The Titan Tragedy

hello and welcome to the oceans gate Expeditions update my name is Aaron I am the CEO and founder of sub brief I am a 20-year submarine veteran from the United States Navy submarine force and a subject matter expert in submarines I'm here to give you my opinion on what happened with this Titan tragedy today so the Ocean Gate Expedition is a manned submarine Transport company that leverages college graduate Engineers with off-the-shelf technology for cost-effect subsea research on Sunday June 18 2023 Ocean Gate suffered loss of communication with their Titan submarine a deep diving Cyclops class Titan was designed to take up to five people to the Titanic wreck site and other deep water locations as the Titan descended with its crew of five to the Titanic wreck and now we're in 40 minutes into the dive communication with a submersible was lost this is about the same time that she was scheduled to drop ballast and touch bottom at near the two hour mark so those may be connected we're not sure yet loss of communication with the vessel below 3000 meters is not uncommon it's a non-zero chance of happening as it happened during testing so there was not unexpected so as the hours passed on June 18 2023 communication was not re-established during the 10-hour dive after approximately 12 hours the top side support team on the ship polar prints contacted the U.S Coast Guard at 9 13 pm to report loss of contact with their vessel that's a summary of what happened so in this video I'm going to describe you vessel construction the systems that they have on board the concerns that I have about the design about its experimental experimental build and first a disclaimer from Ocean Gates Expedition listen to this an experimental submersible vessel that has not been approved or certified by any regulatory body and could result in physical injury disability emotional trauma or death where do I find where do I sign right so ocean get Expedition waiver explains just how experimental this design is it's not registered or certified by any agency or the Coast Guard like some of their other submarines actually are this one is not this is like an experimental plane but it's a submarine in this case it spells out the dangers and writing for everybody on board and that you may die if you ride on board the submersible it says it right there in the waiver so let's talk about the data sheet that they have this is from the Ocean Gate website the Titan is a 21 000 pound 22 foot long electrically driven submarine for five people the test step that's calculated to be 4 000 meters and this is kind of key because right now this is just the naval architect engineering calculating the strength of the pressure vessel without an actual Dynamic test at sea at this point four four thousand meters it is built at five inches of carbon fiber with a titanium hatch glued on the bow in a tight in a steel or titanium Dome on the aft it has 96 hours of life support which is very vague we'll talk a little bit more about that sensors and systems on board are built and produced by Teledyne blueview they have the 2D sonar and the Doppler velocity ins which is inertial navigation system that is upgraded with the ultra short Baseline which means it's very accurate at calculating motion while submerged and this system I know is very good I have no questions about the Teledyne equipment it's probably the best thing on this thing that actually works all right so here's the pressure Hall under construction as you can see it's just a carbon fiber weave that is just loomed left and right until it becomes five inches thick it's a carbon fiber wrap that's designed to withstand the pressures of 4 000 meters of sea depth here is a video of it being of the titanium hatch Rings being installed on one of the ends watch this that's the adhesive right there think of it like a very thick glue it's going to bond the titanium ring that you see there onto the carbon fiber pressure Hall and they only get one chance to do this because once it's on that bonding agent adheres and um it's not coming back off again after this so they very carefully line it up it looks like they got it right so good job getting the hatch rings on this is going to go on both sides the fat the the forward bow and the AFT section here's what the app section looks like the app section simply an aft Dome that is placed on that titanium ring on the front there is an access hatch that we'll show you here in a second but now I want you to watch this short interview that the CEO of Ocean Gate Mr Stockton Rush had with Teledyne Marine Representatives Teledyne Marine are making the sonar systems and inertial navigation systems for this vessel but listen to what he talks about the CEO talks about hiring people uh yes I mean when I started the business one of the things you'll find there are other sub-operators out there but they they typically um have a gentleman who are ex-military submariners and they you'll see a whole bunch of 50 year old white guys um I wanted our team to be younger to be inspirational and I'm not going to inspire a 16 year old to go pursue Marine technology but a 25 year old uh you know who's a subpilot or a platform operator or one of our techs can be inspirational so we've really tried to to get um very intelligent motivated younger individuals involved because we're doing things that are completely new we're taking approaches that are used largely in the Aerospace industry is related to safety and uh some of the the preponderance of checklists things we do for risk assessments and things like that that are more Aviation related than ocean related and we can train people to do that we can train someone to Pilot the sub we use a game roller um so anybody can drive the sub all right so Stockton rushed the CEO of Ocean Gate Expeditions avoided hiring submarine veterans because we're 50 year old white men like myself and would not Inspire young people and that's a valid reason I wouldn't expect say the young teenage generation to look up to me and be like I want to be like that guy I kind of get that but also you don't want to just only hire young college graduates that you would then train to inspire the Next Generation you have to have subject matter experts at some point in the chain and I'm not talking about the vice admiral that's on the board of directors we're not even going to talk about him he's a retired Coast Guard Admiral served you know honorably no problems there but you