For lack of a pinger …

George Rebane

The submersible Titan is now most certainly lost with five dead tourists aboard.  The search for Titan has been going on since contact with it was lost within two hours into the mission to visit the wreckage of the sunken Titanic resting at a depth of approximately 12,000 feet. (more here)

As an engineer with some experience in working with submersible systems ranging from nuclear submarines to remotely operated underwater vehicles, I’ve been struggling to figure out how such a tourist cum research vessel could have been designed to get lost in such a way that it could not be found with the latest underwater technology brought to bear.

All the submersible systems of any value on which I worked were always deployed, at a minimum, with a pinger to enable it to be quickly located should the need arise.  A pinger is an electrically powered transducer that emits a loud acoustic signal when activated, one that can be heard tens of miles away.  The simplest pinger can be turned on from inside the submersible by just pushing a button.  More sophisticated pingers, most certainly warranted for vehicles like the Titan, would entail programmable transponders which can listen to a coded interrogation from, say, a support vessel, and reply with a number of responses that report the condition and location of the submersible.  Such pingers can also be programmed to start broadcasting automatically when any one of a number of problems/contingencies is sensed.

In the scheme and cost of underwater operations pingers are cheap insurance.  Even when working with marine mammals on various recovery and attack systems, we always had a pinger on the target vehicle that we wished to recover or determine its location.  These were also standard components strapped on to various test missiles, mines, and other gear to be recovered later.

So it now boggles this technical brainbone to hear days of reports on the Titan recovery effort that lament the loss of the vehicle, designed by a first-rate engineering team, that supposedly passed its man-safe qualifications before submerging with a live crew.  The entire scenario is made even more amateurish by reports of potentially manmade pounding sounds being heard by the transducer field deployed by the rescuers, and still no one has offered the obvious observation about onboard pingers or the lack thereof.  If they didn’t think of it before hearing the possible sounds from Titan, then by now someone should have said, ‘Oh shit, we forgot the pingers!’ or at least reported the presence of dysfunctional onboard pingers when the pounding started.

Having now discovered a debris field potentially from Titan, some may offer that the vehicle suffered a massive and sudden decompression during its descent, thereby not allowing time for a pinger to be manually activated.  But we already covered how that contingency would have been overcome with a programmed pinger.  The sound of silence on the missing pingers deepens the mystery.

Comments

[Scott O]

Looking at Stockton Rush's background, I wouldn't get into a car with him.
Key quote:
""I think I can do this just as safely by breaking the rules,” he continued."
I'm not sure what rules he was referring to, but it looks like he paid the ultimate price for his hubris.
https://www.dailyprincetonian.com/article/2023/06/princeton-alum-stockton-rush-lost-tital-submersible-submarine-ceo-pilot-search
He had made the trip before successfully, but there were reported problems.
I'm sure the people on board were aware of the immense potential danger at that depth.
To keep it in perspective - it seems every month I read about some one who just went for a hike ending up missing or dead. Life is dangerous - no one gets out alive.

[Gregory]

"You know, at some point, safety just is pure waste. I mean, if you just want to be safe, don’t get out of bed. Don’t get in your car. Don’t do anything.”

“At some point, you’re going to take some risk, and it really is a risk/reward question. I think I can do this just as safely by breaking the rules..."
-the CEO of the operation

How many dives to 12000' did the pressure tank make before it imploded at depth? How many did a prototype make before it failed?

What? They didn't test it that way?

A pinger wouldn't help that operation.

[Scott O]

I hadn't seen this - "...once explained how he didn’t hire “50-year-old white guys” with military experience to captain his vessels because they weren’t “inspirational.”"

Sez the 61 year old white guy.

"Stockton Rush, 61, added that such expertise was unnecessary because “anybody can drive the sub” with a $30 video game controller."

Going down 12K feet with a guy that doesn't find competence and safety to be paramount just doesn't sound like a good idea.
https://nypost.com/2023/06/21/why-stockton-rush-didnt-hire-50-year-old-white-guys-for-titanic-sub-tours/

[Gregory]

"WASHINGTON—A top secret U.S. Navy acoustic detection system designed to spot enemy submarines first heard the Titan sub implosion hours after the submersible began its mission, officials involved in the search said.

The Navy began listening for the Titan almost as soon as the sub lost communications, according to a U.S. defense official. Shortly after its disappearance, the U.S. system detected what it suspected was the sound of an implosion near the debris site discovered Thursday and reported its findings to the commander on site, U.S. defense officials said.

“The U.S. Navy conducted an analysis of acoustic data and detected an anomaly consistent with an implosion or explosion in the general vicinity of where the Titan submersible was operating when communications were lost,” a senior U.S. Navy official told The Wall Street Journal in a statement. “While not definitive, this information was immediately shared with the Incident Commander to assist with the ongoing search and rescue mission.”

The Navy asked that the specific system used not be named, citing national security concerns."

[🐠]

Posted by: Scott O | 22 June 2023 at 03:15 PM

Funny…..even the crazy doing things his own way undersea explorer rebel dude still feels the compulsion to virtue signal. Fired the uninspiring white guy whose suggestion might have saved his life and the lives of his passengers.

Inspiring!

[The Estonian Fox]

Gregory 03:18 PM

Sonar/acoustics have made substantial improvements since the USS Thresher loss 60 years ago. It took some time then for the US Navy to search (probably manually) through its recordings to pinpoint the time & location of the Thresher loss.

The Titan was 600 miles farther from the US coastline than the Thresher was, with a 'target' less than 1% of the Thresher volume, so should be expecting a much quieter 'boom'. It's isn't surprising that our Navy picked up the loss.

I did get one notice from the sonar group a decade ago when a 500+ pound guest of ours dove into our pool. They accused us of secretly harboring Russian assets. They weren't even close. The guy was Chinese.

[Misanthrope]

The OceanGate sub had sensors on the inside of the hull to give them a warning of when it was starting to crack according to James Cameron.

"Beep-Beep, you're fucked"