> That’s according to legal documents obtained by The New Republic. According to the court documents, in a 2018 case, OceanGate employee David Lochridge, a submersible pilot, voiced concerns about the safety of the sub. According to a press release, Lochridge was director of marine operations at the time, “responsible for the safety of all crew and clients.”
He was "responsible for safety of all crew and clients". So, he voiced that the sub wasn't safe. He was doing his job. If he hadn't been fired maybe he would've been able to enact changes to prevent a disaster, so I disagree that being fired was an ideal outcome. Being fired is only an ideal outcome if you believe that Lochridge wasn't trying to enact change but only to avoid liability. I don't see a reason to such cynical view.
What outcome is ideal depends on the priors, I suppose.
If the company not listening to Lochridge is a given, then being fired is better than not, and having to go down on the sub.
The company listening to Lochridge is better than the company not listening to Lochridge.
The company putting safety first and engineering something that met Lochridge's standards from the outset is better than the company listening to Lochridge when he brought up problems. And so on.
I think they couldn't modify the sub to be safe - the big worry is the integral part of the sub (and the one with the highest cost in this one), the composite pressure hull.
You cannot ensure its safety, since you cannot evaluate it for growing defects. As is best practice for all other DSVs in the world that use metal pressure hulls.
I suspect a metal hull and all it entails (way more complex design and careful selection of materials, equipment, passenger space etc.) would have cost too much.
> Being fired was an ideal outcome for Lochridge, because Lochridge was therefore not piloting the sub this week.
What an absurd thing to say. Not having the sub sink has all the upsides and none of the downsides of having it sink. Ergo, being fired is guaranteed not to be optimal.
If he resigned then it's plausible to speculate that he was trying to avoid liability, but he was fired. Someone didn't want him to do his job regardless of what he himself wanted.
I think there was simply no economically feasible alternative to the composite hull, so Lochridge was fired.
I also suspect that if you go with a metal hull, you don't have positive buoancy anymore - you need syntactic foam. You need larger thrusters, those are heavier too, so more foam etc.
The engineering becomes harder and also costlier, in addition to the material and equipment costs.
What you gain is the ability to evaluate your pressure vessel for growing defects - which you didn't do in the first place (and can't do) with your composite hull.
Problem is there are far far far more cases of an employee reporting irrelevant 'safety' problems just to try to win a settlement from a company.
How do you separate the legit concerns from someone complaining that they can't go to work because their yellow safety vest is slightly dirty and therefore not safe anymore?
To be fair, there's a huge sampling bias issue here. We're talking about the submarine whistleblower because it made the news headlines. An employee raising concerns with OSHA and getting proven false doesn't make the front page.
Maybe "Safety officer" should not be a position that can be let go at any time for any reason, and they should have actual, legal authority to do their job.
Safety/Quality Assurance in the U.S. is like legal ablative armor for companies. Especially if you're considered a C-Level voice at the table; because all that'll happen is engineers running to the CTO to override that mean old Safety/Quality guy to get override authority.
You have reached the point of bloodshed. At this point there is no more convincing people of anything. The lines in the sand have been drawn. Management has decided that this is how things will be and that is that. We have seen this behavior pan out in battlefield commanders in Ukraine recently too. In the AFU battle for Bakhmut conscripts were sent into a meat grinder when it was clear that the battle could not succeed without air superiority. Leadership ignored all warnings out of hubris and total disregard for human life.
See any thread here about whistleblowers who whistleblow/are fired in advance of the Bad Thing happening, particularly if the whistleblow-ee is a VC-funded company other other HN darling. The attitude tends to be overwhelmingly "they got what they deserved, how dare they try to harm INNOVATION?!"
I think to a somewhat lesser extent (HN is particularly aggressively anti-whistleblower) this is the general attitude, unfortunately.
With the company's president as one of the passengers this is a rare example where "skin in the game" didn't offer much insurance (or assurance).
edit: Actually it seems the person responsible for saftey wasn't on board (he got fired) and you can claim his skin was much more important to be in the game if you were looking for assurance
Taleb and others spread this idea that "skin in the game" is some kind of magical anecdote to faulty thinking, incomplete risk analysis, incorrect application of heuristics, and other things. That just doesn't seem true. Lots of people do risky things every day based on social proof, or familiarity, or commitment, or scarcity, or many of the other risk-perception-altering heuristics that govern our lives. We do it when we drive, when we drink, when we ski, and in all kinds of other occasions. "Skin in the game" seems like an extremely faulty heuristic in its own way, with little evidence to support a strong assurance effect.
Conversely, I know lots of people who take risks themselves who'd never recommend the same risks to others (especially outdoor and motor sports enthusiasts). That's the opposite of Taleb's hypothesis.
"Rare" might be a strong word, but I would have order of magnitude more confidence living in an apartment if I know the head engineer who supervised its construction lives in the top floor. Or I would feel 10x more confident in an investment if I know its seller has a significant amount of his net worth invested in it. It is a very natural heuristic and has a long history.
Where it mostly fails is incompetence, some might have the best intention of something succeeding but their best effort is still not worth much.
It fights against one kind of incompetence (direct and deliberate fraud) but it doesn't remove a bunch of other types. Many people will happily live in a deathtrap because they don't really think anything will happen to them.
I don't doubt you would have more confidence, but human estimations of risk tend to be very poor. So it would still be useful to see whether that sort of belief holds true: that is, whether people who "have skin in the game" really do take fewer risks.
And even if that were the case, it's still quite a complex calculation to make. Let's say there are two architects building a tower block with the knowledge that they will be living in the top floor when it's built. One of them has little appetite for risk and builds their skyscraper very safely, without any real deviation from classic proven standards. Meanwhile, the other architect is much more open to risk and designs their skyscraper using brand new ideas and techniques. Both of them are equally happy to stay in the top floors of their buildings, but are the two buildings equally safe and risk free?
I'm unclear on what your argument is - of course if you have additional information about the architects, you should consider it. But if you don't have any other information, all other things being equal, it would be rational to strongly prefer to live in a building where the architect is willing to live. Of course, if possible, you should choose the place where the structural engineer lives.
Firstly, you've made the assertion that someone whose own life of at risk based their decisions is more likely to make safe decisions. As you say, it's an intuitive assumption to make, but reality tends to be very counterintuitive, especially when it comes to human logic and risk. Look at misconceptions around dangers of fighting vs driving, for example, or health risks and causes of death. So my first argument is that you should find evidence for that assertion before relying on it. I just don't trust it.
My second argument is that, even if it is true that people will take fewer risks if they know their life will be affected by those risks, I still don't think that would make that a useful tool in judging absolute risk. This is because human appetites for risk seem to vary a lot. Judging whether a building is safe based on whether the builder sleeps there is meaningless unless we know the builder's own propensity for risky decisions.
To give a more concrete example not directly related to risk: say you've got a disease, and I come to you with two medicines, A and B. I won't tell you how effective they are, but I will give you a double dose of medicine B, which will double its effectivity. Which one of these medicines should you take?
The logical answer here being that you just don't know, because you don't know the baseline effectivity of the medicines. Maybe they work about the same, in which case the double dose is obviously better. Maybe A is ten times more powerful to start with, so it doesn't really matter that B gets doubled.
Similarly, unless we have some indication of people's baseline propensity for risk, I don't think we can effectively make genuine (as in, statistically valid, data-backed) judgements about the situations you're describing, however counterintuitive that might feel.
I think these people are more likely to be habituated to any risk than people who are forced to keep a professional distance and imagine what might happen with less personal experience.
> but I would have order of magnitude more confidence living in an apartment if I know the head engineer who supervised its construction lives in the top floor
I absolutely do not. Pretty much all of the risky decisions I see people make, they seem to be self-harming just as often as they harm others.
To me whether the engineer lives in his own building doesn't tell me anything, because a guy who cuts corners does it because he thinks it's safe to cut corners.
What I want to know is, is the engineer's personality risk-seeking or risk-averse? Are they the kind of person who does things by the book or is always looking to cut corners? Do they value a job well done or do they value speed? These are the things that matter, not their personal tolerance for risk.
Exactly. The notion that skin in the game decreases risky behavior assumes that everyone is perfectly rational, which is demonstrably untrue. It's a classic "spherical cow" modeling of human behavior.
Overconfidence, hubris, obsession, laziness, envy, spite, and a nearly-infinite list of other "irrational" behaviors are a function of human existence and would cause someone to take stupid risks with both themselves and others!
No assumption of rationality is necessary, when the people who take the risks suffer the consequences they’re no longer around to take more risks no matter how irrational they are.
Evidence from the US mortgages before the Financial Crisis doesn't seem to support this. Middle managers at Countrywide (etc.) played even more games with their mortgages than normal people, interest-only up the wazoo etc. to get themselves into even nicer houses than they could afford, because they thought that they understood how the mortgage system worked.
The problem is that old line from Upton Sinclair about how it was "difficult get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it." The engineers, investment people, mortgage people etc. are motivated to believe that what they are doing is sufficient. This is supposed to be why disinterested government regulators- people whose pay does not change on whether this building, investment, submarine, mortgage etc. is safe- jump in and actually approve things. But, of course, government regulators are silly and just slow things down, because they don't understand how our new system uses computers/crypto/AI/whatever to be just as safe.
Skin in the game is neither magical or infallible, and nothing is. It is the greatest display of trust/confidence that we have. We can't have perfect, so this is what we have.
Thanks, you said it better than I could have. I feel like engineers frequently get stuck in this “perfect or worthless” mindset. Putting your life on the line is a hell of an incentive.
