It’s Not a Submarine (and Why It’s Controlled by a Video Game Controller)
Right now, five people may be stranded in a private submarine somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean. At the time of this writing, they have less than 20 hours of air left – assuming they are still alive. A massive effort is being made by the US Coast Guard, Navy and Canadian military to locate and recover the vessel, which has been named the Titan . Despite the recent discovery that the sound of the “pops” was picked up by powerful underwater microphones near the site of the missing submarine, things are not going well .
On June 18, the 21-foot-long submarine embarked on a mission to survey the wreck of the Titanic, located 12,500 feet below the ocean’s surface and about 435 miles south of St. John’s in Newfoundland, with four passengers and a pilot on board. . After about an hour and 45 minutes of diving, communication between the underwater vehicle and its base ship, the Polar Prince, was interrupted.
According to a disclaimer signed by Titan’s passengers, the submarine is an “experimental vessel” that has not been “approved or certified by any regulatory body”.
Who is on board the missing submersible?
The Titan is owned by Oceangate Expeditions and its passengers are four tourists (each paid up to $250,000 for the trip) and the owner of Oceangate Expeditions. Lost Adventurers:
- Hamish Harding is a British businessman and explorer who has been described as a “living aviation legend”.
- Shahzada Daud, Pakistani businessman.
- Suleman Daoud , son of Shahzada Daoud.
- Paul-Henri Nargeole , 77-year-old French explorer and director of underwater research for the company that owns the rights to the wreck of the Titanic .
- Stockton Rush , CEO and founder of OceanGate, Inc.
The difference between an underwater vehicle and a submarine
Titan is a submersible ship. Unlike a submarine, a submarine is launched from a larger ship and then lifted back up. While some submarines can safely stay submerged for months and travel thousands of miles under their own power without resurfacing, the Titan only has the power for short passages. The journey to the Titanic takes about 8 hours, so it looks more like an untied diving bell than a real submarine.
Navigation on the Titan is based on a text messaging system in which the mothership basically tells the Titan’s pilot how to steer. There is no GPS or other positioning system on board.
Something went wrong?
It is impossible to say exactly what caused the ship to stop communicating with the outside world, nor to determine exactly where it is now. But there are three possible scenarios:
- The submarine is currently floating on top of the ocean . The Titan is equipped with ballast mechanisms that allow it to rise to the surface even if it loses power. This is probably the best scenario, but it’s still a grim one: it’s impossible to open the submarine from the inside – it’s bolted – so the passengers will run out of air if they aren’t found within the next day. Canadian and American warplanes have so far scoured the Connecticut-sized region of the ocean looking for the ship, but the sea is vast and foggy conditions have made the search even more difficult.
- The titan is intact, but cannot return to the surface . If the ballast mechanism fails or the Titan becomes trapped in debris (perhaps the Titanic itself), it could become stuck deep under the ocean. In this case, even if it is discovered, saving the crew will be an unprecedented task. There are very few ships that can dive as deep as the Titan, and getting it back to the surface would be a major logistical challenge.
- A hull breach or other catastrophic structural failure has occurred . If this happened, the submarine would be immediately crushed , and no one would be left alive.
According to retired US Navy submarine captain David Marquet, the crew’s chances of surviving at all are about 1%. “It’s basically the representation that the spacecraft has disappeared on the far side of the moon,” Marquet told NPR. “Ah, you must find him. B, you have to get to him. Even when you get to it… you still need to somehow get people out of there to safety.
Do they really control the submersible with a game controller?
Despite costing a quarter of a million dollars for an eight-day Oceangate expedition, the Titan is far from a luxury vessel. The interior is the size of a minivan and there is no room for passengers to stand up inside the ship.
David Pogue, reporter for CBS Sunday Morning, embarked on the Oceangate mission last year and reported on the do-it-yourself style of some of Titan’s components. Lights from a camping store. The toilet is a plastic bottle. The ship is controlled by a modified $30 Logitech F710 game controller. But using a game controller to control submarines is not uncommon; the military has been doing this for a year , and as Oceangate owner Rush told CBS Sunday Morning, the interior lighting, toilet and gamepad may be homemade, but important parts of the car are not.
“There are certain things you want to zip up. A pressure vessel is not a MacGyver at all,” Rush told the Sunday Morning. “This is where we worked with Boeing, NASA and the University of Washington. Everything else can fail – your engines can fail, your lights can fail – and you’ll still be safe.” Depends on how you define the word, I guess, but let’s hope so.
A successful underwater rescue operation is possible, but unlikely
To give an idea of how difficult a Titan reentry will be, consider the successful rescue of the Pisces III submersible. In 1973, Roger Mallinson and Roger Chapman were laying a cable on the ocean floor off the coast of Ireland when the hull of their submersible was damaged. In a compartment filled with water, the cable connecting Pisces III to its mothership broke and the ship sank to a depth of 1,575 feet below sea level before coming to rest on the ocean floor.
Even though Pisces III was in much shallower water ( the Titan could be up to 12,000 feet deep) and its location was not a mystery, the frantic rescue operation still took 84 hours. Both Mallinson and Chapman survived, but barely had about 12 minutes of breathable air left by the time they were removed from their submersible.