compared to the little coverage of the vessel carrying hundreds of migrants which capsized and sank in the mediterranean, and, by factor of sitting, watching, and waiting without intervening, were killed by the eu and greek coast guard
Why is it more likely that it immediately imploded rather than after a few days?
The latter is more probable to me as it has never been tested under water for more than a few hours at a stretch.
This will also be consistent with your banging hypothesis which was only heard after a day or two when it got lost. And also with the fact that no immediate sound disturbance was registered with the controlling ship.
I of course would very much hope it imploded way before any psychological trauma was inflected on the passengers, but sadly I think the most consistent hypothesis with the little data we have is that it got lost and went astray for around two days then imploded.
Are you telling me, that the porthole of a DSV, intended to dive to the Titanic, was EDIT: not: rated for the depth the Titanic is at? This whole operation is getting sketchier by the minute...
The filing states that OceanGate refused to pay for the manufacturer to build
a viewport that would meet the Titan’s intended depth of 4,000 meters. The
Titanic lies about 3,800 meters below the surface.
The filing also claims that hazardous flammable materials were being used
within the submersible.
Your occam is incorrectly structured. Power/comms is irrelevant to the equation in question, imploding, and doesn't add.
It imploded later requires only one failure (the structural failure), just as the relatively short time duration option requires only one failure. Right away is also a later event.
We have no way of knowing what its structural true condition was in terms of whether it was more likely to make it a very short duration or something more like a day.
As others have pointed out, there were multiple, redundant failsafes on the ballasts which would have led an intact sub to surface even if the crew were incapacitated or dead.
You're completely ignoring that the comms went out. All we know is that comms went out early, and debris was found later. What single failure would cause both of those pieces of evidence?
You're right, I think, but we also know that several ships heard sounds after the communication loss. You'd also need to account for that with your theory.
No, it doesn't as it would depend on the root cause of the implosion, like whether or not it crashed hitting the bottom then imploded or imploded partially descended from it's target depth. Slamming into the ocean floor would point to other things than the structure itself being the root cause.
Exactly this, "imploded straightaway" doesn't explain no implosion registered AND probable banging noise heard a few days later, so it doesn't explain everything.
"Lost then imploded" explains both by adding only a small extra assumption so by occam's razor is strictly superior to imploded straightaway as far as I can see.
People are putting a lot of weight on the whole "one vessel heard a rhythmic sound while exploring". From what I've seen of these investigations the ocean is a noisy place and sometimes it gets mistaken for signal. We saw a lot of similar reports from the MH370 investigation.
My money is on simple catastrophic failure of the hull and it not being detected either because the private company is run by jokers who weren't listening for it or because they have been running around like chickens with their heads cut off because the CEO and paying customers just died and they don't want to have to report that to the family, government, media, insurance company, etc... Either explanation is plausible, but I'm slightly more inclined to go with the second simply because they were actively trying to communicate with the sub when it happened and it seems so improbable that they could miss it.
Loud is relative. You wouldn't hear it standing on deck of the support ship. And the hydrophones they were using for communications and pings were possibly (likely?) passed into an FFT, band-pass filtered to look for the expected frequencies of pings, and triggered on a signal spike in that range. I doubt they had somebody just listening to a straight up amplified signal straight from the hydrophones. Even if they did, someone unfamiliar with what they were hearing might not recognize it as an implosion event and attribute it to something else. And given the apparent attitude and methodology of the whole operation, it wouldn't surprise me if they didn't bother making recordings of the raw data. So it's entirely possible they wouldn't hear/notice an implosion event.
As for the banging sounds heard days later, there are a thousand possible sources of those, especially with a dozen or more other vessels on the scene. Anything from a buoy with a loose part clanking away, to some waves breaking and clapping on the surface, to a whale slapping its tail, to extraneous noise from one of the search vessels or its equipment, to other sources of sea life making a racket. It's a bit like trying to listen for the buzzing of a bee in a basketball stadium with a game going on. Any signal you get is far more likely to be something else, but when you have literally no better options, every signal, no matter how unlikely, is worth investigating. Then they report they investigated and found nothing, and in a bit of target fixation, people assume it must have been people in the sub. Understandable, but it's not necessarily the most likely/logical conclusion.
