Titan lost

[edschweppe]

It's now official: OceanGate's carbon-fiber submersible Titan imploded Sunday while diving on the wreck of RMS Titanic, killing all five passengers and crew:

A submersible carrying five people to the Titanic imploded near the site of the shipwreck and killed everyone on board, authorities said Thursday, bringing a tragic end to a saga that included an urgent around-the-clock search and a worldwide vigil for the missing vessel.

Coast Guard officials said during a news conference that they’ve notified the families of the crew of the Titan, which had been missing since Sunday.

The sliver of hope that remained for finding the five men alive was wiped away early Thursday, when the submersible’s 96-hour supply of oxygen was expected to run out and the Coast Guard announced that debris had been found roughly 1,600 feet (488 meters) from the Titanic in North Atlantic waters.

“This was a catastrophic implosion of the vessel,” said Rear Adm. John Mauger, of the First Coast Guard District.

After the submersible was reported missing Sunday, the U.S. Navy went back and analyzed its acoustic data and found an anomaly that was consistent with an implosion or explosion in the general vicinity of where the TITAN submersible was operating when communications were lost,” a senior Navy official told The Associated Press on Thursday.

The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive acoustic detection system.

The Navy passed on the information to the Coast Guard, which continued its search.

OceanGate Expeditions, the company that owned and operated the submersible, said in a statement that all five people in the vessel, including CEO and pilot Stockton Rush, “have sadly been lost.”

The others on board were: two members of a prominent Pakistani family, Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood; British adventurer Hamish Harding; and Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet.

[ ... ]

Mauger said it was too soon to say whether the implosion happened at the time of the submersible’s last communication on Sunday. But it was not detected by sonar buoys used by search crews, he said, which suggests it happened before they arrived several days ago.

“We had listening devices in the water throughout and did not hear any signs of catastrophic failure from those,” he said.

I'm an ex-submariner myself, so this has particular resonance for me. But the sub I went to sea aboard had a high-tensile-strength steel hull, with every single weld radiographed prior to our even leaving the drydock. The Titan submersible had a carbon-fiber hull and, apparently, no way for the (single) hatch to be opened from the inside. They also routinely lost communications with their support ship, and I keep hearing stories about how the company refused to get certified by any of the maritime classification societies.

The sea will kill you if you give it the chance.

Note that I'm using a Wayback Machine link to OceanGate's website; currently, their web server (www.oceangate.com) is returning HTTP 525 errors, which is apparently a Cloudflare-specific error meaning "SSL Handshake Failed".