A US Coast Guard investigation reveals the full extent of the failures surrounding doomed submarine Titan, while safe sub journeys remain the norm for the rest of a well-regulated industry, says Triton Submarines’ CEO.
The end of the 2023 Titanic Survey Expedition was nearing, and OceanGate was not having a good season. Between poor weather and complications arising from towing the launch and recovery platform that held the submarine Titan, the expedition had not managed a single dive where the submarine was able to detach from the platform, much less reach the Titanic wreck some 12,600 feet below.
After aborted dive number 87, a “mission specialist,” aka a trained paying passenger, reported the clearly frustrated OceanGate CEO, Stockton Rush, said: “I’m going to get a dive in, even if it kills me.”
Dive 88 began on June 18, 2023, above the Titanic as Titan slipped beneath the waves at 9:04am. It disengaged with the platform and maneuvered away, descending at 108 feet per minute. At 3,300 feet, the crew — comprising pilot Stockton, three mission specialists and a Titanic expert — notified the bridge that all was well.
A final ping transmitted from Titan at 10:47am showed it was 10,978 feet deep; three seconds later an audible “bang” emanated from the ocean surface and communications and tracking were lost. When Titan failed to surface at the expected time that afternoon, the support team conducted a grid pattern surface search then notified the authorities.
What followed was akin to the plot of a disaster movie: a missing submarine, a multinational rescue mission, countdown to when the oxygen would run out. Glued to the news feeds, the world waited, but there would be no Hollywood ending. Four days after the team lost contact with Titan, an ROV located debris that conclusively showed it had imploded. The site of one of history’s worst maritime disasters had claimed five more lives.
On August 5 this year, the US Coast Guard Marine Board of Investigation released its findings of this “preventable” tragedy with a 327-page report that is a damning indictment of OceanGate’s “toxic safety culture.” Titan was built out of an unproven material, carbon fiber, and the USCG determined that the implosion was caused by the hull’s loss of structural integrity. It learned that Boeing and the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Lab broke ties with OceanGate when it failed to adhere to their testing and safety recommendations, and OceanGate deliberately circumvented all regulatory oversight. Titan was not registered, certified, inspected or classed by any international flag administration or recognized organization.
Stockton Rush claimed that class societies impeded innovation, and the vessel’s real-time monitoring system would give adequate warning of potential failures. Yet this system’s data suggested delamination had occurred during dive 80 in 2022, the last dive made to Titanic depth, and it wasn’t analyzed or acted upon. It was one of many “glaring disparities between their written safety protocols and their actual practices,” investigators determined.
None of the findings surprised Patrick Lahey, CEO of Triton Submarines, only perhaps the extent of the operation’s unprofessionalism. “We all knew this was an experimental craft that had no place in human-occupied exploration. It hadn’t been appropriately designed, engineered or tested.”
Triton builds 14 models certified to depths ranging from 330 feet to full ocean depth; many destined for superyachts. All are built to class.
“The certification process is critical to ensuring that the end result is something that is not just fit for purpose, but has been independently validated at all levels — everything from your original design and engineering and analysis, and all the calculations that go into that, to the actual overall design and the efficacy of it,” Patrick says. “It goes down to the level of procuring appropriate materials, testing those materials in accordance with the certification authority requirements to ensure that they have the necessary characteristics for them to be used in an assembly like this. Then compliance with drawings, tolerance compliance and then overall testing. Long before a human being gets in a classed sub, it’s made multiple dives to its certified depth and 25 percent beyond it.”
Following the Titan tragedy, Patrick found himself having to re-educate customers who were suddenly afraid to dive, about the difference between a classed sub and an experimental vessel. “Classed subs have an extraordinary track record of safety — 50 years without an incident. So to put this (OceanGate) contraption into the same group where people devote countless hours to the accreditation process is not only unfair, it’s completely inappropriate,” he says.
Just like Titanic’s sinking did, Titan’s implosion may usher in more regulatory oversight, as USCG investigators recommended. Patrick is unsure what authorities like the USCG could add to the already effective certification process, but he supports port states ensuring that submarines operating in their waters be classed.
“I’ve been playing around with subs for 43 years now. The things that we have to do to ensure safety have existed for that whole time and long before. As long as we continue to abide by those recommendations and follow those very sensible practices, we’ll continue to have safe operations.”