And in this case, the sub had systems for resurfacing even if power was lost (including automatically after a set amount of time). It's highly improbable that it was astray for days before it imploded. The only way this could have happened is if it somehow got stuck on part of the Titanic wreckage and was unable to free itself.
There's little other explanation for why contact would be abruptly lost. The company said that the sub has multiple forms of ballast, including systems that could be activated manually, and ties that were designed to dissolve after 20+ hours in seawater, allowing the sub to rise even if the crew were unconscious.
> The latter is more probable to me as it has never been tested under water for more than a few hours at a stretch.
That's not true, they've successfully reached the Titanic several times over a dozen or so expeditions. Mike Reiss (a famous writer for The Simpsons) said his trip reached the Titanic but got lost for most of the ~8 hour trip, but that another group on his trip had several hours to explore the Titanic.
> The company said that the sub has multiple forms of ballast, including systems that could be activated manually, and ties that were designed to dissolve after 20+ hours in seawater, allowing the sub to rise even if the crew were unconscious.
is there more information on these dissolvable ties? or their redundant ballast systems?
But what if the hydraulic system breaks? Well, then they have roll weights.
KYLE: Ah, so, we’ve got these weights here on the side, these are roll weights, we can actually roll the sub and those come off, and that gains us some buoyancy to come back to the surface.
These are pipes that sit on a shelf that juts out from either side of the sub, held in place only by gravity. If everyone inside the sub shifts their weight to one side, the sub tips enough to let these pipes roll off.
If that doesn’t work, there are ballast bags, full of metal shot, hanging below the sub.
KYLE: These bags down below, we drop those off using motors and electric fingers.
OK. But what if the electronics go out, and the hydraulics fail, and everyone inside has passed out unconscious?
KYLE: There’s fusible links within these that actually can dissolve and come back in time if it’s drop off.
Fusible links are self-dissolving bonds. After 16 hours in seawater, those bonds disintegrate, the weight bags drop off automatically, and you go back to the surface.
Great, in theory. All the operator has to do now is to show the test reports for all of that. Should be easy, right? After all, those functions can be tested in comparatively safe depths, while being tethered to a surface ship.
> There's little other explanation for why contact would be abruptly lost.
You'd think - but past passengers have said that when they dove they lost contact as well.
Mutiple trip passengers said they lost contact every time.
So multiple anecdotes of loss of contact with the same vehicle without an implosion. The jankiness of this operation continues to be discovered bit by bit.
I listened to Reiss's (the passenger cited in that story) account on his podcast [0], and it's somewhat ambiguous. There are periods of spotty communication and long periods of the sub just getting lost. But not comms system/transponder abruptly going out and not being heard from again.
David Pogue seems to concur with this [1]. He saw them lose track of where the sub was located (wrt to the Titanic wreck), but he said the support ship never lost the ability to communicate with the sub.
In addition, note that despite losing contact while the sub was on its way down, they did not report it missing until it was overdue after the full mission length.
That indicates a certain blase, routine attitude to communication loss.
This is consistent with this video of a trip. Comms were lost, and the pilot even jettisoned some of the ballast in order to resurface. They continued the descent later though.
I know first hand how hard it is to design carbon fibre preasure bulk heads, for aircraft with a much lower preasure delta (I wrote my first thesis about how to produce something like that). So, on the sirface, titanium makes sense. Using both, carbon fiber and titatium is just, well, not a good idea. Especially since I have the feeling this whole things wasn't properly calculated in the first place.
The sub had 7 redundant ways to surface (drop weights / ballast), several of which work without power, and one of which triggers automatically after ~20 hrs of exposure to seawater.
The only way it wouldn't have already surfaced on day 1 is if it got stuck on something (and lost power, unlikely), or it imploded.
Failure modes for advanced composites are less well understood than for traditional metals as well. The sub's pressure hull was also made out of three disparate materials joined together which adds additional complications. Carbon Fiber in particular is notorious for performing flawlessly until it catastrophically fails in an instant.
I know doing amateur rocketry pressure vessels work until they don't. Motor cases will gladly handle multiple launches and then on the 20th launch, explode. I think it's a matter of the metal fatiguing over time but I'm not sure how you measure the rate or severity.
