THE OCEANGATE TITAN SUBMERSIBLE DISASTER:

On Sunday, 18 June 2023, A submersible known as Titan which is owned by a submarine tech company Oceangate set off from St John’s, Newfoundland, Canada on a mission to visit and explore the wreckage of Titanic on the ocean floor.

The Titan which is a 22-foot carbon-fiber and titanium craft was deployed into the ocean by a Canadian expedition ship, the M.V. Polar Prince, to travel nearly 13,000 feet down to the shipwreck site, on the North Atlantic Ocean floor off Newfoundland.

The descent was supposed to take 2 hours 30 minutes and ascent after exploration was also supposed to take the same time frame. Sadly, The Titan lost contact with the surface ship an hour and 45 minutes after it started to dive on Sunday,

THE BACKGROUND STORY:
The expedition crewed by 5 men was to descend over 12,500ft to the ocean floor where the wreckage of the R.M.S. Titanic, the biggest steamship in the world at the time, hit an iceberg four days into its first trans-Atlantic voyage in April 1912, and sank to the bottom of the ocean killing more than 1,500 people.

After it sank, The Titanic wreck lay undisturbed on the ocean floor for over 73 years until it was discovered in pieces in 1985, about 400 miles off Newfoundland at the floor of the ocean.

Since its discovery, the wreck of the Titanic has become a tourist attraction of some sort to marine researchers, scientists, tourists and wealthy thrill seekers.

On board the Titan were five people who wanted to explore the Titanic wreck and they are:

1. Stockton Rush: CEO of OceanGate, the company responsible for organizing the tour and providing the submersible. OceanGate charges $250,000.00 per person for this exclusive experience, with Rush personally serving as the pilot. Greg Stone, a renowned ocean scientist and close friend of Rush, lauded him as a visionary in submersible technology.

Stockton Rush previously had experience in aviation – becoming "the youngest jet transport rated pilot in the world" at age 19 in 1981, according to his bio on the OceanGate website.

He became an F-15 flight test engineer and later worked with sonar and wireless technologies for marine applications.

"In 1989, Rush personally built a Glasair III experimental aircraft, which he still owns and flies," according to OceanGate. "He obtained his BSE in Aerospace Engineering from Princeton University in 1984, and his MBA from the U.C. Berkeley Haas School of Business in 1989."

Greg Stone, a longtime ocean scientist and friend of Rush, described him as "a real pioneer" in submersible innovation.

2. Paul Henry Nargeolet: A former officer in the French Navy and an expert on the Titanic. Nargeolet has undertaken 37 dives to the wreck in the past and played a pivotal role in the recovery of 5,000 Titanic artifacts.

3 & 4. Shahzada and Suleman Dawood: A father-and-son duo hailing from a prominent Pakistani family. Their company, Dawood Hercules Corp., headquartered in Karachi, is involved in diverse sectors such as agriculture, petrochemicals, and telecommunication infrastructure.

5. Hamish Harding: A British billionaire who currently resides in Dubai and serves as the chairman of Action Aviation, a reputable aircraft brokering company.

Due to the depth of the Titanic wreckage, visiting and exploring the site is difficult and expensive. For proper perspective, Human divers wearing specialized equipment and breathing helium-rich air mixtures can safely reach depths of just a few hundred feet below the surface before having to succumb to decompression. A couple of hundred feet deeper, light from the sun can no longer penetrate the water and the pressure at that point will kill any human who ventures that deep and that is why those descending below 800-1000 feet must be inside a specialized made submersible to be able to survive.

This is why a boarding ticket in the Titan submersible cost $250,000 per passenger who want to go on Deep Ocean dives and exploration.

RESCUE MISSION:
The desperate search and rescue operation tried to find the submersible before its oxygen supply run out on Thursday morning.

Over 10 aircrafts, 4 submarines, 6 large vessels, 14 small boats, 3 underwater RVs and 8 sonar buoys were involved in the search for the vessel in the hope that the Titan will be found intact, rescuing it but everything was against time. The US Navy’s deep sea salvage system, Fadoss was deployed alongside a remotely operated vehicle called Curv-21 (cable-controlled undersea recovery vehicle). This 2.4-meter (8ft) craft, about the size of a large refrigerator, can operate as far down as 6km (20,000ft).

Recovering the missing Titan submersible and bringing its crew to safety in time using the latest advanced deep-sea rescue equipment was an extremely difficult task. Even if Titan was located, a successful rescue would require remote-controlled vehicles (ROVs) capable of allowing operators on the surface a clear view of the submersible’s location, any obstacles that may be present and where to attach cables capable of lifting it thousands of meters through the water.

ASSUMPTIONS
If the Titan and its five-person crew did arrive at the Titanic wreck, they will be located 3,800 meters (12,500ft) below the surface on the seabed – too deep for most ROVs to reach. Only a “tiny percentage of the world’s submarines operate that deeply”, according to David Marquet, a former US Navy submarine commander.

