They've had problems, but they've kept it safe with frequent inspections, disassembling and reassembling it over and over again.
It was built by General Mills of all people, but it's made out of more than cardboard and glue.
Posted on 06/21/2023 11:18:17 AM PDT by Red Badger
Search and rescue teams are racing against the clock as they attempt to find a missing submersible and its five-person crew that was slated to explore the wreck of the Titanic nearly 13,000 feet under the North Atlantic on June 18. The U.S. Coast Guard said that the 22-foot-long deep-sea vessel, dubbed the Titan, only has a few days worth of oxygen.
The craft is owned and operated by OceanGate, a private submersible company that offers chartered trips to the wreckage of the Titanic to customers for $250,000 a seat. It set out on its voyage on Sunday morning, but lost contact with its research ship the Polar Prince about 1 hour and 45 minutes into its journey.
Things are looking bleak. Even in the best conditions, voyages on and under the North Atlantic are fraught with the kinds of dangers that the Titanic itself faced including freezing water temperatures, chaotic weather conditions, and surging waves and currents. It’s not helped that the technology that went into building the Titan was experimental, unregulated, risky, and potentially life-threatening. This not only makes diving operations like the one undertaken by the Titan fraught, but it also dangerously complicates search and rescue operations.
“We are doing everything that we can do to make sure that we can locate and rescue those on board,” U.S. Coast Guard Rear Admiral John Mauger said at a press briefing. He later told Good Morning America that the international team of search and rescue officials have scoured an area “about the size of Connecticut” so far.
Walt ‘Butch’ Hendrick, a former safety coordinator for the U.S. Army’s Green Beret Diver Trainer Program, told The Daily Beast that if the sub is entangled by the Titanic wreckage or something else, a remotely operated underwater vehicle (ROV) could theoretically cut through four inches of steel to cut it loose—but it needs to be fitted with the right tools to be able to do so.
And things would look even grim if the sub simply isn’t able to surface on its own. “These ROVs are not capable of bringing it back up if it’s a solid dead weight, and we don’t have a 13,000-foot cable to pull it back to the surface,” said Hendrick.
Indeed, the issues facing the Titan, its crew, and its rescue operation can likely be attributed to the submersible’s design—and potentially deadly lack of safety features.
Sea (Un)Worthy When the Titanic sank in 1912, it left a debris field of ship parts roughly a mile long. It was from these breadcrumbs that oceanographer and retired naval officer Robert Ballard was able to finally discover the wreckage of the ill-fated steamship in 1985 more than 73 years after it sank.
To reach it, Ballard and two crew members rode aboard a deep-ocean research submersible owned by the U.S. Navy known as the DSV Alvin—allowing them to slowly sink more than 2 miles below the Atlantic Ocean surface to gaze on the wreckage of the Titanic for the first time ever.
At that depth, the pressure is immense—roughly the equivalent to a building made of solid lead the size of the Empire State Building pressing down on any vessel below it. So the hull of any submersible needs to be strong enough to withstand the enormous weight of the water above it.
The Titan is made of a combination of carbon fiber and titanium, according to OceanGate’s website. At roughly 22 feet long and 9 feet high, it’s designed to carry a pilot and four other passengers to levels as deep as 13,123 feet at a clip of 3.5 mph. The submersible is roughly as big as a minivan inside. It provides enough room for five people to sit in a cramped hull, with a small porthole peering out.
There’s a panel of screens so the crew can see a small portion of its surroundings—which is a good distraction from the tiny toilet for customers at the front of the sub. The panel allows the crew to communicate with the control room on the research vessel via an acoustic link. This allows the vessel to send text messages back and forth with the Titan. However, this is limited to telemetry data.
In a 2022 CBS Sunday Morning feature on OceanGate and its sub, company CEO Stockton Rush—who was identified as one of the crew members aboard the Titan on Tuesday—seemingly bragged about the “off-the-shelf components” that outfit the sub including a handle that he said he got from Camping World.