If the stories about some parts only being certified to 1.3km instead of 4km are true then it was probably operating closer to the yield point than ideal. My guess is that metal fatigue started to become an issue and it failed too quickly for anyone to react.
If the were too cheap to design and build it properly then they were too cheap to check for wear and tear properly.
Fatigue occurs after oscillating stress levels (far) below the strength of the material. So - stuff will break under low stress, if you apply it often enough. It must oscillate, otherwise it will never break. Some material, like aluminium, have very low minimum thresholds.
A sub is subjected to static stress mostly. Quite a lot actually at these depths. And having it certified for 1.3 km hints to over stressing.
The USCG admiral coordinating the search effort and doing all the press briefs said that yes, they most likely would have heard it if it happened after they got the listening buoys in the water.
Immediate implosion if a far more likely explanation because give that we knew it imploded the most likely time would be immediately after the pressure vessel reached maximum or near maximum stress and it failed. The time actually is not the biggest factor; it is the number of cycles the pressure vessel has endured. An implosion after a relatively low number of cycles is consistent with past incidents with pressurization failures.
As was pointed out, the submersible is pretty large and its a essentially a large cylinder which induces stress in the middle. Usually you make deep sea submersibles out of a sphere or spheroid because you don't have this failure modes.
It isn't surprising it failed. They were strong claims that the company did do enough test, rejected safety advice and even had the CEO claim that at one point the titan wouldn't be able to reach the titanic because it (a model maybe?) had experience a pressurization failure. To say nothing of the materials they were using.
Just comically bizarre that anyone involved in the project thought it would somehow survive let alone be safe.
The most puzzling aspect, from what I understand from the experts, if it imploded at time and depth you are suggesting it would have been very likely to be registered by at least the controlling ship due to the noise. As you highlighted the sub is pretty large, imploding in a millisecond causes huge effects in the surroundings.
So saying it got lost and imploded after a few days solves two problems. Explains why there was no implosion noise originally, and that the banging heard afterwards was the implosion. Also it has a history of losing contact in its previous tours.
They mentioned in the press conference that it was very unlikely that the implosion would have happened after more listening equipment was in use on the scene. I believe there were sonar buoys dropped on Monday, so the implosion likely happened before then.
There’s a series of episodes of Smarter Everyday where the host goes on a US nuclear submarine and interviews the crew and shows some of the equipment. In one of the episodes, they talk to navigators, who explain that submarines can be invisible to sensors in certain locations because the ocean water is not uniform. Temperature, currents and salinity vary, so a sound could be attenuated in some directions.
> Why is it more likely that it immediately imploded rather than after a few days?
Weren't there a lot of boats and other resources listening once it was reported missing?
It's one thing for the tender to not hear an implosion when no one else was following this excursion. It seems harder to explain no one hearing an implosion when a growing number of resources were trying to detect any signs of activity from the sub.
I wonder if U.S. agencies (e.g. the Navy) had picked up the sound of the implosion days ago, back when the Titan was said to have lost communication, and knew all this time that the Titan had likely already been destroyed. But there's no incentive for them to publicly say anything, as it would hint to their underwater surveillance capabilities. And the "rescue effort" is good practice for their crews.
I watched most of the press conferences and don't think I heard anyone ask about it. But hearing loud noises across thousands of miles is certainly within the U.S. military's capability.
There's a lot of unclassified information about their historic capabilities, I'm pretty sure they can give a lot of detail without leaking anything not already public.
It's known that they can detect implosions from very long distances however this is a tiny submarines so perhaps they are just using it as a training opportunity with no other information.
FWIW, there are small (and highly stealthy) military submarines and submersibles, for whom accurately determining destruction based on acoustic signatures could very well have strategic value. So those capabilities (and this opportunity) could be more significant than might appear at first blush.
Sound can travel MUCH further and fast underwater, so in the event of an implosion, it might create enough of a spike in hydrophones that is statistically significant. Also the experts might be able to analyze the signal's signature to confirm (or bet) it's an implosion.
Crossmatch that with the time of loss of communication and it's safe to assume that it's it.
Indeed, and moreover, the ability to detect underwater sound is probably aided by the lack of localized turbulence (wind noise in microphones) and the degree of sophistication sought after by navies due to the detection and counter-detection of military submarines.
