Record for the fastest circumnavigation of the Earth, and flown into space in 2022 on Blue Origin NS-21.
• Stockton Rush (61), an American submersible pilot, engineer and businessman. He was the chief executive and co-founder of OceanGate.
• Paul-Henri Nargeolet (77), a former French Navy commander, diver, submersible pilot, member of the French Institute for Research and Exploitation of the Sea, and director of underwater research for E/M Group and RMS Titanic Inc, that owns salvage rights to the wreckage site. Nargeolet led more than 35 expeditions to the wreck, supervised the recovery of thousands of artifacts, and was "widely considered the leading authority on the wreck site".

Reactions

James Cameron

James Cameron, who directed the 1997 film Titanic, visited the wreckage site 33 times, and piloted the Deepsea Challenger to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, said he was "struck by the similarity" between the submersible's implosion and the events that led to the Titanic disaster. He specifically noted that both disasters seemed preventable, and were indirectly caused by someone deliberately ignoring safety warnings from others. Cameron criticized the choice of carbon-fibre composite construction of the pressure vessel, pointing out that such material has "no strength in compression" when subject to the immense pressures at depth. He also criticized Rush's real-time monitoring of the submarine's hull as an inadequate solution that would do little to prevent an implosion.

David Scott-Beddard

According to David Scott-Beddard, the CEO of White Star Memories Ltd, a Titanic exhibition company, the likelihood of conducting future research at the Titanic wreck has decreased due to the loss of Titan.

The Destruction of Titan would be recorded as a catastrophic incident in history. But The End of Titan marks an important detail of nature. Rush rushed to beat the nature with his Invention, but nature showed it's might to mankind again. It would be a ultimate lesson for the generations to come.