They aren't just daredevils, though. Check out "Heuristic Traps in Recreational Avalanche Accidents" http://www.sunrockice.com/docs/Heuristic%20traps%20IM%202004... for one interesting example: a lot of these people would think of themselves as cautious and informed, and still fall prey to heuristic traps (and, many explicitly don't recommend their sport to others, who they believe may not be informed enough to apply the same cautions).
I thought that "skin in the game" just means that you feel the consequences of your actions, and are (maybe) forced to learn as a result. I think that doesn't work well for single catastrophic events as you describe because single mistakes are deadly/ruinous/etc. IIRC Taleb is focused more on the field of managing risk for shared-decision-making and aligning incentives, but none of that rules out total failure etc, it just means that everyone bears the consequences.
> Taleb and others spread this idea that "skin in the game" is some kind of magical anecdote
"some kind of magical anecdote" [sic. You mean "antidote"]
I don't think you've even read the book, or you wouldn't say something so devoid of logic. "I know lots of people who take risks themselves who'd never recommend the same risks to others" is a non sequitur.
> "Skin in the game" seems like an extremely faulty heuristic in its own way, with little evidence to support a strong assurance effect.
I did read the book, although that was around the time it came out and my memory may be faulty. I remember not being particularly impressed with the level of evidence presented, and the care taken to present that evidence accurately.
I mean, you completely missed the point of what "skin in the game" is about. It's not a magical antidote to anything, nor is it a guarantee of anything. It just means that if the plane goes down, you're on it. The point of antifragility is that the group benefits by the heroic total loss of the individual. This could be wipe out in business or it could be that your submarine didn't work and you were on it. That's not an antidote for anything, but it is a moral safeguard against total disregard.
Didn't know about the Taleb part, but you're obviously right. Just because someone has "skin in the game" doesn't tell us anything.
We need to know more about said someone, their risk aversion profile and history, and what part of their area of expertise matches the "game" -- if any.
I call this issue "Tower Jumpers" versus "Arm Whirlers". I'm taking the names from Inventing Flight by John D. Anderson, Jr. The book is mostly about the Wright brothers. It starts with a discussion of the early history, with brave men inventing wings, strapping them on, and jumping out of towers. Jumping to their deaths. Others were more cautious and built gadgets to help them understand wings and lift. Wind tunnels were invented late. Before wind tunnels they used the whirling arm apparatus.
A theme of the book is that outsiders were taken by surprise by the success of the Wright brothers. Outsiders only got to hear of the passion and tragedy of the Tower Jumpers, who were making no progress. Only insiders knew of the Arm Whirlers with their gradual accumulation of knowledge and slow progress.
The distinction helps us understand "skin in the game". If you can distinguish between Tower Jumpers and Arm Whirlers, employ only Arm Whirlers. Insisting that they have "skin in the game" will ensure proper caution. If you cannot tell which is which, insisting on "skin in the game" will have an uneven record, with the Tower Jumpers ruining your safety record and their own skin.
The trickiest question is: how much skin in the game? Insist on too much and the Arm Whirlers will stay away; they were the risk averse ones. Then you only have Tower Jumpers and insisting on "skin in the game" will help you not at all.
Guides die on Everest more frequently than the rich tourists they haul up and down the mountain. At least this submarine didn't take a bunch of sherpas with it.
That's not Taleb's point at all, not even close. The point isn't about whether people take the risk or don't, the point is who is exposed to the risk. The CEO here had skin in the game. He may have been a cowboy taking needless risk, but if so he paid the price. Morally it's a very different thing from making the same set of decisions but never going down yourself.
The point of antifragility is the system benefits, even if the individual loses as happened here. The corruption is when the benefits accrue to one set of people and the risks somewhere else.
Taleb literally did say that you should never board a plane on which the pilot isn't onboard (such as a drone plane). Unless this was intended to never make you board an unethical plane, he does believe in some sort of insurance related to "skin in the game".
I would never get on a plane with the pilot anywhere but on the plane either.
But, the point of skin in the game isn't that it reduces the risk, it's a moral issue of who bears the risk. Skin in the game means you don't get the upside without the downside risk. That's it. It's not some magical pixie dust that makes people act rational, or follow safety protocols.
The pilot is more often than not the cause of the accident. Without a pilot airplane would have to be designed to a much higher standard. Right now the pilot is an unreliable fallback
> According to the court documents, in a 2018 case, OceanGate employee David Lochridge, a submersible pilot, voiced concerns about the safety of the sub.
> "That meant the Titanic trips — which had been planned at first for 2018, then 2019, then 2020 — had to be put off until mid-2021. By that time, Rush expects the new submersibles to be ready to enter service."
It's my impression that one of those "new submersibles" is the one that's lost.
I was also curious about the timeline of this. I'm waiting for that one geeky blog post that integrates all the facts.
I'm particularly interested in an educated perspective on their choice in materials. I'm familiar with carbon fibre from bike frame building, and the common tricks/practices to try and look for fissures, find voids/delaminations, etc. after a crash, and it's such a complex subject and material. I wonder who manufactured this vessel and what the quality of their facilities, tools, processes was.
I think they can't even send it un-manned because it is not externally controllable. From what I understood in footage of a previous "mission", all is operated on board and there is nothing the ship crew can do appart from communicating (when it still works).
My educated (a little bit of engineering at uni) perspective is: Completely idiotic to build a submarine out of carbon and not have the means for a complete inspection for manufacturing defects as the original article suggests.
Carbon, as you correctly note, needs to be very homogeneous. Bubbles, lamination defects or -god beware- fissures lead to failure, of the sudden, unannounced and total kind. And not only is it necessary to check after production, but also after regular short intervals of use, because a mere scratch in the carbon can be fatal.
I was thinking about that but a steel sub can only really weigh as much as the same volume of water which probably limits things if you are going to 4000m. Too much weight and it'd sink like a stone.
> The advantage of CF is low weight. But who cares what a submarine weighs?
The heavier a sub is the bigger the ballast tanks have to be to compensate and the more energy is wasted on moving it, just like any other powered vehicle.
It's very bizarre. It's the first thing you learn about in materials engineering, in any mechanical/aeronautical engineering degree. We even made our own carbon fibre models (some with intentional defects) and tested failing them at my Uni.
I even get worried about cracks in my road bike. These guys are going 3km+ under water... It's insane.
I expect there will be a lot of books documenting every angle of this incident, if for no other reason than because of the Titanic connection. I'm looking forward to reading the whole story on how this incident happened.
Here is a quick and dirty analysis from a US Submariner of 20 years.
It is supposedly, incredibly hard to find defects or damage on carbon fiber. SpaceX did cite this as a reason for using stainless steel. His belief is that there was a hull failure somewhere on the carbon fiber hull; a failure point that simply wasn't found before this dive.
It depends on the material system they used. It is possible to scan for defects just need expensive equipment. Loading and unloading a sub like this could easily result in damages that aren’t detected though
The article talks about how this was to do with their 1/3 scale model. I guess the relevant question then is if the "new model" is just the old 1/3 model scaled up, or if there are important differences. Are they still using a viewport that's not certified for the depths they're reaching? Are they still using flammable materials? Are there still parts in danger of de-laminating? Do they still have a culture and pattern of covering up and lying about safety?
If there were relevant changes to the new model other than scaling it up, it'd need to go through a much lengthier certification and testing phase.
Even if that is the case, the ethos of the company was to dismiss safety concerns, use inappropriate hardware, stonewall and then fire the only person who cared.
People died. I do hope the CEO isn't one of them, because he needs to be thrown in front of a court. Same with the other senior executives and HR.
The ascent and descent to Titanic is about 2 hours one-way. The exact time they say they lost contact was after around 1 hour and 45 minutes. It was likely at or close to at the depth of Titanic.
The article says they were going for 4000m, but it was only rated for 1300m.
That would imply a collapsing somewhere between the two.
Also, would the body, being mostly made of water itself, really get crushed instantly? I would certainly expect the pressure to squeeze all the air out of your lungs.
I know nothing about how the body behaves under high pressure.
I looked up a depth to pressure calculator, at even 1300m, the pressure is 1892.67 psi.
"psi" is pounds per square inch, and a human has ballpark 3000 square inches of surface area.
So to get a (very) rough approximation, picture what would happen if you squeezed a human with 3000*1892 pounds of force. Or try not to picture it, because I imagine it being pretty gross.
Yeah. Reminds me of this underwater pressure awareness training video on youtube from a few years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXgKxWlTt8A (if you're squeemish, don't click that link)
Industrial divers / welders / etc get all kinds of training to avoid that stuff, for good reason.
I'm sure they never imagined this video being paired with an incident like this but wow, their joyful and excited reactions (with no context of the lead up to this experiment) feels really morbid/sick. I realize they were trying to prove a myth and it worked, but still found it unsettling.
You'd have to subtract about 1atm from that, but yes the sudden pressure change would be quite gross.
That said, if divers are slowly "eased in" to the high pressure environment, it is actually possible to equalize pressure slowly and acclimatize. Though 1.3km would still likely be beyond the limits of that
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5110125/
I'm Hollywooding it here, but I bet it develops crack lines before collapsing. Most things in nature fail slowly, then all at once - think of standing on an iced-over puddle or pulling tree limbs.
I think 400 atmospheres of pressure change the dynamics a lot here.
Perhaps there might be a hairline crack that makes a window shatter when it's hit with a hammer. Except the hammer impact is constant. I don't think there would have been a lot of time.
I don't mean that it had a crack in it, but that it developed one as a precursor to total failure. My experience of physical materials is that they almost never just atomize, rather there's a weakpoint from which the failure cascades. I'm envisioning a process that might only last a few seconds, or be measurable in milliseconds.
The forces are immense and act all the time. In your daily life, you don't usually have that kind of system, so this feels counterintuitive.
