Titan Submersible Incident 2023

                      Titan 2023 submersible incident 

Titan, a submarine run by the American travel agency Ocean Gate, imploded on June 18, 2023, as it descended in the North Atlantic Ocean, roughly 400 nautical miles (740 km) off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada. Five people were aboard the submersible, which was part of a tourist mission to the Titanic wreck. When it did not emerge at the anticipated time later that day, authorities were notified. The outcomes were based on the U.S. Navy's sonar discovery of an explosion in the region on the day of the journey, which showed that the weight of the container had imploded while Titan was sinking, causing the instantaneous death of all five occupants within the submarines. 

                                   

Failure analysis of Titan “Catastrophic implosion” 

During its initial dive into the Titanic in 2023, Ocean Gate loses communication with Titan on June 18, 2023. The submersible had lost communication several times during prior test and tour dives, and authorities were not notified until the submersible was delayed for its return to shore. A large global search and rescue campaign occurred, ending on June 22, when trash from Titan, which had been crushed in a devastating implosion, was located close to Titanic's bow. 

The titan’s hatch was closed and tied from the outside once the people inside entered; there was no means of opening the hatch from within the vessel. Furthermore, there was no on-board positioning system; the support ship, which tracked Titan's position relative to its target, would relay text messages to Titan with distances and directions. Titan's hull was designed experimentally. It used primarily carbon fibers, which are lighter than titanium or steel, allowing Titan to have greater passenger place. However, the properties of carbon fibers for deep water operations are not widely recognized. It can abruptly crack and break. Furthermore, Titan had already made a few deep-sea dives, which would have added to hull fatigue, making the hull more prone to catastrophic failure. The cause is being investigated, but preliminary reports and conclusions indicate that it had a catastrophic implosion. Fears are growing for the five people aboard the missing Titanic submarine, as their emergency oxygen supply is reported to have depleted. In the case of an emergency, OceanGate Expeditions' Titan sub was outfitted with enough oxygen to last the five men on board for four days - 96 hours. Experts had cautioned that under high pressure at great depths, the Titan's hull may rupture, resulting in instant death for everybody on board. 

Main Causes 

When US authorities found the Titan submersible's wreckage, they observed that it appeared as though a "catastrophic implosion" had taken place because of the "loss of the pressure chamber." The pressure hull was most certainly breached, but it's not clear what brought it about in the first place. A leak, a power outage, or a minor fire from an electrical short circuit might all be to blame for such an implosion, according to Stefan Williams, a professor of marine robotics at the University of Sydney whose lab works with uncrewed submersibles. Concerns regarding the submersible's safety have also been raised by its design. Cameron criticized the pressure vessel's carbon-fiber composite structure, claiming that such material has "no strength in compression" when subjected to the high pressures at depth. He also criticized Rush's real-time monitoring of the submarine's hull as insufficient and unlikely to avoid an implosion. 

 

 

Five occupants on board 

Aboard the submersible were OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, British billionaire Hamish Harding, French diver Paul-Henri Nargeolet, Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his teenage son Suleman Dawood. 

Stockton Rush 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                              

                                           

Rush is the creator and CEO of Ocean Gate Expeditions, which operates the missing submersible. As a child, he wished to be an explorer and the first person to set down on Mars, and he was interested in aircraft and aquatic activities. In 1984, he earned an aerospace engineering degree from Princeton University. He earned a Master of Business Administration from the University of California, Berkeley in 1989. He was 61. He claimed to be willing to take on danger and break the law to accomplish his objectives since he recognized potential in underwater travel. Mr. Rush says, “if you just want to be safe, don’t get out of bed” Instead, he built a small submersible from schematics provided by a retired US Navy submarine commander. Rush's watercraft was 12 feet long and had the capacity of diving to a depth of 30 feet. Rush established OceanGate in 2009 with business partner Guillermo Söhnlein after completing marketing research that indicated there was enough demand for underwater ocean tourism. According to Rush, the company's goal was to use commercial tourism to fund the construction of new deep-diving submersibles, which would allow for more business enterprises such as resource extraction and catastrophe response. Prior to the June 2023 dive, Rush was accused of negligence in Florida by a couple who claimed Rush continually cancelled and postponed a scheduled 2018 dive to the Titanic. Due to Rush's ethics, the couple claimed they were unable to obtain a refund. 

Paul -Henri Nargeolet 

                                     

 

French maritime expert Nargeolet has made more than 35 dives to the Titanic wreck. Mr. Nargeolet is the manager of submarine research for RMS Titanic, Inc. Mr. Nargeolet has dived to the wreck site numerous times, including during earlier OceanGate expeditions on the Titan, the lost submarine. Mr. Nargeolet has devoted his professional life to the water despite being from Chamonix in the French Alps. In his youth, he admired diving, and in 1964, he joined the French Navy. He served in the Navy for twenty years, working as a submarine pilot, deep-sea diver, and mine-clearing diver. About two years after the wreck's discovery, in July 1987, he made his first dive to the Titanic. He talked about how the small crew of the craft was cheerful before it arrived near the crash. Then, according to him, "there wasn't a sound in the submarine for the following 10 minutes." 

Hamish Harding 

                                     

Hamish Harding (24 June 1964 – 18 June 2023) was raised in Hong Kong by his parents. Harding graduated from Cambridge University with degrees in chemical engineering and natural sciences. In 1985, he obtained his private pilot's license. He claimed that between the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s, he "transitioned from piloting light aircraft to piloting jets." The Titanic was a place he'd always longed to see. In June 2023, it became known that billionaire Harding, the chairman of Action Aviation, along with the other four passengers, died aboard the submersible. He usually had a smile on his face and an upbeat outlook. But he also possessed that calm, unflappable pilot sensibility. A debris field was found on June 22, two days before Harding would have turned 59, around 490 meters (1,600 feet) from the Titanic's bow. The debris was consistent with a catastrophic failure of the pressure hull, leading to an implosion and the deaths of everyone on board, the United States Coast Guard later verified during a news conference. 

Shahzada Dawood and Suleman Dawood 

                                     

The 48-year-old British-Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son Suleman are also onboard. The Dawood family is from Britain. Shahzada is listed as a trustee of the SETI Institute, a non-profit organization that conducts research into other worlds and intelligence. Additionally, he collaborates with King Charles's British Asian Trust and the Prince's Trust International. Shahzada, according to a family statement obtained by the BBC, was interested in "discovering different natural habitats". Suleman Dawood, his son, is a student in London. Suleman Dawood enjoys reading science fiction and discovering new things. Shahzada Dawood additionally governs the Dawood Hercules Corporation Limited, which focuses on agricultural and telecommunications, as well as the Dawood Foundation, which promotes access to education in Pakistan. 

These men were genuine explorers who shared a sense of adventure and a strong desire to explore and preserve the oceans around the world. 

What do you need to safely complete a dive like this? 

The design of the vehicle is critical. Deep-sea submersibles are frequently spherical, or at least their inner chambers are, because the shape aids in the even distribution of pressure. Titanium, a highly robust material, has traditionally been used to construct submersibles. The worst-case scenario is that the hull fails. Your life dies in a split second under those great forces. Humans on a dive require oxygen as well as the capacity to use it efficiently. Manipulation of the vehicle's density is the simplest approach to regulate its descent and return to the surface. The communication system is also critical. The team should send down a robot first. This aids the submersible's navigation and keeps it linked to the main ship. It is yet unknown what safety precautions OceanGate took in this case.