3 other submarines that visited Titanic almost met the same fate as Titan

The loss of the submarine Titan during its expedition to the Titanic has raised questions about the ship’s safety, but Titan is just the latest vessel in danger at the site of the world’s most famous shipwreck.

Of the 10 submarines in the world that can reach depths of 4,000 meters or more, the Titan, owned by the exploration company OceanGate Expeditions, was the only one not certified by a regulatory bodyand OceanGate had been warned by both industry experts and one of its own senior employees that the vessel was potentially unsafe.

But no matter how reliable the vehicle, diving to such extreme ocean depths is always risky. At least three previous expeditions to the Titanic had close calls that could have cost the crew their lives.

An Imax shoot hits a snag

As an advisor to the team that rediscovered the Titanic in 1985, Canadian submarine physician Dr. Joe MacInnis had already participated in several dives to the site by the time he co-led a joint Canadian-Russian-American expedition there in 1991.

In addition to conducting biological and geological studies of the sunken ship, the group planned to capture the wreckage on Imax film – their footage became the basis of the 1995 documentary Titanica.

Two Russian Mir submarines made 17 dives during the expedition and literally ran aground on the last one.

MacInnis’s submarine was perched in the wheelhouse, right where Captain Edward Smith might have stood as the Titanic sank beneath the waves. When the crew finished filming and tried to lift off the platform, they realized they had been caught doing something.

After a moment of panic and a series of expletives, they enlisted the help of the second Mir submarine.

The second ship’s pilot could see that their left landing gear had slipped under a mass of wires, possibly telephone cables that had once led to the wheelhouse, and instructed them on how to maneuver their way out of the tangle.

“We had that second pilot, that second sub, self-rescue capability,” MacInnis said in an interview with Times Radio“so we were very lucky.”

Powerless at the bottom of the sea

Another filming at the shipwreck led to a near-death experience for director James Cameron.

Cameron made several trips to the wreck in the fall of 1995 while filming for his 1997 blockbuster Titanicand he was on his third dive with submarine pilot Dr. Anatoly Sagalevich and a Russian engineer when they encountered an unexpected sandstorm on the ocean floor.

As Cameron recalls in the 2009 biography The futurist, by author Rebecca Keegan, “Anatoly said, ‘Oh, no,’ something you never want to hear a pilot say, and we looked at each other for a second.”

Fighting the strong current had sapped the submarine’s power supply and its batteries were running low.

They immediately aborted the dive, but at 25 meters above the seabed it was as if they had hit a ceiling. The submarine stopped rising and sank back to the ocean floor.

They sat in total darkness and temperatures around freezing for half an hour to rest their battery before trying again, only to be stopped a second time at 80 feet.

Unbeknownst to them, they were caught in a downward movement caused by the flow of the current over the shipwreck. In a stroke of luck though, every time the current pushed them back down it also blew them a little further away from the Titanic.

On their third attempt, they held their breath as they reached 80 feet, but continued to rise and broke the surface five hours later.

treacherous currents

Despite his fear of water, Michael Guillen couldn’t pass up the opportunity to become the first reporter in 88 years to visit the Titanic when he was invited to dive there in 2000.

Submersible pilot Viktor Nischeta took Guillen and his dive partner on an hour-long tour of the wreck, but as the submarine crossed the debris field between the forward part of the ship and the stern, Guillen realized they were speeding up. Like Cameron’s crew, they were caught in one of the deep sea’s unpredictable currents.

“A fraction of a second later, [our submersible] slammed into the Titanic’s propeller,” Guillen says in his book To believe is to see. “I felt the shock of the collision; shards of reddish, rusty debris fell on our submarine, obscuring my view through the porthole.”

The small submarine was wedged into the housing of the giant propeller. As Nischeta rocked the ship back and forth like a car stuck in mud, Guillen thought to herself, “This is how it will end for you.”

After nearly an hour of tense silence, there was a sudden change in the way Mir felt beneath their feet. The growling of the engine stopped and the submarine felt weightless again.

“OK?” Guillen asked hesitantly.

Nischeta grinned. “No problem!”

Like being in a dishwasher

In 2005, French deep-sea explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet, one of five men who died on the Titan, wrote in an open letter to the discoverer of the Titanic shipwreck, Bob Ballard: “From my 11-year experience diving on the Titanic I can assure you that the ocean floor around that wreck is not a quiet place. Often it looks more like a dishwasher.”

Between erratic currents, a total lack of heat and daylight, and the rusting hull of the ship itself, whose ruptured hull and snapped cables reach into the darkness to snare passing watercraft, diving for the Titanic is always a dangerous proposition.

There will no doubt be an investigation into what went wrong on Titan in the coming months, but while we can mitigate the risks, in our lifetime it will never be completely safe to visit the deep ocean – one of the few places on Earth completely inhospitable to human life.

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