Without any actual knowledge, I imagine that a ship or sub could be festooned with hydrophones, enabling it to detect faint noises, but also to determine their direction from phase information.
I have no idea specifically how loud it would have been. However with some probably-reasonable guesses, it looks like it actually would have been quite loud.
They found that a 10lb block of C4 exploding produced ~210db of underwater sound. If we use that sound level as an approximation of the implosion of 200 cubic meters of submersible, which seems not completely unreasonable, then we can use the inverse square law to calculate the perceived sound far away.
Halifax, NS is 1100km from the Titanic wreck. A sound that is 210db at 1 meter, is 89db at 1100000 meters. Boston is 1700km away; at that distance it would be 85db.
85db is really quite loud. You would be able to hear that, if you were underwater and paying attention.
If the implosion was instead, say, 180db, then it would have been 55db in Boston harbor. Still easily detectable by instruments.
For reference, when divers are performing construction using e.g. rock drills, those commonly reach 170db. The implosion of close to 200 cubic meters of air seems like it would produce a louder noise than a rock drill.
The sad part to ponder is most likely the team on the ship knew the sub was gone right when the communications was lost but kept the information to themselves.
From what I read and watched the company didn't take safety very seriously at all.
A former employee claims they were fired after brining up concerns about safety. The glass apparently was not rated for the depth required to see the titanic.
Which begs the question why there were no additional safety measures put in place after so many "skin of the teeth" trips making it back.
IMHO this was a get rich scheme the two founders spun up that went sideways. They spent the absolute minimum on safety and repeatedly cut corners on the sub in order to get it up and running, then charged people a ton of money to take a trip down deeper than the sub was clearly capable of going.
Perversely, a bunch of near-disasters can reduce people's concern and make them less likely to demand fixes because "it did that last time too and everything turned out okay" is a powerful rationalization.
Meanwhile, smart organizations have decades-ago stopped tracking (primarily) "Time-Lost Work Accidents" and replaced that with tracking "Close Calls".
I've seen prominent signs for "N Days Since a Time Lost Accident", and more recently "X Days Since a Close Call".
Sadly, it is so obvious that this CEO clown was doing everything possible to avoid experienced people ("not as inspiring to hire 50yo white guys as hiring young upstarts") so he could overrule any safety or redundancy concerns, firing people as soon as they raised things like "this porthole window is only rated to 1500m and we're going to 4000m", using cheap scrap scaffolding as ballast, and completely ignoring any kind of redundancy in case something went wrong. He seems to have gotten a just end, but his deceived customers didn't deserve that.
A good real-world example of the consequences of this normalization is British Airways flight 5390 [1]
This problem extended far beyond this one individual, who was merely a symptom. The entire Birmingham maintenance facility, and perhaps British Airways more broadly, had a singular focus on “getting the job done.” If doing the work by the book took longer and jeopardized schedules, then doing the work by the book was discouraged. The shift manager who used the wrong bolts stated in an interview that if he sought out the instructions or used the official parts catalogue on every task, then he would never “get the job done,” as though this was a totally normal and reasonable attitude with which to approach aircraft maintenance. This attitude was in fact normalized on a high level by supervisors who rewarded the employees who most consistently kept planes on schedule. That a serious incident would result from such a culture was inevitable. The shift manager believed it to be reasonable to just “put on whatever bolts came off” and make a quick judgment call about what kind of bolts they were — not because he was personally deficient, but because he had been trained into a culture that didn’t consider this a flagrant safety violation.
Very few industries are safe enough to actually capture the "That could have been bad" events, that's what ASRS https://asrs.arc.nasa.gov/ does for the Aviation industry (there are equivalent agencies in various other wealthy countries e.g. CHIRP in the UK)
In the absence of a proper means to report "That could have been bad" as you say it can cause normalization. But it's understandable that you don't implement something like ASRS when you haven't solved most of your "That was bad" problems. If you regularly have CI failures due to the code not even compiling, "We need more unit tests" isn't top of the list of your problems.
I mean the CEO of the company is one of the fatalities so it's not like he thought and understood the sub was dangerous but was still willing to sell tickets to other people. We thought what is was doing was safe (obviously he was wrong) but he did have skin in the game.
