Titanic Sub Implosion Has 'Only One Explanation'—Deep Sea Pilot

There is "only one explanation" as to why the Titan submersible catastrophically imploded as it descended towards the Titanic shipwreck this week, and that is a fault with the engineering design of the capsule itself, a deep sea submersible pilot has said.

Ofer Ketter, president of SubMerge, which provides consulting on submersible safety, told Newsweek on Friday that the repeated stress from trips to the Titanic wreck on a hull made from an unconventional material meant the vessel was "just not designed to withstand the pressure that it went down to."

Rear Admiral John Mauger, of the U.S. Coast Guard, announced on Thursday that one of the deep-sea robots drafted in to look for the submersible had found a debris field "consistent with the catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber" near where communications had gone dark.

The vessel had stopped responding to the surface trip around an hour and 45 minutes into its descent, which began at 8 a.m. ET on Sunday morning. A 96-hour on-board oxygen supply had raised hopes that the sub may have been found intact, or even on the surface following the release of an emergency weight.

But the discovery of the debris field confirmed the worst-case scenario, and that billionaire Hamish Harding, OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, former French Navy diver Paul-Henry Nargeolet, British-Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son, Suleman, are now presumed dead.

"In this case of this extreme, catastrophic implosion, there is only one explanation—and that is an engineering fault," Ketter, who has spent over 20 years making trips to around 1,600 feet below the surface, said.

He explained that the laws of physics "are known" and "don't change," adding: "That means, from an engineering and operational point of view, we know how to do it; it's not something that needs to be discovered."

"We, as an industry and as humanity, have been three times deeper than the depth of the Titanic, to the Challenger Deep, to the deepest points of all the oceans; we've been down and back up repetitive times safely," the Costa Rica-based pilot said.

The Challenger Deep, part of the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean, is the lowest known point under the sea and was explored in July 2022. It has a depth of nearly 36,000 feet. The Titanic wreck, meanwhile, sits at around 12,500 feet below sea level—still far lower than most submersibles can travel.

"So that leaves us only with that option: that this specific submersible was just not designed to withstand the pressure that it went down to," Ketter said. "That's only conclusion there is for this scenario."

Around the shipwreck, the sea exerts around 400 bar of pressure. Near sea level, just one bar of pressure is experienced.

Others have noted Titan's unconventional design. Tom Shugart, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security and former U.S. Navy submarine commander, told Newsweek on Thursday that it was "very unusual" to have a carbon-fibre cylinder for its hull, while other deep sea submersibles tended to be constructed out of metal spheres.

Ketter agreed, adding that while the industry was not averse to innovation, OceanGate, Titan's owner, had received "warnings" about its novel design.

One of the company's former employees sued the company over safety issues in 2018, while The New York Times reported that the Manned Underwater Vehicles committee of the Marine Technology Society had warned OceanGate about not allowing independent testing of the craft.

The company said in 2019 that bringing in an outside entity was "anathema to rapid innovation." Its website states that the Titan was designed for depths of over 13,000 feet and had a real time hull health monitoring system that provided "unparalleled safety."

Newsweek reached out to OceanGate via email for comment on Friday.

The voyage on Sunday was not the Titan's first, though. The submersible had taken trips down to the wreck in 2021 and 2022, and several people who travelled in it previously have spoken of their experience since its disappearance.

Ketter added that a "very, very important factor in designing a deep submersible" was "how the material reacts to repetitive cycles."

"It's one thing to do it once, it's actually a whole other thing to have the same pressure structure and the same material go up and down through the pressures and withstand the extreme changes," he said.

Ketter mentioned the possibility of microscopic fissures developing on the hull throughout its trips, and suggested that Titan's last trip was just when the pressure became too much for the structure.