Inside the Titan Submersible Implosion Disaster: OceanGate Allegedly Failed To Test Viewport to Society’s Standards

Nearly a year ago, the world was rocked by the devastating news about the implosion of the Titan submersible. It turned out that the inside story was more horrible than expected.

OceanGate Allegedly Failed Testing, Ignored Safety Concerns

On June 18, OceanGate's Titan lost communication with its mother ship, MV Polar Prince. The communication was cut an hour and 45 minutes into the dive. The submersible was set to explore the wreck of the Titanic in the North Atlantic Ocean.

Days later, it was confirmed that the signal had been lost because the Titan submersible had imploded. The implosion resulted in the instant deaths of the passengers aboard -- Stockton Rush, the American chief executive officer of OceanGate; Paul-Henri Nargeolet, a French deep-sea explorer and Titanic expert; Hamish Harding, a British businessman; Shahzada Dawood, a Pakistani-British businessman; and Dawood's son Suleman.

In a new report marking the disaster's first anniversary, OceanGate reportedly ignored the safety concerns raised and did not test the viewport to society's standards.

Titan's front dome had a smaller 23-inch viewport in the middle and was constructed entirely of titanium. OceanGate's Director of Engineering, Tony Nissen, created a completely new design for the viewport, which was to be made of 9-inch-thick acrylic and manufactured by Hydrospace Group.

Hydrospace CEO Will Kohnen told WIRED that he had initially anticipated that Rush would extensively test the viewport in accordance with exacting guidelines established by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. To determine how much the plastic slowly shrank under pressure, OceanGate would, by those standards, test at least five windows to destruction at high pressure, cycle a viewport from low to high pressure a thousand times, and subject another viewport to five times the intended pressure for 300 consecutive hours.

"The more innovative you get, the more testing you've got to do," Kohnen said. "Over a period of years, it was pretty obvious that OceanGate wasn't going to do the testing."

The ex-workers who also spoke with WIRED added that OceanGate wasn't putting the viewport through its paces by societal norms.

By autumn 2017, Kohnen was beginning to feel uneasy. In a desperate attempt, he offered Rush "a serious discount" in November to construct a second viewport with a design verified and tested to 4,000 meters. He wrote that it could be switched out for the experimental window in less than a day. Rush reportedly told Kohnen he wasn't interested.

In December, Kohnen supplied the viewport for OceanGate. He estimates it to be only 650 meters, one-sixth the depth of the Titanic. Additionally, he disclosed a pro bono examination conducted by an independent expert, which concluded that OceanGate's architecture might not hold up after a few 4,000-meter dives. Nevertheless, later that month, OceanGate integrated the viewport in Titan. The sub's construction was nearly finished, and the corporation was promoting its maiden trip to the Titanic in May.

Titan Was Reportedly Unsafe, But OceanGate Still Pushed It

Titan's safety began to worry David Lochridge, the company's maritime operations manager, who had to approve the transfer. Rush received a quality-control inspection report from Lochridge in January 2018 that listed 27 problems with the submersible, including combustible materials, missing fasteners, and dubious O-ring seals on the domes.

The report also raised concerns about the vehicle's carbon-fiber hull. Rush fired him the following day. However, Lochridge went on to report Titan to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration as a whistleblower. This sparked a legal battle between them after Rush reportedly sued him for breach of contract.

Lochridge dropped his complaint in the settlement, signed an NDA, and paid OceanGate almost $10,000. Lochridge did not respond to WIRED's request for comment.

One of the possible causes of the "catastrophic implosion" that destroyed the Titan sub could have been its hull. One expert suggested that the main body of the sub, or its hull, might have failed.

Professor Stefano Brizzolara of Virginia Teach Ocean Engineering hypothesized that a flaw in the sub's pressure hull may have cracked under pressure, causing the implosion.

Check out more news and information on the Titan Sub in Science Times.