Titan sub: Emerging details on vessel reveal safety concerns within industry

As additional details emerge about the Titan submersible’s deadly implosion in June, concerns surrounding exploration company OceanGate Expeditions’s allegedly cavalier attitude toward safety have come into sharper relief.

The doomed vessel reportedly dropped weights at some point during its descent; however, it is not known whether this was due to a routine part of descent or in an effort to abandon the mission. All five Titan occupants died in the implosion.

Rob McCallum, a veteran submersibles expert who started bringing tourists to Titanic wreckage in the 2000s using Russian submarines – and who was among industry members voicing concerns about OceanGate before the catastrophe – said submersibles jettison weight to control their buoyancy.

“Sometimes, they lose a little bit of weight to slow down as they’re approaching the bottom and sometimes, they lose a lot of weight in order to ascend,” McCallum explained to the Guardian. “You would need to read the dive log to know what weights were being dropped immediately prior to the catastrophe.”

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The known circumstances are limited: the submersible was “located pretty much exactly where it was supposed to be” and that the implosion took mere milliseconds, Mr McCallum said.

Submersibles “don’t carry a flight data recorder, and so you are reliant on communications between the submersible and the ship above – unless the log shows a concern from the submersible, then we’ll never know,” said Mr McCallum, who has operated multiple commercial submarines to about 11,000m (36,089ft).

An expansive New Yorker feature published on July 1st detailed efforts by Mr McCallum and other industry member to sound the alarm about OceanGate’s vessels. Government authorities and OceanGate apparently did not act on their warnings.

OceanGate set its sights on Titanic exploration around 2015; company co-founder Stockton Rush reached out to Mr McCallum, the magazine said.

“He wanted me to run his Titanic operation for him,” Mr McCallum told the New Yorker. “At the time, I was the only person he knew who had run commercial expedition trips to Titanic. Rush’s plan was to go a step further and build a vehicle specifically for this multi-passenger expedition.”

Mr McCallum, who said he gave marketing and logistics tips to Mr Rush, ultimately visited OceanGate’s Seattle-area workshop, to look at OceanGate’s first submersible, Cyclops I – a retrofitted research vessel that could descend no more than 1,500ft. Mr Rush planned on using most of Cyclops I’s design in his would-be Titanic submersible, named Cyclops II, according to the New Yorker. (The magazine said that Titan was Cyclops II, renamed.)

Worried, given its seemingly crude design and lack of redundant safety features, Mr McCallum told the magazine that “there were multiple points of failure”, including that its control system used Bluetooth. “Every sub in the world has hardwired controls for a reason – that if the signal drops out, you’re not f**ked.” The Cyclops I got stuck during a shallow-water test dive.

Mr McCallum decided not to be involved in the project. He told the Guardian that his decision stemmed from a variety of safety concerns, including that the submersible’s launch-and-retrieval procedures were from a barge rather than a large ship.

In a spring 2018 email to Mr McCallum, who had written him with safety concerns, Mr Rush appeared to take the concerns as a personal affront.

“I know that our engineering-focused, innovative approach (as opposed to an existing standards compliance-focused design process) flies in the face of the submersible orthodoxy, but that is the nature of innovation,” Mr Rush said. “Titan and its safety systems are way beyond anything currently in use.”

Mr Rush further complained in the email, viewed by the Guardian: “As you can tell, this subject gets me a bit worked up; I have grown tired of industry players who try to use a safety argument to stop innovation and new entrants from entering their small existing market. Since Guillermo [Söhnlein] and I started OceanGate we have heard the baseless cries of ‘you are going to kill someone’ way too often.”

“I take this as a serious personal insult,” Mr Rush also wrote.

David Lochridge, who was the Cyclops I pilot when Mr McCallum went for the test dive, wound up leaving OceanGate. Following his departure, they exchanged emails that discussed their safety concerns and, in one missive, Mr Lochridge said of OceanGate’s submersible: “It’s a lemon,” the New Yorker reported.

Mr Lochridge said he had brought his concerns to OceanGate and Mr Rush in a written report and was fired after doing so. He made a safety claim with the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (Osha), saying his termination was retribution for voicing worries.

OceanGate’s attorney allegedly threatened Mr Lochridge with legal action if he did not withdraw his Osha complaint and after months of fighting, agreed to do so. While Osha did apprise the US Coast Guard of Mr Lochridge’s complaint, “there is no evidence that the Coast Guard ever followed up”, the New Yorker reported.

OceanGate did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment. The Coast Guard did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Even one of Mr Rush’s friends told him that his submersible was unsafe. Karl Stanley, who was on the Titan for an expedition near the Bahamas in April 2019, said he heard troubling noises during its voyage.

Mr Stanley said in an email to Mr Rush, according to CNN: “What we heard, in my opinion ... sounded like a flaw/defect in one area being acted on by the tremendous pressures and being crushed/damaged.” – Guardian