don't seem to have a subject matter expert that's from the submarine community that could maybe talk about some of the problems that we're going to go over to just some things that I've seen just from your promotional videos on your site the team included technicians that threw a hammer in college was this qualification besides being a college graduate another college graduate was a surfer he hired him on because he enjoyed his surfing stories I guess I don't know uh but the idea was to train these young college graduates in operating the submarine with a game controller let's take a look at this game controller it's a PlayStation 3 wireless controller I really don't have a problem with it being a PlayStation controller it could be any kind of controller that they want I really have a problem with it being Wireless you don't want to control your submarine with a wireless connection like what happens if the batteries die do you have this extra set you always put fresh batteries in on every dive did you bring extra batteries is there a USB port where in a pinch you could plug the controller into whatever system you have there and actually controller doesn't have to maintain a Bluetooth connection you know did you bring a spare and does that spare sink properly if the primary controller doesn't work like are these things that they thought about I hope so we don't know they've only shown this one all right so let's talk about access this is the bow or the front of the Titan and the only way in and out of this submarine is through this forward hatch that is held on by 17 bolts there is no other egress there's no other way out of the submarine other than through the 17 bolted hatch and it's there's no way to open it from the inside you can't undo the bolts from the inside or swing Notch open you are completely dependent on the surface support vessel top side whenever you get in this thing that they're going to let you back out before you're 96 hours of air Runs Out so he talks about taking examples and learning lessons from the aviation Community well one of the worst non-flight disasters in NASA history was from the Apollo one where three astronauts lost their lives doing a systems check on the launch pad while they were bolted into their capsule you know there was a fire that started in there they were alive when the fire started they reported it to the control center said get us out of here get us out of here there's a fire and before they could get the bolts off the the astronauts had passed away this is a very important lesson learned that apparently Stockton didn't learn from or at least forgot because he's locking people into this submarine with no way for them to quickly get out themselves in the case of a casualty so let's talk about life support um the data sheet claims that it has 96 hours of life support for five people my question is how was this tested did they put five people in the submarine while it was ashore sealed them in there with 17 bolts and waited even 24 hours to see how good the air quality was after one day much less four days was that test ever done we don't know there's no information on that there's simply a claim on the website that they have 96 hours of life support where is the atmosphere monitoring system in all these photos I don't see any air pitons or sensors anywhere and in all the displays that I see from their public website no there's no indication of oxygen levels and other you know toxic gas levels like CO2 carbon monoxide all these things that could generate you need to be aware of those levels and if they are aware it's just not available on any of their uh of their photos did they just keep pumping oxygen and into the capsule while it was underway so they could keep the CO2 and you know oxygen level in a proper ratio well there's a lot of other gases involved with that that you have to manage as well so they need to keep track of that stuff if they were just adding oxygen to the environment well that creates a high oxygen environment what happens when you're locked inside a capsule with a high oxygen environment and you're operating Electronics well you burn up in your Apollo capsule like an astronaut that's another possibility of what happened here we just need to know more about this life support system this was a custom build so there is no other standard to go off of we just have their claim of 96 hours on their website and the video and photos that they have made public on their website the only evidence of a deep submergence test that we have with the Titan the specific submarine is when Stockton rushed the CEO took it down to just over 3 000 meters by himself Solo in about a 10 hour trip this does not verify the atmosphere system will support five people okay certainly not for 96 hours because he wasn't even down there that long okay it also and more importantly does not support that the test depth of this vessel is actually 4 000 meters because he just went down below 3000 meters but not to four thousand so the test death has been verified at some point between those two depths and the Titanic is very close to 4 000 meters it's just shy of that actually uh the test depth right now is just mathematically calculated by a naval architect engineer that I'm sure did the math right but it's still just theoretical until you actually dive to that depth and then you stay there for a fixed period of time this is one of many tests that they needed to do now let's talk about emergency air breathing what if there's toxic gas in your capsule and you can't get out how do you breathe if there's smoke billowing out of a piece of equipment or something so do they have emergency air breathing gas mask or mask rather with positive airflow positive air going into the mass keeping all the toxic fumes out of the out of the Mask itself is there a way to ventilate the capsule if it's full of smoke from what I've seen absolutely not the only way you're going to ventilate it is to go to the surface take off the 17 volts open that hatch and wave the smoke out well that is not going to help you if you're submerged and you're trying to drive the submarine to the surface if you can't see your displays or even outside the port how are you going to know which way you're driving with your little PlayStation 3 controller this is why you hire a submarine expert to bring these things up and then resolve them and then test them it would have saved lives so let's get back to our story so it is June 