US Coast Guard Releases Audio of Titan Submersible Implosion at Titanic Wreck Site
The US Coast Guard has released audio from the implosion of the Titan submersible, which was lost during a dive at the Titanic wreck site in the North Atlantic in 2023. The incident resulted in the deaths of four paying “mission specialists” and the CEO of the operating company, marking the first fatal accident in a deep-diving manned submersible in fifty years.
The Coast Guard suspects that the Titan’s experimental carbon hull imploded quickly, with little to no warning. An acoustic buoy from NOAA detected the sound of the underwater explosion from several miles away, providing one of the first indications that the dive had ended in disaster.
Ongoing investigations have revealed that the Titan had a history of safety issues prior to the incident. The submersible, along with an earlier prototype, experienced several problems, including partially sinking at the pier, running out of battery power while submerged, losing its forward dome during recovery, and failing to release weights on multiple occasions.
Testimonies from former Oceangate employees indicated that co-founder and CEO Richard Stockton Rush III opted not to seek classification or a Coast Guard Certificate of Inspection (COI) for the innovative design, despite numerous warnings from engineering consultants and his own team.
Rush acknowledged the experimental nature of Oceangate’s vessel, stating at a conference that it was difficult to gauge how far outside conventional norms they were operating. He remarked that traditional research subs were not designed for profit but for exploration, and criticized certification programs for being excessively stringent.
