The Titanic Sub Tragedy

Five adventure-seeking people, including a billionaire and a son who was terrified to go but didn't want to upset his father, died on a sub tour to the Titanic wreckage. How did the rescue attempt go down? What's it like in one of these subs? Stephen Wood is a professor and chair of the Ocean Engineering Department at the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne and a man with some answers.

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Stephen Wood, who is a professorin the program chair of the Ocean Engineering
Department of a Florida Institute of Technology. And first of all, Stephen,
are you're there? Can you hearus? Yes? I can hear you.
Awesome, there you are? Allright? So now we just learned
not that long ago that they foundsome sort of debris field, that's what
they're calling in in the area wherethey were searching for this submersible. What's

(00:26):
your gut take on that? What'sthat tell you when you hear about that?
Well, first of all, notgood, but there's things which could
happen. It's just like in aspacecraft. You can have part of your
system fail, but your rest ofthe system is still working. They were
using a deep sea remotely operated vehiclestypically the Victor six thousand is one of

(00:50):
them, has fuel capabilities for beinga very deep depth and to be able
to work and manipulate things at deepdepth. And supposedly one of their operated
vehicles found some stuff on the bottomof the sea. The question is is
how recent is it, because thereare lots of debrief fields in the ocean,
and the question is if it's brandnew, fairly new. The chances

(01:14):
are it is a submarine. Butif there is an element of slime or
whatever on it, then there's somethingprevious. So the cameras will tell them
that fairly quickly, and so whenthey gave their final of the next news
baby at three o'clock, it shouldbe I'd tell us in detail or whether
or not that is the submarine ornot. Well, Stephen, one thing

(01:36):
that we were talking about yesterday.We were asking this question to each other,
but we don't know, and youprobably do. If they found this
submersible that was touring the Titanic wreckageand it's way down on the bottom of
the ocean, like two and ahalf miles down, maybe it got hung
up on the wreckage or something.If they found that, they had one
of these ROVs that they were swimmingaround through the water to try to locate

(01:57):
it, would they be able tolike hook a line on it and pull
it back up. Can those remotelyoperated vehicles do stuff like that? Yes,
they can do any of that.The chances are what it would actually
do is be because remember remotely operatedvehicle as a person up on the ship
controlling that vehicle, and so they'relooking through cameras and they can see everything.

(02:19):
They have grippers, they have cutters, and so if they came across
the submersible entangled some way, shapeor form on the Titanic, they could
actually grab ahold of it and moveit. They'd actually cut through the metals
or whatever. If something caught ontoit, they could chop it off to
release it. Yeah, it reallydepends on what it happened if it got

(02:44):
entangled. So they're really versatile,these machines that they have down there searching
for this thing. What is yourgut say then, on what you think
happened here to begin with, becauseI've heard some people saying they believe that
the moment they lost contact with thesefolks, this thing they have imploded.
And I've seen this passed around quitea bit. And you guys watch this,

(03:05):
pay attention to this because this iswild and those of you watching will
see the visual of this. ButI'll describe it for everybody else. This
is a trained tank vacuum implosion atone atmospheric pressure, and where titan would
be would be around three hundred andseventy five atmospheres. So if you want
to know what happens at one atmosphereversus three hundred and seventy five atmospheres.
Check this out. Here's what happens, Oh my god, And it shows

(03:30):
the imploi is insane of this TANKERU. You know, like it just completely
when they're like a second just completelyimplodes. And you know a lot of
people have been saying like that wouldbe the best case scenario as far as
quick, because yeah, not painful. I would imagine, Steven, is

(03:50):
that the case if it imploded whilethey were going down and they were at
that depth, would have just beenan immediate death for them. They weren't
even know what happened incoming fast.Imagine that a nuclear bomb blows up over
your head right now, Yeah,you don't even not happen right right,
And it happened so quicktaneous, andyes, I mean we took a film