Press against a solid object gently with one hand on each side, then suddenly yank away one hand. The object will be accelerated gently. Now do that with all your strength and send the object flying through the room in no time, with a few dozen kg of pressure. Now imagine that you could apply hundreds of tons of pressure. In such a system, every change will be nigh instantaneous.
I understand the physics just fine, thanks. I'm not disputing that it will be 'nigh instantaneous', I'm talking about how it fails. You and downvoters are also neglecting the fact that the submersible isn't suddenly teleported to/near its destination at which point it suddenly fails. It gets there slowly, passing through its safety envelope on the way.
Agreed on the likely short timescale. I am imagining having just enough time to think 'something's not right...' Musicians are sensitive to latencies on the order of 10-20 milliseconds; I doubt there was time for a conversation about it.
Oxygen is just about running out in the next few hours, they don't seem to have had any sonar contact, no cable or underwater phone. Getting something like a DSRV (which wouldn't really help if they are at ground level there, because it cannot dive that deep) there will take at least a day. Even if they are still alive, their chances of rescue are nonexistent.
Yes there were oxygen scrubbers on-board that had an estimated endurance to provide clean air for about 5 days for 5 people.
It has come out that it is wildly untested and optimistic estimate. The longest mission they had conducted onboard was 12 hours. So the theoretical limit may not be realistic. If there was panic onboard, that would increase oxygen usage dramatically, which could cut as much as 25% off the estimate (which is nearly a day in this case).
The best 'find things on the bottom of the ocean' gear is usually on a ship somewhere, but just happens to be in-between ships, but is on the Jersey islands in the English Channel. Except it still needs a military cargo plane to retrieve it, deliver it to Newfoundland and be moved by ship on location.
Yeah at this point, it seems that catastrophe struck 90 mins or so into the dive. That is when contact was lost.
They were early enough into the dive that they would have abandoned the dive after losing contact, they would have only been about halfway to the bottom, and they still would need communication to even find the titanic. So if they lost contact, the mission would have been aborted inside the sub, because they wouldn't have any hope of completing the mission without the aid of the surface vessel.
There are several emergency surfacing options available on the sub in addition to the primary propulsion method. If the sub lost contact, it would have surfaced. That is what happened in several other missions this company has made where communication was lost.
So the fact that communication was lost and no attempt to surface was made, suggests that there was a catastrophic failure. At the pressure they were at, the smallest leak would lead to immediate implosion. The most likely scenario is that they experienced a crack or defect in the hull that lead to implosion. It was likely over before anyone onboard even was aware of a problem (or within seconds of it).
Mission is a perfectly valid word for describing an outing of a submarine, specially when most of the discussion is surrounding the technical aspects of it. Do you also get angry when a business describes something as mission critical?
(1) a specific task with which a person or a group is charged
(2) a definite military, *naval*, or aerospace task
So in answer to your question, yes. If hikers wanted to call their hike a mission it is well within their rights. Merriam-Webster isn’t going to stop them.
You should seriously find better things to do with your life than obtuse rebellion against dictionary definitions. It makes you look like an illiterate nonce.
Implosion is probably the second best possible outcome after being rescued. The alternative of slowly running out of oxygen in 96hrs with no possibility to self-rescue is a level of grueling horror no one should experience.
How likely is it that they actually have survaced but nobody found them yet? Would sonar pick them up if their engines are out? How likely is a visual contact on the ocean if the sub drifted a few miles?
Under water, sonar could pick them up, but sonar is mostly "look down". If a current dragged them somewhere outside the immediate vicinity, they'll be hard to find, because the search vessel needs to be within at most 4km to find them in the water if they are drifting. Far less on the ground, because eliminating and processing ground echos is extremely hard.
If they are on the surface, getting them by sonar is not possible, but aerial surveillance might find them. However, things are very hard to see in the ocean if there are waves. They might have an AIS locator which would transmit their position and an emergency signal, but maybe they skimped on that too, because the submarine-rated ones are expensive.
Maybe. Sound travels longer distances in water than in air, but there still is a limit. And hydrophone chains and buoys are probably not dense enough to hear everything.
Volume is also an issue, the Titan is far smaller than a military sub, so the sonar spike corresponding to the implosion will be shorter and of a smaller amplitude.
The sonar on their surface vessel should have picked up the noise, if they have one that does recordings and passive mode. But I guess they were too cheap for that as well, since no regular sonar surveilance of the sub is mentioned in the press.
Yeah, everyone calculating oxygen rates is a nice optimistic view on the situation.
I think occams razor suggests that they experienced a breach or defect in the viewing window (or possibly the hull).
At the pressures they were at, it would have been over for them, before they ever even knew there was a problem. The pressures are so great, that they would have assimilated into the water instantly.
For what its worth, as sad as that sounds, it is possibly a better fate than the alternative of suffocating to death for 4 days in complete darkness (which is exactly what happened to 23 crew members aboard the Kursk russian sub back in 2000 [1])
I also thought they suffocated but it seems more likely that they died in a fire.
"Analysts concluded that 23 sailors took refuge in the small ninth compartment and survived for more than six hours. When oxygen ran low, they attempted to replace a potassium superoxide chemical oxygen cartridge, but it fell into the oily sea water and exploded on contact. The resulting fire killed several crew members and triggered a flash fire that consumed the remaining oxygen, suffocating the remaining survivors."
Apparently they were trying to fix the cartridge and the officer lost control of it and was killed instantly, some of the others dove under the water and survived the fire, but as the fire had consumed all the oxygen, it didn't matter. How they figured all that out from what they hauled up, I can only imagine.
They don't advertise any of their "new submersibles" on the website and the specifications they claim for Titan don't match any of their new submersibles; Titan is rated to go to the Titanic and not any lower. Titan isn't a previous version either. Unless they shelved the first Titan they probably just added some strengthening and called it a day.
I'm blown away that for a sub of that size and shape they used carbon fiber. The sub is positively gigantic and a cylinder is very susceptible to failure after repeated cycles. I'm pretty sure the claims they made about working with NASA and having a system to monitor the structural integrity of the sub are just BS.
"Hi Bob, did you used to work at NASA in the 60's? Can I ask, do you think this 1/100th scale submarine could get to this 1/100th scale titanic in my bathtub? kthxbye"
> Missing Titanic Sub Once Faced Massive Lawsuit Over Depths It Could Safely Travel To
I was always told never to end a sentence with a preposition. Is that still considered correct grammar? If I was the editor I would have rewritten the title to:
> Missing Titanic Sub Once Faced Massive Lawsuit Over Depths To Which It Could Safely Travel
Better or worse?
Maybe this one:
> Missing Titanic Sub Once Faced Massive Lawsuit Over Traveling To Unsafe Depths
Ending sentences with prepositions is perfectly fine English. According to this source [0], the original idea behind avoiding ending sentences with prepositions was conceived by people who wanted to align English grammar more closely with Latin grammar. Obviously, that's not an attractive selling point to many English speakers and sentences frequently end in prepositions today.
That's pretty good, but keep in mind that it's a headline. Most style guides stipulate alliteration, even at the expense of accuracy and specificity. For example:
Sunk Submarine Sued: Design Deadly During Designated Dives
Not because of the (non-existent) rule, but because "depth" is a stronger word than "to." It's almost always better for the last word to have some punch.
Not exactly the point you're asking, but pg made a point [0] about spelling that I think about:
pg:
"11 yo asked why he had to learn spellings. I told him honestly that although spelling may not really matter, if he couldn't spell, people would think he was stupid. And that was sufficiently motivating."
Can I End a Sentence with a Preposition? [1]
Generally you can (as others and the article points out), but I would suggest you use it in a very limited manner. I still hear my high school teachers frightening chastising voice and it stops me doing it. :)
When people realize they can do it (or hear others doing it) they tend to overuse it for everything and it can drive those around you mad. That's when you get in the territory that pg describes IMHO.
One things that makes my skin crawl, is when I hear people speaking (loudly) into their mobile (which for some reason always seems to be in speaker mode) "Hello? Where you at?". /shiver
> Lochridge discovered the viewing window on front of sub "was only built to a certified pressure of 1,300 meters, although OceanGate intended to take passengers...to...4,000 meters...OceanGate refused to pay...to build a viewport that would meet the required depth of 4,000 meters."
Previously unseen levels of "I told you man, I warned you" here.
Is there any way for this to end (other than sabotage and other outlandish options) in which this was not caused by a company trying to make money in an extremely unsafe way?
You may be right in a colloquial sense, but it's an engineering forum, you know? If someone dies while skydiving you could argue they were doing something risky-unsafe and unnecessary and had it coming, too, but as an engineer I'd still want to know why the chute didn't release, whether it was actually predictable, and how to fix it.
This may absolutely make a great tale about hubris one day, if we ever find out.
I agree, but the whole set-up seems to have so many massive safety issues that it seems like they were relying on pure dumb luck more than anything else.
This feels more like someone went skydiving with a homemade parachute in strong winds above an active volcano.
Conversely, if we can't find out (eg the wreck isn't located, or is so damaged we can't be sure) then a probabilistic assessment is the best we can do. Refusing to speculate at all essentially gives a pass to predictable failures.
If it turned out that the failed parachute had a history of using and misusing a number of cheap parts that weren't up to spec, I'm not sure there would be much of interest left to speculate about.
In this case, OceanGate has a well documented history of making poor and reckless engineering decisions. The fact that things went horribly wrong is probably related to one of the many corners they cut.
It will be interesting if/when we get more solid information but until then most of the speculation seems pretty on point to me.
I'd rather listen to expert opinions on the matter rather than software engineers who think they know all. People dunk on then using off the shelf equipment but that is rather common even for the military.
