Inside the Titanic sub disaster

catastrophic implosion the unthinkable became all too real this past week as we learned of the fate of undersea Explorer Stockton Russia's Titan submersible on its way to the Atlantic grave of the Titanic the questions the second guessing David Pogue tells us are likely to continue for a long time to come last summer a company called Ocean Gate invited Sunday morning to join an expedition to the Titanic at the time I was thrilled next time I come out of this doorway I'll either be a changed man forever or cursing the bad weather as the whole world knows now ocean Gate's business was taking Adventure Seekers on these Titanic Dives for 250 000 a ticket on a one-of-a-kind carbon fiber submersible called the Titan carbon fiber is a great material it's better than titanium it's better than a lot of other materials this is Stockton Rush the CEO of Ocean Gate and the designer of the sub last Sunday as he was piloting the sub to the Titanic it imploded killing him and his four passengers we spent nine days at Sea with Rush last summer and in Wake of the tragic news we thought you might like to see more of what we saw and hear more of what Stockton Rush said the Titan wasn't like any previous deep sea submersible there was no dashboard just a touchscreen computer and a single power button we only have one button that's it wait a minute I've seen submersibles and they are banks of controls like like cockpit after exactly this is to other submersibles what the iPhone was to the Black Earth but many of its components seemed surprisingly cheap for views outside the sub he had installed store-bought security cameras as for the ceiling lights I got these from uh Camper World then there was the steering unit we run the whole thing with this game controller a lot of the way you made this is by taking off-the-shelf parts and sort of macgyvering them together yeah pretty much does that not raise anybody's eyebrows in the industry oh yeah oh yeah yeah no I'm definitely an outlier there were a lot of rules out there that didn't make engineering sense to me everyone I know keeps asking me the same question why would you get on that dangerous sub well first of all Stockton Rush had the credentials he majored in aerospace engineering at Princeton he designed and flew his own airplanes he designed previous submersibles second he was emphatic that the important parts of the Titan were Rock Solid like the carbon fiber body for which NASA served as a consultant there are certain things that you want to be buttoned down and that's the pressure vessels once the pressure vessel is you're certain it's not going to collapse on everybody everything else can fail your thrusters can go your lights can go you're still going to be safe third I was convinced by an expert pH narjale the veteran deep sea explorer who also perished in the Titan over the years he'd been to the Titanic more than just about anyone how many times have you been uh with the last dive 37th time you've been to the Titanic 37 times yes I was in charge of one two three four five five sub how different is the Titan from those other subs completely different most of them you have a sphere was there never a point when you wondered about the safety of the sub at that depth no two or three years ago I had a phone call with uh Stockton and he explained to me that he was doing a lot of tests he showed me some of the ways they were building the stuff I said okay that's fine that's fine no problem diving this I was also impressed by the subs seven redundant systems for returning to the surface these are roll weights we can actually roll this up and those come off that gains us some buoyancy to come back to the surface okay these triple weights we call them are hydraulically driven Expedition manager Kyle Bingham underneath this tray hang these bags we're around around 35 pounds and those hang down there typical diet will have eight of them we can also use our thrusters we have enough power to thrust back up and then under this last fairing here we have our variable ballast tank our soft ballast it's an air bladder that we use a big 10 000 psi air tank that's under the tail to fill that up fill it with air and then it helps bring us to the surface there were even sandbags that detach automatically after about 16 hours even if everyone inside had passed out their connectors would dissolve in seawater so you have a backup of a backup of a backup of a backup of a backup correct [Music] finally the crew seems to foster a culture of safety there were checklists inspections before and after every dive and a three strikes rule if three things seemed out of the ordinary no matter how minor they'd cancel the dive I learned that the hard way on our own dive we're in the water we're floating at this point divers are supposed to detach the sub from its launch platform so apparently those floats there came off the platform that wasn't supposed to happen so we're scrubbing yeah yeah it up here copy that I never did see the Titanic and I wasn't unusual in Ocean Gate's first two summers of Titanic operations it spent a total of 50 days floating above the Shipwreck site but because of waves bad weather and malfunctions the Titan actually made it to the Titanic only 12 times but through it all Stockton Rush defended his unconventional approach I mean anything when you're trying something outside the box people inside the Box think you're nuts same thing when Elon Musk was doing SpaceX Inside the Box everything's scary but as early as 2018 there was concern about the Titans design a former employee says that when he raised safety concerns Rush fired him that same year a group of submersible Engineers urged rush to seek certification of the Titan by a safety agency Rush declined saying that regulation would stifle Innovation at some point safety just is pure waste I mean if you just want to be safe don't get out of bed don't get in your car don't do anything at some point you're going to take some risk and it really is a risk reward question I said I think I can do this just as safely by breaking the rules so Captain McLaren um have you spent much time in submarines David my total time under the water divorced from the outside atmosphere is a little over five and three quarters years no kidding fact retired U.S Navy submarine Captain Alfred McLaren is not impressed by ocean Gates Innovations I mean would you fly in an airplane that somebody excitedly tell you well it's going to be a lot cheaper because we found a new way of attaching the wings yeah right he theorizes that the Titan failed not because it was made of carbon fiber but because it was made of three dissimilar materials carbon fiber titanium and plexiglass for the porthole when you have different materials different molecular structure they have different coefficients of expansion and compression and you then you make repeated Cycles in depth of course you're going to work that seal loose and that's why submarines don't run around with any portholes at all come to think of it it's a weak point I think there's a great almost surreal irony here which is Titanic sank because the captain took it full steam into a an ice field at night on a moonless night with very poor visibility uh after he had been repeatedly worn by telegram by Marconi Graham in an interview with Anderson Cooper filmmaker and Veteran Titanic diver James Cameron pointed out a sad parallel between Stockton rush and the captain of the Titanic the arrogance and the hubris that sent that ship to its Doom is exactly the same thing that sent those people in that that sub to their fate the world Mourns the loss of Stockton Rush pH nargely and their three passengers British billionaire Hamish Harding Pakistani businessman jazada dawood and his son Suleiman already there's talk of restrictions and regulations and lawsuits will the Ocean Gate disaster mean fewer people going adventuring well every year people do die skydiving and scuba diving and climbing Mount Everest tragic every time and yet people still keep coming some people just have that itch for them danger is the point the risk of dying gives meaning to living I think Stockton Rush was among them I wanted to be sort of the Captain Kirk um I didn't want to be the passenger in the back and I realized that the ocean is is the universe that's where life is foreign

Channel: CBS News

Views: 3,831,383

Keywords: CBS Sunday Morning, CBS News, news, OceanGate, Titan, submersible, Titanic, deep sea, exploration, Stockton Rush, P.H. Nargeolet

Id: -TowaxZDUnY

Length: 10min 1sec (601 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 26 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/Legend_of_dirty_Joe]

Were they alive before they died?

[u/jvriesco]

Death is sad. But dying due to someone else’s negligence, that is truly unfortunate. RIP.