The U.S. Coast Guard issued a sweeping report detailing all of the failures that led to the catastrophic implosion of OceanGate’s submersible “Titan” in 2023.
The U.S. Coast Guard issued a sweeping report detailing the failures that led to the catastrophic implosion of OceanGate’s submersible “Titan” in 2023. The findings emphasized a range of deficiencies — from the company’s “toxic” workplace and safety cultures, where critics were silenced, to the faulty design practices linked to the flawed carbon fiber hull.
The report, released on Tuesday, identifies numerous “primary causal factors” behind the disaster, including the choice of design materials, failure to investigate mishaps from previous dives, and the lack of preventative maintenance when Titan was not in use. It also cites an organizational culture that prioritized customer expectations and operational demands over safety.
The bottom line, officials wrote, was that the disaster that resulted in five deaths, including OceanGate’s CEO Stockton Rush, was preventable.
Hanumant Singh, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Northeastern University, who has overseen the design of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV), talked to Northeastern Global News about the final report and its findings.
His comments have been edited for brevity and clarity.
This is what we expected. There are no two ways about it. But now that they’ve done a comprehensive review, it’s not speculation anymore.
There are two aspects to it: one is the technical part, and the other is the operational part. Both are really, really critical. When you’re operating a submersible or any vehicle that has a human being in it, then all the risk factors and safety margins need to increase — both from a technical and operational standpoint.
It’s clear from the report that the people in charge made a series of tradeoffs that compromised the whole operation. It was only a matter of time before something like this would happen.
Part of the problem is that this isn’t a well-regulated industry. If you want to get a submersible certified, the civilian authority would be the American Bureau of Shipping. And they’re the people who certify ships; they just don’t have the experience certifying these things because we don’t build enough of them.
If you’re building a one-of-a-kind submersible every 20 years or so, especially the deep ones, how do you go about certifying it? All of the materials change; all of the construction changes. If you’re more conservative and go with stainless steel or titanium — even those materials have their set of issues.
Yes, for sure. When you look at these new technologies like carbon fibers — that’s just a completely different ballgame that nobody has experience with, especially with lots of cycles and operational concerns. The OceanGate folks were towing their vessel behind the ship.
But other vessels, whether it’s the Japanese Shinkai or [Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s] Alvin, have a dedicated ship associated with their submersible. These guys just chartered a ship and towed the vessel behind it, and so all of the stress, all of the wave action that this thing experienced — nobody has any experience dealing with that.
Carbon fiber has these unique properties in that it’s very strong but can get damaged by, for example, somebody dropping something on it. So you get these small cracks that form somewhere — it might be microscopic. But as you cycle it, that crack is going to propagate and get bigger and bigger until you get to failure.
So the carbon fiber, when it’s put together to make this spherical hull, it’s beautiful, of course. But there’s a caveat, which is: don’t drop a hammer when you’re working in there, because then you’re going to create this microscopic crack that’s going to expand over time.
Part of the problem is this Silicon Valley ‘fake it till you make it’ culture. Even when it comes to testing unmanned vehicles, people don’t like to own up to their mistakes. Then we don’t learn from them. But we want to learn from them. When we’re talking about manned vehicles, it’s just completely unacceptable the way this was done.
Part of the reason why this CEO was under pressure was that this kind of thing costs a lot of money. Nobody really wants or needs a manned submersible to go to those depths. If you look at the ones that already exist: there’s Alvin in Woodshole; there’s the Japanese vehicle called the Shinkai 6500; the French had some vessels that are retired now; the Russians used to have the Mirs — those too are gone now. And then there are some shallow vehicles where people go reef diving and stuff like that. Even those you worry about how they’ve been certified.
But if you want to explore the deep ocean, we use things called ROVs, or remotely operated vehicles; and the majority of those are being used in the oil industry. A small percentage are being used by naval forces and for science. But here, these vehicles are unmanned and nobody’s getting hurt. Those technologies are well-known and everybody knows what the standards are. But for manned submersibles, there’s no real market. You can really accomplish a lot more with ROVs than manned vehicles. In reality, there’s little reason to put people into those situations.