The type of equipment needed to search at the depths required is rare. The Titanic sits more than 3,800 metres beneath the surface of the ocean, where the pressure is immense and light is nonexistent. OceanGate has previously told CBC News there are few manned vessels on the planet that can reach such depths.
They're searching for a small vessel in a wide area. Titan is seven metres long and just under three metres high. Mauger said the search area they've covered by air is about the size of Connecticut.
The submersible was towed out to sea on the weekend, taking crews of five below the surface to view the Titanic. The last communication between the submersible and its mother ship, the Polar Prince, happened about 1½ hours into the dive early Sunday morning. It has not been heard from since.
The kicker? Watch this CBS News video:
It is a literal death trap for the wealthy.
innovation is outside of an already accepted system. However, this does not mean that OceanGate does meet standards where they apply, but it does mean that innovation often falls outside of the existing industry paradigm.
Bringing an outside entity up to speed on every innovation before it is put into real-world testing is anathema to rapid innovation.
Oh boy.
Working at a company that puts innovative stuff on ships, this makes me really worried.
The rules can be downloaded for free from the websites of the class societies. Getting the certification can cost quite a bit of money and time, but if you are not doing something monumentally stupid you can get it. Surveyors can be tough, but they are also constructive. If you are able to show that you have done your homework and provide a clear argument why you are deviating from a rule, they are not stopping you from using innovative solutions to problems. You just have to show it is still safe.
The blog of the submarine company makes it sound like they didn’t feel like adhering to all the standards, or they didn’t make it through the initial consultations and didn’t want to make the required changes. I don’t know which is worse.
What I do know is that I never want to set foot on a vessel that proudly advertises that they don’t adhere to Class rules.
Remember my voyage to the Titanic last last summer? In OceanGate’s homemade carbon-fiber sub? They took passengers out again this summer—but as of today, the sub is lost. Coast Guard is doing a search and rescue.
Do submersibles have something similar to an aircraft's Emergency Locator Transmitter (ELT) that could be detected by searchers?
This submersible does not have any kind of beacon like that. On my expedition last summer, they did indeed get lost for about 5 hours, and adding such a beacon was discussed…
Could you elaborate on how you got lost for 5 hours? What was that experience like and how were you able to surface?
To be clear, I was not on the sub that day—I was on the ship at the surface, in the control room. They could still send short texts to the sub, but did not know where it was. It was quiet and very tense, and they shut off the ship’s internet to prevent us from tweeting.
Is there a reason that detail didn't make it into the show?
Yes. The company gave us a different rationale for shutting off the Internet… That this could be an emergency, and they needed all channels open… And we had no idea how to confirm whether or not that was true.
They've lost the submarine before and shut off Internet access to prevent reporters from live-tweeting about it.
Missing Titanic Sub Once Faced Massive Lawsuit Over Depths It Could Safely Travel To:
Given the prevalent flaws in the previously tested 1/3 scale model, and the visible flaws in the carbon end samples for the Titan, Lochridge again stressed the potential danger to passengers of the Titan as the submersible reached extreme depths. The constant pressure cycling weakens existing flaws resulting in large tears of the carbon. Non-destructive testing was critical to detect such potentially existing flaws in order to ensure a solid and safe product for the safety of the passengers and crew.
Over the course of the next several days, Lochridge worked on his report and requested paperwork from the Engineering Director regarding the viewport design and pressure test results of the viewport for the Titan, along with other key information. Lochridge was met with hostility and denial of access to the necessary documentation that should have been freely available as part of his inspection process.
At the meeting Lochridge discovered why he had been denied access to the viewport information from the Engineering department—the viewport at the forward of the submersible was only built to a certified pressure of 1,300 meters, although OceanGate intended to take passengers down to depths of 4,000 meters. Lochridge learned that the viewport manufacturer would only certify to a depth of 1,300 meters due to experimental design of the viewport supplied by OceanGate, which was out of the Pressure Vessels for Human Occupancy (“PVHO”) standards. OceanGate refused to pay for the manufacturer to build a viewport that would meet the required depth of 4,000 meters.
Chances are the ship imploded.
