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.
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