Thing is... The CEO is aboard the missing submersible. That same CEO who presumably wouldn't pay for a proper window...
This wasn't only a case of a CEO putting other lives at risk for profits... This was a case of a CEO putting his own life on the line for profits he will likely never see...
CEOs sniff their own abysmally stupid farts all the time. When trying to sell something, the first person you have to trick is yourself, but that does NOT indemnify them for harming others. Getting people killed because you are too stupid to understand basic risk concepts shouldn't be acceptable.
Power should come with responsibility and accountability ESPECIALLY if you are not responsible or accountable.
"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
I didn’t mean to say he’s a good guy, just that it’s one step up from others who make others take the risks at no cost to themselves. You know, face I win tails you lose kind of thing. But yeah, still reckless and irresponsible.
I may be wrong here, but I think there is a regulation that prevents the owner of an airline from piloting the planes of their own airline. It might create a conflict of interest between saving money and being cautious.
This is not only a theoretical risk. It happened. A Brazilian soccer team, Chapecoense, hired a private airliner to get them from Bolivia to Colombia. Due to some bad luck, airport closing hours and whatnot, the flight plan had to be changed and the plane was fueled below what the regulations required. They were getting close to the destination airport when they got a low fuel warning. More bad luck and in the airport of the destination the flight control asked their flight to wait while another plane had priority in landing.
There were alternatives to redirect the flight or request priority to land, which they only requested when it was too late and the plane crashed due to fuel exhaustion. 71 of 77 people in the plane died in the crash, including the pilot.
The pilot was also the co-owner of the airline, so there is room to speculate that he didn't want to promptly admit to be low on fuel and require priority to land, or divert to another airport when the low-fuel warning appeared, because he would have to admit that he fueled below what the regulations asked. He could face the consequences, like a fine or losing his license.
I don't know what a lawsuit would hope to gain - given that the CEO and the company's main asset are gone, I doubt there's much of a company left to sue.
The carbon fiber tube is also sealed from the outside by 10 inch long bolts. There is no way to open it from the inside (not that it really matters at 13,000 ft deep), just to add to the terror.
Yeah, I'm happy to enjoy the views of Titanic wreckage from 4k video footage taken by robot subs, while viewing it in my underwear in front of a 70" OLED tv. In a few years I will probably be able to don a VR headset and swim around the titanic in VR. I'm satisfied with that alternative.
If you look at the pictures linked in the arstechnica article, you can see they used screws in the _carbon_ _fiber_ _hull_ to fix a monitor and lights.
They are really up there with boeing to compete for a price in malicious stupidity.
I was wondering about that. What would be the proper way of doing it? Perhaps glue…but then you have the screws that hold on the titanium caps. Maybe carbon fiber in general wasn’t a good choice.
Edit: Actually I’m wrong. The hatch is bolted on to a titanium ring, which is glued to the carbon fiber body. So no hatch screws in the carbon fiber. [0]
Wouldn't they want everything on a inner sled, like a cool looking carbon rollcage, hanging from attachment points, perhaps on Titanium rings on end caps?
I can't see any wires going to their camper world lamp on the ceiling, but I do see what looks like a reworked area in the hull from the back leading to it...
Obviously not the pressure hull, just sheeting. Probably got wiring, pluming, ventilation, insulation and expansion over probably insulation/expansion wiring and insulation and expansion joint under there before the real hull.
Found a photo looks like you can see the other side.
And you can't really tell what fasteners are being used either. It could be screwed straight in the side like it's drywall, but it could be something slightly more reasonable.
It's not a contraption I would set foot in, but they reached the Titanic multiple times with it. That can not be done with screw your TV into the pressure hull level stupidity.
EDIT: And the pressure hull is 5 inches thick. That thing looks about a half inch.
It doesn't even look remotely comfortable for more than a few few minutes - they seem to be sitting crosslegged on a metal floor. Couldn't they spend a few dollars to put a padded seat cushion on the floor?
I'm usually the first to look at how to defend engineers' decisions when building something that failed... But it's very hard for me to imagine how this can be OK.
Why would carbon fiber be a suitable material for this application? I get why people want it to be lightweight and resist environmental corrosion, but it just seems like the wrong choice under hydrostatic pressure. I found some recent academic articles analyzing composite cylinders for submersible applications and in those papers they buckled at a fraction of the pressure equivalent to 4000m of seawater. The fact that they advertise their suite of strain gauges seems to indicate that they under-designed the thing and intended to just see what happened in practice.
There were lots of wrong choices and execution in the design of this submarine (no, using a joypad isn't one of them. There are far more worse details).
Using a joypad isn't a big problem in itself, but using a wireless one is extremely careless. What if the connection is lost? What if batteries die? Or leak? Etc.
If the batteries leak, you have toxic material inside the cabin (perhaps you retain control because you surely have replacements!). It's probably one of the last things you need in such environments, especially using a stupid cable with a couple of backups eliminates a big single point of failure.
This specific controller does not. The Logitech F710, I've got one on my desk right now. It has zero ports and only works wirelessly. It uses AA batteries so there's no need for a charging port either.
For wired use, Logitech have the cheaper F310 that lacks rumble, and the discontinued F510.
I'd just want to make the whole thing out of a massive steel pipe with welded end caps.
Make the thing 200 mm thick, and a 2m diameter cylinder should be good down to 8 kilometers (so 4 kilometers with a 2x safety margin).
Steel is expensive when it's 200 millimeters thick... But when you're done with the sub, you can melt it down and get most of the value back again!
A window is probably the hardest part - acrylic would need to be nearly a yard thick! Glass could do it, but casting huge bits of glass is really hard.
The craft is super heavy and impossible to transport by land - but it ends up being nearly neutrally buoyant, so you just tow it in the ocean to wherever it is needed.
This might be overkill, while failing to take advantage of (very) prior art. FWIW, Finland's biggest (AFAIK) tangle with COCOM export controls (against the USSR) was about deep-diving submersibles.
- "Lochridge’s recommendation was that non-destructive testing of the Titan’s hull was necessary to ensure a “solid and safe product.” The filing states that Lochridge was told that such testing was impossible, and that OceanGate would instead rely on its much touted acoustic monitoring system."
- "The company claims this technology, developed in-house, uses acoustic sensors to listen for the tell-tale sounds of carbon fibers in the hull deteriorating to provide “early warning detection for the pilot with enough time to arrest the descent and safely return to surface.”"
I don’t understand how they couldn’t NDT that tiny thing. They could have done it with a 10k tool and a week or less of work. Or the could have done it in a couple weeks with a grid and manual probe. The only reason it would be impossible is if they had so many defects they could never show it good in the first place and expected it to fail, just couldn’t predict when.
> OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush says the company had been evaluating the potential of using a carbon fiber composite hull since 2010, primarily because it permits creation of a pressure vessel that is naturally buoyant and, therefore, would enable OceanGate to forgo the use — and the significant expense — of syntactic foam on its exterior.
That was my immediate reaction when I read "carbon fiber tube". Really? Carbon fiber doesnt seem like the right choice, but I am not a submarine designer. Maybe there's something I don't know. But for me it immediately felt wrong.
They're going 4,000 meters/ 2.5 miles under the sea. Roughly 400 atmospheres of pressure. A quick google shows the longest commercial tether is 1,100 meters and is meant for undersea drones for power/ data.
Aside from the massive tether and engine that would need to pull it, I'd imagine it would rip the submersible to shreds at those depths
Just as another data point, the Nereus[1] explored the Mariana Trench at nearly 11km depth, and had a comms tether (very thin optical fiber). According to the wiki, its tether was 40km in length total. So, it's not out of the question, I don't think.
No good for pulling it to the surface, of course, but reliable communication alone would be a great benefit.
They didn't really need an expensive and complex "umbilical cord" type of system, but a simple rope could pull the sub up in an emergency, and keep it from getting lost or separated from the ship.
This sub has 4 Innerspace 1002 thrusters that make for a max total of 342*4=1,368lb of thrust... I think a useful point of reference in deciding how much pull force would be needed for an emergency recovery tether.
I think it's reasonable that a 4mm dyneema line with a breaking strength of 4,000lbs would be sufficient for emergency surfacing, and safely provide much more thrust that it's own motors. The whole sub weighs 23k lbs and is approximately neutrally buoyant.
Total weight for 3 miles of 4mm dyneema is only about 120lbs, and for simple emergency use, in the spirit of OceanGates now infamous "scrappy thriftiness" could be pulled with the type of simple/cheap hydraulic winches used for pulling crab pots, anchors, or fishing nets. 3 miles of this line would have cost about $15,000.
How big of a ship would you need to even hold that tether?
At 4000m under the ocean, you'd need like 10000m of cabling at a minimum I'd assume? And then you'd need the tether + winch to be capable of supporting and lifting the sub at that depth.
I'd be amazed if any country let alone company has that capability outside of maybe the US military.
The vehicle that discovered the titanic was a sled pulled behind a ship on a tether. A thick steel cable can take a lot of load.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argo_(ROV)
Also, subs operate at close to neutral buoyancy. A tether does not need to support the weight of the vehicle, it only needs to resist the force of drag that the water exerts on the vehicle moving at whatever the max tow / lift speed is.
I think a 4mm dyneema line would have been more than sufficient to pull this to the surface in an emergency, and would have been relatively cheap and light. It could safely 1-2 tons of force, which would rapidly lift a neutrally buoyant sub of any size…
Even without a tether, I'm mystified it didn't have an attachment that was designed to return to the surface and act as a beacon if anything went drastically wrong. Since all it would need would be a few sensors, a battery, and an antenna one imagines it would be somewhat easier to design than the main vessel.
Thethers and ships that can hold their position for thethered ROVs are very expensive. OceanGate didn't even have their own ship, they chartered one and that ship released their base platform from which the sub takes off.
