Although the debris of the missing submersible that launched a three-day search was discovered on Friday morning, it is still unclear whether the wreckage or the bodies of the five passengers will be recovered.
Just over 2.8 metres wide and 2.5 metres high, the Titan, designed by ocean tourism company OceanGate, weighed 9525kg and was capable of carrying 684kg of passengers and supplies.
“I’d like to be remembered as an innovator,” Stockton Rush, founder and CEO of Oceangate, said in an interview filmed within the now infamous submersible.
“I’ve broken some rules to make this, I think I’ve broken them with logic and good engineering behind me.”
OceanGate claimed it was capable of carrying five people to depths of 3800 metres to reach the wreck of the RMS Titanic, which sank in 1912.
Mr Rush was piloting the Titan as it was carrying four tourists to the Titanic’s gravesite, located 740km off the coast of Newfoundland Canada, on June 18 when it went missing.
It is now known that the Titan imploded under the immense pressure, the effect of compression heating the air in the sub to the temperature of the sun and crushing the vehicle in around 30 milliseconds. Those aboard were killed instantly.
What happens next?
The US Coast Guard has yet to say whether the wreck will be recovered. The pressurised container which held the passengers was destroyed during the implosion.
The US has previously used remote-controlled Odysseus 6k vehicles and a special winch system to recover a crashed fighter jet from a depth of 3,780 metres, but there has been no communication regarding any attempt to recover what is left of the Titan.
Whether there is any chance of recovering the bodies of the five aboard the submersible, due to the trauma of the implosion and the difficulty of locating them, is unknown.
Ocean tourism gone wrong
The submersible had made three previous trips down to the wreckage of the Titanic when it arrived at the dive site for its fourth, and ultimately final, attempt aboard the expedition ship MV Polar Prince.
Mr Rush and his four passengers, Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son Suleman, British billionaire Hamish Harding and former French Navy commander Paul-Henri Nargeolet, began their descent at 9.30am on June 18, communicating with the Polar Prince every 15 minutes.
At 11.15am Titan lost communication, which didn’t immediately cause alarm because it had reportedly happened on every one of its previous expeditions, as the above-water crew awaited its expected resurfacing at 4.30pm. Two hours and 40 minutes later, the United States Coast Guard was notified that the Titan was missing.
The search
Navy and Coast Guard personnel from the United States and Canada led a search and rescue effort for the next three days, fearing that the passengers may be trapped on the ocean floor. The Titan was equipped with 96 hours of breathable air for the five passengers, which would have lasted until early on June 22.
Boats with sonar capabilities, commercial and military vessels scoured the area near the Titanic wreckage alongside aircraft in a desperate search.
It is now known the US Navy’s ultra-sensitive underwater microphones, intended to detect enemy submarines, picked up the sound of Titan‘s implosion, according to The Wall Street Journal.
At 1.18pm (local time) on June 22, the US Coast Guard announced a remotely operated vehicle had discovered a debris field just 488 metres from the Titanic, which was later confirmed to be from the submersible.
Safety concerns
James Cameron, Hollywood director and veteran of 33 trips to the ocean’s floor to see the Titanic, told the American ABC News that he was “struck by the similarity of the Titanic disaster itself where the captain was repeatedly warned about ice ahead of his ship and yet he steamed at full speed into an ice field on a moonless night and many people died as a result”.
“As a submersible designer myself, I actually built a sub to go [to] the deepest part of the ocean — three times deeper than Titanic — so I understand the engineering problems with building this type of vehicle and all the safety protocols that you have to go through,” he said.
“This is a mature art and many people in the community were very concerned about this sub, and a number of the top players in the deep submergence community even wrote letters to the company saying that what they were doing is too experimental to carry passengers and it needed to be certified.”
The New York Times reported OceanGate declined to have the Titan certified despite its former director of marine operations composing a report documenting his safety concerns and the Marine Technology Society, a 3800-person professional group of engineers, technologists, policy-makers and educators, writing to Mr Rush to express their concern.
One signatory of the letter told the Times that Mr Rush had “called him after reading the letter and told him that industry standards were stifling innovation”.
Tragically, 19-year-old university student Suleman was a reluctant passenger aboard the submersible.
His aunt, the older sister of his father Shahzada, told NBC News that Suleman was terrified about the trip and only went to please his father.
The man behind OceanGate
Stockton Rush III was born to a wealthy and famous family in San Francisco, California.
After earning a commercial pilot’s licence at 18, he completed an aerospace engineering degree at Princeton and became a flight test engineer.
As a child, he dreamed of being an astronaut, and as a young man, he dreamed of flying military aircraft, neither of which he achieved — two disappointments he blamed on poor eyesight.
After a varied career, he built a submarine in 2006, and with a business partner started OceanGate in 2009 with a focus on underwater ocean tourism.
Remarkably, his wife’s great-great-grandparents were two of the wealthiest people to die when the Titanic sank.
