Titanic tourist sub goes missing in Atlantic Ocean, June 2023 #3

[PrairieWind]

I’d be willing to bet “someone” DID hear the implosion when it occurred.

That area of the North Atlantic is heavily monitored by, among other things, miltary hydrophones. If the US/Canadian militaries heard it, they certainly would not have announced it - it’s giving away important intelligence about your capabilities.

66 Years of Undersea Surveillance

Just over 66 years ago, one

www.usni.org

https://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/explorations/sound01/background/technology/technology.html

I suspect the SOSUS net would have detected it, but as you said, it is highly classified and the information would not have been available.

 

[gitana1]

BREAKING. The debris was located on the ocean floor, roughly 500 meters off of the bow of the Titanic, and it was located around 8:55 a.m. ET. (via CNN)

https://twitter.com/x/status/1671951777300709384

https://twitter.com/WFLAJosh

How close is that? Were they able to see it?

 

[gitana1]

Terrible news. I feel for the families - the lack of empathy from the masses on the internet (and IRL) is so painful. They will see and hear it all.

Oh my gosh people are being so evil. I’m glad that Websleuths is a refuge from that.

 

[Cindizzi]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1671965323795243014

 

[ArianeEmory]

How close is that? Were they able to see it?

If you mean were the passengers able to see the Titanic before the implosion, napkin math tells me it was a couple of football fields away … and I assume (but don’t know) that the sub’s lighting wasn’t strong enough for that, just for a start.

The debris was found on the ocean floor. Don’t have a source handy, definitely read it, I think that came from the coast guard.

 

[fred&edna]

If that's what actually happened, though, a very sad thing to occur.

JMO

Maybe the dad felt more emboldened (and more likely to take risks??) by the scary flight in 2019??


“I've read many times that people start to pray in such situations or that their life flashes by like a movie,” she wrote in a post on her coaching business, Next Step Now, sharing that the event made her switch careers. The experience got her husband thinking about his life as well, she wrote.

“My husband told me later that he was thinking of all the opportunities he’d missed and how much he still wanted to teach our children," she wrote.

'Titan' Sub Passenger Shahzada Dawood Previously Survived 'Deep Plunge' on Plane with Wife

Shahzada Dawood's wife recalled the harrowing flight in a 2019 blog post, sharing that the experience got her husband thinking about his life and the lessons he wanted to teach their kids

people.com

 

[PrairieWind]

Agree with the inherent stress and material benefits of spherical shape: though a sphere introduces rotational degrees of freedom that a cylinder tends to defeat. Hanging from a tensioned cable: the sphere is the better shape...As an untethered object with thrusters in 2-planes, the directionality of a cylinder gains some preference.... But the device had already made many trips to the same depths, so either there was an extraordinary event on this trip or the vessel had decayed/lost integrity in some fashion. There is a history of some servicing to the carbon fiber portion and we have to believe that both the indicators that repair was needed and the specific techniques that effected it will be the subject of some pretty close scrutiny in the near term.

All IMHO and no slight intended.

You can have a spherical pressure hull and still have a surrounding structure that is tubular for stability. Rush chose to not do this in favor of more interior room. But it seems he cut a lot of corners. I don't care about the zip tie story or the game console controller (those are all irrelevant) But I'd like to hear some real maritime engineers thoughts on his design, and testing and certification (or lack thereof).

 

[iamshadow21]

So does that mean above or next to?

I think from what's been said it imploded some distance above and to the side of the original wreck, but I've also seen it said somewhere that it may have descended too quickly and impacted the sea floor. At this stage, I think it more likely it imploded some distance above the wreck because of the time they lost communications.

MOO

 

[BetteDavisEyes]

Titanic submersible live updates: All on board presumed dead after Titan debris is found, Coast Guard says

News on the missing Titanic tourist submersible and the international rescue effort, including updates on the search as the estimated oxygen supply dwindles.

www.nbcnews.com

All five people aboard the Titan submersible are believed to be dead, and debris discovered in the search area for the missing vessel was consistent with a "catastrophic implosion," the U.S. Coast Guard said.

The debris was found off the bow of the sunken Titanic, officials said.

The search for the Titan, which went missing Sunday after embarking on a mission to survey the wreckage of the Titanic, had been focused on an area where Canadian aircraft detected "underwater noises" Tuesday and again yesterday.

U.S. Coast Guard officials had estimated the five passengers could run out of air just before 7:10 a.m. ET today, and the location of the missing vessel had remained a mystery even as the search intensified...

 

[Interested_But_Confused]

Agree with the inherent stress and material benefits of spherical shape: though a sphere introduces rotational degrees of freedom that a cylinder tends to defeat. Hanging from a tensioned cable: the sphere is the better shape...As an untethered object with thrusters in 2-planes, the directionality of a cylinder gains some preference.... But the device had already made many trips to the same depths, so either there was an extraordinary event on this trip or the vessel had decayed/lost integrity in some fashion. There is a history of some servicing to the carbon fiber portion and we have to believe that both the indicators that repair was needed and the specific techniques that effected it will be the subject of some pretty close scrutiny in the near term.

