What Really Happened to the Titan Submarine?

On 18th June 2023 at 9: 30 am, 5 people sat in a submarine called Titan and dove into the sea. They were going to seek the wreck of the Titanic . The same historical ship Titanic that had sunk in the sea about 100 years ago . This an extreme form of adventure tourism and it is very expensive .

Each person sitting in the submarine had spent more than 20 million INR for a few hours of this tour . This trip is so expensive because Titanic wreck is hidden deep in the sea . Specifically speaking 3,810 meters below the surface of water . This submarine started its journey under the water . It takes about 2 hours to reach the deep of 3,810 meters .

At every 15 minute interval, this submarine sent a signal to the support ship on the surface of the see named the polar prince . For the , this was the only communication channel with world . On that day 18th June it had been only 1 hour and 45 minutes of this submarine dive into the sea that suddenly it loses contact with the support ship on the sea .

At 4 : 30 pm by the time when the submarine should have come back up after its tour, there is no sign of it . At 7: 10 pm the team in the polar prince decided to inform the US Coast Guard. And from here a 4-day long multinational search began . A large scale search and rescue operation is carried out to find this submarine.

Aircraft, ships and robot vehicles were also used . Everyone had only one question in their mind . What happened to these passengers? Now lets understand the whole story of the Titan submarine .

The place where the Submarine disappeared is in the Atlantic Ocean near Canada . If you look to the map you will see it from 600 km away from newfounland , a Canadian island . At this place ,in the depths of the water, you will find the wreck of the Titanic, broken into two parts .

The bow and stern both lying about 800 meters away from each other . The Titan submarine that disappeared here was not a submarine but a submersible . These two words are very similar to each other . So, till now , I using the word submarine to simplify things , but there is a very important difference between these two words .

Submarines

Submarines have their own power. They can use a port to go into the sea and come out of the sea independently .

Submersible

But submersibles cannot do that. To launch a submersible into the water and for it to come back, a support ship is needed. A ship that is present on the surface of the water and is controlling everything.”

In our case, this support ship was the Polar Prince . This entire operation was run by a company called OceanGate,, whose CEO was Stockton Rush . Remember his name because he plays n important role in the story . By profession, he had been an aerospace engineer. And in 2009 , he founded the OceanGate company .

A private company whose purpose was to take rich people on deep sea expeditions as tourism . This company started offering Titanic tours in July 2021 . Before this, they offered tour of other ship wrecks and areas. As you can still see on their websites apart from the Titanic , there were expeditions to Azores and Bahamas.

Titanic was not the only submersible of this company . Apart from this , OceanGate had two other submersibles , Antipodes and Cyclops. Antipodes could go up to a depth of 304 m, and cyclops up to 500 m . But Titan was designed to go down 4,000 m , 4 km underwater .

This is why this was the only submersible to go to the Titanic . To visualise the frightening depth of 3,800m look at this chart created by the Washington post. Measurements are in feet here . Normally a man height is 6 feet . The iceberg that collided with the Titanic was 100 feet above the surface of the water and several times that underwater. 130 feet is the maximum depth that recreational scuba diverse can go to while scuba diving.

After 650 feet , a twilight zone area starts where only a small amount of light can penetrate the depths of the water . 1,600 feet was the depth of the deepest-ever underwater rescue operation conducted to date . 2,600 feet is the depth where giant squids swim. Giant squids are so scary that they look like they have come from an alien planet.

If you go further a midnight zone starts after 3,800 feet . No sunlight reaches below this mark . Everything turns black after this . The water temperature here around 4 C . Now if you go further down from here . 5,00 feet, 6,000 feet , 8,000 feet, 10,000 feet. And then you finally reach 12,500 feet , here is the ocean floor where the Titanic wreck is lying .

The pressure at this depth is almost 400 times the pressure on the surface . So, whichever submersible goes to this depth its design should be thoroughly though out . The glass for looking outside , the size of the window , could be only this big. And the window in the Titan submersible which is called a viewport , was the biggest viewport that had been installed in any private submersible to date .

The Titan submersible was not that big. It had the capacity to seat only 5 people . Its main body , which is called the Hull , was made of carbon fiber . Two caps were attached at the end, which were made of titanium and the total length of it was approximately 6.7 meter . And weighed more than 10,400 kg.

In its design , you can see there were four electric thrusters outside . Two horizontal and two vertical , through which it could be operated . Now an interesting fact to be noted here this sub was controlled by a video game controller . This is not as weird as it sounds. Because the US Navy also controls their submarines and the periscopes the viewports to see outside .

They control them with Xbox controllers. But yes, the entire submarine , Titan was being controlled with a video game controller . This means that the pilot who was operating the submersible in the water . was also using his game controller . If you look at the inside, there were no seats to set inside it . But small toilet was provided which was beside the viewport.

But there was no barrier to the toilet , so they literally said that if some had used the toilet, other would need to face the other way . To keep looking at a TV screen while the toilet was being used . Because these submersible go so deep into the water , the GPS does not work here .

The communication to their support ship was carried on through a text messaging system . It is still unclear which internet connection was available on the ship. In a tweet from a few back, OceanGate had said that they were using starlink satellite internet service to communicate .

If we come back to this story of 18th June then 5 people were on board this submersible that day . The first was 58-year old British billionaire Hamish harding . He was an adventurer and a 3-time Guinness world record holder . In 2016 ,he went to the south pole with astronaut Buzz Aldrin. At one time he died a 4-hour dive into the deepest part of the Ocean, Mariana Trench .

And last year, he was part of the Blue Origin suborbital flight which was started by the space exploration company of Jeff Bezos . The second passenger was Paul Henri Nargeolet 77 year old . A former commander of the French Navy . He had visited the Titanic wreck 37 times . He was the director of underwater research of the RMS Titanic .

The third and fourth passengers were a British-Pakistani businessman , Shahzada Dawood and his 19 year-old son Suleman. He was the owner of one pf the biggest companies in Pakistan . Suleman aunt had said that Suleman was actually scared of going . But he went with his father to please him and to give him company on this journey .

As i told you, that day the submersible was communicating with the support ship at every 15-minute interval . This communication stopped at 11: 15 AM. After this , no communication and no signal is received . Despite this it was expected that the Titan would resurface at 4 : 30 PM as scheduled . Because if by chance, this submersible would get stuck in the water .

There was a way for the passenger to tilt it from inside and push it back and forth to bring it back up . This is done by removing the ballasts . Ballasts are an important part of big ships and submarines to provide stability . They are nothing more than heavyweight . With their help, submarine can descend into the water.

In olden days stones and sandbags were used as ballasts . But today submarines use water ballasts . Ballast tanks are filled with water so that the weight increase and the submarines sink into the water . At 4: 30 PM when the Titan did not resurface , people in the support ship waited for a while and then notified the US Coast Guard at 7: 10 PM.

After tis , began the great race . The race against time 96 hours, only 4 days of oxygen supply was available in Titan . So if a rescue operation had to be conducted , they only had 4 days to find the passengers alive . Often an emergency locator is installed on ships which is called emergency position indicating radio Beacon, EPIRB . With the help of this these vessels can be located . But it was not installed in Titan . Here another problem was that even if Titan would have come back to the surface of the sea , people sitting inside it would have died due to the lack of oxygen .

Because there is noway to open this submersible from the inside . You heard it right , the door of this submersible could only be locked from the outside and opened from the outside . So whether the submersible was inside the water or on the surface those 4 days were very critical . To know more about this blog click the link