I honestly see the company as a startup in idea. They couldn't afford to build a proper deep sea sub so they used the idea of new tech in the form of carbon fiber (which I'm assuming is way cheaper to form vs a titanium hull) and billed this as next gen. Everything that I read almost fits in the idea of "fail fast".
yes I believe in one interview the CEO said carbon fiber provides buoyancy but is much cheaper than syntactic foam, which other similar such vessels have used
"not completely unreasonable" does a lot of heavy lifting here. I have zero intuition how the sound of an under water explosion of c4 compares to an implosion.
Volume is more like a tenth of that, I think? Maybe interior dimensions 2 meters diameter and 5 meters length gives around 16 cubic meters if my math is sane (Religion major, so go easy on me if not).
my "orders of magnitude" alarm is going off here. There's no way that the implosion of a fairly small sub is going to be heard in Boston even if underwater. Something doesn't make sense here.
http://resource.npl.co.uk/acoustics/techguides/seaabsorption... -- here is a quick calculator for sound loss by distance. I think actual geography is important too but from understanding whether or not it's hypothetically possible, it certainly looks like it.
For example, at the default inputs we see .061 db/km absorption. This is at 1khz. Higher frequencies attenuated more and lower frequencies less.
I have no idea what frequencies an implosion generates, but given that, a sound at 120db might still be 60db 1000km later. Certainly seems possible and in fact given what we have seen from the US Navy (detecting imploding soviet subs in the middle of the pacific ocean) it seems totally possible to me that this small sub could be detected if microphones were places in quiet spots offshore of the continental US and Canada.
I think we don't have enough information to rule out that this was detectable.
Your calculations might be wrong. If the distance is 1000 km (1M meters), and inverse square law is correct, then the sound would become 1M*1M = 1T times more silent. 1M times smaller is 120 dB less, and 1T times smaller is 240 db less, so the amplitude of sound should be at 210 - 240 = -30dB less than threshold of hearing.
Also, I wonder, if sound of explosions propagate that well, can one install multiple sensors to detect and map source of gunfire and artillery positions in realtime? (I hope I haven't disclosed NATO military secrets here).
Navy sonar equipment can hear so much more than you would ever expect. Sound travels very well in water. The navy has software that pretty much tunes all of that out, similar to how radar ignores things under certain speeds as it's just not interesting to them. However, if they want, they can see/hear the raw data. There's all sorts of Navy stories about what can be heard, and not all of them are untrue.
How do submarines commonly fail? Is the assumption of a violent implosion warranted?
I would think another failure mode could be water rushing in without the overall structure catastrophically failing, which would actually relieve pressure on the structure as it happened and be much less energetic.
Just note that the body was experimental: while the hull indeed have a thick titanium body, it was mixed with (don't know exactly how and where though) carbon fibers, which are known to catastrophically break under pressure if there's even a microscopic impurity or damage. At least that's what the experts say. Carbon fibers is great for lightweight things that need to bend, terrible for things to be relied under pressure.
It was just the end caps that were titanium - the entire tube was just a 5inch thick carbon fiber wrap. In one of the videos with the CEO I saw him saying that he was a rule breaker because common consensus was that you shouldn't build a submarine out of carbon fiber and titanium.
"The Spencer-built composite cylindrical hull either was repaired or replaced by Electroimpact and Janicki Industries in 2020 or 2021, prior to the first trips to Titanic."
I'd really like more detail on that tube's layup schedule.
Solid 5inch thick carbon composite OR a sandwich design with thick outer facesheets of carbon fiber? I suppose under that pressure not much would take the hydrostatic loads other than carbon, but that seems thick compared to everything I've seen made out of composites.
There are videos of them building it. From what I remember, they rolled carbon fiber around a cylinder, making the flat part of the cylinder. Then they mated two titanium half spheres to the end of the carbon fibre cylinder. This was done using some kind of "glue". Meaning that the middle part had no titanium.
I saw a bit of video where they showed the construction- it’s a few inch wide band of carbon fibre wrapped around an inner tube like a spool of thread until it reaches 5” thickness.
It’s been a while since physics for me, but I was under the impression that this only really applies when pressure is greater inside the solid shape. In this case, it seems roughly equivalent to pulling a vacuum inside a soda can at sea level, which fairs quite poorly for the soda can, and I cannot imagine an unfortified sphere-ish shape performing better.
