ASIC - Titan Submersible - Catastrophic Incident

Titan Submersible

Stats of Titan

Name: TITAN (previously Known as Cyclops 2)

Owner / Company: OceanGate

Project Completion: 2018

Weight: 9,525 kg (21,000 lbs)

Speed: 3 knots (3-1/2 miles per hour)

Propeller: Electric Thrusters

Life-Support System: Enough to keep five people alive for up to 96 hours

Test depth: Up to 4,000 m (13,000 ft)

Capacity: 5 people

Crew: 1 x pilot, 1 x technical expert, 3 x mission specialists/passengers

Manufacturing Material:

Walls: Carbon-fiber walls (5 inches ~ 13 cm thickness)

Domes: Titanium Domes (capped at each end)

Development Status: Experimental (Risk of Injury or Death)

Length: 6.7 m (22 ft)

Beam: 2.8 m (9 ft 2 in)

Height: 2.5 m (8 ft 2 in)

History of Titan

In 2013, OceanGate began working with the Applied Physics Laboratory (APL-UW) at the University of Washington to develop a titanium-hulled composite carbon fiber submersible with the tentative name Cyclops 2; OceanGate signed a settlement with Spencer Composites in January 2017 for the carbon-composite cylinder. Spencer had previously constructed the composite pressure hull for Steve Fossett's single-person DeepFlight Challenger to a design by Graham Hawkes. Spencer Composites was given challenging performance targets for Cyclops 2, which was meant to withstand 6,600 psi (46 MPa) Spencer Composites was given challenging performance targets for the carbon-compo 450 atm) working service pressure with a factor of safety of 2.25 for its intended maximum depth of 4,000 m (13,120 ft), and it took six weeks to complete the design. Cyclops 2 was renamed Titan in March 2018; Rush referred to it as "an amazing engineering feat" when it was first released in 2018.

When Rush went to DOER Marine in 2015 to learn from "Project Deep Search," Liz Taylor, DOER's president, specifically told him not to use carbon fiber; She recalled that carbon fiber has "been proven to now no longer be very glad while it is being immersed to start with after which being hole at the internal or simply one environment at the internal and then having the tremendous pressure of the ocean trying to push in on it, it's not the right material." The Marine Technology Society's committee on Manned Underwater Vehicles wrote a private letter to Rush in March 2018, expressing concerns with the design of Titan and urging him to have the ship "classed" In 2018, he sent Rush an email warning him that Rush was "potentially placing yourself and your clients in a dangerous dynamic" as a result of the development cycle and his refusal to have the ship classified. He also said that in Rush's "race to Titanic," he was "mirroring that famous catch cry:' She cannot sink." In response, Rush referred to the email as "a serious personal insult" and criticized "the baseless cries of 'you are going to kill someone'". In 2019, OceanGate said withinside the submit that "the significant majority of marine (and aviation) injuries are a end result of operator error, now no longer mechanical failure" and argued that class targeted solely on the vessel's physical state rather than its corporate actions, which it characterized as a "constant, committed effort and a focused corporate culture" of "maintaining high-level operational safety." Journalist David Pogue, who took part in an OceanGate Titanic excursion in 2022, pointed out that The addition of such a beacon was discussed after the surface support vessel lost track of Titan "for about five hours" during his expedition. They could still send brief texts to the sub, but they needed to know its location. They turned off the ship's internet to prevent us from tweeting, making it quiet and tense. " Mike Reiss confirmed that the submersible lost contact on each of the four dives he had conducted with OceanGate and stated that "that seems to be just something baked into the system." For instance, despite landing just 460 meters (500 yards) from the wreck, Reiss reported that it took three hours to locate the Titanic during a single dive.

History of Incidents

When Titan became lost and could not locate the Titanic during a dive in 2022, reporter David Pogue was on board the surface ship. Pogue's report for CBS News Sunday Morning in December 2022 questioned Titan's safety and went viral on social media after the submersible lost contact with its support ship in June 2023. In the report, Pogue stated to Rush, "It seems like this submersible has some elements of MacGyver Jerry- He claimed that a $30 Logitech F710 wireless game controller with modified control sticks was used to steer and pitch the submersible and that construction pipes were used as ballast. During a subsequent dive to the Titanic in 2022, one of the thrusters on Titan was unintentionally installed backward, and the submersible began to spin in circles while attempting to advance close to the sea floor. According to court filings from November 2022, OceanGate reported that during a dive in 2022, the submersible experienced battery issues, necessitating manual attachment to a lifting platform, resulting in damage to external components, as documented by the BBC documentary Take Me to Titanic.

The Incident (18th Jun, 2023)

During an expedition to view the Titanic's wreck in the North Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada, on June 18, 2023, the submersible Titan, operated by the American tourism and expeditions company OceanGate, imploded. OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush was aboard the submersible; French deep-sea explorer and Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet; British billionaire businessman Hamish Harding; a Pakistani-British billionaire businessman named Shahzada Dawood; and Suleman, Dawood's son.

Correspondence with Titan was lost 1 hour and 45 minutes into its plunge. When it didn't show up at the scheduled time later that day, authorities were notified. A remotely operated underwater vehicle (ROV) discovered a Titanic-related debris field 500 meters (1,600 feet) from the Titanic's bow after the submersible had been missing for four days. The United States Navy's (USN) sonar detected an acoustic signature that suggested an implosion around the time communications with the submersible stopped, indicating that the pressure hull had imploded while Titan was sinking, resulting in the instantaneous deaths of all five occupants. This provided information for the search area.

The jump activity started on 18 June at 9:30 a.m. Newfoundland Sunlight Time (NDT), or 12:00 UTC. For the principal 90 minutes of the drop, Titan spoke with Polar Sovereign at regular intervals, however, correspondence halted after a recorded correspondence at 11:15 a.m. (13:45 UTC). James Cameron showed that almost certainly, the sub's initial admonition framework had made the travelers aware of an approaching delamination of the body. "We understand from within the community that they had dropped their ascent weights and were coming up, trying to manage an emergency," he continued. " A U.S. Navy acoustic detection machine designed to find army submarines detected an acoustic signature regular with an implosion hours after Titan submerged. The submersible became anticipated to resurface at 4:30 p.m. The U.S. Coast Guard was notified of the missing vessel at 7:10 p.m. (21:40 UTC). Titan had as much as ninety-six hours of breathable air delivered for its 5 passengers while it set out, which could have expired on the morning of June 22, 2023, if the submersible had remained intact. The Navy reviewed its acoustic statistics from that point and handed the records approximately the viable implosion occasion to the Coast Guard.