Titan Submarine İncident

On June 18, 2023, Titan, a submarine operated by OceanGate , disappeared in international waters in the North Atlantic Ocean approximately 400 nautical miles (≌ 740 kilometers) off the Canadian territory of Newfoundland . The Titan was carrying five people participating in a tourist expedition to observe the Titanic wreck. Communication with Titan was lost 1 hour and 45 minutes into its dive into the debris field. [1] Authorities were notified of the incident when the submarine's occupants did not surface at the scheduled time. It was said that the submarine, which had 5 people on board, had an oxygen capacity of 4 days [2] and its wreckage was found dismembered 4 days after its disappearance. All 5 people lost their lives in the incident.

5 large pieces of the wrecked submarine were found approximately 500 meters away from the Titanic. Authorities claimed that this may have been caused by a large explosion . [4] Regarding the company's submarines, former director of maritime operations David Lochridge wrote a report stating that the submarine under development needed more testing and could endanger passengers if it reached "excessive depth," according to a 2018 lawsuit. OceanGate, on the other hand, fired Lochridge, who wrote the report, alleging negligence of the confidentiality agreement.

OceanGate

OceanGate is a private company founded in 2009 by Stockton Rush and Guillermo Söhnlein. Since 2010 , it has been transporting paying customers with commercial submarines off the coast of California , in the Gulf of Mexico and in the Atlantic Ocean. The company was headquartered in Everett , Washington , USA.
Rush realized that visiting shipwreck sites was a way to attract media attention, and in 2016 the company transported customers to a shipwreck for the first time, using the submarine Cyclops 1 to visit a wreck site.

Titan Submarine

Titan, OceanGate, Inc. It was a five-man submarine operated by . The 6.7-meter-long (22 ft), 10,432 kg (23,000 lb) ship is made of carbon fiber and titanium. The entire pressure vessel consisted of two titanium hemispheres, two matching titanium interface rings, and a 2.4-meter-long (7.9 ft) carbon fiber-wrapped cylinder with an internal diameter of 142 cm (56 in). A 380 mm diameter (15 in) acrylic window is installed in one of the titanium hemispherical end caps. In 2020, Rush stated that the hull's depth rating had been reduced to 3,000 m (9,800 ft) after showing signs of cyclic fatigue. In 2020 and 2021, Titan was rebuilt.
The Titan's steering wheel controls consisted of a Logitech F710 wireless gamepad with modified analog sticks. It would travel at up to 3 knots (5.6 km/h; 3.5 mph) using four electric thrusters, two arranged horizontally and two vertically.
As of 2023, OceanGate claimed on its website that Titan was "conceived and engineered by OceanGate Inc. in collaboration [with] experts from NASA, Boeing, and the University of Washington" (UW). A 1⁄3 scale model of the Cyclops 2 pressure vessel was built and tested at the Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) at the UW; the model was capable of sustaining a pressure of 4,285 psi (29.54 MPa; 291.6 atm), corresponding to a depth of approximately 3,000 m (9,800 ft). Following the disappearance of Titan in 2023, UW claimed that APL had no involvement in "the design, engineering, or testing of the Titan submersible." A Boeing spokesman also claimed that Boeing "is not a partner in Titan and did not design or build it." A NASA spokesperson said NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center has a Space Act Agreement with OceanGate, but "does not engage in testing and production through its workforce or facilities."
According to OceanGate, the ship included monitoring systems to constantly monitor the strength of the hull. The ship had life support for five crew members for 96 hours. There was no onboard navigation system; Tracking the Titan's position relative to its target, the support ship sent text messages to the Titan providing distances and bearings.
According to OceanGate, the Titan had seven backup systems, including droppable ballasts, a balloon and thrusters, intended to return the ship to the surface in the event of an emergency. Some of the backup systems are designed to work even if everyone aboard the diver is unconscious; There were sandbags held by hooks that dissolved after a certain number of hours in the water to release the sandbags, ideally allowing the ship to surface. An OceanGate investor explained that if the ship does not automatically rise after elapsed time, those inside the ship can help release the ballast by either tilting the ship back and forth or using a pneumatic pump to loosen the weights.

Crew and passengers

*Stockton Rush , American submarine pilot and businessman. He was the CEO and founding member of OceanGate.
*Prince Davut , a Pakistani - British businessman (of Dawood Hercules Corporation). He was one of the richest men in Pakistan .
*Süleyman Davut is the 19-year-old son of Prince Davut.
*Hamish Harding, British businessman, aviator and space tourist . He had previously descended into the Mariana Trench , broken the Guinness World Record for circumnavigating the Earth, and flew into space with Blue Origin NS-21 in 2022.
*Paul-Henri Nargeolet , a former French Navy commander, diver , submarine pilot.

