Was Titan 'Rushed' to wreck amid unsinkable complacency?

Owing to the inherent risks involved, submarine service is generally perceived to be unsafe. However, keeping in view the stringent safety standards and oversights at all levels, submarining has been made very safe. That’s why, we rarely come across such occurrences as the sinking of the Titan. However, it was not a submarine, but rather a submersible, constructed for limited undersea applications ie tourism exploratory missions.

Owing to its compact size, very few facilities are provided onboard. These subs are operated in consort with a support ship (mother ship) that provides launching and recovery, navigation, communication, logistics, and on-scene assistance in distress. Prior to this Titan mission, the company that owned the sub had conducted over 200 successful missions, including 10 dives by the ill-fated vessel.

The unfortunate incident of Titan that claimed five valuable lives on June 18 had its genesis in the inception of OceanGate, an American tourism company co-founded by Stockton Rush in 2009, operated on the basis of corporate commercialism psyche. The company initially acquired a submersible, Antipodes, and later built two of its own — Cyclops 1 and Titan.

In 2021, OceanGate began taking paying tourists in the Titan to visit the ‘unsinkable’ Titanic’s shipwreck at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. The company had established its credentials well in the exotic maritime tourism industry. As of 2022, the price per passenger on an OceanGate expedition had risen to $250,000 or about 7 crore rupees.

The mother ship, Polar Prince, sailed from the city of St John’s in Canada's Newfoundland island on June 16 with four thrill-seeking tourists — Hamish Harding, Shahzada Dawood (a prominent Pakistani businessman and philanthropist), his son Suleman Dawood, Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet. Meanwhile, the company’s CEO, Stockton Rush, acted as the pilot.

The next day, the ship arrived at the wreck location of Titanic, around 400 nautical miles (740 kilometres) south of Newfoundland, which is lying on the seabed of the North Atlantic at 3,800 metres (12,460ft) depth since April 15, 1912.

On June 18, Sunday morning, the ill-starred submersible Titan initiated her descent at 8:00am EDT (11pm PST). Dr Rush started steering Titan with the help of a Logitech video game controller towards the Titanic wreckage. With about seven hours of the mission duration, Titan was expected to be in the visual range of the wreck in two hours.

But communication with the mother ship was lost within the initial one hour and 45 minutes. It did not raise alarm bells since it was taken as 'business as usual' due known fact of thrusters’ interference with communication systems. Despite repeated communication failures in the past, no efforts were made to rectify this anomaly.

An uneasy situation started developing when the Titan did not surface by 3:00pm EDT on completion of its scheduled seven hours of dive time. After an unsuccessful search of two hours and 45 minutes, the mother ship alerted shore authorities including the United States Coast Guard at Cape Cod about 900NM away from the dive position. The disappearance of the submersible triggered extensive SAR (Search and Rescue) efforts.

US and Canadian maritime forces swung into action for a very complex SAR operation with 10 ships and four aircraft; including two advanced long-range reconnaissance P-3C Orions. Later, France also deployed Atalante, a ship with a deep-diving Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV).

On Tuesday, June 20, Canadian P-3C detected some banging sounds on its hydrophones at 30-minute intervals. The available Canadian ROV was directed towards the area of sound signals. Meanwhile, received signals were sent to US underwater sound experts, who later classified these as ‘non-submersible’.

By then, experts had started speculating about a major-scale accident onboard Titan with the probability of fire, flooding, power loss, or entanglement with floating fishing nets. As the 96-hour limit of oxygen supply onboard Titan was approaching, the panic amongst the SAR forces started setting in. 

After a hectic coordinated search, the first breakthrough came on Thursday around 11:48am when the Canadian ROV found traces of debris near the Titanic wreck. ROV discovered five major pieces of the sub including its titanium tail-cone. At 4:00pm, it was officially announced that five members of Titan were instantly killed in a ‘catastrophic implosion’. The debris pattern was also “consistent with a catastrophic loss of pressure chamber”. At this point, the SAR mission was called off and the focus was shifted towards accident investigation.

Occurrences of this magnitude are usually caused by a series of unregulated practices, inactions, errors and omissions attributable to human, material or violations of SoPs. In Titan’s case, it was a combination of all three. This mystery can be unplugged by identifying a trail of errors committed at various tiers.

Titan’s cylindrical portion of the hull was made of carbon fibre material instead of titanium alloy, which was a risky proposition as it could not withstand the successive dives’ (material) fatigue. Reportedly, the carbon fibre material used in Titan’s construction had expired shelf life as well. On completion of its test dives in 2020, Titan’s hull reportedly began to show signs of cyclic fatigue.

Yet another design flaw was that the Titan used to be bolted from the outside after passengers were slipped in with no possibility of opening the hatch from the inside contrary to the safe submarining practices. Moreover, Titan was not equipped with a locator buoy, essential for localisation in case of disability.

David Lochridge, the OceanGate director of marine operations, had expressed his concerns about the non-conduct of NDT (nondestructive testing) to ascertain hull integrity. He also voiced reservations about the design limitations of the front viewport. Unfortunately, he was expelled by the company CEO at short notice.

Rush did not consider certification of Titan’s design from a renowned classification society despite advice from the US-based ‘Marine Technology Society’ in 2018. Instead, he used big names like NASA, APL, Boeing etc to authenticate design credibility.

To cut the cost, Rush preferred ‘off the shelf’ components instead of military specs. He was too possessive and complacent about the design of RTMS (Real Time Acoustic Monitoring System). He would say if everything fails, RTMS will bring the Titan to the surface. Therefore, he termed Titan’s design as ‘invulnerable’, something consistent with Titanic’s ‘unsinkability’. Alas! Both ‘unsinkable’ and ‘invulnerable’ are lying on the ocean bed, side by side at a depth of 3,800 metres.

With all his intellect and professional acumen in engineering, Rush had become overconfident and complacent with regard to safety standards. He used to express his views about the US Passenger Vessel Safety Act of 1993 as "needlessly prioritised passenger safety over commercial innovation".

Generally, specialised vehicles are piloted by a well-qualified crew. Likewise, the test pilots of newly developed vehicles are the best selected so as to effectively deal with emergencies. In this case, Rush himself steered and didn’t employ a qualified operator.

Lastly, the role and responsibilities of countries and authorities to oversee Titan’s certification and safe operation have become highly questionable. Their failure to exercise a comprehensive regulatory system is opined to be the ‘contributory cause’ of the accident. This trail of errors and omissions could have been disrupted by the system.

It can be safely concluded that the ‘main cause’ of this occurrence was complacency on the part of Rush. He ventured into the unknown territory — diving depths beyond Titan’s capacity and paid the price.

With all the media hype during the past week, the Titan incident has exceedingly highlighted the importance of adherence to safety standards, protocols and regulatory framework at all levels. So far, only preliminary analysis has been done on the basis of facts projected in the media. Much more is likely to come to light by technical experts on the basis of primarily two ongoing inquiries by US and Canadian Coast Guards respectively.

Ahmed Saeed is a retired vice admiral of the Pakistan Navy’s submarine service. He currently serves as director general at the National Institute of Maritime Affairs. He can be reached at [email protected]

— Banner and thumbnail image by AFP