TITAN SUB: THE NINE (9) UNANSWERED QUESTIONS

THE NINE QUESTIONS:

WHAT CAUSED THE SUB TO IMPLODE?
WHAT WAS THE CHEAP DESIGN TO BLAME?
WHY WERE THE DEBRIS PIECES SO BIG?
HOW DID THE OFFICIALS RECOVER PRESUME HUMAN REMAINS?
WHY IS OCCEAN GATE STILL ADVERTISING TOURS?
IF THE SUB WAS'NT SAFE, HOW WAS IT ABLE TO TAKE TOURISTS ON EXPEDITIONS?
WHAT WERE THE BANGING SOUNDS?
WHY WAS SO MUCH MONEY SPENT ON THE SEARCH IF THE U.S KNEW IT HAS ALREADY IMPLODED?

WILL OCCEAN GATE FACE LEGAL ACTION?
LET'S FIND OUT IN THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE

The desperate five-day search for the missing Titan submersible came to a tragic end on 22 June when debris was discovered close to the Titanic shipwreck.

OceanGate CEO and founder Stockton Rush, British billionaire explorer Hamish Harding, renowned French and Pakistani diver Paul -Henri Nargeolet and Pakistani businessman Sharzada dawood and his 19-year-old son Suleman set off on a trip of a lifetime on 18 June, travelling around 13,000 feet below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean to visit the famed ocean liner’s wreckage.

But the five explorers met a chillingly similar fate to the doomed White Star Line ship more than a century earlier.

Just one hour and 45 minutes into their expedition, Ocean Gate Expeditions’ Titan sub lost contact with its mother ship the Polar Prince on the surface.

This kicked off a huge search and rescue operation, using drones, remotely-operated vehicles (ROVs), ships and the most sophisticated technology and equipment available today.

On 22 June, hopes faded when a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) found five major pieces of debris from Titan on the sea bed around 500m from the bow of the Titanic shipwreck. Coast Guard Rear Admiral John Mauger confirmed that the discovery was consistent with a “catastrophic implosion”.

US defence sources – and Titanic film director James cameron – later revealed that the Navy picked up the sound of the underwater implosion not long after the sub lost contact 105 minutes into its journey on 18 June.

Officials said on 28 June that debris and presumed human remains were recovered from the sea floor at the site of the deep-sea vessel’s fatal implosion.

Large pieces of wreck were transported to St John’s harbour by the Horizon Arctic ship, where it was seen being unloaded by a crane.

The latest developments added to a growing list of questions about what went wrong, whether the tragedy could have been avoided and what happens next.

Here, The Independent delves into those unanswered questions:

What caused the sub to implode?

Rear Adm Mauger told reporters on 22 June that the discovery of debris revealed that the sub and its occupants had fallen foul of a “catastrophic implosion”.

In consultation with experts in the unified command, the debris is consistent with the catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber,” he said.

An underwater implosion means that the vessel – under intense pressure due to the depths of the ocean – suddenly collapsed inward.

Such an implosion would have been “incredibly quick” and “painless” for the passengers –

taking place within just a fraction of a millisecond, Aileen Maria Marty, a former Naval officer and professor at Florida International University, told CNN.

“The entire thing would have collapsed before the individuals inside would even realize that there was a problem,” she said.

“Ultimately, among the many ways in which we can pass, that’s painless.”

At the time of the implosion, the sub was descending to the Titanic wreckage which lies on the sea bed around 13,000 feet below sea level.

At that depth, any object – including a human body – is subject to a water pressure more than 300 times stronger than the pressure Earth’s atmosphere exerts on us every day. On the surface, we only need to withstand 14.7 lbs per square inch (Psi) of pressure, whereas the Titan had to withstand 5,500 psi.

It is unclear exactly where the implosion occurred but the journey to the wreckage was supposed to take around two hours and the vessel lost contact around one hour and 45 minutes in.

The cause of the implosion remains unclear at this time but several safety concerns with Titan’s vessel have come to light in recent days with members of the explorer community, Titanic movie director James Cameron and a whistleblower lawsuit all detailing potential issues with the sub.

The Titan was designed to survive the level of pressure at a depth of 13,000 feet, with two strong titanium domes at either end of the hull linked by a five-inch-thick cylinder of carbon fibre.

However, carbon fibre is far weaker than solid steel or titanium which submersibles are typically made from.

OceanGate founder Rush chose the material because it was a much lighter and cheaper option, offsetting it with a “real-time hull health monitoring system” that could, in theory, detect any deformations, cracks, or other faults rapidly enough for the crew to attempt an emergency ascent.

