The Titan sub: A case study in hubris?

The Titan submersible disaster may well serve as a warning of the dangers of a combination of a risk-taking mindset with a lax regulatory environment.

The Titan disaster

On 18th June OceanGate's Titan submersible suffered a catastrophic implosion instantly killing all five passengers on board. This happened shortly after it went out of contact with its support vessel the ‘Polar Prince’ on descent to the wreck of the Titanic which rests nearly 4,000m below the surface of the Atlantic ocean. In piecing together what went wrong in this high profile disaster, the submersible’s novel design quickly became an area of public interest. The pressure vessels of deep sea vehicles like this are normally constructed from a robust metal like steel. They’re also usually constructed as spheres, to spread the immense undersea pressures equally around the pressure hull within which passengers sit. The Titan was instead built by stitching a carbon fibre cylinder between two titanium hemispheres which were glued onto the end, and then passengers bolted in. This created a larger pressure hull that could accommodate more passengers and therefore generate more revenue for each trip. This design obviously creates a potential weakness between the materials and indeed searchers found the two titanium end caps on the ocean floor, separated from the imploded cylinder. It is known that carbon fibres can break individually and are prone to delamination, where a material fractures into layers under pressure.

Who takes the lead?

The oceans are considered to be ‘global commons’ owned by everyone and no one. This leaves responsibility for regulation and investigation of deep sea accidents like this subject to international treaties and competition between nations for registration. OceanGate is based in Washington state, on the western coast of the USA, which is a long way from the dive that day. But any vessel carrying passengers or cargo has to be registered with a flag state, putting it under the national regulator of that country. The US coastguard has regulations for steel passenger carrying submersibles, but not for submersibles of other materials. According to the U.S. Coast Guard the Titan submersible itself:

was not a U.S. flagged vessel and was never certified or certificated by the U.S. Coast Guard.

OceanGate Expeditions, the company that led the Titan’s dives to the Titanic, is registered in the Bahamas but the Bahamas is apparently not the flag state of the Titan either, given that its rules for submersibles do not apply to craft that are launched from other states.

The other key interested party here is the Port State. Because Titan’s surface support vessel, the Polar Prince, is a Canadian-flagged ship, Canada’s Transportation Safety Board has a role. In June it grasped the nettle and announced that it was launching a safety investigation regarding the circumstances of the Titan accident. It’s being supported by other bodies, in particular the U.S. Coast Guard’s Marine Board of Investigation.

The investigation is now underway and forensic study of the debris in a lab will doubtless be undertaken before any firm conclusions are reached.

A frenzy of public interest

This accident had all of the elements to create a swell of press and media interest. Firstly, it was linked to the story of the Titanic, which was already the most famous and enduring maritime tragedy of modern history even before it was made into one of the highest grossing blockbuster movies of all time. The accident has also triggered immense sympathy for the passengers that died including 19 year old Suleman Dawood, who went with his father, the British businessman Shahzada Dawood.

It is always problematic to speculate about what caused an accident before the formal investigation, but in the face of such huge public interest, the media investigation began immediately. A previous BBC documentary about OceanGate and the Titan sub soon surfaced and with the benefit of hindsight it served to highlight some deeper areas of concern. Even being charitable, the use of a wireless games controller to steer the craft seems cavalier (my son has broken three games controllers in the last two months). The documentary also showed passengers being bolted into the craft by the re-sealing of its titanium ends, a practice that is likely to be closely observed in the investigation, given its importance to the structural integrity of this novel design, under water pressures similar to the weight of the Eiffel Tower.

Tech hubris?

