The deep-sea tourism industry risks being viewed through the lens of a "one-off, extreme" incident involving a "non-compliant player," a pilot has said following the implosion of the Titan submersible last week.
Ofer Ketter, a professional submersible pilot with 20 years' experience, has conducted explorations of deep-sea coral reefs, Roman shipwrecks in the Mediterranean and World War II wreckage in the South Pacific. He told Newsweek that the event would prompt a debate about regulation, but that the trade on the whole had a "proven track-record" of safety.
On Thursday, Rear Admiral John Mauger of the U.S. Coast Guard announced that the search-and-rescue effort had discovered a debris field of the Titan consistent with a "catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber." The wreckage was near the sunken remains of the Titanic the sub had descended to visit.
The vessel had stopped responding to its support vessel in the Atlantic Ocean around an hour and 45 minutes into its descent, which began at 8 a.m. ET on Sunday morning.
The passengers—British billionaire Hamish Harding; the CEO of Titan's owner, OceanGate, Stockton Rush; former French Navy diver Paul-Henry Nargeolet; British-Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son, Suleman— are all now presumed dead.
Ketter said he thought the incident would impact the submersible tourism industry, but added that "I believe it shouldn't," as there were "tens of thousands of dives that submersibles have done with zero incident."
The Costa Rica-based pilot said that "submersibles have been diving deep for over four decades" and were doing so now "based on decades of knowledge and research and experience" that he felt OceanGate had brushed off with Titan.
"We, as an industry and as humanity, have been three times deeper than the depth of the Titanic, to the Challenger Deep, to the deepest points of all the oceans; we've been down and back up repetitive times safely," he said.
The Challenger Deep, part of the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean, is the lowest known point under the sea and was explored in July 2022. It has a depth of nearly 36,000 feet.
"So that leaves us only with that option: that this specific submersible was just not designed to withstand the pressure that it went down to," Ketter previously told Newsweek. "That's only conclusion there is for this scenario."
Soon after Titan was reported missing, questions were raised about the safety of the craft, which had an unconventional design constructed out of some off-the-shelf parts and was not certified.
One of OceanGate's former employees sued the company over safety issues in 2018, while The New York Times reported that the Manned Underwater Vehicles committee of the Marine Technology Society had warned OceanGate about not allowing independent testing of the craft.
The company said in 2019 that bringing in an outside entity was "anathema to rapid innovation." Its website states that the Titan was designed for depths of over 13,000 feet—the Titanic lies about 12,500 feet below sea level—and had a real-time, hull-health monitoring system that provided "unparalleled safety."
Ketter said he could see how a situation such as this one, when the industry is thrown into the spotlight by "a tragic catastrophe, a one-off, extreme, out-of-the-norm event," could "create a twisted reality."
On Saturday, the Transportation Safety Board of Canada announced that it would be investigating the cause of the implosion, in collaboration with U.S. authorities.
"Our job as an industry is to clarify the message, and say, 'listen, this is not an example, this is not the norm. We know how to do this safely; we've been down to all the depths of the oceans multiple times with different subs, with different manufacturers, with zero incidents,'" Ketter said.
He expected that from Monday, the industry would begin debating whether the Titan implosion warranted greater regulation or greater compliance to the regulations already in place.
"The industry will say, 'well, we have a proven track record, we have proven that our procedures, and our engineering, and our testing, and our certification is safe and it works,'" Ketter said. "On the other hand, we cannot deny that OceanGate falls under the big picture of the industry, although it was the odd one out, a non-compliant player."
The president of SubMerge, which provides consulting on submersible safety, said he had always done a "rigorous investigation of any sub and on any manufacturer before I go in it" and that one key marker he looks for is whether the vessel is certified for repetitive pressure testing of three times the operating depth.
He previously told Newsweek that the only explanation in his eyes for the implosion of Titan was a submersible design that was not made to withstand repeated trips to depths with such intense water pressure.
Near the Titanic wreckage, the water exerts around 400 times the pressure as it does close to the surface.
Ketter, who often journeys to areas of deep-sea wildlife around the world for clients, said that he would not have piloted Titan if asked, citing the "professional due diligence" he applied to the crafts he uses.
"I have sat in a sub with thousands of different people over 20 years," he added. "And never experienced an emergency situation or a lack of solutions or a lack of procedures."
Newsweek approached OceanGate via email for comment on Sunday.