And composite materials are basically threads embedded in glue. Threads can be extremely strong in tension. In compression, you have only the strength of the glue and the fiber/glue interface strength, which isn't a whole lot. Composite materials are in general poor in compression.
Crewed submersible hulls are always in compressive stress from the ocean outside. I can't fathom why somebody would choose a composite for a deep submersible hull. It's just asking for a buckling failure. Bad design choice, IMO.
>Carbon fibers is great for lightweight things that need to bend, terrible for things to be relied under pressure.
Composite Overwrapped Pressure Vessels (COPVs) are fairly common in cases where a pressurized system needs to be relatively lightweight (e.g., spacecraft). To your point though, the failure mechanisms can be hard to model.
Take this with a grain of salt because I worked on the data acquisition side of COPV testing and not the engineering side, but my understanding is that while carbon fiber is strong in tension but weak in compression, epoxy is strong in compression but weak in tension. So the combination is thought to make a vessel strong in both.
It's hard enough to make a small hole that doesn't turn into a big hole under such pressure when you're trying to. Even harder for a small hole you're not expecting.
I worked at an aquarium for a while, and IIRC one of the exhibits discussed how a device equivalent to an average home stereo placed in the water in Japan could be easily heard on the coast of California.
Like evryone else I have no idea but I do know implosions tend to be pretty impressive events and can easily be supersonic generating a shockwave, so pretty loud!
Maybe there is a term from quantum physics that can be used here metaphorically, but I think you can safely assume that what you said is probabilistically true, and probably true for all other comparable assumptions. It may resolve to be false when examined closely in any one particular instance, but it doesn't change the fact that they are working extremely hard to maintain a fog of mystery around their scope of capabilities.
It's not a complicated or even malicious "coverup". They hear an anomalous sound, but don't know with 100% certainty that it's came from the lost sub. What is the Coast Guard supposed to do, not do anything the past few days and say it's because "Sorry we heard a loud sound at that time and are 99% sure that those people are dead"?
I must be missing something it seems simpler to assume
"Coast guard gets report of lost sub and searches for a while".
Why would you turn that into
"USN knows that a sub imploded. Did nothing observable. Coast guard gets report of lost sub and searches for a while."
I looked at the link, I can't see any reason to interject into that more capability than was demonstrated. It may exist, it may not. There is no reason to comment on additional capabilities based on this event.
My assumption is that hearing this kind of long distance noise is well within the laws of physics and what we know of the U.S.'s capability. So I don't see this as "additional capability", but rather, am asking from a mindset of "How did they not hear a suspicious sound at the time of the missing sub?"
Whether they did or not, nothing would presumably change about the Coast Guard conducting search-and-rescue/recovery operations (since they still don't know for sure what happened). Worth pointing out that private explorers, led by Richard Garriott (aka Lord British, apparently), complained that they had optimal rescue equipment but got pushback from the U.S. officials:
> “Magellan has received mixed signals, first hearing from US Gov to get ready, waiting for plans, then getting told to stand down,” Garriott wrote in an email sent to Vice Admiral William Galanis, commander of Naval Sea Systems Command, U.S. Coast Guard Rear Admiral John W. Mauger, who is leading the recovery mission, Congressman Lloyd Doggett, and Representative Eric Swalwell on Wednesday afternoon.
Again, hard to know if this is just standard operating procedure or not. If it's the case the U.S. govt already had things figured out by now, then it makes sense they weren't going to expedite Garriot's group, given that the search effort had already resulted in the loss of 1 (maybe 2) search vehicles:
> In addition, at least one ROV, possibly two, was damaged or destroyed during the search-and-rescue mission—a testament to the difficult conditions currently facing rescuers.
Given military subs operate around a maximum of 500msw why would the USN have randomly coverage of hydrophones to detect implosions at depths no military sub would be at? This sub probably imploded around 1500 msw.
A lot of people are saying sounds travel far under water that's true.. but laterally and not between the typical layers of the sea.
Not to mention that these hydrophone systems are at critical choke points not littering the ocean floor uselessly.
It seems motivated by a sci-fi understanding of the physics.
Don't get me wrong things like this happen as cover ups. In this specific instance it seems driven by nonsense.
