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Authorities to examine Titan's voice recordings, data to determine if case warrants criminal investigation
Officials investigating the Titan submersible will reportedly examine voice recordings from its mothership to determine what happened during the voyage
Officials investigating the Titan submersible will reportedly examine voice recordings and other data from its mothership Polar Prince to determine what happened during the voyage. They will also try to determine if the incident occurred criminally.
The submersible began its journey on Sunday morning, June 18. About one hour and 45 minutes into its descent, the vessel lost contact with the Polar Prince, the support ship that transported it to the site.
Investigators with the Transportation Safety Board of Canada visited the Polar Prince on Saturday, June 24, “to collect information from the vessel’s voyage data recorder and other vessel systems that contain useful information,” TSB Chairwoman Kathy Fox told CNN. She stressed that the aim of the investigation was not to blame anyone but that voice recordings “could be useful in our investigation.”
Royal Canadian Mounted Police Superintendent Kent Osmond has announced that authorities are trying to determine if the case deserves a criminal investigation. “Such an investigation will proceed only if our examination of the circumstances indicate criminal, federal or provincial laws may possibly have been broken,” he said, according to New York Post.
OceanGate said that the Titan was a 23,000-pound submersible made of carbon fibre and titanium. The vessel uses a “proprietary real-time hull health monitoring (RTM) system,” and any time an issue is detected, an “early warning” would be sent to the pilot, to leave “enough time to … safely return to the surface.”
All the passengers were killed in a catastrophic implosion – an underwater implosion that led to the vessel suddenly collapsing. The five deceased passengers were OceanGate Expeditions CEO Stockton Rush, British billionaire Hamish Harding, French diver Paul Henry Nargeolet, and Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son, Suleman.
The Transportation Safety Board of Canada is now launching an investigation into the implosion of the Titan, CNN has reported. The National Transportation Safety Board has also said that the US Coast Guard will lead the investigation into the incident.
