How Titan was Built, Lost and Found: An Analysis

James Cameron was basically right. Cut corners. Ignored warnings. Needless catastrophe waiting to happen…. Right next to the Titanic. Like modern day Shakespeare.

The Titan was built by people who thought they knew better, Lost by people who thought they knew better, and found by people who knew better.

Funny how oceangate's stated goal was for science, yet they ignored every piece of scientific and engineering advice from everyone more qualified than rush

The only open question I have about Titan is where the incompetence stopped and the willful negligence began.

A couple of potentially key aspects that weren't mentioned in this video: A - The viewport was only rated for EDIT: 1300m. That's 1/3 of the depth to the Titanic. That was a flagrant, known danger point. Russian roulette on every dive with a negative safety margin. B - The engineering spec for the carbon fiber thickness was 7". They built it to 5". C - Preface: I used to work at Boeing on the 787 program, both post-cure and pre-cure. The 787 is mostly made of carbon fiber. Pre-cure was basically a low-level clean room. Not an open warehouse where people were at working areas with loafers and polo shirts. Every single large co-cured part underwent ultrasonic inspection and any defects fixed, and checked again for verification. The submersible did not get any testing for voids, inclusions, nor delamination after it was built. Any small one of those SIGNIFICANTLY weakens a co-cured composite structure by a significant amount. For them claiming to be primarily interested in scientific pursuits, they intentionally disregarded science, engineering, and safety standards, then claimed they got in the way of innovation. I'm fine with innovation, but when innovating, you put no lives or only put your life on the line...... not putting several uninformed lives on the line. In my opinion, the passenger's deaths are akin to homicide. Rules were intentionally disregarded, then lives knowingly put in significant danger. Edit: I'm in no way meaning to imply the video missed points intentionally. The stream of information about the disaster comes and goes, and I'm certain there was no ill intent, intentional misinformation, nor deliberate skipping of information.

At the end of the day, it appears this incident was caused by no small amount of hubris and carelessness by OceanGate. Untested construction techniques, ignoring safety regulations and dismissing safety concerns. Simplicity and "risk taking" is something for consumer technology, not when human lives are at risk when visiting one of the most extreme environments on Earth.

Can’t speak for the weapons system aboard USS Colorado, but as a former submariner, there is a very big difference between the Titan being completely controlled by a game controller, and a game controller literally only controlling the periscope. Not to mention that the control surfaces (at least on board a 688i) have several redundancies and other places they can be controlled even if the ships control panel is damaged.

I'm honestly surprised they found it. Amidst all that wreckage, they were able to locate (at least part of) that tiny submersible. Says a lot for the skill of those involved.

I was on a submarine for a few years and this is one of the craziest stories I’ve ever heard. He was basically submerging an RV. Absolutely bonkers.

Great video! I gotta add, I was one of the CP-140 pilots, I flew the search over the 96th hour and was leaving the scene as the wreckage was discovered. As an ASW aircraft, acoustics is our bread and butter. We know the difference between biological, background noise, surface vessels, and subsurface sounds. The entire time the “banging” we heard was unlike anything we’ve heard before. It was to a cadence and we located it to a very small area of probability on the sea floor. It seemed to respond when we dropped Mk84 eSUS, or used active to Ping as a mode of communication. This is why we believed they were alive. As more ships arrived on scene, background noise drowned out the banging we heard, but we could still hear it on occasion and easily differentiate noises. The area we triangulated the banging to come from, in part using the echos through a passive sono grid and strategically positioning surface vessels to block certain echos, is where the wreckage was found. At the moment, we don’t know what the banging was, but could have been wreckage tumbling in the strong currents or small implosions from life support equipment as it settled. It’s a tragic ending and all assets on scene really gave it their all. Thanks for making a great video that lays it out nicely.

My father was a sonar tech in the navy during the Cold War and he used to tell me that the things he’d hear in the ocean would probably freak a lot of people out. Really freaky stuff down there.

