A new video detailing the collapse of the doomed Titan submarine has captivated millions of viewers worldwide, with video graphics showing exactly how pressure destroyed the craft.
Within just 11 days of its upload, the six-minute explainer shared by AiTelly has amassed over five million views. AiTelly is a company that specialises in showcasing original 4K and 3D engineering animations.
The Titan submarine met its tragic demise on June 18, just two hours into its descent towards the renowned Titanic shipwreck.
Plunging to a depth of approximately 5,500 feet (1,680 meters) in the North Atlantic, the vessel succumbed to the immense pressure and imploded, claiming the lives of all five occupants on board.
The narration begins by explaining that an implosion is “a process of destruction by collapsing inwards on the object itself”.
“Where explosion expands, implosion contracts,” it says.
At the Titanic’s 12,600-foot (3840 metre) depth at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, “there is around 5600 pounds per square inch of pressure”, the video says.
“That’s almost 400 times the pressure we experience on the surface.”
It goes on to attribute the Titan’s doom to high hydrostatic pressure in the surrounding water.
Such force caused the OceanGate sub to crumple “within a fraction of a millisecond”, the narrator said.
The accompanying animation showed a three-dimensional OceanGate-branded submersible being crushed and torn apart.
The narration blames the catastrophic failure on Titan’s controversial carbon fibre construction.
“Existing technology is based on steel, titanium and aluminium. These are what kept other submarines from being crushed. But the Titan has had an experimental design,” the video says.
The animation was created using an open-source software called Blender, according to an AiTelly spokesperson — who asked to remain anonymous so as to not interfere with his current engineering job at an aviation company.
The spokesperson told The Post that three team members are behind AiTelly.
They created the Titan animation by taking information and measurements posted about the sub on OceanGate’s website and Google and then plugging it into Blender’s 3D modelling software — a process that took 12 hours, the spokesperson added.
AiTelly “released a first video and it was plagued with corrections”, the representative told The Post.
“We then re-uploaded the video with the updated versions and corrections,” and it went viral.
“The bottom line is that we’re not afraid to make mistakes and accept information from the audience — and our background as amateur engineers I think it might help.”
In the days after Titan’s implosion, OceanGate boss and sub operator Stockton Rush was accused of tuning out many safety warnings about the craft, calling them “baseless cries” and a “personal insult.”
In a series of emails reviewed by the BBC, Rob McCallum, a consultant for OceanGate, told Mr Rush he was putting the lives of his clients at risk by not having his submersible certified by outside third parties.
“In your race to Titanic you are mirroring that famous catch cry, ‘She is unsinkable,’” Mr McCallum wrote to his boss in March 2018.
“I implore you to take every care in your testing and sea trials and to be very, very conservative,” he said in another missive.
“As much as I appreciate entrepreneurship and innovation, you are potentially putting an entire industry at risk.”
Mr Rush refused to listen to Mr McCallum, and the vessel continued on its deep-sea venture without ever being classed or certified by an outside agency.
A would-be passenger who pulled out of the eight-day trip to the Titanic wreck over safety concerns, Jay Bloom, shared text exchanges between himself and Mr Rush that showed the chief executive shrugging off Mr Bloom’s worries.
Mr Rush, 61, went so far as to tell Mr Bloom that a trip in the Titan was “way safer than flying in a helicopter or even scuba diving”.
His false belief led to his own death, as well as those of four passengers — British billionaire Hamish Harding, 58, prominent Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood, 48, his son, Sulaiman Dawood, 19, and French Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet, 77.
Spanish engineer and underwater expert José Luis Martín told the Spanish news outlet NIUS on Tuesday that the five victims of the implosion were likely made aware of their fate between 48 and 71 seconds before the disaster occurred.
“In that period of time, they are realising everything. And what’s more, in complete darkness,” Mr Martín said. “It’s difficult to get an idea of what they experienced in those moments.”
– with the NY Post