Now, he has made a report for NIUS in which, based on the data that has been made public today, he proposes the most plausible hypothesis of what happened on Sunday June 18, 105 minutes after the Polar Price will launch the submarine into the waters of the North Atlantic.
Stability and weight control system are key
The document, which can be found here, begins by explaining how stability is the key factor in the design of a tourist submarine and how the weight control system allows the apparatus to carry out the dive in safe conditions (without destabilizing).
“The submarine was advancing stable and horizontally, but during the controlled immersion of the Titan there must have been an electrical failure, which left the submersible without propulsion. And in the absence of this propulsion, the weight of the passengers and the pilot (about 400 kilos), which they were concentrated at the front near the ‘bull’s eye’, it unbalanced the stability longitudinal”, explains José Luis Martín, who places it at around 1,700 meters deep.
The beginning of the end
It is the beginning of the end. “At that moment, the submarine falls forward like an arrow towards the bottom of the sea, without any possibility of maneuvering with damaged control and safety elements. The pilot could not activate the emergency lever that suddenly released the lead ballasts and that the company pompously announced it in one of its advertising videos”, says the Spanish engineer, who after seeing the layout and protocol for using that lever, came to the conclusion that it was not an adequate mechanism to act in a critical situation.
Martin’s story continues. “Falling into the depths of the ocean, the strong hull was subjected to a sudden increase in pressure (which is not proportional to the depth of each moment) and then there was a strong compression of the container where the tourists and the pilot were.”
And this means? Well, when suddenly falling, the Titan went from supporting a certain pressure to a much higher one in a few seconds. And in those cases, the contraction of the hull of the submarine is not gradual but instantaneous.
“It’s like when you prick a balloon”
This is how Martin explains it. “Inside the Titan there was an instantaneous contraction of the resistant hull, which meant a loss of volume of the order of 70% to 80%. Under these conditions and at these depths, the sudden contraction of the hull in turn meant a decrease in ‘thrust’, so that the Titan in its continuous fall was increasingly heavier”. That drop like “a stone” stretches for about eight hundred meters.
And it is at that point, at a depth of 2,500 or 2,700 meters, when the tragedy occurs: “The hull suffered an instant contraction that was not accompanied by the material of the porthole, which was of a different nature, and since there was no similarity of deformation the microcrack was produced that allowed the entry of water at such a pressure that it generated the instantaneous implosion”.
It is the end of the hypothesis of the expert José Luis Martín. The implosion caused the immediate death of the five crew members of the Titan. “It’s like when you prick a balloon,” explains the merchant marine very graphically. The remains ended up scattered almost 4,000 meters deep, very close to the Titanic, the ‘ship of dreams’ they wanted to see.
At what point is the official investigation
Meanwhile, the official investigations continue and they do it to several gangs:
- The United States opened an investigation at the highest level, through the Marine Board of Investigation (MBI), who leads the United States Coast Guard. “Once the investigation is complete, the Office will issue a report to the commander with the evidence collected, the established facts, his conclusions and recommendations,” the Coast Guard said. The investigation seeks to “establish the cause of the deaths, whether there was any wrongdoing, incompetence, negligence, ineptitude, or violation of law by any licensed, certified, or documented person that contributed to it.”
- Canada also started its own a few days ago by the Transportation Safety Board. They will be in charge of analyzing the voice recordings of the Polar Price (the mother ship of the Titan submersible) and the statements of witnesses, which are “protected” by the country’s legislation. So they will only share what “Canadian law” allows.
- The Royal Canadian Mounted Police also have an investigation underway. in case “federal or provincial criminal laws have been infringed”.
The human remains found by the Horizon Arctic will be analyzed in the United States. It was advertised by the Coast Guard. “After consultation with partner international investigative agencies, the Marine Board of Investigation intends to transport the evidence aboard a US Coast Guard vessel to a United States port, where the Marine Board of Investigation (MBI) will be able to perform further analysis and testing. American medical professionals will conduct a formal analysis of the suspected human remains that have been carefully recovered from the wreckage at the crash site.”