However, the item that caught much of the internet’s attention the most was a retrofitted third-party XBox 360 controller that the CEO said operates the entire submersible. “We run the whole thing with this game controller,” Rush told CBS.
“It seems like this submersible has some elements of MacGyver-y, jerry-riggedness,” David Pogue, a CBS reporter, said on the segment. “I mean you’re putting construction pipes as ballasts.”
Safety Not Guaranteed After the announcement that the crew went missing, Pogue took to Twitter to further highlight some of the disconcerting facets of the submersible and OceanGate’s overall operation, including the fact that the craft—at least the one he went on—doesn’t have any kind of emergency location transmitter (ELT). These devices are typically carried aboard air and watercraft in case of emergencies, and emit distinct signals that allow rescuers to find lost and injured victims.
This is such a basic and essential item for nearly any sea voyage that it calls into question the decision-making ability of Rush and the company at large. Rush would later dismissively tell CBS that there was a limit to the amount of safety measures these vessels should have.
“You know, there’s a limit,” he told the broadcaster. “At some point, safety is just pure waste. I mean if you don’t just want to be safe, don’t get out of bed. Don’t get in your car. Don’t do anything. At some point, you’re going to take some risk and it really is a risk-reward question. I think I can do this just as safely by breaking the rules.”
That’s not the only damning revelation about the sub’s onboard technologies to come to light recently. In 2018, executives at other submersible vehicle companies signed a letter to Rush warning “the current ‘experimental’ approach” that the company was using to build its vessels like the Titan could result in “minor to catastrophic” issues, according to The New York Times.
Legal documents obtained by The New Republic further revealed that an employee of OceanGate had complained about safety issues with regards to the Titan. The employee, David Lochride, was a submersible pilot and director of marine operation for the company, and was “responsible for the safety of all crew and clients,” according to a press release.
However, after voicing his concerns and refusing to approve crewed test voyages of the Titan, Lochridge was fired from and sued by the company for alleged disclosure of confidential information. “Given the prevalent flaws in the previously tested ⅓ scale model, and the visible flaws in the carbon end samples for the Titan, Lochridge again stressed the potential danger to passengers of the Titan as the submersible reached extreme depths,” the countersuit read. The two parties would later settle the dispute.
Given all these issues, it’s a wonder how a submersible like the Titan was given the greenlight to operate in the first place. Unfortunately, it seems as though OceanGate benefitted from a regulatory loophole: There were no regulations to begin with. Since the Titanic is in international waters, there are no laws that companies like OceanGate have to follow and comply with when it comes to their submersibles.
That’s how we get an “experimental, submersible vessel that has not been approved or certified by any regulatory body and could result in physical injury, disability, emotional trauma, or death,” as the waiver form from OceanGate that Pogue signed on the CBS profile said.
“This unit never met international safety standards because it was both innovative and experimental,” said Hendrick, the former Green Beret rescue training chief who currently runs a company that trains people in water rescue. “It doesn’t have a beacon to send out a signal to tell our Coast Guard where it is. The thing is supposed to have its own ability to surface, but if its electrical system shortcircuited because of salt water getting into it, that system doesn’t work anymore. We know from other people who have been interviewed that there are people who have been on this unit and the dive didn’t last an hour, they went back because of mechanical difficulties.”
So now we have something that looks startlingly like the maiden—and final—voyage of the Titanic. It too was an experimental ship that was considered a technological and engineering marvel at its time. It was one that allowed some of the world’s wealthiest and esteemed individuals to purchase a ticket and set out on a great adventure on the Atlantic Ocean. However, it also lacked basic safety tools that ultimately doomed it and 1,500 passengers to a cold, watery death.
It’s a grim and sobering lesson—but worth remembering: History doesn’t repeat itself—but it often rhymes.