18th it's day three of an eight day trip we're on board the polar prints polar prints is a deep sea support vessel and it's over the Titanic wreck site the Titan submarine is on board it's on board its launch a sled that you can see here and I will say this this patented launch sled is very cleverly designed and seems to work very well so they did a great job with the sled getting this thing on board ships one of the nice things about this sled is it allows them to operate in higher C States than if they were just going off the back of a deep sea ocean vessel because they don't need an a crane they can just slide this sled into the Seas and then they submerge the sled as we'll see here in a second here is another photo of that sled presumably during testing because it looks like it was near Everett Washington whenever they took this photo but this is what that sled looks like here is it submerged they submerge it down to 30 feet where it is then stabilized and the cease to be pretty rough 30 feet at the surface and down here they'll be very calm and from this platform this is where they dock and launch the the submerged vessel the Titan okay so the Titan swims away under its own electrical power this is on June 18th of uh 2023 using its four Motors and begins its descent down to the Titanic wreck people on board we now have the names of all five people we have Stockton Rush the CEO of Ocean Gate probably acting as tour guide I imagine we have pH who is a French explorer also Titanic expert very well respected gentleman who presumably would be the pilot and of course a tour guide for the guest on board the guest on board are three businessmen uh Mr Day wood and his son tragically is with him and I uh another gentleman Hamish Harding is is the third guest total of five people on board going down to see the Titanic and sadly they have not been heard from at the time of this recording so at about one hour and 40 minutes into the dive they lose communication with the surface vessel that uh data link that they have that is giving position of the and depth of the submarine is finally lost but that is not unexpected because they saw that loss in testing as well whenever the CEO went down on a solo dive they had lost communication so this was not you know unheard of which I think delayed the call for assistance from topside they expected contact to be re-established probably during a cent some eight to ten hours later and unfortunately contact was never re-established and then some 12 hours later at about 9 13 PM is when they called the American coast guard for a loss of communication with their vessel so I made a short list of just some of the things I see wrong with this design I'm sure this list will grow and we'll know more once the investigation is complete on the submarine first they use the carbon fiber pressure Hall that is great to a point it's lightweight it's very strong but it's not perfect these things are not made out of magic and everybody that's worked with carbon fiber in the past knows that it does not crack it shatters like a porcelain plate so whenever it does fail it fails quickly and unexpectedly and because the test depth of 4 000 meters was never actually tested before they brought guest on board this is one possibility is that the carbon fiber pressure Hall shattered uh for whatever reason maybe a defect in the construction you could speculate all you want about that but that's one possibility also he hires young inexperienced technicians that alone is not a problem I support that it's a great idea especially with inspiring the Next Generation but with your young and experienced technicians you have to hire subject matter experts in submarine operations and safety you have to have that and you a lot of these concerns could have been addressed before you brought guests on board or you took anyone down and and lost them at Sea as what appears to have happened here it did not use lessons learned from NASA in the aviation Community as he stated he did in that interview because he's locking people in a cylinder in a capsule if you will with no way to get out with oxygen being fed into it and possibly a high oxygen environment resulting in a fire okay and once there's a fire there isn't any way to breathe there's no emergency air breathing that I'm aware of there's no pictures of it there's no mention of it in the stat sheet data sheet so the test step like I said was not verified the atmosphere life support system there's not enough details on that to really make a judgment I would love to know more as to how they monitored life support and how they scrub the CO2 and other toxins like hydrogen and carbon monoxide all that stuff takes equipment to do that and if they're just dumping oxygen into this environment by the time an hour and 40 minutes went by they would have a high oxygen environment just like Apollo one all right there's no way to ventilate that I'm aware of the pressure Hull so once it does have a toxic gas or smoke there's no way to get rid of it other than the surface and open the hatch that's ridiculous and unsafe there's no emergency air breathing for the people on board there's no voice Communications with topside because Stockton Rush enters interview with Teledyne said that he was tired of being interrupted from topside with update request which is why he chose to go with the data acoustic modem that would transmit the position and depth of the submarine continuously so that he could enjoy his submarine ride so the Titan began its descent with five Souls on board uh contact was lost after an hour and 40 minutes and contact was never re-established and uh I really feel terrible for all the families involved because your family members are dead and it hurts me to say that but it's the truth and I hope this video helps give you some closure help helping you know what probably happened we'll we'll know more in the coming days I'll probably do a follow-up to this but I hope this video helps you process what's what's happened this past week all right thanks for watching everybody [Music]

Channel: Sub Brief

Views: 2,709,880

Keywords: sub, submarines, silent service, untied states navy, united states, acoustic analysis, sonarman, sonar, cold war, tactics, tutorial, guide, review, destroyer, navy, aaron, subbrief, brief, china, current, events, established, titles, established titles

Id: 4dka29FSZac

Length: 20min 44sec (1244 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 20 2023