(04:11):
canister size um objects taken figure ofthe film canister, you know, and
put it at the edges or abouta quarter and stick, and then we
sent it down to six hundred feetin a pressure tank at the university here
and it imploded. And it implodedso loudly and so instantaneously. Everybody evacuated
buildings since thinking that some bomb hadgone on Oh my god, Okay,

(04:34):
that's wild. There a memo thatwent out to everyone beforehand. No,
we didn't need to realize it's goingto be that bad. We thought it's
just gonna be Oh how many manculpa emails did you have to send out
after that one? Sorry? Soone thing I wanted to ask you here
because I think there's a lot alot going on with this story. Um,

(04:56):
we've seen a bunch of videos ofinside the submersible that went down there.
It's called Titan from Ocean Gate,and we've seen a lot of people
almost like laughing at the slap dashway with which some of this was put
together, and some of the partswere bought from, just like regular stories
that people could go to. Haveyou seen anything that made you think that

(05:17):
perhaps there was not a level ofcontrol over this submersible in the construction of
it, that maybe there was somenegligence going on here, or as everything
you've seen about the way this shipwas built been okay with you, Sophy,
where it was built seems okay.Well always I'm always the leera of

(05:39):
is how did they use composites?Composites is a very good material and you
can use it for all types ofstuff. But I do know a team
over in Bremen, Germany, theytried to use composites for a pressure hole
for an autonomous underwater vehicle and theycould never get it to go to the
depth that terms of your calculations inmathematically said to say it goes to a

(06:02):
thousand meters. They could only getAnd so I do not know how they
use the composits. Talk about this, Are you talking about the carbon fiber
the carbon fiber, Yeah, butsee carbon fiber is the actual strength material.
But then you use some type ofepoxy to actually embed that carbon fiber

(06:23):
in and so to be able toget the purity having it so clear without
any air bubbles, any imperfections isvery very difficult. It's much better to
use your pressure chamber as a titaniumsphere, which what most people do.
And if they had kept everything aswith respect to titanium, then it's a

(06:44):
rarity, in which case I wouldn'thave any qualms with it. I just
do not know. When they sayyou used a carbon fiber and uh titanium
mix, I mean, what didthey do? How do they do it?
I do not know their design,They don't know their way they put
it together. It has gone downto that depth a number of times.
Um so yeah, I might yeahsomething else. Yeah, we still you

(07:08):
know, who knows a lot ofquestion marks. Still talking to Steven Wood.
He's a professor and program stair programchair rather at the Ocean Engineering Department
at f I T. And Iwanted to ask you this because I thought
this was like pretty pertinent. Wouldyou, knowing what you know about going
down to that depth and knowing whatyou may know about ocean Gate or whatever,
would you have gone on that submersibleand gone down to the wreckage.

(07:32):
Probably you would have said yes thenprobably. So yeah, that was kind
of my question. Are you hoppingsome of these things that go down and
check stuff out? Guy? Ormore? I mean you're in the engineering
department, are you more? I'vebeen on Johnson ceiling too, but we
have only down to you know,four hundred and six hundred feet doing some
studies. Um, so I've beenin one before. I so I have

(07:56):
an idea about what it is,you hope the design engineers. First of
all, it's going down a coupleof times beforehand. I'm not the number
one guy going on it, soI don't feel bad about it. Yeah,
so the chances are higher that Iwould go because it has been already
been proven a number of times.I mean I would go on this one
way before, I'd have gone onCameron's vehicle when he went down to the

(08:16):
bottom of lee in a street becausehe tried to prove it. But in
the end he almost died, buthe made it through. But these things,
the element of risk. The problemis is they've now going into tourism.
I as a scientist engineer, I'mexpecting those risks on these things,
but they have now gone to alevel that they're hoping they would be able

(08:39):
to make this a tourist m.Yeah, that's true. You've got people
going down there that don't understand,maybe even if they're signing something, what
the risks actually are being inside oneof these submersibles. What's it like?
Because we're all thinking that it's justmust be so claustrophobic and it must be
weird and hard not to panic himthere. Well, if you are susceptible