The media always likes to have a compelling protagonist and this story gave them one in the form of OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, who also died in the accident. Rush apparently idolised Captain Kirk from Star Trek, boldly seeking to go where no one had gone before, through innovation and adventure. After an early career in aviation and as a budding space traveller, he swapped his attention to the ocean. Paying attention to the fad for luxury space travel being developed by the likes of Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, Rush spotted an opportunity to take well-heeled tourists to the depths of the ocean instead. Before the accident, concerns had been raised about the Titan craft he developed for this purpose. For example, OceanGate's former head of marine operations, David Lochridge, raised concerns about the hull and porthole in court documents in 2018. In that same year the Marine Technology Society, a group of leading experts on submersible technology voiced urgent fears about the safety of the Titan and OceanGate's practices. They criticised the “experimental approach” adopted by Rush and urged the company to have the vessel examined by industry regulators and independent groups that assess the safety of submersibles. The oceanographic exploration and naval submarine sectors have good safety records, learning from early experiences of high accident rates.

Rather than a modern day Captain Kirk, Rush appears from the press narrative more like Moby Dick’s Captain Ahab; doggedly pursuing his mission on the high seas, full of hubris and ignoring the advice and caution of calmer heads.

An outlier

In an interview with Smithsonian magazine Rush made his views about regulations and rules relating to the safety of submersibles clear:

There hasn’t been an injury in the commercial sub industry in over 35 years. It’s obscenely safe, because they have all these regulations. But it also hasn’t innovated or grown—because they have all these regulations.”

This is a common critique of standards and regulations but one that is rejected by those who understand the benefits of standards to innovation, when properly applied.

James Cameron, the director of ‘Titanic’, and a man who has visited the ship’s wreckage thirty three times made his views equally clear after the accident.

No fatalities, no incidents, no deaths, no implosions — until today…The Titan disaster is an extreme outlier of a data point that in a sense proves the rule. And the rule is we've been safe for half a century.

The international maritime organisation (IMO) sets sensible and effective guidance around how to safely design and operate deep sea submersibles. It operates modern goal-based frameworks for safety management that are well suited to innovation. But in the absence of related regulatory requirements its guidance needs to be adopted voluntarily. This requires the mindset and appetite to do so.

What are the immediate lessons here?

Regardless of the investigation’s findings, this accident highlights the risks inherent in rapid technological innovation within safety critical sectors. The entrepreneurial personality type - embodied by Steve Jobs - is pursued with messianic zeal on the West Coast, where OceanGate was headquartered. Stockton Rush apparently wanted to be the ‘Elon Musk of the deep’ and embrace the ‘move fast and break things’ culture.

But risks must be assessed, understood and consciously undertaken. Test pilots are professionals who are paid to take risks that would otherwise be intolerable. Passengers are not usually part of test flights (or sailing) and they shouldn’t be exposed to intolerable risks that they don’t understand.

This accident was perhaps predictable in the sense that, if safety disasters are to occur in the modern world, they will most be likely be in situations where a strong appetite for risk and profit is coincident with weak or ineffective regulation. This creates a pressure point just as dangerous as the 4000 tones per square metre of pressure on the seal of the titanium ends of the Titan.

In areas like transportation, safety standards, and safety culture have evolved slowly across decades, through the painful learning that comes from major accidents. We don’t want to kill the innovative spirit. But we do need to curb its excesses in areas with the potential for public harm. Understanding and communicating risks is therefore the essential ingredient to unlock innovation in safety critical sectors.

So what do I think we can say with confidence at this stage? Firstly, regulation in the maritime world appears to need strengthening. Canada and the United States are likely to adopt more regulations around submersibles as a result of the investigation, and the International Maritime Organization’s guidance will likely become stronger too. But this is not enough. We also need to recognise the role of culture and mindset in the creation of risks. This isn’t just about wagging a finger at the innovators though. Those in the know must help them to recognise when they are straying into sectors with the strong unwritten behaviours that past catastrophes build.

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Thanks for reading

All views here are my own. Please feel free to feed back any thoughts or comments and please do feel free to drop me an e-mail.

My particular area of professional interest is practical risk management and assurance of new technology. I’m always keen to engage on interesting projects or research in this area.