Titan Submersible Explosion

I have followed this incident since the day it went missing. I read everything about it and watched every video. Like most people, I was really hoping that they would be found alive. But as the days passed, I feared that they might be suffocating at the bottom of the ocean. Then the possibility of an implosion crossed my mind.

On June 18 2023, Titan, a submersible operated by American tourism and expeditions company OceanGate, imploded during an expedition to view the wreck of the Titanic in the North Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada. It actually imploded not far from the wreck of the Titanic. On board the submersible were Stockton Rush, the American CEO of OceanGate; Paul-Henri Nargeolet, a French deep-sea explorer and Titanic expert; Hamish Harding, a British businessman; Shahzada Dawood, a Pakistani-British businessman; and Dawood’s son Suleman. Suleman’s mother originally was supposed to go on the exploration with her Husband, but she gave her ticket to her son, so he could spend time with his father. Suleman apparently, didn’t want to go on the exploration and was scared, but did it to please his father. When you think about it, it’s really sad. This young man had his whole life ahead of him.

Communication between Titan and its mother ship, Polar Prince, was lost 1 hour 45 minutes into the dive. Authorities were alerted when it failed to resurface at the scheduled time later that day. After the submersible had been missing for four days, a remotely operated underwater vehicle (ROV) discovered a debris field containing parts of Titan, about 500 meters (1,600 ft) from the bow of the Titanic. The search area was informed by the United States Navy’s (USN) sonar detection of an acoustic signature consistent with an implosion around the time communications with the submersible ceased, suggesting the hull had imploded.

Contrary to all the videos out there and theories, they were not aware of what was going to happen. It happened so suddenly that they did not feel anything. The transcripts that were posted in videos on Youtube about the situation happening are all fake. At first I thought that the viewport, which safety requirement was not met, might have cracked under pressure. But after watching a Youtube video of an implosion of the haul, I changed my mind. It describes very well what might have happened, how and why. I will share the video at the end of this post. With every video I watched about the incident, this one is by far the most well made, that makes the most sense.

I think Stockton was very passionate about what he was doing, but unfortunately did not have the money to fund his project properly, cutting corners that ultimately sealed his fate. He was using people to help fund his project, calling them “crew” so that he could take passengers down to the Titanic. The primary task of a submersible is to not implode but to reach the surface, which the Titan was trying to do. It seems it was descending too fast and had a very hard time trying to ascend, which makes me believe that it was taking on water.

A month before the implosion, Rush had confessed that he’d “gotten the carbon fiber used to make the Titan at a big discount from Boeing because it was past its shelf-life for use in airplanes. “Carbon fiber makes noise,” Rush told David Pogue, a CBS News correspondent, last summer, during one of the Titanic expeditions. “It crackles. The first time you pressurize it, if you think about it—of those million fibers, a couple of them are weak. They shouldn’t have made the team.” He spoke of signs of hull breakage as if it were routine. “The first time we took it to full pressure, it made a bunch of noise. The second time, it made very little noise.” Fibers do not regenerate between dives. Nevertheless, Rush seemed unconcerned. “It’s a huge amount of pressure from the point where we’d say, ‘Oh, the hull’s not happy,’ to when it implodes,” he noted. “You just have to stop your descent.”

It’s not clear that Rush could always stop his descent. Once, as he piloted passengers to the wreck, a malfunction prevented Rush from dropping weights. Passengers calmly discussed sleeping on the bottom of the ocean, thirty-eight hundred meters down; after twenty-four hours, a drop-weight mechanism would dissolve in the seawater, allowing the submersible to surface. Eventually, Rush managed to release the weights manually, using a hydraulic pump.

Another time, one of the thrusters had been installed in the wrong direction. “Oh, my God,” Griffith muttered. One of the thrusters had been installed in the wrong direction. “The only thing I can do is a three-sixty,” he said.

The Titan’s viewport was made of acrylic and seven inches thick. “That’s another thing where I broke the rules,” Rush said. He went on to refer to a “very well-known” acrylic expert, Jerry D. Stachiw, who wrote an eleven-hundred-page manual called “Handbook of Acrylics for Submersibles, Hyperbaric Chambers, and Aquaria.” “It has safety factors that—they were so high, he didn’t call them safety factors. He called them conversion factors,” Rush said. “According to the rules,” he added, his viewport was “not allowed.”

In May, Rush invited Victor Vescovo to join his Titanic expedition. Victor is one of the best known deep sea explorers. He once served in the United States Navy. In December 2018, he became the first person to reach the deepest point of the Atlantic Ocean. On February 4, 2019, he became the first person to reach the bottom of the Southern Ocean, in the southern portion of the South Sandwich Trench. On April 16, 2019, Vescovo dived to the bottom of the Sunda Trench south of Bali, reaching the bottom of the Indian Ocean. “I turned him down,” Vescovo said. “I didn’t even want the appearance that I was sanctioning his operation.” But his friend—the British billionaire Hamish Harding, whom Vescovo had previously taken in the Limiting Factor to the bottom of the Mariana Trench—signed up to be a “mission specialist.”

On the morning of June 18th, Rush climbed inside the Titan, along with Harding, the British Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood, and his nineteen-year-old son, Suleman, who had reportedly told a relative that he was terrified of diving in a submersible but would do so anyway, because it was Father’s Day. He carried with him a Rubik’s Cube so that he could solve it in front of the Titanic wreck. The fifth diver was P. H. Nargeolet, the Titanic expert.”

OceanGate declined to comment. But, in 2021, Stockton Rush told an interviewer that he would “like to be remembered as an innovator. I think it was General MacArthur who said, ‘You’re remembered for the rules you break.’ And I’ve broken some rules to make this.” He was sitting in the Titan’s hull, docked in the Port of St. John’s, the nearest port to the site where he eventually died. “The carbon fibre and titanium? There’s a rule you don’t do that. Well, I did.” 

He broke so many safety rules and it’s very sad that 5 people died because of it. I know they all signed waivers but it’s very sad.

What are your thoughts about this incident ?