Reflections on Titan & Titanic
Since the Titan submersible disaster occurred on 18 June 2023, there has been a lot of public comment and interest in what happened. The loss of the Titan with all her passengers and crew remains under investigation in Canada and the United States. It is important to wait for the full findings of those investigations, nonetheless a series of television programmes are set to broadcast in the coming weeks, starting with ‘Implosion: The Titanic Sub Disaster‘ on BBC Two in the United Kingdom.
I do not claim to have any special knowledge or expertise concerning Titan. However, I have studied Titanic‘s construction in great detail and I think some of the parallels being drawn between the two disasters are unwarranted.
Titanic was built in Belfast by the firm of Harland & Wolff, which was one of the world’s leading shipbuilders. She represented an ongoing evolution in North Atlantic passenger liners rather than a revolutionary design. Structurally, her design incorporated tried and tested practice. Her hull was an enlarged version of previous ship designs by Harland & Wolff with additional strengthening features incorporated because of her greater size. The structural design was approved by the British Board of Trade. Her keel, double bottom, hull frames, plating and general structure were very similar to other large liners built contemporaneously and afterwards (such as Queen Mary, which survives today as a floating hotel in Long Beach, California). By any form of benchmarking, she was built to the same high standards of strength.
During construction, Titanic was under constant inspection and observation by the regulator. She was constructed of mild steel, which was tested to the highest standards of Lloyd’s classification society. In common with other White Star liners, she was not classed by Lloyds. Nonetheless Harland & Wolff were generally familiar with their requirements and built a significant minority (‘one third to one half’) of their ships to Lloyd’s classification. Naval architect Edward Wilding believed that Olympic (Titanic‘s nearly identical sister ship) would be accepted for classification by Lloyds without any modifications. Titanic‘s watertight bulkheads (which ran from one side of the ship to the other, dividing the ship into compartments) were built to a very high standard of strength and exceeded the revised rules that Lloyds issued after the disaster. Wilding noted: ‘We adopted, to an unusual extent, hydraulic riveting wherever possible, to insure the rivets being thoroughly well closed. This was of course a slow and expensive affair, but it was done’. (He reviewed Olympic‘s early years of service and said in 1915: ‘We have had less repairs to the Olympic than to any large ship we have ever built, due to external causes, of course’.)
When Titanic was completed, the Board of Trade issued a full passenger certificate for her to operate as a foreign going emigrant ship.
The highest standard of watertight subdivision at the time was taken as a ship which could remain afloat with any two watertight compartments completely flooded. This was the same standard to which ships such as Adriatic (1907), Lusitania (1907), Rotterdam (1908) and George Washington (1909) were built to. It represented the highest category of watertight subdivision laid down by Sir Edward Harland’s committee advising the British government in 1891. Harland & Wolff designed Titanic with such a margin of safety that she was, with a few exceptions, a three compartment ship; she could also remain afloat in several scenarios with four different sets of watertight compartments flooded.
Unfortunately, she suffered a freak encounter with an iceberg which led to flooding far beyond what she was designed to withstand, but her older sister ship Olympic went on to have a lengthy, successful career over a quarter of a century. That included the Hawke collision in 1911. The damage was extensive, flooding one large compartment entirely and allowing hundreds of tons of water into a second, but it was well within the design criteria and she easily survived.
In Titanic‘s case, her commander and officers were overconfident in their ability to see ice and take successful evasive action. The way she was operated was a problem. The materials she was constructed of and the way she was constructed were not.
Based on what we are all seeing on our television screens, that was not the case with Titan.