7:45 there's a huge difference between using a wired controller of good quality to operate some specific equipment and using a bluetooth controller infamous for its clumsy performance to operate the entire thing. The philosophy was not "simplicity", it was "let's just cut any possibile corner because I'm smarter than anyone else".

I'm glad James Cameron said what we were all thinking. The irony of the situation is astounding. This didn't need to happen. Those who don't learn from history, are doomed to repeat it.

It's commendable you defended the OceanGate project, both its design, and its reason for existence - science. But I'd dispute that, as a scientist who has been professionally involved in studying and mapping the seabed, and I've made digital photogrammetric 3-D imagery. There isn't any science that this submerisible could do that couldn't be done as well, or better, by remote vehicles mapping the Titanic in detail. Which has already been done and which you pointed out. In fact the Titanic has now been mapped in incredible detail. Taking with them a man and his young son, both of whom had no scientific background, or reason to be there (apart from sightseeing) does not suggest any genuine science. Ok perhaps we could justify their presence by saying the company needed paying customers (with a high ticket price) to fund the project. But if doing genuine science, skip the need to make the vessel big enough for fee-paying passengers, and just build a smaller one (to take only genuine scientists), made from titanium as a sphere - as you showed in your excellent breakdown of Alvin. Finally, if this was all about science, why did Stockton Rush do the exact opposite of that? i.e. ignored the science that showed what materials you could and couldn't build with, ignored the necessary certification (which all genuine scientists would adhere to), and ignored what other experienced experts were telling him. It smacks at best of massive overconfidence in his own abilities, at worst of extreme arrogance.

I know that their deaths are said to have been instantaneous and painless, but right before it, the fact that they had the time to try some methods of resurfacing means that they had at least some seconds that they knew that something was wrong... and that's a horrifying feeling to imagine.

Very informative video, Mike. Although Ocean Gate existed supposedly for science, Rush was still criminally negligent in many areas involving the Titan. He, obviously, had faith in his design but had definitely not reached the point where the Titan had been confirmed safe for others to join the dives.

The idea that this company was primarily interested in the scientific aspects of diving on the Titanic and allowing paying passengers to go along was secondary is ridiculous. This company was in it for the money and cut corners sacrificing the safety issues to improve their bottom line.

There is literally hundreds of times more information within this video then I found in aggregate of all the news sources I read and viewed. I have no idea how you are able to write the script, collect the visuals, and produce the drawings you did, but the effort is nothing short of amazing. Given the speed with which you accomplished it is something I could have expected only from the staff the size of the largest news organizations. But they didn't do it, you did. A phenomenal achievement!

Small correction about the comet, it didn't exploded because of the square windows, it didn't had square windows, they were rounded on the corners, the real reason was metal fatigue on the suboptimal aluminum alloy it was used, it wasn't good enough to withstand the pressure on the new altitudes it was supposed to go, also the rivets left microscopic cracks that eventually made the structure to be torn apart, and unlike modern aircraft, instead of tearing apart the skin and keep flying, it just couldn't hold on the structure and the plane broke apart almost instantly.

As a complete layman it seems to me the acoustic warning system that drops the weights if the pressure vessel makes telltale noises of impending breakup was worthless because once you hear those noises you have seconds to react, and the ship can't change its depth significantly in seconds. It took hours for it to free fall to the target depth of ~12000 feet. Lets say the cracking noises happened at 10000 feet, they took action and dropped the weights, but then the momentum of the ship still continued downward for a second, then slowed to a stop, then reversed to begin accelerating upward, and all that action took say 5 to 10 seconds before the ship attained any significant upward speed. It may have managed to reduce its depth by a couple hundred feet before BOOM, it imploded at say 9800 feet, which was not enough pressure reduction in time to save them. Like the Titanic was unable to make enough course correction in the time it had to react to the sighting of the iceberg.