(09:01):
to class to philobia, don't getin one. That's a great piece of
a typically if I mean you needto straighten out your legs don't get anyone,
Yeah, because you can't these things. The pressure chambers are so strong
that they make them so small.Uh, that's like can withstand those pressures?
Um? That A typically, youknow, if you have the heating

(09:24):
systems going on electrical, you're justlike you're you know, in your car.
It's nice and warm, it's okay, and you have beautiful views of
all types of stuff. It's offthat no one else in the world has
ever seen. Um, so that'sreally amazing. Uh. Let's have you
ever have you ever went on oneof these had to use the bathroom because
this thing had a little bathroom withit. Well, they're lucky to have

(09:46):
a little bathroom minded and have one. What did you guys? Do you
make sure you don't you make sureyou don't drink any coffee that morning?
And if you're the classic should havegotten before we left. Yeah, we
really got as an emergency of thatsituation. You're not going to be very
popular after that. Make sure youhave your diapers on or something. Yeah.

(10:07):
Man, The whole world of thiskind of deep ocean exploration is so
interesting, which is why I guessit draws so many people to it.
But these people paid I think twohundred and fifty thousand dollars to go down
there as part of this kind oftourism that you're talking about, and they
lost contact within an hour and fortyfive minutes. From what I can tell,

(10:30):
it doesn't look like they reported thatto anybody until way later on in
the evening. Does that seem abnormalto you that they maybe waited too long
to report this? Well, firstof all, let's go back. Well
I found was disturbing this the factthat they had already had experienced communication drop

(10:50):
off in previous dives. Okay,as number one, if you have a
communication drop off, typically you don'tdive until you have verified why you don't
have communication. And by the way, from what I've heard, all that
communication was not speech communication, butwith telemetry information going from the instruments from
the vehicle on up. Again.Okay, in general, anytime that we

(11:13):
did our diyes for research, youhave voice communication to the surface, and
if you did not have voice communicationto the surface, you came up.
So why do you think that theywent with the route of not having voice
communication. I have no clue youwould have said, hey, let's make
sure we can hear each other before. Yeah, it's kind of important.

(11:35):
Yeah, if I knew that thatwas happening, I would not have gone
into the submarine. I think basicallyjudging from the pictures that I saw inside
of submersible, it was just aWindows computer with a window that had like
a like a little chat room,Yeah, where you're just kind of chatting
back and forth with people upstairs.The guy said, there's like one button
for the whole submersible that like turnedthe operation on. It was just one

(11:56):
thing. I don't understand how theywere able to sussfully do this prior.
Yeah, but they were until itlooks like, you know, possibly now
is there Stephen, Because you're sofamiliar with all this stuff and you've been
in this situation before, I imaginethere's some conversations before him, much like
if you go on a cruise andthey have these, you know, things
about what happens in the event thatsomething goes wrong. Do they tell you

(12:18):
when you're going down into submersible whatyou're supposed to do if you lose communication?
Like because we heard that these peoplewere maybe knocking in every thirty minutes
or whatever. Are things like thatdiscussed in case of an emergency. Yes,
when you are before you even godown, you're all sit down and
you have a complete briefing of whatis expected. Where are you doing?

(12:39):
Remember you have to think about it. These guys are terists, which is
very different. But of course Ido not know what I mean. The
one was a space tourist. Hehad gone up to the International Space Station,
if I remember right, So he'sused to high risk, that one,
rich guy. But when we wentdown in terms of a research one,
you said down and you had afull briefing about what to expect.

(13:01):
How uh if this happened. Ifthis happened, what do you do?
There are blankets and stuff extra forsome reason, you lost electrical power and
because it's cold down there. Yeah, that's what they said, is it
gets down real. I wouldn't besurprised if these these corner cutters that didn't
have blankets on them. Yeah,yeah, so they're gonna who knows.

(13:22):
But I mean, the problem isis the urnist operation. And I believe
this uh incident, like all incidents, just not until someone dies before they
make it safer. Yeah, it'sjust like they say in the sixties.
I don't know if you know thatage but back in the sixties, Smber,
my dad putting seat belts in thecar because the seat belts weren't required.

