Titan sub implosion animated video garners 5 million views in 11 days
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An animation depicting how the doomed Titan sub imploded has been viewed more than 5 million times in the 11 days since the video was posted to YouTube.
The 6-minute, 20-second clip was uploaded to the video-sharing site on June 30 by AiTelly, a YouTube channel that posts original 4K and 3D engineering animations, according to the account’s “about” page.
Titan is believed to have imploded on June 18 — less than two hours into its dive to the famed Titanic shipwreck at a depth of about 5,500 feet in the North Atlantic.
All five voyagers aboard the submersible were killed.
The narration begins by explaining that an implosion is “a process of destruction by collapsing inwards on the object itself. Where explosion expands, implosion contracts.”
At the Titanic’s 12,500-foot depth at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, “there is around 5,600 pounds per square inch of pressure,” the video says.
“That’s almost 400 times the pressure we experience on the surface.”
It goes on to attribute the Titan’s doom to high hydrostatic pressure in the surrounding water.
Such force caused the OceanGate sub to crumple “within a fraction of a millisecond,” the narrator said.
The accompanying animation showed a three-dimensional OceanGate-branded submersible being crushed and torn apart.
The narration blames the catastrophic failure of Titan’s controversial carbon fiber construction.
“Existing technology is based on steel, titanium, and aluminum. These are what kept other submarines from being crushed. But the Titan has had an experimental design,” the video said.
The animation was created using an open-source software called Blender, according to an AiTelly spokesperson — who asked to remain anonymous so as to not interfere with his current engineering job at an aviation company.
The spokesperson told The Post that three team members are behind AiTelly.
They created the Titan animation by taking information and measurements posted about the sub on OceanGate’s website and Google and then plugging it into Blender’s 3D modeling software — a process that took 12 hours, the spokesperson added.
AiTelly “released a first video and it was plagued with corrections,” the representative told The Post.
“We then re-uploaded the video with the updated versions and corrections,” and it went viral.
“The bottom line is that we’re not afraid to make mistakes and accept information from the audience — and our background as amateur engineers I think it might help.”
In the days after Titan’s implosion, OceanGate boss and sub-operator Stockton Rush was accused of tuning out many safety warnings about the craft, calling them “baseless cries” and a “personal insult.”
In a series of emails reviewed by the BBC, Rob McCallum, a consultant for OceanGate, told Rush he was putting the lives of his clients at risk by not having his submersible certified by outside third parties.
“In your race to Titanic, you are mirroring that famous catch cry: ‘She is unsinkable,'” McCallum wrote to his boss in March 2018.
“I implore you to take every care in your testing and sea trials and to be very, very conservative,” he said in another missive.
“As much as I appreciate entrepreneurship and innovation, you are potentially putting an entire industry at risk.”
Rush refused to listen to McCallum, and the vessel continued on its deep-sea venture without ever being classed or certified by an outside agency.
A would-be passenger who pulled out of the eight-day trip to the Titanic wreck over safety concerns, Jay Bloom, shared text exchanges between himself and Rush that showed the chief executive shrugging off Bloom’s worries.
Rush, 61, went so far as to tell Bloom that a trip in the Titan was “way safer than flying in a helicopter or even scuba diving.”
Rush’s false belief led to his own death, as well as those of four passengers: British billionaire Hamish Harding, 58, prominent Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood, 48, his son, Sulaiman Dawood, 19, and French Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet, 77.
Spanish engineer and underwater expert José Luis Martín told the Spanish news outlet NIUS on Tuesday that the five victims of the implosion were likely made aware of their fate between 48 and 71 seconds before the disaster occurred.
“In that period of time, they are realizing everything. And what’s more, in complete darkness. It’s difficult to get an idea of what they experienced in those moments,” Martín said.
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