Yet at such depths, there is very little margin for error. If even one part of the hull fails and lets in water, the pressure would be so great, and the velocity of the incoming liquid so fast, that the sub and its occupants might be torn apart in mere milliseconds, monitoring system or not.

Mr Cameron has predicted that the carbon fibre and titanium hull could have been behind the disaster, calling the use of such weak materials a “horrible idea” and pointing out that the dives he has done in the past were in a ceramic submersible better suited to sustain pressure.

Was the cheap design to blame?

Besides the material choice, questions have also been asked about what appears to be a hotch-potch of “off-the-shelf components” used to put together the sub.

In an interview in November,OceanGate CEO Rush boasted that the sub was operated with a video game controller and was compiled of components bought from Camping World.

In a 2018 lawsuit brought by the company’s former director of marine operations David Lochridge, OceanGate was accused of ignoring safery concerns about the Titan.

Mr Lochridge had begun working with OceanGate in 2015 and was allegedly tasked with conducting a final safety review of the Titan. His lawsuit, which was later settled out of court, claims that he raised “critical safety concerns” about the sub’s “experimental and untested design” – only to be fired for his troubles.

“Issues of quality control with the new submersible were raised, as there were evident flaws throughout the build process,” the lawsuit alleged, noting that no carbon fibre submersible had ever achieved its target depth of 4,000 metres.

Lochridge was also sceptical about the real-time monitoring system, which he believed would only show when a component was very close to failure – perhaps only “milliseconds before an implosion”. The lawsuit alleges that he pressed for the hull to be tested more rigorously, but was denied.

Worse, the lawsuit claims that the Titan’s single porthole was only certified to withstand the pressure at 1,300m and that OceanGate “refused to pay” for a porthole certified to 4,000m.

Why were the debris pieces so big?

Debris from the Titan was brought ashore by deep-sea robots on 28 June.

The Titan’s wreckage was seen for the first time in pictures after the Coast Guard announced on 22 June that ROVs (remotely-operated vehicles) found its chambers in a sea of debris 1,600ft from the bow of the Titanic, roughly 12,000ft below the ocean surface.

Pelagic Research Services, the company that operated the ROV that made the previous debris findings, said that its team had successfully completed off-shore operations and was now in the process of demobilisation after 10 days of work.

Photos from the wharf show what appeared to be several pieces of the submersible being lifted from the ship, including the nose cone with its distinctive circular window. The pieces were unloaded from the American ships Sycamore and Horizon Arctic at a port in St John’s, Newfoundland.

The US Coast Guard declined to comment on the investigation or the return of debris to shore. Representatives for the National Transportation Safety Board and Transportation Safety Board of Canada (TSB), which are both involved in the investigation, also declined to comment.

The large size of the recovered pieces sparked discussion as Coast Guard officials had warned the implosion had been “catastrophic.” But Northeastern University of physics professor Arun Bansil said the wreckage is consistent with what officials determined happened to the Titan.

“Although it seems counterintuitive, large objects do not normally split apart into smithereens in an implosion or explosion. For example, a pressure cooker usually explodes with the top blown off but the body remaining intact,” Mr Bansil told The Independent.

“Initial failure of Titan would have occurred at its weakest links such as defects in the hull. Once a crack opens, however, large pieces of the hull will no longer experience very violent forces and remain more or less intact.”

Speaking after the evidence was recovered, the Marine Board of Investigation’s (MBI) chairman, Captain Jason Neubauer, said on 28 June: “I am grateful for the co-ordinated international and inter-agency support to recover and preserve this vital evidence at extreme offshore distances and depths.

“The evidence will provide investigators from several international jurisdictions with critical insights into the cause of this tragedy.

“There is still a substantial amount of work to be done to understand the factors that led to the catastrophic loss of the Titan and help ensure a similar tragedy does not occur again.”

How did officials recover ‘presumed human remains’?

The Coast Guard had previously said that due to the depth of the debris and the nature of the passengers’ deaths, it was unlikely that their remains will ever be found.

“This is an incredibly unforgivingenvironment down there on the sea floor and the debris is consistent with a catastrophic implosion of the vessel,” Rear Adm Mauger said on 22 June. “And so we’ll continue to work and continue to search the area down there, but I don’t have an answer for prospects at this time.”

But on 28 June, the service announced that it had recovered “presumed human remains” from the sea floor. It is unclear how it was determined the remains were human but medical professionals will now perform a formal analysis.