Hydrophones don't need to be nearby or even at a similar depth. The SOFAR channel acts as a waveguide and will duct sources from other depths as long as the bottom is below the critical depth. As others have said, this part of the North Atlantic is one of the most heavily monitored parts of the ocean as well. No sci-fi physics necessary — this has been done continuously since the 1950s.
I don't believe I said that. You can draw your own conclusion from the fact that it is within their capabilities to detect, localize, and to some extent classify a wide range of sources in this region of the ocean.
What you won't find is a lot of information about those capabilities in the public domain. Just consider that what _is_ known tells us that we had these capabilities in the 1950s, and that they were continuously improved upon throughout the cold war. This is not Area 51 conspiracy speculation; it is bread-and-butter NRL stuff that is more than half a century old at this point and is classified for good reasons.
Maybe there's a miscommunication here; detecting underwater sound from hundreds, even thousands of kilometers away, is made possible via the publicly known laws of physics.
Detecting extraterrestrial aliens requires technology that is not publicly known. Therefore, it is not at all logical to compare "hearing an imploding submersible in the Atlantic" to "detecting aliens/UFOs"
I fail to see the analogy between "aliens must exist" (a statement for which there is no evidence) and "the submersible imploded" (which is substantiated by debris). The syllogism is simple:
* submarines make loud noises when they implode
* the navy can hear loud noises underwater
* the submersible is thought to have imploded based on debris
I'm not a physics expert, but sound seems to travel for long distances extremely well underwater. So even if they have a buoy at 1000 ft, hearing a loud sudden sound at 10000 feet (the sub's last communication was 1h45m into a roughly 2hr descent) would not require "sci-fi" physics?
Yes because if you have a buoy there you need one everywhere...
Doesn't matter, I was curious why people were speculating this and that's clarified.
You believe that USN would detect this, and it's not motivated by any factor in the story. And a conspiracy to cover up capabilities is the only way you can sustain that belief.
Let's assume that in our current reality, U.S. agencies did not detect an anomalous sound. So what we've observed is how they would operate if they had zero foreknowledge or data other than the initial report to the Coast Guard.
Now imagine the alternate scenario in which Navy or NOAA buoys pick up a suspicious sound near the Titanic. There might be a flurry of U.S. gov activity (e.g. communication between NOAA, the military, and intelligence agencies) to make sure it's not a Russian sub, but that would be completely hidden to the public, and for all we know, is something that happens relatively routinely.
In this alternate scenario, what would change about how the Navy, Coast Guard, or any other U.S. official has responded? Coast Guard rescue ships would still conduct search-and-rescue, the Navy would still send a deep sea salvage ship. You honestly think the Navy would volunteer information about an intelligence report that, as far as they know, may or may not be related to a now-missing civilian sub?
In the second scenario the Russell's teapot satellite the Soviets put into space would have picked up the uptick in US military Comms.
Maybe they kept it quiet to not reveal the satellite was still operational? I doubt it given the current situation, mostly likely it'd be all over telegram and we'd have known about it.
> The Navy began listening for the Titan almost as soon as the sub lost communications, according to a U.S. defense official. Shortly after its disappearance, the U.S. system detected what it suspected was the sound of an implosion near the debris site discovered Thursday and reported its findings to the commander on site, U.S. defense officials said.
LOL. C'mon man, you're the only one here who thought this was some kind of super secret capability. My entire premise is that this was a logically foregone conclusion based on what we know of their decades-old systems and the laws of physics with respect to how sound travels in water.
As for why they revealed their foreknowledge now? I don't speak for the military, but admitting to it vaguely, well after the fact is a significantly different situation than talking about it at the time and making it actionable intelligence. Furthermore, something may have leaked to a journalist, who then pressed them to make some kind of answer.
I am a bit mystified at your apparent belief that the military has any obligation to proactively tell anybody anything, or find it shocking that a military would ever hide things from anybody, to the point that you would attack people claiming that they might do so.
Are you aware that there is, in fact, a such thing as "classified" information? If you'll pardon me linking to that hotbed of conspiratorial thinking, the Cornell Law School, here's some of the basic, completely open, law covering such things: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/798
Where on Earth do you get the idea that everyone in the world is operating in a regime where they tell you everything you want to know simply because you want to know it?
