Day 402.1 | The Titan Submersible Was “an Accident Waiting to Happen”

 “You can’t cut corners in the deep. It’s not about being a disruptor. It’s about the laws of physics.”

The primary task of a submersible is to not implode. The second is to reach the surface, even if the pilot is unconscious, with oxygen to spare. The third is for the occupants to be able to open the hatch once they surface. The fourth is for the submersible to be easy to find, through redundant tracking and communications systems, in case rescue is required. Only the fifth task is what is ordinarily thought of as the primary one: to transport people into the dark, hostile deep.

Until June 18th, a manned deep-ocean submersible had never imploded. But, to Rob McCallum, Patrick Lahey, the C.E.O. of Triton Submarines, and other experts, the OceanGate disaster did not come as a surprise—they had been warning of the submersible’s design flaws for more than five years, filing complaints to the U.S. government and to OceanGate itself, and pleading with Rush to abandon his aspirations. As they mourned Nargeolet and the other passengers, they decided to reveal OceanGate’s history of knowingly shoddy design and construction. “You can’t cut corners in the deep,” McCallum had told Rush. “It’s not about being a disruptor. It’s about the laws of physics.”

Stockton Rush wanted to become a fighter pilot. But his eyesight wasn’t perfect, and so he went to business school instead. Years later, he expressed a desire to travel to space, and he reportedly dreamed of becoming the first human to set foot on Mars. In 2004, Rush travelled to the Mojave Desert, where he watched the launch of the first privately funded aircraft to brush against the edge of space. The only occupant was the test pilot; nevertheless, as Rush used to tell it, Richard Branson stood on the wing and announced that a new era of space tourism had arrived. At that point, Rush “abruptly lost interest,” according to a profile in Smithsonian magazine. “I didn’t want to go up into space as a tourist,” he said. “I wanted to be Captain Kirk on the Enterprise. I wanted to explore.”

Rush had grown up scuba diving in Tahiti, the Cayman Islands, and the Red Sea. In his mid-forties, he tinkered with a kit for a single-person mini-submersible, and piloted it around at shallow depths near Seattle, where he lived. A few years later, in 2009, he co-founded OceanGate, with a dream to bring tourists to the ocean world. “I had come across this business anomaly I couldn’t explain,” he recalled. “If three-quarters of the planet is water, how come you can’t access it?”

OceanGate’s first submersible wasn’t made by the company itself; it was built in 1973, and Lahey later piloted it in the North Sea, while working in the oil-and-gas industry. In the nineties, he helped refit it into a tourist submersible, and in 2009, after it had been sold a few times, and renamed Antipodes, OceanGate bought it. “I didn’t have any direct interaction with them at the time,” Lahey recalled. “Stockton was one of these people that was buying these older subs and trying to repurpose them.”

In 2015, OceanGate announced that it had built its first submersible, in collaboration with the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Laboratory. In fact, it was mostly a cosmetic and electrical refit; Lahey and his partners had built the underlying vessel, called Lula, for a Portuguese marine research nonprofit almost two decades before. It had a pressure hull that was the shape of a capsule pill and made of steel, with a large acrylic viewport on one end. It was designed to go no deeper than five hundred metres—a comfortable cruising depth for military submarines. OceanGate now called it Cyclops I.

Most submersibles have duplicate control systems, running on separate batteries—that way, if one system fails, the other still works. But, during the refit, engineers at the University of Washington rigged the Cyclops I to run from a single PlayStation 3 controller. “Stockton is very interested in being able to quickly train pilots,” Dave Dyer, a principal engineer, said, in a video published by his laboratory. Another engineer referred to it as “a combination steering wheel and gas pedal.”

RMS Titanic

Around that time, Rush set his sights on the Titanic. OceanGate would have to design a new submersible. But Rush decided to keep most of the design elements of Cyclops I. Suddenly, the University of Washington was no longer involved in the project, although OceanGate’s contract with the Applied Physics Laboratory was less than one-fifth complete; it is unclear what Dyer, who did not respond to an interview request, thought of Rush’s plan to essentially reconstruct a craft that was designed for five hundred metres of pressure to withstand eight times that much. As the company planned Cyclops II, Rush reached out to McCallum for help.

“He wanted me to run his Titanic operation for him,” McCallum recalled. “At the time, I was the only person he knew who had run commercial expedition trips to Titanic. Stockton’s plan was to go a step further and build a vehicle specifically for this multi-passenger expedition.” McCallum gave him some advice on marketing and logistics, and eventually visited the workshop, outside Seattle, where he examined the Cyclops I. He was disturbed by what he saw. “Everyone was drinking Kool-Aid and saying how cool they were with a Sony PlayStation,” he told me. “And I said at the time, ‘Does Sony know that it’s been used for this application? Because, you know, this is not what it was designed for.’ And now you have the hand controller talking to a Wi-Fi unit, which is talking to a black box, which is talking to the sub’s thrusters. There were multiple points of failure.” The system ran on Bluetooth, according to Rush. But, McCallum continued, “every sub in the world has hardwired controls for a reason—that if the signal drops out, you’re not fucked.”

Stockton Rush pictured inside the Titan submersible in 2018.

One day, McCallum climbed into the Cyclops for a test dive at a marina. There, he met the chief pilot, David Lochridge, a Scotsman who had spent three decades as a submersible pilot and an engineer—first in the Royal Navy, then as a private contractor. Lochridge had worked all over the world: on offshore wind farms in the North Sea; on subsea-cables installations in the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific oceans; on manned submarine trials with the Swedish Navy; on submarine-rescue operations for the navies of Britain and Singapore. But, during the harbor trial, the Cyclops got stuck in shallow water. “It was hilarious, because there were four very experienced operators in the sub, stuck at twenty or twenty-five feet, and we had to sit there for a few hours while they worked it out,” McCallum recalled. He liked and trusted Lochridge. But, of the sub, he said, “This thing is a mutt.”

Rush eventually decided that he would not attempt to have the Titanic-bound vehicle classed by a marine-certification agency such as DNV. He had no interest in welcoming into the project an external evaluator who would, as he saw it, “need to first be educated before being qualified to ‘validate’ any innovations.”

That marked the end of McCallum’s desire to be associated with the project. “The minute that I found out that he was not going to class the vehicle, that’s when I said, ‘I’m sorry, I just can’t be involved,’ ” he told me. “I couldn’t tell him anything about the Five Deeps project at that time. But I was able to say, ‘Look, I am involved with other projects that are building classed subs’—of course, I was talking about the Limiting Factor—‘and I can tell you that the class society has been nothing but supportive. They are actually part of our innovation process. We’re using the brainpower of their engineers to feed into our design.

“Stockton didn’t like that,” McCallum continued. “He didn’t like to be told that he was on the fringe.” As word got out that Rush planned to take tourists to the Titanic, McCallum recalled, “people would ring me, and say, ‘We’ve always wanted to go to Titanic. What do you think?’ And I would tell them, ‘Never get in an unclassed sub. I wouldn’t do it, and you shouldn’t, either.’ ”

👉 Click here to read the full article

Source: The New Yorker, Ben Taub, July 1, 2023

Disclaimer: If you are the copyright owner of a photograph, video, artwork, text posted to this nonprofit blog and want it removed, please contact me at mynarrowcorner@gmail.com and the item(s) will be promptly taken down.