Last year, a report allegedly Titan Submersible and its parent company are widely circulated on the Internet. View Millions of timesthe so-called logs indicate that a series of alarms have been turned on diving The Titanic sank in a heart-pounding crisis as five passengers struggled in vain to return to the surface.
But the head of a federal government team investigating the disaster says the entire record is a fabrication. After nearly a year of investigation, his team found no signs that the five people aboard the Titan had any warning of the deadly, catastrophic implosion that would have caused the ship's hull to collapse violently and instantly under the pressure of the water two miles underwater.
“I believe this is a fake transcript,” Captain Jason D. Neubauerwho is retired from the U.S. Coast Guard and currently chairs the U.S. Maritime Board of Investigation, the agency’s highest-level investigative body. “This is made up.” Its author is unknown.
Although the logs looked authentic, the FBI saw through their lies for a variety of reasons. Notably, Neubauer's team obtained records of actual communications between the submersible and the mother ship, which the FBI still did not disclose.
He said his team, assisted by investigators from the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, “found no evidence” that Titan's travelers were aware of the impending explosion or their fate.
Neubauer also said he hoped the truth would comfort relatives who are concerned about the pain the five passengers of the Titan may have suffered in their final moments.
The information disclosed by investigators is the first to be revealed in a sweeping inquiry into the disaster and its causes that began last summer. Although the inquiry was expected to be completed by the first anniversary of the Titan's sinking, a final report could take years because of technical and legal complexities.
Five men Those on board the submersible included: Shahzada Dawood, 48, a British Pakistani businessman; his 19-year-old son Suleman; Hamish Harding, 58, a British Airways executive; Paul-Henri Nagiolet77, French Titanic authorities; Stockton RushThe 61-year-old is the founder and CEO of OceanGate, the US company that built the submersible and operates tourist diving programs. He was also the pilot of the Titan that day.
Since 2018, Mr. Rush ignored the warnings The submarine Unique design Doomed to fail. OceanGate Exemptions According to a list of prospective passengers published by the website Business Insider, the “experimental” submersible made about 90 dives, 13 of which successfully reached the depth of the Titanic.
The Titan disaster begins On June 18, 2023, the ship disappeared in the North Atlantic. Five days later, on June 22, the Coast Guard Citing this finding Fragments from Titan Near the site where the Titanic sankannouncing that the submersible had suffered a “catastrophic implosion.”
During these tense five days, an international fleet searched for the missing ship, raising hopes that the Titan's voyagers were still alive and simply trapped. Amid a growing crisis two miles deep.
News Report Inquiry How much oxygenn may be retained in the submersible's life support system. Underwater impact sound Some analysts believe that the survivors of the missing submersible are desperately signaling their location in the hope of being rescued.
The Coast Guard's explosion bulletin ended the legend that the Titan had survived. In the weeks that followed, the public began to speculate about what might have gone wrong in the Titan's final moments on June 18.
Transcript Apparently it started to spread In late June, someone posted a detailed report on the Titan on the Internet, which was rich in technical detail. The report detailed the Titan's professional abbreviations, the names of the mother ship's experts, and a credible description of the submersible's sinking process. In short, this detailed report gave people a sense of reality.
“Someone did a good enough job to make it all look believable,” Neubauer said, adding that the logs made the adventurers “look panicked.”
maker YouTube video has nearly 7 million views In a line-by-line commentary on the fake log, he said: “It's horrible to know these people spent 20 minutes fearing for their lives.”
At the heart of the fake crisis was what the records call RTM — short for Real-Time Hull Health Monitoring. OceanGate once praised proprietary systems Billed as an “unparalleled safety feature that assesses the integrity of the hull during every dive,” the network of sensors could theoretically warn of a hull failure and give the pilots enough time to escape the intense pressures of the deep ocean. Skeptics of the system call it false assurance.
The falsified log said the Titan notified the mother ship of a series of hull alarms and reports of crackling noises. The last message from the Titan regarding the hull sensors read: “RTM alarm activated, all red.”
The falsified transcript ends with an uneasy silence, with no response to seven brief messages sent by the mothership asking about the submersible’s fate. “Please reply if you can,” the last message allegedly read.
In an interview, Alfred S. McLarenThe retired Navy submariner, submersible pilot and president emeritus of the Explorers Club said he believed the record was credible. “It makes sense,” he said. “It seems to fit perfectly with how the Titan and the mother ship communicated.”
In a subsequent interview, Dr McLaren speculated on the Coast Guard's rebuttal. “It was probably intended to embarrass OceanGate,” he said. “It would certainly anger the relatives.”
In the interview, FBI Director Neubauer talked not only about his team's denial of the record's authenticity, but also about how the investigation was one of the most complex he had encountered in decades. He said complications included a lack of eyewitnesses to the disaster, a lot of new ship technology, the need to test special materials and extract data from electronic devices, and the fact that the disaster occurred in international waters near Canada, which raised jurisdictional issues.
The dive itself illustrates the entanglement. OceanGate is headquartered in Everett, Washington, but its mother ship, the Polar Prince, is from Canada. Five people The passengers on board the submersible included British, Pakistani, French and American citizens.
So the Coast Guard has a lot of partners in the investigation—not only the National Transportation Safety Board; Similar institutions In Canada, France and the United Kingdom. The agency relies on The U.S. Navy was asked to salvage the wreckage from the accident site.
Neubauer said the large number of investigative angles and investigators made some aspects of the investigation more difficult than expected and delayed its completion date.
The investigation officially began on June 23, the day after the blast announcement. Convocation Notice Request for Completion Report Within a year. However, Mr Neubauer said a major report usually took two or three years to complete. He suggested the Titan investigation might follow the same pattern.
Mr Neubauer said that despite the considerable time and effort involved, he took such investigations very seriously because the findings often translated into new laws, rules and regulations that improved ship safety.
Mr Neubauer also said friends and families of the Titan crash victims might take comfort in knowing there was a silver lining to such a disaster.
“It won’t relieve the pain,” he said, “but it will help.”
