Expert in underwater autonomous vehicles weighs in on a preventable tragedy
In June 2023, the Titan submersible with five people on board, designed and operated by OceanGate, a private deep-sea exploration company, imploded while descending to the wreckage of the Titanic in the North Atlantic Ocean. A U.S. Coast Guard investigative report released in August detailed the “critically flawed” safety practices, regulatory gaps, and misleading claims that contributed to this tragedy, while identifying “inadequate design, certification, maintenance, and inspection process for the Titan.”
This preventable disaster underscores the systemic failures that contributed to five deaths and brings to light the ways that oversight and engineering standards could have averted the disaster, says James Bellingham, executive director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Assured Autonomy and Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of exploration robotics, and an expert in autonomous underwater vehicles.
What engineering failures have recently been identified related to the OceanGate submersible?
Several problems contributed to the implosion of the submersible, including a fundamental flaw in how technology was selected, says Bellingham.
“To get as many people as possible to the ocean floor to see the wreckage of the Titanic, you need a large pressure vessel that is comparatively light,” he explains. One of the key challenges in submersible design, he notes, is achieving neutral buoyancy—ensuring the final vehicle floats without rising or sinking. In a practical sense, this means the vessel must weigh less than the water it displaces, so that designers have excess payload capacity to add all the other equipment, like batteries, and of course, passengers. “The best shape for a deep pressure vessel is a sphere, but the designers wanted it to be both small, for launch and recovery reasons, and at the same time carry more passengers, and that drove them to a cylinder. A cylinder requires thicker walls, and is therefore heavier,” he says. “Thus, the combination of these design requirements moved them away from the well proven approaches, for example to use a titanium sphere.”
Instead, the OceanGate team designed and built the submersible out of carbon fiber, though Bellingham said they realized there were issues in the carbon fiber vessel early on. He notes that carbon fiber performs better under tension than under compression, when forces are pushing on the material. This isn’t theoretical knowledge for Bellingham—his team at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), where he served as founding director of the Center for Marine Robotics, tested carbon fiber’s performance in deep-water environments. They found that, under extreme compression, carbon fiber cylinders shattered and turned into dust in the water.
Another engineering failure that may have contributed to the implosion involves the vessel’s storage conditions and thermal stress on its materials. The winter before its descent, the Titan submersible was stored outdoors in Canada, where sub-freezing temperatures are common and may have compromised the material. The porosity of the hull allowed seepage of water, which on freezing and thawing would have created cracks in the composite hull. Furthermore, the submersible was not evaluated in the water after it was taken out of winter storage, Bellingham says. “When you’re pushing the envelope, failure is less acceptable,” he says, adding that the technology-development culture at OceanGate likely conflicted with critical safety standards.
“Working at sea is very difficult,” says Bellingham. “It’s extremely easy to damage things, and the maritime rating system—which sets internal safety standards for vessels—is critical to ensure that nothing is damaged. These systems not only protect the materials and vessels but also provide an important layer of protection for people riding in watercraft.”
How could these failures have been prevented?
There are well-established third-party systems in the maritime industry that are regularly used to ensure the safety of new technologies and are in place to prevent catastrophes such as the implosion of the Titan, Bellingham says. “OceanGate bypassed the system,” explains Bellingham, noting that these third-party systems provide unbiased evaluations of systems to perform as expected.
Another issue that Bellingham identified is how the entire project was managed, including designing and building the Titan. He explains that there were reports that OceanGate employees who identified and spoke out about safety issues were terminated. Gradually, all those who may have flagged issues to leadership had left the company, and stakeholders did not have enough engineering knowledge to ask the right questions.
How are industry and academia working to better equip experts to prevent similar catastrophic failures?
To prevent similar failures, the industry needs to address the leadership and knowledge gaps that enabled the Titan disaster. Bellingham believes that when OceanGate replaced experienced engineers with junior staff, it created a culture where dangerous decisions went unchallenged. Furthermore, the adventure travel industry is not always regulated as it should be, Bellingham. said.
He notes that in the absence of comprehensive oversight, the responsibility falls even more heavily on properly training the next generation of engineers and industry leaders—a mission he said that experts at the Institute for Assured Autonomy are working to address.
Bellingham says that an important component of this training is ethics. “When we’re training our students, we need to teach them to know when an organization or company they’re working with is cutting corners in a way that could put people in hazard,” he says. “If something catastrophic happens, it should be because it wasn’t preventable.”