I'm a little confused by his video. He says that it has never been tested at depth, but I thought this contraption had already made Titanic visits the last two years.
If we consider that the deepest submersibles in the US Navy "only" went 1.5 km deep (not talking about experimental craft, only deployed, actively deployed equipment), I'd be really cautious before embarking on this ship.
This was a guy in a Marina nonchalantly going where the fucking US Navy, the most powerful navy in the whole history of the world doesn't dare to tread.
The US Navy has no need or desire to go deep like that. I'm sure they would figure out how to do it if they needed to, but it probably would be a ROV and not a little capsule you stuff some humans into.
I'd say it's more "doesn't bother to tread" rather than "doesn't dare to tread". There probably is not a lot below 1.5km that would be of much interest to the US Navy.
There is a big difference between "doesn't dare to" and "it's not practical/useful for warfare".
There have been plenty of submersibles that went much deeper. People went down 10km in the 1960s. There is no excuse for the incompetence and stupidity of this titanic crew.
The US navy is not attempting to solve the problem space of "Tourist trip to deep ocean locations". Privately owned submersibles have long out-depthed US navy crafts, because US navy doesn't need a small craft to go that deep.
The Navy's Trieste II went to 20,000 feet (6.1 km) in the 1960s. It dove to the wreckage of the Thresher, among other things and was in service until 1980. It was replaced by Alvin-class of deep-submergence vehicles.
Okay, so I'm confused. The bathyscape Trieste, paid for by the USN, went to the deepest spot in the entire ocean- the Challengers Deep of the Mariana's Trench- back in 1960 (it is on display at the US Navy Museum in Washington DC). The DSV Alvin, also paid for by the USN, visited the Titanic back in the 1980's (it is still operational, operated by Woods Hole Oceanographic Research Institute under contract for the USN). So what kind of distinction are you trying to make with "deployed, actively deployed equipment"?
1.5km far exceeds any realistic estimate of crush depth for a USN warship submarine- generally open source estimates are around 600m for them, so I am really not sure where you got your number from. It is much deeper than the typical big nuclear submarine would be able to do, but not nearly as deep as the research vehicles the Navy has.
- "Lochridge, who claimed he was discharged in retaliation for being a whistleblower, made his filing after OceanGate sued him in federal court in Seattle that June. OceanGate has accused him of sharing confidential information with two individuals, as well as with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA)."
> I didn't know "sharing confidential information with OSHA" could be a valid (?) cause of action.
Not that this sounds like one of those cases but I can think of several cases that it'd a perfectly reasonable cause of action, mainly when the disclosure isn't relevant to OSHA.
There's a surprising amount of corner cutting that goes on with large engineering projects. Examples:
- A water slide had basic design flaws. That water slide would later go on to decapitate the son of a Congressman [1];
- The Millenium Tower in San Francisco was allowed to be built without the piles going down to bedrock [2];
- A borrowed system from an earlier rocket was never tested on the Ariane 5. An integer overflow basically caused the Ariane 5 to blow up on launch [3];
- Famously, the Challenger disaster came down to some O rings becoming brittle in the cold launch conditions and the launch was approved regardless [4];
- To counter the competition of the Airbus A320neo, Boeing decided against a full redesign of the 737 and instead just updated the aging 737 design by putting more powerful engines on it and moving them forward. This could lead to stalls if the plane angled up too much. To counter this, Boeing added the (now famous) MCAS to keep the 737 type rating [5] and didn't really tell airlines and pilots about it. But the worst part was the system had no redundancy. It relies on a single sensor. Normally for safety-critical sensors there is triple-redundancy. So for something like this you'd have 3 sensors (minimum) and there'd need to be agreement between at least two. That was an optional upgrade.
I mean, yes, there are a lot of designs that fail, but the vast majority of infrastructure operates reliably for decades. Most waterslides don't decapitate people, and skyscraper collapses are exceedingly rare. Launch vehicles fail more frequently but they're phenomenally complicated machines that are produced in low volumes and flown infrequently.
The concept of "cutting corners" is difficult to define.
Good engineering is not about pouring as much concrete as possible into the largest hole ever made by mankind, for every bridge pillar.
It's the opposite! Good engineering is finding the minimum amount of concrete that will hold the bridge under all possible foreseeable circumstances.
Yes, sometimes the minimum proves too short, and in those times the failures are often catastrophic. But we're still looking for that minimum. We're never looking for "maximum safety with no regard for anything else". That would be impossible.
And when we push that too far, or allow economics to overrule the fact we're putting squishy humans at the center of forces thhe vast majority of them have difficulty comprehending, people die.
I'd prefer people stop couching engineering as "the quest for the cheapest we can make it", and more "lets not make an industrial scale coffin".
None of which is possible without someone who can rein in risk comfortable execs with a hard, unoverridable no.
Essentially, the "gradient descent" of business interests will invariably push safety design right to the edge that is deemed acceptable. Not to some "safe region" with decent wiggle room! The very edge.
This is why the "minimum amount of concrete" will eventually be the minimum amount of concrete, and catastrophic failures will occasionally occur, even in foreseeable circumstances.
We did it (past tense) in aviation, up to the point where business pressures pushed things to the edge. That's how MCAS happened and 346 people died -- because due to a profit motive, the minimum number of sensors (1) were installed instead of the desired safe number (3).
This is truly the wisest comment on this otherwise very questionable thread.
It is hugely challenging - and rewarding - to try and solve a constraint satisfaction problem that balances the risk, cost, upside that are a function of the huge set of decisions made in any complex undertaking.
It is massively easier to identify flaws and demand mitigations, which you can do ad infinitum.
They lost contact right around 1:30-1:45 into the dive, which takes about 2 hours to reach final depth... while it's possible they lost power or controls, the idea that we're going to find them bobbing around somewhere instead of basically right next to the Titanic wreck itself on the seafloor seems laughable. It feels like the most likely failure mode has to do with the viewport, considering some earlier duty cycle trepidation and the linked concerns about the viewport's certifiable depths.
Would love to be wrong, but I think we're going to find a crushed/mangled carbon fiber tin can sitting alongside the wreck when we finally get an unmanned submersible down there that can look for them.
> the idea that we're going to find them bobbing around somewhere
It wouldn't actually make any difference, because the only way out of that thing is to unscrew 17 heavy duty bolts from the outside.
If they're floating around somewhere that doesn't make them safe; they're just suffocating at the surface instead of on the sea floor.
Also, the claimed 96 hours of "life support" was never properly tested, and there's no evidence the vessel was able to properly extract toxic gasses from its atmosphere, etc.
Apparently they implemented 'seven safety systems to help it return to the surface', but whether those actually worked is questionable.
It doesn't exactly inspire hope to read that one of these 'systems' was to have the passengers 'tilt the sub by moving to each side of it releasing weights held in place on each side'.
This reads like peak marketing since at least 5 of those 7 safety measures are just "drop weights" with extra steps, but I guess "three safety systems" sounds less sexy in promotional material.
The submersible craft industry is especially niche. and that comes will all the facets of niche industry.
There is no enforcement body, you can operate with great freedom.
Most of the members lay at the intersection of wealth and liberty. Sometimes science.
for reference; Ive been born and raised in this field. This is roughly my viewpoint when interpreting this news
Safety margins exist for a reason in Engineering. Lots of times you can just work dangerously and nothing is going to happen; the people pushing for using machines operating at the edge of the breaking point are seen as "aggressive", "daring" and "true leaders".
But from time to time, things DO break and that's why these safety measures exist to begin with. They exist for dealing with the unknown, with the things that can't be directly measured like random imperfections or variations in the operating conditions.
I hope that the company, and its owners/executives, that got away for so long with operating unsafe machinery are exemplarily punished.
Sincere question: if this did in fact implode (hopefully not), would there be identifiable wreckage? Would we be likely to find it? And how likely is it that the Navy or some other group picked up the audio of the implosion via hydrophone, etc?
I'm trying to understand whether
[1] they've heard a possible implosion and are proceeding with search and rescue against all hope;
[2] they haven't heard one, and think that's indicative that it's still intact; or
[3] they haven't heard one and aren't sure either way.
Even if it would be intact and somehow floating at 3000 meters it would be probably very hard to find it. Just think about submarine warfare, even the big military ones can be pretty stealthy.
And this is a small submarine mostly made of carbon fiber. Thats probably even hard to distinguish from a big fish with sonar. And if this thing is on the ground then sonar doesnt help.
I think if this thing has no ping device on board (to make active sound), then they probably never find it. Assuming its still under water of course.
After looking at the photos of the submarine that’s missing, I have no clue how people who are as rich and successful as the ones who were on board could pay such insane amounts of money to board that tiny tin-can of a submarine and go 12,500 feet under the sea without having a sense of, “You know what? This probably isn’t the greatest idea ever. I probably shouldn’t do this.” It boggles my mind.
If the tickets cost $50, there's no way anyone would have thought "this is a good idea." But they charged so much people who could afford to pay for the tickets assumed competence. Parallels with the Titanic are obscene...
I agree, I reckon they could’ve pooled their money together and built or bought something safer than this, maybe with some more room too. Or go to another company.
Maybe if we had "obscenely safe" regulations in IT there wouldn't be this neverending procession of hacks - Louisiana and Oregon DMV is the latest breach, but since there are no consequences nothing will be done about the intractable towers of complexity that keep collapsing.
Safe does not mean secure. Old defense technologies, while more reliable, are not typically up to par against modern weapons. The same is generally true for cybersecurity.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 271 ms ] threadIn this case, being fired was an ideal outcome.
Being fired was an ideal outcome for Lochridge, because Lochridge was therefore not piloting the sub this week.