All IMHO and no slight intended.

I completely agree, a sphere floating alone in the water would have no stability. The sphere is generally molded inside syntactic foam which gives it stability and additional buoyancy, without diminishing the strength of the sphere. Take James Cameron's DeepSea Challenger as an example:

Deepsea Challenger - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

24 feet tall in total, the spherical pressure hull located at the bottom of the vessel is only 43 inches in diameter. It withstood the pressure almost 11,000 metres down in the Mariana Trench.

My belief, which will either be proven right or wrong, is that the carbon fibre tube couldn't withstand the repeated cycling of pressure.

 

[gitana1]

Jettisoning the landing gear would have aided the Titan in getting back to the surface. But then, it would be on the surface (and there are quite a few ships just above the Titanic site, so hard to believe they didn't see it on the surface).

It is more likely that the hull imploded (as it had 1 Earth atmosphere of pressure inside - and, well, what 400 atmospheres or more outside? Once breached, the weight of the ocean crushed the capsule to particles - perhaps to molecules). It would be like a blast from a 6000 PSI air pump. If you've ever over inflated a tire to explosion (I did), the air rushing out of 70-90 PSI can hurt you, blind you, or damage your hearing (especially in an enclosed area). Think about what happens when a mere tire blows out and there are small fragments in the road.

It's hard for us to imagine the force of this implosive blast at that depth. All I know is that the diving pool that was 20 feet deep when I was a kid was too much pressure for me to go down below 10-12 (I'm not very brave and don't like pressure in my ears or around my body). I know people routinely go down with SCUBA gear to much lower depths.

But not even a military sub can go to 13,000 feet below (more like 4500 feet). Still nearly impossible to rescue due to weight of water.

IMO.

Yeah. I mean I imagine it would be like an explosion, but inwards, that almost vaporized everything. Like what happens when a plane nose dives into the earth from 30,000 feet. Except no descent. It would be instant.

If they had to die in this, it’s the best scenario.

No human remains to be found.

 

[NewbieMasterSleuth]

I do not know much about subs or pressure, but have any of the experts or people on here said if the passengers would have been aware that they were about to face a catastrophic failure moments before the implosion? And if the implosion would have been "very loud," wouldn't the Mothership have heard it when it happened? Especially if it happened in the mid-depth water column; not at the very bottom?

 

[citygirl]

I loved the rear admiral in that news conference, imo he had some very loud "journalists" to cope with. He just stood out to me concidering the horrible news.

All of the men looked incredibly somber. Imagine how they must feel? They did their best to find these men.

 

[MsMarple]

I think from what's been said it imploded some distance above and to the side of the original wreck, but I've also seen it said somewhere that it may have descended too quickly and impacted the sea floor. At this stage, I think it more likely it imploded some distance above the wreck because of the time they lost communications.

MOO

Interesting. Your post makes me wonder how the Titan pilot knew its location and depth. What instruments would be installed?

 

[bestill]

I had visualized a 19 year old excited about this adventure, not worried or scared because we all thought we were invincible at that young age. Reading that he was concerned and scared makes this even more tragic, imo. The family losing both are going to have a lot to process. I hope they can find some peace with this. All jmo.

 

[happyday]

Agree. Not very nice of a sister to make that her brother's legacy.

True, but hopefully people won’t take it that way. It doesn’t sound like he made his son go. More like his son wanted to do something with his dad that his dad loved. That’s how I see it anyway.

 

[iamshadow21]

Interesting. Your post makes me wonder how the Titan pilot knew its location and depth. What instruments would be installed?

It's been said in many articles that the Titan only knew such things through communication with the surface crew. That's why the loss of communication was so dire, even if the sub was intact. It had no means to navigate itself.

MOO

 

[cuffem]

If you mean were the passengers able to see the Titanic before the implosion, napkin math tells me it was a couple of football fields away … and I assume (but don’t know) that the sub’s lighting wasn’t strong enough for that, just for a start.

The debris was found on the ocean floor. Don’t have a source handy, definitely read it, I think that came from the coast guard.

I recall in an article the lighting is turned off to save power on decent and ascent, so not sure if they had lighting.

 

[Gardenista]

James Cameron says 'catastrophic implosion' reminds him of 912 wreck

Director of The Titanic, Cameron said that the 'catastrophic implosion' of OceanGate's Titan sub which killed five men reminds him of the 1912 disaster.

www.dailymail.co.uk

 

[ch_13]

IMO all rescue ships should return home immediately, and if there is any other exploratory work to do, it is on OceanGate. The question has been answered and there is nothing more to be done.

I think there's probably a lot of important or scientific and engineering data that can be gleaned from this crash by analyzing the surviving wreckage.

Just as the NTSB does post-crash investigations which make air travel safer, I hope one good thing to come out of this will be that the knowledge gained will help build better, safer DSVs.