Big mistake in material selection

But the crucial mistake was made in the choice of material: OceanGate produced Titan not from pure titanium or steel like other bathyscaphes, but from carbonfiber composite materials in addition to titanium, in order to reduce weight and facilitate underwater control. Carbonfiber is an incredibly durable material under tension forces that you can imagine pulling in two directions; However, it has much lower durability under the pressure you can imagine by squeezing it from two sides. Moreover, since it is "composite", that is, it is produced by combining more than one material, it is very likely to form microcracks under repeated forces and these cracks will cause catastrophic destruction. Every time Titan dived and emerged from the Titanic wreck, the weight of a 3,800-meter water column was weighing on him. This is a force as high as 400 elephants suddenly sitting on you. When composite materials are subjected to this load, they gradually weaken, and if adequate checks are not made (which Rush skipped all of these checks), they will split and collapse at some point. This might not have been a problem if it were on the water surface; However, an error that occurs kilometers below the water causes an event we call "implosion", that is, "implosion explosion". That's what happened to Titan.

''In 2021, its thrusters broke, and in 2022, the communication system failed. In the same year, the navigation system did not work. So Titan suffered greatly from technical problems''

Titan and its 5 passengers were launched from the Polar Prince ship, a few tens of kilometers away from the Titanic wreck, at 8 am local time, which is 7 hours behind us, on June 18, 2023. The planned landing was at 4 a.m.; but for some reason the dive was delayed by 4 hours. Probably as in previous dives, last minute problems had to be solved; We don't know yet. This was another of the company's chronic problems: A proper protocol had still not been established, and the problems encountered were being solved at that moment by chance. For example, during the dive in May 2021, the thrusters broke down, the problem was not fully understood. During the dive in April 2022, the communication system malfunctioned and subsequently corrected itself; The reason was not understood. The navigation system broke down during the dive in June 2022... As you can see, Titan was a prototype suffering from technical problems.

But none of these problems prevented British-Pakistani businessman Prince Davud, vice president of the Engro Company, and his son Süleyman Davud, and British billionaire Hamish Harding, from boarding the bathyscaphe by paying 250 thousand dollars each. The other two passengers were the company's CEO, Stockton Rush, and French explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet, who also served as the pilot on previous dives. There is a lot to say about these people, but while hundreds of people die at sea every year trying to reach a better life in another country, I will not go into detail about the lives of these ultra-rich and romanticize their deaths during a trip they took just for pleasure. What interests me is the series of scientific and engineering errors that caused this disaster... After the passengers boarded the vehicle, the titanium-structured bow, which included a 380-millimeter viewing window, was permanently closed by connecting it to the body with 17 titanium bolts. These bolts were impossible to remove from the inside; They could only be opened from the outside. So Titan was designed to be a literal tomb for its passengers.

Event

At 8 o'clock, Titan started its 3,800-meter dive, which would last 2 hours. Every 15 minutes, the mother ship would send a text message to the Polar Prince, reporting its status and location. Polar Prince took 7 of them and after 1 hour and 45 minutes, there was no signal from the ship.

The dive was expected to last 7 hours in total; So they must have returned at 3pm. It was hoped that this would happen again, as similar errors had occurred before but managed to surface.
What was expected did not happen.

At 20 minutes before 6 pm, the Coast Guard was finally informed and search and rescue efforts began. The most critical problem was oxygen... The 96 hours of oxygen on Titan gave a period of 3.5 to 4.5 days, depending on how it was managed, and it had already been 10 hours... The next day, June 19, search efforts began by both air and water. it was continued.

The next day, June 20, a Canadian submarine tracking plane, the Lockheed P-3 Orion, detected high-frequency knocking sounds occurring at 30-minute intervals. Other sonars were also able to capture this. These were announced on June 21; but it could not be determined exactly what it belonged to. At this point, the incident had turned into an international operation. Other submersibles that could easily dive into the Titanic wreck also arrived in the region.
At 6 a.m. on June 22, the 96-hour period expired. Even if the bathyscaphe was found, its occupants would probably have suffocated due to lack of oxygen. After 8 more hours, pieces determined to belong to Titan were detected a few hundred meters away from the Titanic wreck. And these pieces contain the evidence that reveals the truth that brings together what I have been telling you from the beginning: The bathyscaphe collapsed in on itself and broke apart.

Those who died did not even realize that moment...

According to calculations, the collapse of the bathyscaphe under high pressure occurred at a speed of 670 meters per second and lasted only a few milliseconds. It takes at least 25 milliseconds for the brain to react even to instinctive stimuli, and when higher-level cognitive functions such as perception are involved, this period extends to 150 milliseconds. So the crew probably died before they knew what had happened. Of course, they must have heard a lot of crunching before the final collapse. So maybe they knew their end would come, but they died before they could experience the moment when that end came.

discovery of debris

At 1:18 p.m. (15:48 UTC) on 22 June the U.S. Coast Guard's Northeast Sector announced that a debris field had been found near the wreck of the Titanic.The debris, located by Pelagic Research Services' Odysseus 6k ROV five hours into its search, was later confirmed to be part of the submersible.At 4:30 p.m. (19:00 UTC) – at a U.S. Coast Guard press conference in Boston – the Coast Guard said that the loss of the submersible was due to an implosion of the pressure chamber and that pieces of Titan had been found on the sea floor about 1,600 feet (about 500 metres) northeast of the bow of the Titanic.
The identified debris consisted of the tail cone (not part of the pressure vessel) and the forward and aft end bells – both part of the pressure vessel intended to protect the crew from the ocean environment.According to the U.S. Coast Guard, 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 US Coast Guard said that 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".