I'm pretty sure he does not set the utility of other peoples' lives at 0, so their surviving along with him would definitely be better.
So this has to be the second-best outcome at best.
What outcome is ideal depends on the priors, I suppose.
If the company not listening to Lochridge is a given, then being fired is better than not, and having to go down on the sub.
The company listening to Lochridge is better than the company not listening to Lochridge.
The company putting safety first and engineering something that met Lochridge's standards from the outset is better than the company listening to Lochridge when he brought up problems. And so on.
You cannot ensure its safety, since you cannot evaluate it for growing defects. As is best practice for all other DSVs in the world that use metal pressure hulls.
I suspect a metal hull and all it entails (way more complex design and careful selection of materials, equipment, passenger space etc.) would have cost too much.
What an absurd thing to say. Not having the sub sink has all the upsides and none of the downsides of having it sink. Ergo, being fired is guaranteed not to be optimal.
I also suspect that if you go with a metal hull, you don't have positive buoancy anymore - you need syntactic foam. You need larger thrusters, those are heavier too, so more foam etc.
The engineering becomes harder and also costlier, in addition to the material and equipment costs.
What you gain is the ability to evaluate your pressure vessel for growing defects - which you didn't do in the first place (and can't do) with your composite hull.
This worker likely blew the whistle on the safety assessment of the system.
Sometimes, external forces see product to market despite risks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Challenger_disas...
See theranos and others. We really need to address this
How do you separate the legit concerns from someone complaining that they can't go to work because their yellow safety vest is slightly dirty and therefore not safe anymore?
All proper engineering companies have integrity and compliance processes, whistleblower systems, confidante contacts, etc.
It's good business to do this. Fucking up kills people, and liability kills companies.
Mature companies develop code to intentionally dodge regulations. They're not trustworthy regardless of "maturity".
Otherwise they are more like a safety consultant.
I'm assuming people have been extracting it, but alas, I'm out of the edit window.
I think to a somewhat lesser extent (HN is particularly aggressively anti-whistleblower) this is the general attitude, unfortunately.
edit: Actually it seems the person responsible for saftey wasn't on board (he got fired) and you can claim his skin was much more important to be in the game if you were looking for assurance
Taleb and others spread this idea that "skin in the game" is some kind of magical anecdote to faulty thinking, incomplete risk analysis, incorrect application of heuristics, and other things. That just doesn't seem true. Lots of people do risky things every day based on social proof, or familiarity, or commitment, or scarcity, or many of the other risk-perception-altering heuristics that govern our lives. We do it when we drive, when we drink, when we ski, and in all kinds of other occasions. "Skin in the game" seems like an extremely faulty heuristic in its own way, with little evidence to support a strong assurance effect.
Conversely, I know lots of people who take risks themselves who'd never recommend the same risks to others (especially outdoor and motor sports enthusiasts). That's the opposite of Taleb's hypothesis.
Where it mostly fails is incompetence, some might have the best intention of something succeeding but their best effort is still not worth much.
You could think of this as avoiding "a scam", but there is no conscious intention involved.
And even if that were the case, it's still quite a complex calculation to make. Let's say there are two architects building a tower block with the knowledge that they will be living in the top floor when it's built. One of them has little appetite for risk and builds their skyscraper very safely, without any real deviation from classic proven standards. Meanwhile, the other architect is much more open to risk and designs their skyscraper using brand new ideas and techniques. Both of them are equally happy to stay in the top floors of their buildings, but are the two buildings equally safe and risk free?
Firstly, you've made the assertion that someone whose own life of at risk based their decisions is more likely to make safe decisions. As you say, it's an intuitive assumption to make, but reality tends to be very counterintuitive, especially when it comes to human logic and risk. Look at misconceptions around dangers of fighting vs driving, for example, or health risks and causes of death. So my first argument is that you should find evidence for that assertion before relying on it. I just don't trust it.
My second argument is that, even if it is true that people will take fewer risks if they know their life will be affected by those risks, I still don't think that would make that a useful tool in judging absolute risk. This is because human appetites for risk seem to vary a lot. Judging whether a building is safe based on whether the builder sleeps there is meaningless unless we know the builder's own propensity for risky decisions.
To give a more concrete example not directly related to risk: say you've got a disease, and I come to you with two medicines, A and B. I won't tell you how effective they are, but I will give you a double dose of medicine B, which will double its effectivity. Which one of these medicines should you take?
The logical answer here being that you just don't know, because you don't know the baseline effectivity of the medicines. Maybe they work about the same, in which case the double dose is obviously better. Maybe A is ten times more powerful to start with, so it doesn't really matter that B gets doubled.
Similarly, unless we have some indication of people's baseline propensity for risk, I don't think we can effectively make genuine (as in, statistically valid, data-backed) judgements about the situations you're describing, however counterintuitive that might feel.
I absolutely do not. Pretty much all of the risky decisions I see people make, they seem to be self-harming just as often as they harm others.
To me whether the engineer lives in his own building doesn't tell me anything, because a guy who cuts corners does it because he thinks it's safe to cut corners.
What I want to know is, is the engineer's personality risk-seeking or risk-averse? Are they the kind of person who does things by the book or is always looking to cut corners? Do they value a job well done or do they value speed? These are the things that matter, not their personal tolerance for risk.
Overconfidence, hubris, obsession, laziness, envy, spite, and a nearly-infinite list of other "irrational" behaviors are a function of human existence and would cause someone to take stupid risks with both themselves and others!
The problem is that old line from Upton Sinclair about how it was "difficult get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it." The engineers, investment people, mortgage people etc. are motivated to believe that what they are doing is sufficient. This is supposed to be why disinterested government regulators- people whose pay does not change on whether this building, investment, submarine, mortgage etc. is safe- jump in and actually approve things. But, of course, government regulators are silly and just slow things down, because they don't understand how our new system uses computers/crypto/AI/whatever to be just as safe.
It does provide strong incentives, which you should trust a lot more than words.
Your point that some people are daredevils who don't care too much about personal risk is interesting though. Hadn't thought about that.
It’s just that we have better categorisation of physical failures than psychological ones.
"some kind of magical anecdote" [sic. You mean "antidote"]
I don't think you've even read the book, or you wouldn't say something so devoid of logic. "I know lots of people who take risks themselves who'd never recommend the same risks to others" is a non sequitur.
> "Skin in the game" seems like an extremely faulty heuristic in its own way, with little evidence to support a strong assurance effect.
The entire book is full of evidence from history.
I did read the book, although that was around the time it came out and my memory may be faulty. I remember not being particularly impressed with the level of evidence presented, and the care taken to present that evidence accurately.
We need to know more about said someone, their risk aversion profile and history, and what part of their area of expertise matches the "game" -- if any.
A theme of the book is that outsiders were taken by surprise by the success of the Wright brothers. Outsiders only got to hear of the passion and tragedy of the Tower Jumpers, who were making no progress. Only insiders knew of the Arm Whirlers with their gradual accumulation of knowledge and slow progress.
The distinction helps us understand "skin in the game". If you can distinguish between Tower Jumpers and Arm Whirlers, employ only Arm Whirlers. Insisting that they have "skin in the game" will ensure proper caution. If you cannot tell which is which, insisting on "skin in the game" will have an uneven record, with the Tower Jumpers ruining your safety record and their own skin.
The trickiest question is: how much skin in the game? Insist on too much and the Arm Whirlers will stay away; they were the risk averse ones. Then you only have Tower Jumpers and insisting on "skin in the game" will help you not at all.
The point of antifragility is the system benefits, even if the individual loses as happened here. The corruption is when the benefits accrue to one set of people and the risks somewhere else.
But, the point of skin in the game isn't that it reduces the risk, it's a moral issue of who bears the risk. Skin in the game means you don't get the upside without the downside risk. That's it. It's not some magical pixie dust that makes people act rational, or follow safety protocols.
2018; this would make it the previous model, no? Not the same submarine that went missing. At least that's the impression I get from this article (2020): https://www.geekwire.com/2020/oceangate-raises-18m-build-big...
> "That meant the Titanic trips — which had been planned at first for 2018, then 2019, then 2020 — had to be put off until mid-2021. By that time, Rush expects the new submersibles to be ready to enter service."
It's my impression that one of those "new submersibles" is the one that's lost.
I'm particularly interested in an educated perspective on their choice in materials. I'm familiar with carbon fibre from bike frame building, and the common tricks/practices to try and look for fissures, find voids/delaminations, etc. after a crash, and it's such a complex subject and material. I wonder who manufactured this vessel and what the quality of their facilities, tools, processes was.
Do you think they do extensive trial runs first at the beginning of each season? Like send it to the bottom un-manned just to double check?
As my former boss liked to say "Things that aren't tested don't work."
We've got more than enough ways to rig up signalling networks that there is zero reason for any submersible to not be remotely tested to crush depth.
Carbon, as you correctly note, needs to be very homogeneous. Bubbles, lamination defects or -god beware- fissures lead to failure, of the sudden, unannounced and total kind. And not only is it necessary to check after production, but also after regular short intervals of use, because a mere scratch in the carbon can be fatal.
The advantage of CF is low weight. But who cares what a submarine weighs?
Some of the articles about it's construction indicate that many of the engineers were aerospace engineers.
I wouldn't want a submarine engineer designing a plane, and vice versa.
The heavier a sub is the bigger the ballast tanks have to be to compensate and the more energy is wasted on moving it, just like any other powered vehicle.
The biggest benefit of reduced weight on this thing would be minimizing the size of the crane and surface vessel needed to deploy and recover it.
I even get worried about cracks in my road bike. These guys are going 3km+ under water... It's insane.
Here is a quick and dirty analysis from a US Submariner of 20 years.