Aircraft black boxes send out an ultra-sonic ping that sonar equipment can pick up if the box is underwater. The technology is there, and I’m guessing not super expensive. Seems like basic equipment for a commercial submersible designed to carry passengers.
He really SAID THAT??
He’s an IDIOT!
OMG...
Sum of all fears...like being buried alive.
Yes. “A bunch of 50 year-old white guys with military submarine experience” would have quickly determined that the ‘adventure’ was far too risky, and kept a few people alive. Middle-aged while guys just don’t know how to have any fun...
Only a 50 year-old white guy would think of such a thing!.........................
International waters... Also most ships have their feet held to the fire by the folks who insure them - not by the flags they sail under.
My guess is the company was NOT able to get insurance. Companies that insure ships don’t mess around ...
I’m scratching “seeing what’s left of the Titanic” off my bucket list ...
... or maybe just moving “dying in a minisubmarine” down to the very bottom of the list ...
“The Titan is made of a combination of carbon fiber and titanium...”
Yeah and those were combined with an adhesive. I don’t know, maybe it really is a “super glue” but I, for one, wouldn’t trust an adhesive to keep the hull of my submersible together at 4,000 feet. I just have a mental image of a elephant stepping on a model airplane....
“I thought all vessels had to be certified by the coastguard or government they are registered with.”
Well, what if they just didn’t register it?
Checkmate, governments!
“I wonder who is paying for the millions to send in the recovery vessels.”
I’m going to take a wild guess and say probably the family of the billionaire who was onboard.
That’s what I thought as well. I saw the video of when they put it together.
The titanium front dome with window is not, according to one article, guaranteed by it’s manufacturer for the depths that the Titanic is at...................
I know a guy (also in Seattle, and a 60 year old white guy) that designs and builds submersible drill rigs that can be propelled to the ocean floor and drill into the sea floor a ways (100 feet?).
He was showing me the control system which was based around a gaming chair and gaming controls which he also bragged about how inexpensive they were compared to other systems.
Of course the chair and operator are on a nice ship at the surface while the drill rig is just a “robot” down in the depths.
Plus the heat. You might think it would be freezing on the bottom of the ocean but remember the gas laws. Lots of pressure on a fixed volume of gas = lots of heat too.
“One could say it’s a good training exercise for the Navy & CG.”
Maybe they’ll finally find that missing MH370 aircraft.
It was only used in international waters. A loophole I suppose.
They've had problems, but they've kept it safe with frequent inspections, disassembling and reassembling it over and over again.
It was built by General Mills of all people, but it's made out of more than cardboard and glue.
I do not believe you can deliver oxygen or any gas mixture through a hose to 12,000’ depth.
Some better informed FReeper please correct me if that’s wrong.
It looks like a big grub. Maybe a giant squid tried to take a bite.
The gravity of this situation aside it annoys me a bit when some ‘reporter’ offers his less than helpful opinion of the design of such a complicated device. Most folks in the ‘journalism’ business don’t know a crowbar from a cow but he feels that using scrap metal pipes for ballast qualifies as jerry-rigging. What does he think ballast is for? Ballast is usually dropped when the sub wants to return to the surface. Is the sub owner supposed to use custom designed gold bars for something that is going to be dropped into the depths and never retrieved? idiots ...
The same for the game controller that manages the sub’s navigation. Has anyone watched their kids play video games? There are more than enough switches and buttons to control a small sub’s attitude, speed, and direction. IMHO the game controller is a far better option than a laptop running Windoze 11.
Also from the article.
The Titan is operated from the inside by a single round button that turns from red to green when pushed: “It should be like an elevator,” CEO Stockton Rush told Pogue in 2022, adding: “It shouldn’t take a lot of skill.”
Later in the video, Rush points to some piping inside the vessel saying he purchased it from RV supplier Camping World, and says “we run the whole thing” using a video game controller—Pogue also shows the vessel uses construction pipes as ballast.
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