Five people died in a submersible that was only loosely regulated and may not have been inspected for safety.
The dreadful saga of the missing Titanic submersible is finally drawing to a close. On Sunday, the vessel, called the Titan, was supposed to take five people on an hours-long, 12,500-foot-deep journey to the wreckage of the Titanic, which rests at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. Instead, less than two hours into the tour, the submersible lost contact with its support ship. At a press conference this afternoon, the U.S. Coast Guard announced that a remotely operated vehicle had encountered the debris of the Titan, which suggested that the passengers were killed in “a catastrophic implosion of the vessel.”
The debris of the submersible was discovered on the seafloor, about 1,600 feet from the bow of the Titanic. For days, rescue workers had operated on the hopeful assumption that the submersible might still be intact, and that its occupants could be alive, even as their oxygen reserves began to run out. The news brings a difficult end to days of frenzied search-and-rescue efforts involving military and research vessels from multiple countries. It also underscores an important question that became more salient with each minute of the search: How, exactly, could this have happened?
In the days since the Titan lost contact with the outside world, reporters have uncovered many details about the submersible and its operator, OceanGate, a research-and-tourism company that has offered such Titanic excursions since 2021. David Pogue, a CBS journalist who traveled on the submersible last year, called the sub “janky” for its scraped-together parts, such as construction pipes serving as ballast. It had no fancy control panels, only a single button that initiates the descent, like pressing “Down” on an elevator, and was piloted using a $30 game controller. The ’s Gene Park pointed out that such controllers are actually not so unusual for certain kinds of vehicles, even those used by the U.S. military—but the Titan’s controller appears to have been an older model, and it relied on a good Bluetooth connection, which is not the case for military craft.
