2023 maritime disaster
On 18 June 2023, "Titan", a submersible operated by the American tourism and expeditions company OceanGate, imploded during an expedition to view the wreck of the "Titanic" in the North Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada. Aboard the submersible were 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. 
Communication between "Titan" and its mother ship, , was lost 1 hour and 33 minutes into the dive. Authorities were alerted when it failed to resurface at the scheduled time later that day. After the submersible had been missing for four days, a remotely operated underwater vehicle (ROV) discovered a debris field containing parts of "Titan", about from the bow of the "Titanic". The search area was informed by the United States Navy's (USN) sonar detection of an acoustic signature consistent with an implosion around the time communications with the submersible ceased, suggesting the pressure hull had imploded while "Titan" was descending, resulting in the instantaneous deaths of all five occupants.
The search and rescue operation was performed by an international team organized by the United States Coast Guard (USCG), USN, and Canadian Coast Guard. Support was provided by aircraft from the Royal Canadian Air Force and United States Air National Guard, a Royal Canadian Navy ship, as well as several commercial and research vessels and ROVs.
Numerous industry experts had stated concerns about the safety of the vessel. OceanGate executives, including Rush, had not sought certification for "Titan", arguing that excessive safety protocols and regulations hindered innovation.
Background.
OceanGate.
OceanGate was a private company, initiated in 2009 by Stockton Rush and Guillermo Söhnlein. From 2010 until the loss of the "Titan" submersible, OceanGate transported paying customers in leased commercial submersibles off the coast of California, in the Gulf of Mexico, and in the Atlantic Ocean. The company was based in Everett, Washington, US.
Rush realized that visiting shipwreck sites was a method of getting media attention. OceanGate had previously conducted voyages to other shipwrecks, including its 2016 dive to the wreck of aboard their other submersible "Cyclops1". (A near disaster on that expedition was recounted in "Vanity Fair" in 2023.) In 2019, Rush told "Smithsonian" magazine: "There's only one wreck that everyone knows... If you ask people to name something underwater, it's going to be sharks, whales, "Titanic"".
"Titanic".
The "Titanic" was a British ocean liner that sank in the North Atlantic Ocean on 15 April 1912, after colliding with an iceberg. More than 1,500 people died, making it the deadliest sinking of a single ship at the time. In 1985, Robert Ballard located the wreck of the "Titanic" from the coast of Newfoundland. The wreck lies at a depth of about . Since its discovery, it has been a destination for research expeditions and tourism. By 2012, 140 people had visited the wreck site.
Submersible "Titan".
Formerly known as "Cyclops 2", "Titan" was a five-person submersible vessel operated by OceanGate Inc. The , vessel was constructed from carbon fibre and titanium. The entire pressure vessel consisted of two titanium hemispheres (domes) with matching titanium interface rings bonded to the internal diameter, carbon fibre-wound cylinder. One of the titanium hemispherical end caps could be detached to provide the hatch and was fitted with a acrylic window. In 2020, Rush said that the hull, originally designed to reach below sea level, had been downgraded to a depth rating of after demonstrating signs of cyclic fatigue. In 2020 and 2021, the hull was repaired or rebuilt. Rush told the "Travel Weekly" editor-in-chief that the carbon fibre had been sourced at a discount from Boeing because it was too old for use in the company's airplanes. Boeing stated they have no records of any sale to Rush or to OceanGate. OceanGate had initially not sought certification for "Titan", arguing that excessive safety protocols hindered innovation. Lloyd's Register, a ship classification society, refused OceanGate's request to class the vessel in 2019.
"Titan" could move at as much as using four electric thrusters, arrayed two horizontal and two vertical. Its steering controls consisted of a Logitech F710 wireless game controller with modified longer analogue sticks resembling traditional joysticks. The University of Washington's Applied Physics Laboratory assisted with the control design on the "Cyclops 1" using a DualShock 3 video game controller, which was carried over to "Titan", substituting with the Logitech controller. The use of commercial off-the-shelf game controllers is common for remote-controlled vehicles such as unmanned aerial vehicles or bomb disposal robots, whilst the United States Navy uses Xbox 360 controllers to control periscopes in s.
OceanGate claimed on its website as of 2023[ [update]] that "Titan" was "designed and engineered by OceanGate Inc. in collaboration [with] experts from NASA, Boeing, and the University of Washington" (UW). A ;templatestyles src="Fraction/styles.css" / ;1⁄3-scale model of the "Cyclops 2" pressure vessel was built and tested at the Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) at UW; the model was able to sustain a pressure of , corresponding to a depth of about . After the disappearance of "Titan" in 2023, these earlier associates disclaimed involvement with the Titan project. UW claimed the APL had no involvement in the "design, engineering, or testing of the "Titan" submersible". A Boeing spokesperson also claimed Boeing "was not a partner on "Titan" and did not design or build it". A NASA spokesperson said that NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center had a Space Act Agreement with OceanGate, but "did not conduct testing and manufacturing via its workforce or facilities". It was designed and developed originally in partnership with UW and Boeing, both of which put forth numerous design recommendations and rigorous testing requirements, which Rush ignored, despite prior tests at lower depths resulting in implosions at UW's lab. The partnerships dissolved as Rush refused to work within quality standards.
According to OceanGate, the vessel contained monitoring systems to continuously monitor the strength of the hull. The vessel had life support for five people for 96 hours. There is no GPS underwater; the support ship, which monitored the position of "Titan" relative to its target, sent text messages to "Titan" providing distances and directions.