It is supposedly, incredibly hard to find defects or damage on carbon fiber. SpaceX did cite this as a reason for using stainless steel. His belief is that there was a hull failure somewhere on the carbon fiber hull; a failure point that simply wasn't found before this dive.
If there were relevant changes to the new model other than scaling it up, it'd need to go through a much lengthier certification and testing phase.
People died. I do hope the CEO isn't one of them, because he needs to be thrown in front of a court. Same with the other senior executives and HR.
That would imply a collapsing somewhere between the two.
Also, would the body, being mostly made of water itself, really get crushed instantly? I would certainly expect the pressure to squeeze all the air out of your lungs.
I know nothing about how the body behaves under high pressure.
"psi" is pounds per square inch, and a human has ballpark 3000 square inches of surface area.
So to get a (very) rough approximation, picture what would happen if you squeezed a human with 3000*1892 pounds of force. Or try not to picture it, because I imagine it being pretty gross.
Industrial divers / welders / etc get all kinds of training to avoid that stuff, for good reason.
That said, if divers are slowly "eased in" to the high pressure environment, it is actually possible to equalize pressure slowly and acclimatize. Though 1.3km would still likely be beyond the limits of that https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5110125/
Perhaps there might be a hairline crack that makes a window shatter when it's hit with a hammer. Except the hammer impact is constant. I don't think there would have been a lot of time.
Press against a solid object gently with one hand on each side, then suddenly yank away one hand. The object will be accelerated gently. Now do that with all your strength and send the object flying through the room in no time, with a few dozen kg of pressure. Now imagine that you could apply hundreds of tons of pressure. In such a system, every change will be nigh instantaneous.
Failure is going to occur on the order of fractions of a second at those huge pressures. (Fortunately?)
Here's a pressure vessel failing at only 1 bar:
https://youtu.be/Zz95_VvTxZM
Official reports have been saying 40 hours a few hours ago.
It has come out that it is wildly untested and optimistic estimate. The longest mission they had conducted onboard was 12 hours. So the theoretical limit may not be realistic. If there was panic onboard, that would increase oxygen usage dramatically, which could cut as much as 25% off the estimate (which is nearly a day in this case).
In other words... it is grim.
Time isn't on their side.
They were early enough into the dive that they would have abandoned the dive after losing contact, they would have only been about halfway to the bottom, and they still would need communication to even find the titanic. So if they lost contact, the mission would have been aborted inside the sub, because they wouldn't have any hope of completing the mission without the aid of the surface vessel.
There are several emergency surfacing options available on the sub in addition to the primary propulsion method. If the sub lost contact, it would have surfaced. That is what happened in several other missions this company has made where communication was lost.
So the fact that communication was lost and no attempt to surface was made, suggests that there was a catastrophic failure. At the pressure they were at, the smallest leak would lead to immediate implosion. The most likely scenario is that they experienced a crack or defect in the hull that lead to implosion. It was likely over before anyone onboard even was aware of a problem (or within seconds of it).
Not if they are doing something useful to others.
Are hikers who get lost on a mission?
You should seriously find better things to do with your life than obtuse rebellion against dictionary definitions. It makes you look like an illiterate nonce.
[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/mission
If they are on the surface, getting them by sonar is not possible, but aerial surveillance might find them. However, things are very hard to see in the ocean if there are waves. They might have an AIS locator which would transmit their position and an emergency signal, but maybe they skimped on that too, because the submarine-rated ones are expensive.
Volume is also an issue, the Titan is far smaller than a military sub, so the sonar spike corresponding to the implosion will be shorter and of a smaller amplitude.
The sonar on their surface vessel should have picked up the noise, if they have one that does recordings and passive mode. But I guess they were too cheap for that as well, since no regular sonar surveilance of the sub is mentioned in the press.
I think occams razor suggests that they experienced a breach or defect in the viewing window (or possibly the hull).
At the pressures they were at, it would have been over for them, before they ever even knew there was a problem. The pressures are so great, that they would have assimilated into the water instantly.
For what its worth, as sad as that sounds, it is possibly a better fate than the alternative of suffocating to death for 4 days in complete darkness (which is exactly what happened to 23 crew members aboard the Kursk russian sub back in 2000 [1])
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kursk_submarine_disaster
"Analysts concluded that 23 sailors took refuge in the small ninth compartment and survived for more than six hours. When oxygen ran low, they attempted to replace a potassium superoxide chemical oxygen cartridge, but it fell into the oily sea water and exploded on contact. The resulting fire killed several crew members and triggered a flash fire that consumed the remaining oxygen, suffocating the remaining survivors."
I'm blown away that for a sub of that size and shape they used carbon fiber. The sub is positively gigantic and a cylinder is very susceptible to failure after repeated cycles. I'm pretty sure the claims they made about working with NASA and having a system to monitor the structural integrity of the sub are just BS.
"Hi Bob, did you used to work at NASA in the 60's? Can I ask, do you think this 1/100th scale submarine could get to this 1/100th scale titanic in my bathtub? kthxbye"
It took a while to go from dismissing employee concerns to tourism, but it seems to be the same device.
I was always told never to end a sentence with a preposition. Is that still considered correct grammar? If I was the editor I would have rewritten the title to:
> Missing Titanic Sub Once Faced Massive Lawsuit Over Depths To Which It Could Safely Travel
Better or worse?
Maybe this one:
> Missing Titanic Sub Once Faced Massive Lawsuit Over Traveling To Unsafe Depths
0: https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/prepositions-e...
"to which" is technically EDIT: better formal English. For a headline in mainstream news? I might well give it a pass.
My suggestion:
Missing Titanic Sub Once Faced Massive Lawsuit Over Safe Travel Depth
Sunk Submarine Sued: Design Deadly During Designated Dives
Not because of the (non-existent) rule, but because "depth" is a stronger word than "to." It's almost always better for the last word to have some punch.
You likely mean "arrant", too.
pg: "11 yo asked why he had to learn spellings. I told him honestly that although spelling may not really matter, if he couldn't spell, people would think he was stupid. And that was sufficiently motivating."
Can I End a Sentence with a Preposition? [1]
Generally you can (as others and the article points out), but I would suggest you use it in a very limited manner. I still hear my high school teachers frightening chastising voice and it stops me doing it. :)
When people realize they can do it (or hear others doing it) they tend to overuse it for everything and it can drive those around you mad. That's when you get in the territory that pg describes IMHO.
One things that makes my skin crawl, is when I hear people speaking (loudly) into their mobile (which for some reason always seems to be in speaker mode) "Hello? Where you at?". /shiver
[0] https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1307987891658858502
[1] https://www.grammarly.com/blog/end-sentence-preposition/
Previously unseen levels of "I told you man, I warned you" here.
They must have thought Titanic was a diminutive, if they only kept the Titan part then they would actually be invincible.
But it wasn't enough to fool fate.
This may absolutely make a great tale about hubris one day, if we ever find out.
This feels more like someone went skydiving with a homemade parachute in strong winds above an active volcano.
In this case, OceanGate has a well documented history of making poor and reckless engineering decisions. The fact that things went horribly wrong is probably related to one of the many corners they cut.
It will be interesting if/when we get more solid information but until then most of the speculation seems pretty on point to me.
https://www.mentalfloss.com/posts/novel-predicted-titanic-di...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wreck_of_the_Titan:_Or,_Fu...
It needs to be raised, and placed on Wall Street for all to see.
Add Titan visit for just 20% more!
This wasn't only a case of a CEO putting other lives at risk for profits... This was a case of a CEO putting his own life on the line for profits he will likely never see...
Power should come with responsibility and accountability ESPECIALLY if you are not responsible or accountable.
"Please don't fulminate."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
At least he put his money where his mouth was. Or rather didn’t put his money, but you know what I mean.
This is not only a theoretical risk. It happened. A Brazilian soccer team, Chapecoense, hired a private airliner to get them from Bolivia to Colombia. Due to some bad luck, airport closing hours and whatnot, the flight plan had to be changed and the plane was fueled below what the regulations required. They were getting close to the destination airport when they got a low fuel warning. More bad luck and in the airport of the destination the flight control asked their flight to wait while another plane had priority in landing.
There were alternatives to redirect the flight or request priority to land, which they only requested when it was too late and the plane crashed due to fuel exhaustion. 71 of 77 people in the plane died in the crash, including the pilot.
The pilot was also the co-owner of the airline, so there is room to speculate that he didn't want to promptly admit to be low on fuel and require priority to land, or divert to another airport when the low-fuel warning appeared, because he would have to admit that he fueled below what the regulations asked. He could face the consequences, like a fine or losing his license.
I might forgot or misunderstood something, but more details here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaMia_Flight_2933
Fine anyone who has nearly run out upon landing.
Given the whistle blower this company has no hope of surviving any lawsuits, even if the victims (passengers) signed away their rights.
Yeah, I'm happy to enjoy the views of Titanic wreckage from 4k video footage taken by robot subs, while viewing it in my underwear in front of a 70" OLED tv. In a few years I will probably be able to don a VR headset and swim around the titanic in VR. I'm satisfied with that alternative.
They are really up there with boeing to compete for a price in malicious stupidity.
Edit: Actually I’m wrong. The hatch is bolted on to a titanium ring, which is glued to the carbon fiber body. So no hatch screws in the carbon fiber. [0]
[0]: https://youtu.be/4dka29FSZac?t=245
2: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/06/submarine-missing-nea...
Found a photo looks like you can see the other side.
https://eu-images.contentstack.com/v3/assets/blt949ea8e16e46...
And you can't really tell what fasteners are being used either. It could be screwed straight in the side like it's drywall, but it could be something slightly more reasonable.
