Search and rescue teams are racing against the clock as they attempt to find a missing submersible and its five-person crew that was slated to explore the wreck of the Titanic nearly 13,000 feet under the North Atlantic on June 18. The U.S. Coast Guard said that the 22-foot-long deep-sea vessel, dubbed the Titan, only has a few days worth of oxygen.
The craft is owned and operated by OceanGate, a private submersible company that offers chartered trips to the wreckage of the Titanic to customers for $250,000 a seat. It set out on its voyage on Sunday morning, but lost contact with its research ship the Polar Prince about 1 hour and 45 minutes into its journey.
Things are looking bleak. Even in the best conditions, voyages on and under the North Atlantic are fraught with the kinds of dangers that the Titanic itself faced including freezing water temperatures, chaotic weather conditions, and surging waves and currents. It’s not helped that the technology that went into building the Titan was experimental, unregulated, risky, and potentially life-threatening. This not only makes diving operations like the one undertaken by the Titan fraught, but it also dangerously complicates search and rescue operations.
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“We are doing everything that we can do to make sure that we can locate and rescue those on board,” U.S. Coast Guard Rear Admiral John Mauger said at a press briefing. He later told Good Morning America that the international team of search and rescue officials have scoured an area “about the size of Connecticut” so far.
Walt ‘Butch’ Hendrick, a former safety coordinator for the U.S. Army’s Green Beret Diver Trainer Program, told The Daily Beast that if the sub is entangled by the Titanic wreckage or something else, a remotely operated underwater vehicle (ROV) could theoretically cut through four inches of steel to cut it loose—but it needs to be fitted with the right tools to be able to do so.
And things would look even grim if the sub simply isn’t able to surface on its own. “These ROVs are not capable of bringing it back up if it’s a solid dead weight, and we don’t have a 13,000-foot cable to pull it back to the surface,” said Hendrick.
Indeed, the issues facing the Titan, its crew, and its rescue operation can likely be attributed to the submersible’s design—and potentially deadly lack of safety features.
Sea (Un)Worthy
When the Titanic sank in 1912, it left a debris field of ship parts roughly a mile long. It was from these breadcrumbs that oceanographer and retired naval officer Robert Ballard was able to finally discover the wreckage of the ill-fated steamship in 1985 more than 73 years after it sank.
To reach it, Ballard and two crew members rode aboard a deep-ocean research submersible owned by the U.S. Navy known as the DSV Alvin—allowing them to slowly sink more than 2 miles below the Atlantic Ocean surface to gaze on the wreckage of the Titanic for the first time ever.
At that depth, the pressure is immense—roughly the equivalent to a building made of solid lead the size of the Empire State Building pressing down on any vessel below it. So the hull of any submersible needs to be strong enough to withstand the enormous weight of the water above it.
The Titan is made of a combination of carbon fiber and titanium, according to OceanGate’s website. At roughly 22 feet long and 9 feet high, it’s designed to carry a pilot and four other passengers to levels as deep as 13,123 feet at a clip of 3.5 mph. The submersible is roughly as big as a minivan inside. It provides enough room for five people to sit in a cramped hull, with a small porthole peering out.
There’s a panel of screens so the crew can see a small portion of its surroundings—which is a good distraction from the tiny toilet for customers at the front of the sub. The panel allows the crew to communicate with the control room on the research vessel via an acoustic link. This allows the vessel to send text messages back and forth with the Titan. However, this is limited to telemetry data.
In a 2022 CBS Sunday Morning feature on OceanGate and its sub, company CEO Stockton Rush—who was identified as one of the crew members aboard the Titan on Tuesday—seemingly bragged about the “off-the-shelf components” that outfit the sub including a handle that he said he got from Camping World.
However, the item that caught much of the internet’s attention the most was a retrofitted third-party XBox 360 controller that the CEO said operates the entire submersible. “We run the whole thing with this game controller,” Rush told CBS.
“It seems like this submersible has some elements of MacGyver-y, jerry-riggedness,” David Pogue, a CBS reporter, said on the segment. “I mean you’re putting construction pipes as ballasts.”
Safety Not Guaranteed
After the announcement that the crew went missing, Pogue took to Twitter to further highlight some of the disconcerting facets of the submersible and OceanGate’s overall operation, including the fact that the craft—at least the one he went on—doesn’t have any kind of emergency location transmitter (ELT). These devices are typically carried aboard air and watercraft in case of emergencies, and emit distinct signals that allow rescuers to find lost and injured victims.
This is such a basic and essential item for nearly any sea voyage that it calls into question the decision-making ability of Rush and the company at large. Rush would later dismissively tell CBS that there was a limit to the amount of safety measures these vessels should have.
“You know, there’s a limit,” he told the broadcaster. “At some point, safety is just pure waste. I mean if you don’t just want to be safe, don’t get out of bed. Don’t get in your car. Don’t do anything. At some point, you’re going to take some risk and it really is a risk-reward question. I think I can do this just as safely by breaking the rules.”
That’s not the only damning revelation about the sub’s onboard technologies to come to light recently. In 2018, executives at other submersible vehicle companies signed a letter to Rush warning “the current ‘experimental’ approach” that the company was using to build its vessels like the Titan could result in “minor to catastrophic” issues, according to The New York Times.
Legal documents obtained by The New Republic further revealed that an employee of OceanGate had complained about safety issues with regards to the Titan. The employee, David Lochride, was a submersible pilot and director of marine operation for the company, and was “responsible for the safety of all crew and clients,” according to a press release.
However, after voicing his concerns and refusing to approve crewed test voyages of the Titan, Lochridge was fired from and sued by the company for alleged disclosure of confidential information. “Given the prevalent flaws in the previously tested ⅓ scale model, and the visible flaws in the carbon end samples for the Titan, Lochridge again stressed the potential danger to passengers of the Titan as the submersible reached extreme depths,” the countersuit read. The two parties would later settle the dispute.
Given all these issues, it’s a wonder how a submersible like the Titan was given the greenlight to operate in the first place. Unfortunately, it seems as though OceanGate benefitted from a regulatory loophole: There were no regulations to begin with. Since the Titanic is in international waters, there are no laws that companies like OceanGate have to follow and comply with when it comes to their submersibles.
That’s how we get an “experimental, submersible vessel that has not been approved or certified by any regulatory body and could result in physical injury, disability, emotional trauma, or death,” as the waiver form from OceanGate that Pogue signed on the CBS profile said.
“This unit never met international safety standards because it was both innovative and experimental,” said Hendrick, the former Green Beret rescue training chief who currently runs a company that trains people in water rescue. “It doesn’t have a beacon to send out a signal to tell our Coast Guard where it is. The thing is supposed to have its own ability to surface, but if its electrical system shortcircuited because of salt water getting into it, that system doesn’t work anymore. We know from other people who have been interviewed that there are people who have been on this unit and the dive didn’t last an hour, they went back because of mechanical difficulties.”
So now we have something that looks startlingly like the maiden—and final—voyage of the Titanic. It too was an experimental ship that was considered a technological and engineering marvel at its time. It was one that allowed some of the world’s wealthiest and esteemed individuals to purchase a ticket and set out on a great adventure on the Atlantic Ocean. However, it also lacked basic safety tools that ultimately doomed it and 1,500 passengers to a cold, watery death.
It’s a grim and sobering lesson—but worth remembering: History doesn’t repeat itself—but it often rhymes.