(13:43):
Yeah, and obviously huge changes withthat, and maybe huge changes coming
to deep seat travel too. Becausethis has got a lot of eyeballs on
it. M Yeah, this issomething that's really really transfixed a lot of
people as they watched this, andwe learned a lot about things that I
had never known about. They weretelling us, Stephen about these planes that
were flying overhead, and the planeswould drop these contraptions into the water to

(14:09):
be able to hear way down deepin the ocean, to hear if there's
any noises or anything like that.That's where they've talked about the knocking.
There's a lot of different vehicles anddifferent instruments that they could use to try
to help somebody in this situation.Huh Okay, let's go back a little
bit. First of all, they'resew in our bodies and invented for what

(14:31):
reason, to detect submarines, andthey're not designed to go deep to the
layers. So like we could havean enemy submarine right off the coast of
Miami and it'd be hiding out belowthe thermal climb to the fact that the
Gulf Stream is whipping across us,and then you have a major temperature difference

(14:52):
between the surface level and the subsurface, and you could have a submarine just
hiding there. We wouldn't even know. So what they do they design your
sonar berries so they can drop thembelow. These thermal clients. They go
down, you know, a thousandand two thousand feet and all they do
is listen for anything mechanical, uh, you know, propeller beats, sounds,

(15:15):
bangings, and so that's what theydropped. So miss that's for a
surface level yep. So if thesubmersible, let's say, lost all of
its power but was able to dropits weights and shot to the surface,
those vehicles are really really hard tofind when you even moderatecies, unless you

(15:39):
have a strobe light or something flashing. And so what they were expecting to
do is they put those in.If they're submersibles on the surface and you're
banging on it, they would beable to find that, hey you're there.
Yeah, that doesn't help them outdown below though, so it knocked
out below. In your opinion,you think that the reports of the bang

(16:00):
were not related to the submersible ordo you think that that was kind of
just something else? Well, thething is is when you hear anything out
of the ordinary, you promptly wishthe best. Yeah. Yeah, And
the problem is you have now twten ships out there, everybody doing all

(16:22):
types of stuff. You don't knowwhat ship as doing or ship bees doing.
Someone might be working on some partof the ship down below. Who
happens to be banging, But theship sounds of are so loud that you
don't even notice it. But youwith a sonar buoy, you know,
a couple of miles away, here'shis banging. Yeah. Do you think
we're gonna find these people alive ornow? Well, I'm not supposed to

(16:45):
answer that question, all right,I don't. Just for the record,
it seems like too much time hasgone by here. I would be worried
about even though evens things which youhave to realize here, they never tested
the ninety six hours. He neverput that in and actually tested. Does

(17:06):
those air tanks last ninety six greatthey might be how twenty hours? Eighty
hours? They never tested it.So that's what the part that they failed
to do so they could still bealive. This is I'm not putting enough
hope there. Do you think thatthe an incident like this could put a
scar on ocean exploration or do youthink that more people are interested than ever

(17:32):
because they want to know more informationabout the case exactly. The only thing
is going to really do is gonnamake deep sea tourism safer. Yeah,
which, well that's good because peopleare not going to look at how many
people climb Mount Everest, you know, and how many people die per year
on it. I mean, mayeven make it more attractive. All right,
Well, thank you so much.You answered a lot of questions for

(17:53):
us. We really appreciate that.Stephen Wood, Professor and Program chair of
the Ocean Engineering Department of the FloridaInstitute of Technology in Melbourne. Thank you
for your help. We appreciate you. Yeah, you're welcome every day.
Have a great day. There hegoes, that guy knows a lot about
it. Very smart, very verysmart, smarter than us. He know,
you dummied me a couple of timesthere. I called you the dummy,

(18:15):
but no, he was very verysmart. That was that was interesting.
Okay, we're quick break. Whenwe come backward to hear from you your dispatches