Titan disaster: Craft was 'bounced around' on previous trip

Titan, an OceanGate deep sea vessel, was destroyed on a dive to the sea floor killing 19-year-old business student Suleman Dawood, his father the billionaire investor Shahzada Dawood, Mr Harding, French pilot Paul-Henri Nargeolet and the CEO of the company, Stockton Rush.

It's thought that the vessel imploded, killing all five instantly, with many speculating that its controversial carbon fibre hull could be to blame.

Conventional submersibles feature steel, aluminium or titanium hulls which require the use of syntactic foam attached to the outside of the craft to achieve bouyancy.

A carbon fibre hull, which OceanGate had been exploring since 2010, offered natural bouyancy and avoided the expense of using the foam.

Read More: University principal urges classmates to seek support after death of Titan student

However, experts feared that such a structure could be progressively weakened over time, leading to a sudden and catastrophic failure.

It has now emerged that Titan had a previous mission aborted due to damage sustained on a previous expedition, with one of the passengers killed on the fateful voyage stating it had been repaired after being "bounced around" on the ocean all night and sustaining damage from a bouy.

OceanGate did not respond when asked if it had undertaken scans of the hull to determine whether any damage had been caused to the by this incident, or whether there had been expeditions following the repair.

A spokesperson said: "We are unable to provide any additional information beyond OceanGate’s statement at this time."

In an interview with Tony Harrington, Mr Harding told Business Aviation Magazine in April of this year: "This (Titanic dive) was supposed to take place last year. Unfortunately, on the mission before mine, the submarine was damaged on the surface.

“The problem they faced was that by the time they had surfaced heavy fog had set in, and they could not dock with the ship.

“So, the submarine bounced around on the surface all night with the crew still on board and it was damaged against the buoy it was tethered to.”

He had previously told the same publication: "This was to have taken place in June 2022 but the submersible was unfortunately damaged on its previous dive. No one was injured but it has delayed the next dive... I think the Titanic dive will now have to wait until 2023."

Asked about the danger of such a trip he replied: "My view is that these are all calculated risks and are well understood before we start."

Azmeh Dawood, Shahzada’s older sister, told NBC that Suleman had admitted he “wasn’t very up for” the trip and was “terrified”. She said he had agreed to go in order to please his father.

While the reason for the failure of Titan has not yet been established, a number of concerns had been raised about its safety.

David Lochridge, an experienced submarine pilot from Glasgow who had moved from Scotland to the U.S to work on the project, had expressed concerns over the carbon fiber hull.

In a court case he alleged he had queried a lack of non-destructive testing on the hull, particularly the risk of delamination - when layers of fibre become detached and weaken the structural integrity - porosity and voids of sufficient adhesion of the glue being used.

Mr Lochridge was told that no technology existed to perform such a scan and Titan would rely on an acoustic monitoring system to detect any such issues. He responded that such technology may only sound the alarm "milliseconds before an implosion", according to the filing.

Read More: Titan disappearance raises uncomfortable questions over our reaction to tragedy

The pilot said he had "stressed the potential danger to passengers of the Titan as the submersible reached extreme depths" as "constant pressure cycling weakens existing flaws resulting in large tears of the carbon".

He claimed that trials on a smaller - one-third - scale model of the sub had revealed flaws in the carbon under pressure testing.

Titanic director James Cameron, who has made more than 30 dives to the wreck, told Reuters: "I thought it (the carbon fibre hull) was a horrible idea. I wish I'd spoken up, but I assumed somebody was smarter than me, you know, because I never experimented with that technology, but it just sounded bad on its face."

Guillermo Sohnlein, the co-founder of OceanGate who no longer works for the company told Times Radio: "I know from first-hand experience that we were extremely committed to safety and safety and risk mitigation was a key part of the company culture.”

An open letter by the Marine Technology Society dated March 27, 2018 raised a number of concerns with the design of the submersible.

It said: "Our apprehension is that the current experimental approach adopted by OceanGate could result in negative outcomes (from minor to catastrophic) that would have serious consequences for everyone in the industry".

The signatories expressed the "unanimous view" that Titan should be subject to a "validation process" by a third party.

Because Titan operated in international waters it was not subject to any safety regulations. It had never been certified seaworthy by any regulatory agency or third-party organisation.

OceanGate said in 2019 it did not have Titan tested to see if it would meet industry standards because "by definition, innovation is outside of an already accepted system".

Mr Rush, CEO and founding member, had hit out at what he saw as unneccessary regulations in a 2019 interview with the Smithsonian Magazine: "There hasn’t been an injury in the commercial sub industry in over 35 years. It’s obscenely safe, because they have all these regulations. But it also hasn’t innovated or grown—because they have all these regulations."

Other safety concerns included the possibility of galvanic corrosion - rapid corrosion of the titanium used on the craft due to the carbon fibre acting as a cathode - and that the viewing port was only built to a certified pressure of 1,300m while Titanic lies around 4,000m beneath the ocean.

In an interview in 2021 Mr Rush said: "I think it was General MacArthur who said 'you're remembered for the rules you break' and I've broken some rules to make this, I think I've broken them with logic and good engineering behind me.

"The carbon fiber and titanium there's a rule you don't do that. Well, I did. It's picking the rules you break that are the ones that will add value to others and add value to society."