According to OceanGate, "Titan" had several backup systems intended to return the vessel to the surface in case of emergency, including ballasts that could be dropped, a balloon, thrusters, and sandbags held by hooks that dissolved after a certain number of hours in saltwater. Ideally, this would release the sandbags, allowing the vessel to float to the surface. An OceanGate investor explained that if the vessel did not ascend automatically after the elapsed time, those inside could help release the ballast either by tilting the ship back and forth to dislodge it or by using a pneumatic pump to loosen the weights.
Dives to wreck of "Titanic".
Dives by "Titan" to the wreck of the "Titanic" occurred as part of multi-day excursions organized by OceanGate, which the company referred to as "missions". Five missions occurred in the middle of 2021 and 2022. "Titan" imploded during the fifth mission of 2023; it was the first mission of the year in which a dive came close to "Titanic", due to poor weather during previous attempts.
Passengers would sail to and from the wreckage site aboard a support ship and spend approximately five days in the ocean above the "Titanic" wreckage site. Two dives were usually attempted during each excursion, though dives were often cancelled or aborted due to weather or technical malfunctions.
Each dive typically had a pilot, a guide, and three paying passengers aboard. Once inside the submersible, the hatch would be bolted shut and could only be reopened from the outside. The descent from the surface to the "Titanic" wreck typically took two hours, with the full dive taking about eight hours. Throughout the journey, the submersible was expected to emit a safety ping every 15 minutes to be monitored by the above-water crew. The vessel and surface crew were also able to communicate via brief text messages.
Customers who travelled to the wreck with OceanGate, referred to as "mission specialists" by the company, paid each for the eight-day expedition.
OceanGate intended to perform multiple dives to the "Titanic"'s wreck in 2023, but the dive in which "Titan" was destroyed was the only one the company had launched that year.
Safety.
Because "Titan" operated in international waters and did not carry passengers from a port, it was not subject to safety regulations. The vessel was not certified as seaworthy by any regulatory agency or third-party organization. Reporter David Pogue, who completed the expedition in 2022 as part of a "CBS News Sunday Morning" feature, said that all passengers who enter "Titan" sign a waiver confirming their knowledge that it is an "experimental" vessel "that has not been approved or certified by any regulatory body, and could result in physical injury, disability, emotional trauma or death". Television producer Mike Reiss, who also completed the expedition, said the waiver "mention[s] death three times on page one". A 2019 article published in "Smithsonian" magazine referred to Rush as a "daredevil inventor". In the article, Rush is described as having said that the U.S. Passenger Vessel Safety Act of 1993 "needlessly prioritized passenger safety over commercial innovation". In a 2022 interview, Rush told "CBS News", "At some point, safety just is pure waste. I mean, if you just want to be safe, don't get out of bed. Don't get in your car. Don't do anything." Rush said in a 2021 interview, "I've broken some rules to make ["Titan"]. I think I've broken them with logic and good engineering behind me. The carbon fibre and titanium, there's a rule you don't do that. Well, I did."
OceanGate claimed that "Titan" was the only crewed submersible that used an integrated real-time monitoring system (RTM) for safety. The proprietary system, patented by Rush in 2021, used acoustic sensors and strain gauges at the pressure boundary to analyse the effects of increasing pressure as the watercraft ventured deeper into the ocean and to monitor the hull's integrity in real time. This would supposedly give early warning of problems and allow enough time to abort the descent and return to the surface.
Prior concerns.
 In 2018, OceanGate's director of marine operations, David Lochridge, composed a report documenting safety concerns he had about "Titan". In court documents, Lochridge said that he had urged the company to have "Titan" assessed and certified by the American Bureau of Shipping, but OceanGate had refused to do so, instead seeking classification from Lloyd's Register. He also said that the transparent viewport on its forward end, due to its nonstandard and therefore experimental design, was only certified to a depth of , only a third of the depth required to reach the "Titanic"'s wreck. According to Lochridge, RTM would "only show when a component is about to fail – often milliseconds before an implosion" and could not detect existing flaws in the hull before it was too late. Lochridge was also concerned that OceanGate would not perform nondestructive testing on the vessel's hull before undertaking crewed dives and alleged that he was "repeatedly told that no scan of the hull or Bond Line could be done to check for delaminations, porosity and voids of sufficient adhesion of the glue being used due to the thickness of the hull". The viewport was rated to only , and the engineer of the viewport also prepared an analysis from an independent expert that concluded the design would fail after only a few 4,000 m dives.
OceanGate said that Lochridge, who was not an engineer, had refused to accept safety approvals from OceanGate's engineering team and that the company's evaluation of "Titan"'s hull was stronger than any kind of third-party evaluation Lochridge thought necessary. OceanGate sued Lochridge for allegedly breaching his confidentiality contract and making fraudulent statements. Lochridge counter-sued, stating that his employment had been wrongfully terminated as a whistleblower for stating concerns about "Titan"'s ability to operate safely. The two parties settled the case a few months later, before it came to court. He filed a whistleblower complaint with Occupational Safety and Health Administration, but withdrew it after the lawsuit was filed.
Later in 2018, a group organized by William Kohnen, the chair of the Submarine Group of the "Marine Technology Society", drafted a letter to Rush expressing "unanimous concern regarding the development of 'TITAN' and the