On Tuesday, rescue operations searching for the Titan submersible focused their efforts on a remote area of the North Atlantic where a series of underwater noises defined as “BANGING SOUNDS” was detected by Canadian P-3 aircraft on Tuesday and again on Wednesday. Sadly, just a few hours ago the sounds were dismissed as irrelevant and normal search within the wreck of the Titanic resumed.

The US Coast Guard and Canada were frantically trying to locate the vessel, which is said to have last "pinged" while above the Titanic wreckage. France also sent vessels to join the search and rescue mission.

FINDINGS
The Coast Guard has after searching over 10,000 square miles of ocean, debris has been found by The U.S. Coast Guard near the Titanic wreckage in search of the missing submersible. Everyone is unfortunately believed to be dead.

The Coast Guard used a submersible ROV (Remote Operated Vehicle) from the vessel horizon arctic which discovered the tail cone of the missing Titan Submersible approximately 1600ft (4876.8 meters) from the bow of the Titanic on the sea floor.

The ROV Subsequently found additional debris which is consistent with the catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber of the Titan Submersible.

The US Coast Guard continues the search to recover the remains of the dead and the imploded submersible.

SAFETY BREACHES
A former OceanGate pilot, David Lochridge, who was hired to run manned tests of submersibles, claimed five years ago in court papers that he was fired after he warned that the Titan’s carbon shell was not properly tested to ensure it could descend safely to 4,000 meters, the estimated depth said by Oceangate to explore the Titanic. The submersible was only certified to withstand a pressure of only 1,300 meters depth underwater.

In 2018, David Lochridge, OceanGate’s director of marine operations, filed a lawsuit against the company after he was fired for raising safety concerns. In court documents, Lochridge stated that the company’s testing and certification were insufficient and would “subject passengers to potential extreme danger in their vessels which he referred to as experimental submersibles”.

Also, a few years ago, leaders and stakeholders in the submersible industry who were uncomfortable over Oceangate’s indifference to standards and safety issues sent a letter to Stockton Rush, the Oceangate CEO, warning him that "the current 'experimental approach' of the company could result in problems ranging 'from minor to catastrophic.'

The letter was sent by the Manned Underwater Vehicles committee of the Marine Technology Society, which is a 60-year-old trade group that promotes and moderates the development of ocean technology.

It remains unclear if Mr. Rush, or a fellow employee, responded to the letter, and there was no additional information on why the company's approach was considered dangerous by the group as far back as 2018.
However, the most damning issue facing ocean gate is the 2018 revelation from David Lochridge over "safety concerns" and “quality control issues” over the Titan vessel and the fact that he was reportedly "met with hostility" before being sacked from the company for daring to question the CEO and executive management over safety standards of the OceanGate vessels.

David Lochridge and the leadership of the Manned Underwater Vehicles committee of the Marine Technology Society have now provided documented evidence to the authorities highlighting their earlier warnings to the management of Oceangate which was ignored and even punished in the case of David Lochridge.

It is also revealed that the vessel Titan can only be locked from the outside. The only door to the vessel is sealed off by bolts applied from the outside, there’s no way to unlock it from the inside, and there is no way to escape, even if the vessel rises to the surface. The passengers cannot get out of the sub without a crew on the outside opening it up and letting them out. A catastrophic design flaw.

Another shocking revelation is the missing Titan submersible operated by a cheap video game controller which can be purchased for just £42 on Amazon. Experts insist that at £42, it might not be the piece of equipment you’d expect in a dangerous 13,000ft dive to the bottom of the sea.

Aside from the cheap controller controversy, for the expensive amount of money it costs to do these dives, there should at least be some sonar detection system installed, like 'black boxes' on aircraft, to ping where they were when the distress signal was sent and thereby allow more time to plot how the vessel can be retrieved.

Experts describe it as shocking that there is no such location detection technology or tracking device in the vessel despite the huge price tag.

Passengers previously onboard the OceanGate submersible that ventures to the wreck of the Titanic have revealed how they were asked to sign a waiver that admits the vessel has not been verified by a professional or regulatory body.

CBS journalist David Pogue, who boarded craft to visit the wreckage of the Titanic last year, said that among the paperwork shown to potential passengers was a waiver that stated: "This experimental vessel has not been approved or certified by any regulatory body, and could result in physical injury, emotional trauma, or death."

Another past client of Oceangate, Mike Reiss, an American television writer and producer also reported that he did three separate dives with OceanGate including one to the Titanic and each time he was made to sign a massive waiver that he could die on the trip and the company was not to be held liable.

QUESTIONS:
Lots of unanswered questions continue to linger through the minds of regulators, industry players, Scientists, explorers and well-wishers if this incident could have been avoided.

MY TAKE
With my experience as a scientist, researcher, inventor and techpreneur, I believe accidents or implosions will not stop the advancement of technology, explorations and research but regulations must be adhered to for the protection of lives, property and the world at large.

Research will take on the implosion risk of this incident through foreinsic investigations and find a solution just as:

The Columbia Disaster: What Happened and What NASA Learned
https://www.space.com/19436-columbia-disaster.html

The Unsinkable Titanic

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnb75tuyy4c

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© Kay Dawutey