The History Channel special hinges on as to why Titanic broke apart as it did and essentially why….an engineering failure? The missing pieces that were discovered in 2005 essentially indicated that the Titanic broke apart in the water before sinking. The unsinkable ship that was built to serve as its own lifeboat until help arrived broke apart in a manner never imagined by its engineers. TITANIC'S ACHILLES HEEL aims to find out why the ship broke apart as it did, and why the "official" details of the sinking seemed to make the truth so elusive.
Was Titanic a doomed ship before it ever left port, plagued with structural problems? Would she have survived the unforgiving Atlantic Ocean even if she hadn't hit that iceberg? And even more disturbingly, were the ship's builders fully aware of these issues as thousands of civilians boarded the doomed ship? Essentially the story comes down to Titanic`s expansion joints-which allowed it to bend and flex in the waves for a ship of its immense size. The expansion joints may have been a serious flaw in Titanic`s design-possibly explains as to why the hull broke into two pieces and sunk much faster than it should have for a ship of her size.
After the sinking, Titanic`s builder- Harland and Wolff, already may have known in advance about a flaw in Titanic`s design with the expansion joints. Titanic`s sister ship the Britannic, now sunk off the Greek coast in the Aegean Sea, was constructed right after Titanic, showed a newly designed expansion joint as confirmed by the dives of veteran wreck divers in this History Channel special. This gives evidence to the fact that Titanic had a flaw in its expansion joint and was revamped in Britannic.
Newly conducted research also shows, that Titanic for its size was actually built quite strong, not as weak as thought before to cause its demise. It is seen now that engineering flaws along with weak hull plates exacerbated the situation in the sinking of Titanic.
As an addendum to this, from the book Olympic & Titanic: The Truth Behind the Conspiracy, ...The Titanic did not break into two pieces while sinking, as was theorized for some years. She was broken into three sections. The middle section was found a distance from the two larger segments of the wreck, and had been overlooked for a long time. When the middle section was found, it was found upside down. The keel was exposed and found to be twisted at the breaking point. This indicates that the keel was one of the last things to break apart as the ship was foundering; in fact it was probably the last thing connecting the pieces together as the ship was falling to the bottom. The Titanic certainly did not break in two because of any inherent weakness in her keel...
Image above courtesy of The Telegraph
Rushmore DeNooyer, who led the project, said: "Titanic broke at a very shallow angle, yet ships experience shallow angles like this in storms, when they are tilted up by large waves. So perhaps Titanic wasn't designed strongly enough. If the force that broke it was no greater than the force it would have faced in a hurricane, ergo, it could have been broken in a hurricane."
Clues to the fundamental weakness in the Titanic's design emerged after a submersible, sent to dive the wreck two years ago, discovered and filmed previously unlocated parts of the ship. Analysis of the footage allowed researchers to calculate the angle at which the Titanic was tilting when it broke up.
The team also found parts of the rearmost of the vessel's two "expansion joints" - fitted near the bow and the stern - which were supposed to allow the hull to flex in heavy seas. Analysis, however, suggests that they were poorly designed and may have contributed to the ship breaking up at the shallow 10 degree angle.
Roger Long, a naval architect who worked on the project, said: "The design of the expansion joints in the ship was so unimaginably crude."
To test their theory, the team also dived on the Britannic, the Titanic's sister ship, which was also built at the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast and sank in 1916 in the Mediterranean after hitting a mine.
They found that the builders had altered the design and fitted an extra expansion joint, prompting suspicions that the yard was aware of the faults with the Titanic.
The shallow angle at which the Titanic buckled is also believed to have contributed towards the 1,500 death toll.
The researchers believe that many, assuming the vessel would stay afloat for hours, remained on board in the warmth. However, the ship sank just two hours and 40 minutes after the collision. Less than two hours later, the Carpathia arrived on the scene and pulled 705 people in lifeboats to safety.
Mr Long said: "The Titanic would have continued to float for a finite period of time if it had not experienced this structural failure. So if the ship's sinking was hastened by the early breaking, then there are almost certainly people who died because it broke.
"It only needed to float for a few more hours before the Carpathia arrived and one more hour could have given the lifeboats time to go back and get more people, as they were half full."
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