As the Titan may be reaching the end of it’s air supply, the search and rescue efforts are still underway. There’s 5 passengers who chose to go on this excursion to the dark graveyard of RMS Titanic, for whatever reasons, and it struck me that there should be redundancies built into the systems. It’s common in hostile environments that systems be engineered for redundancy.

Emergency surfacing would be an obvious system to make redundant, and according to this, it is.

“…Titan is held underwater by ballast – heavy weights that helps with a vessel’s stability – built to be automatically released after 24 hours to send the sub to the surface, said Newman.

“It is designed to come back up,” he told CNN.

Crew members are told they can release the ballast by rocking the ship or use a pneumatic pump to knock the weights free, Newman said. If all else fails, he said, the lines securing the ballast are designed to fall apart after 24 hours to automatically send it back to the ocean’s surface…”

“What it’s like inside the Titanic-touring submersible that went missing with 5 people on board“, CNN, Emma Tucker, 22nd June 2023.

If these had worked, the surface search for the Titan would have probably found them on Monday or Tuesday visually or with radar. Therefore, there’s a fair assumption that they could not surface or have not surfaced, and with only 96 hours of air they may well be running out even as I write this.

Even if there were some electrical emergency, if these redundant systems worked as explained in the article, the Titan would have been on the surface by Tuesday. Something isn’t right.

Of course, all we have is speculation at this point. Standards for commercial submersibles are a legal grey area but Feynman – the Nobel Laureate who solved the Challenger disaster – said it best:

“For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.“

Richard Feynman, Appendix to the Rogers Commission Report on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident 6 June 1986.