It's not a contraption I would set foot in, but they reached the Titanic multiple times with it. That can not be done with screw your TV into the pressure hull level stupidity.
EDIT: And the pressure hull is 5 inches thick. That thing looks about a half inch.
had they tested it at lower depths before?
For wired use, Logitech have the cheaper F310 that lacks rumble, and the discontinued F510.
Make the thing 200 mm thick, and a 2m diameter cylinder should be good down to 8 kilometers (so 4 kilometers with a 2x safety margin).
Steel is expensive when it's 200 millimeters thick... But when you're done with the sub, you can melt it down and get most of the value back again!
A window is probably the hardest part - acrylic would need to be nearly a yard thick! Glass could do it, but casting huge bits of glass is really hard.
The craft is super heavy and impossible to transport by land - but it ends up being nearly neutrally buoyant, so you just tow it in the ocean to wherever it is needed.
In Finnish: https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mir_(sukellusalus)
English summary: https://www.inventingeurope.eu/story/cold-war-hot-water-the-...
The people who did them moved on and retired, we pretty much forgot how to make more.
- "Lochridge’s recommendation was that non-destructive testing of the Titan’s hull was necessary to ensure a “solid and safe product.” The filing states that Lochridge was told that such testing was impossible, and that OceanGate would instead rely on its much touted acoustic monitoring system."
- "The company claims this technology, developed in-house, uses acoustic sensors to listen for the tell-tale sounds of carbon fibers in the hull deteriorating to provide “early warning detection for the pilot with enough time to arrest the descent and safely return to surface.”"
https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/20/a-whistleblower-raised-saf...
> OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush says the company had been evaluating the potential of using a carbon fiber composite hull since 2010, primarily because it permits creation of a pressure vessel that is naturally buoyant and, therefore, would enable OceanGate to forgo the use — and the significant expense — of syntactic foam on its exterior.
https://www.compositesworld.com/articles/composite-submersib...
Aside from the massive tether and engine that would need to pull it, I'd imagine it would rip the submersible to shreds at those depths
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_(ROV)
And the Titanic was discovered by camera sled being towed by a ship.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argo_(ROV)
So your search might have been a bit too quick. It certainly is possible possible to build a tethered crewed submersible, though this vehicle wasn't.
Credit to js2 from this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36396161
No good for pulling it to the surface, of course, but reliable communication alone would be a great benefit.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nereus_(underwater_vehicle)
Ex.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Schematic-image-of-a-wor...
https://f-e-t.com/subsea/vehicles/tether-management-systems/
There's also this one which looks like it can get to the depths of the Titanic:
https://nautiluslive.org/tech/rov-argus
So it was certainly possible to do this with a tether, but it would have been much more expensive.
This sub has 4 Innerspace 1002 thrusters that make for a max total of 342*4=1,368lb of thrust... I think a useful point of reference in deciding how much pull force would be needed for an emergency recovery tether.
I think it's reasonable that a 4mm dyneema line with a breaking strength of 4,000lbs would be sufficient for emergency surfacing, and safely provide much more thrust that it's own motors. The whole sub weighs 23k lbs and is approximately neutrally buoyant.
Total weight for 3 miles of 4mm dyneema is only about 120lbs, and for simple emergency use, in the spirit of OceanGates now infamous "scrappy thriftiness" could be pulled with the type of simple/cheap hydraulic winches used for pulling crab pots, anchors, or fishing nets. 3 miles of this line would have cost about $15,000.
At 4000m under the ocean, you'd need like 10000m of cabling at a minimum I'd assume? And then you'd need the tether + winch to be capable of supporting and lifting the sub at that depth.
I'd be amazed if any country let alone company has that capability outside of maybe the US military.
They are not tethered?
Also, subs operate at close to neutral buoyancy. A tether does not need to support the weight of the vehicle, it only needs to resist the force of drag that the water exerts on the vehicle moving at whatever the max tow / lift speed is.
The vehicle that
This would cost about $3/meter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dka29FSZac
(it's a fine comment! we're just trying to avoid duplication)
(I moved the replies to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36410120)
This was a guy in a Marina nonchalantly going where the fucking US Navy, the most powerful navy in the whole history of the world doesn't dare to tread.
There have been plenty of submersibles that went much deeper. People went down 10km in the 1960s. There is no excuse for the incompetence and stupidity of this titanic crew.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trieste_II_(Bathyscaphe)
1.5km far exceeds any realistic estimate of crush depth for a USN warship submarine- generally open source estimates are around 600m for them, so I am really not sure where you got your number from. It is much deeper than the typical big nuclear submarine would be able to do, but not nearly as deep as the research vehicles the Navy has.
https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/20/a-whistleblower-raised-saf...
I didn't know "sharing confidential information with OSHA" could be a valid (?) cause of action.
Not that this sounds like one of those cases but I can think of several cases that it'd a perfectly reasonable cause of action, mainly when the disclosure isn't relevant to OSHA.
- A water slide had basic design flaws. That water slide would later go on to decapitate the son of a Congressman [1];
- The Millenium Tower in San Francisco was allowed to be built without the piles going down to bedrock [2];
- A borrowed system from an earlier rocket was never tested on the Ariane 5. An integer overflow basically caused the Ariane 5 to blow up on launch [3];
- Famously, the Challenger disaster came down to some O rings becoming brittle in the cold launch conditions and the launch was approved regardless [4];
- To counter the competition of the Airbus A320neo, Boeing decided against a full redesign of the 737 and instead just updated the aging 737 design by putting more powerful engines on it and moving them forward. This could lead to stalls if the plane angled up too much. To counter this, Boeing added the (now famous) MCAS to keep the 737 type rating [5] and didn't really tell airlines and pilots about it. But the worst part was the system had no redundancy. It relies on a single sensor. Normally for safety-critical sensors there is triple-redundancy. So for something like this you'd have 3 sensors (minimum) and there'd need to be agreement between at least two. That was an optional upgrade.
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/26/us/waterslide-boy-decapit...
[2]: https://practical.engineering/blog/2021/11/10/what-really-ha...
[3]: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20150505-the-numbers-that...
[4]: https://www.simscale.com/blog/space-shuttle-challenger-disas...
[5]: https://medium.com/the-systems-engineering-scholar/inadequat...
Good engineering is not about pouring as much concrete as possible into the largest hole ever made by mankind, for every bridge pillar.
It's the opposite! Good engineering is finding the minimum amount of concrete that will hold the bridge under all possible foreseeable circumstances.
Yes, sometimes the minimum proves too short, and in those times the failures are often catastrophic. But we're still looking for that minimum. We're never looking for "maximum safety with no regard for anything else". That would be impossible.
I'd prefer people stop couching engineering as "the quest for the cheapest we can make it", and more "lets not make an industrial scale coffin".
None of which is possible without someone who can rein in risk comfortable execs with a hard, unoverridable no.
Take a look at the third diagram in this paper titled "Risk Management in a Dynamic Society": http://sunnyday.mit.edu/16.863/rasmussen-safetyscience.pdf
Essentially, the "gradient descent" of business interests will invariably push safety design right to the edge that is deemed acceptable. Not to some "safe region" with decent wiggle room! The very edge.
This is why the "minimum amount of concrete" will eventually be the minimum amount of concrete, and catastrophic failures will occasionally occur, even in foreseeable circumstances.
And that is why having a safety margin is what is “deemed acceptable”. We do it with aviation and it has an excelent track record.
It is hugely challenging - and rewarding - to try and solve a constraint satisfaction problem that balances the risk, cost, upside that are a function of the huge set of decisions made in any complex undertaking.
It is massively easier to identify flaws and demand mitigations, which you can do ad infinitum.
Would love to be wrong, but I think we're going to find a crushed/mangled carbon fiber tin can sitting alongside the wreck when we finally get an unmanned submersible down there that can look for them.
It wouldn't actually make any difference, because the only way out of that thing is to unscrew 17 heavy duty bolts from the outside.
If they're floating around somewhere that doesn't make them safe; they're just suffocating at the surface instead of on the sea floor.
Also, the claimed 96 hours of "life support" was never properly tested, and there's no evidence the vessel was able to properly extract toxic gasses from its atmosphere, etc.
It doesn't exactly inspire hope to read that one of these 'systems' was to have the passengers 'tilt the sub by moving to each side of it releasing weights held in place on each side'.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65965665
For reference, the Titanic is estimated to sit on the ocean floor at a depth of nearly 13,000 feet. “””
I really want to reduce their grade for mixing units. It’s particular egregious to use different units in a “for reference!”
for reference; Ive been born and raised in this field. This is roughly my viewpoint when interpreting this news
But from time to time, things DO break and that's why these safety measures exist to begin with. They exist for dealing with the unknown, with the things that can't be directly measured like random imperfections or variations in the operating conditions.
I hope that the company, and its owners/executives, that got away for so long with operating unsafe machinery are exemplarily punished.
I'm trying to understand whether [1] they've heard a possible implosion and are proceeding with search and rescue against all hope; [2] they haven't heard one, and think that's indicative that it's still intact; or [3] they haven't heard one and aren't sure either way.
Thank you.
And this is a small submarine mostly made of carbon fiber. Thats probably even hard to distinguish from a big fish with sonar. And if this thing is on the ground then sonar doesnt help.
I think if this thing has no ping device on board (to make active sound), then they probably never find it. Assuming its still under water of course.
Luckily she made it back up alive (3 times, since 2 times they couldn't find the titanic, they get told where to go by the mother ship).
There is not enough oxygen left for the amount of time rescue would take at this point.
Submarine missing near Titanic used a $30 Logitech gamepad for steering - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36407781 - June 2023 (256 comments)
On the other hand, look on the bright side… Now there are TWO wrecks for rich people to go visit!