You are operating at personally dangerous levels of naivety, like, levels that are going to cost you money when you fall for a big scam because you thought someone was just informing you of a great money-making opportunity, as everyone always does when they find a way to make money. Or worse. You're light years beyond "rejecting conspiracy theories", you're operating on a Theory of Mind that has no visible correspondence to the real world. This is not how the world works. People and organizations do not rush to reveal everything they are, everything they can do, everything they know, to everybody, all the time, for free, simply because it would be really nice, and the military least of all!
A fully justified, well-established pre-existing belief, not one that they just pulled out of the blue. Mere "pre-belief" is not intrinsically bad, certain sloppy and popular statements to the contrary.
I've seen a bit of discussion around time of release, especially around it being a putative "distraction" from the Hunter Biden news stories, but that doesn't make any sense; those have been going on for a while now and will continue to go on for a while regardless of this. What I see here is roughly the expected speed of the military internally deciding this is safe to release, through several layers of bureaucracy, all of which are concerned about being court martialed if they are too excited to say "yes" without making sure their butts are 100% covered. I'd even call this a surprisingly fast release, honestly, probably because the physics of this are such that they weren't fooling very many people (and none of the ones who really mattered), except, apparently, psychphysic.
Sound reflects off thermoclines. If there's a thermocline at say 1000ft and you have a hydrophone at 900ft, a sound originating at 1500ft will reflect off the thermocline and won't be detected by the 900ft hydrophone above the thermocline (frictionless pulleys and spherical cow assumptions).
That’s conspiracy thinking. The absence of your question being addressed doesn’t mean it’s plausible. The ocean is generally a noisy place, and the activities of a small submerged vehicle likely won’t raise notice without active listening.
What's the conspiracy? That Coast Guard officials declined to say any more than is necessary?
Yesterday the Coast Guard spokesman [0] said he hadn't even heard the notion that the banging noises were made at regular 30-min intervals, even though Rolling Stone published a leaked DHS report the day before [1], something which completely dominated the news coverage and gave people hope that there were survivors. When directly asked about most anything, the officials frequently demurred. Giving out the least amount of info necessary is their standard operating procedure, not a conspiracy
>On 23 November the Argentine Navy said an event consistent with an explosion had been detected, on the day the submarine lost communications, by CTBTO seismic anomaly listening posts on Ascension Island and Crozet Islands
>The organization had been asked to analyse data from the search area by the Argentine government on the week of the disappearance, but no leads had materialised until 22 November when the CTBTO informed the government.
>The Navy added that it received information on the explosion on the afternoon of 22 November, adding that it would have concentrated search efforts in that area had it known sooner.
The three main methods are: acoustic using SONAR to receive data, tether or umbilical cord, and buoy based where the DSV releases a buoy that ascends to the top.
Relays don't really work because you'd need a LOT of them and they'd all have to keep themselves positioned within like 30 meters of each other which is very hard with ocean currents. That's with very low bandwidth VLF radio.
wouldn't it basically need to be the same as what they use for intercontinental cables ? tons of shielding and repeaters. maybe there'd be further risk bc if it breaks at the ship it could fall on or weigh down the submersible
Not at all. Shielding against what? It's light. You only need enough of a protective coat to make sure it's stiff enough to not twist and stretch too much and to make it neutrally buoyant. No repeaters needed, base range is about 40-60 km. ROVs going to greater depths use them all the time without major issues.
The real reason is that they were stingy as fuck and that it's mildly impractical which outweighed their complete disregard for safety.
Those also carry electrical power to supply the inline repeaters on those cables. If the cable does not have repeaters, it wouldn't need this, and the shielding could be greatly reduced.
Might explain why they denied offers from the British rescue sub (IIRC the only available one that could go to such depth) that wanted to come out to try to rescue the crew.
Possibly, but arguing against that are three factors: 1) the sub was tiny and its possible it wasn't actually loud enough; 2) the sub was at a depth that SOSUS doesn't listen at and sound propagation underwater is very complex; and 3) there's a lot of other potential sources of noise underwater, including both mechanical like ships and biological. Even if they did detect the Titan's implosion, there's enough sources of doubt that three days ago it would've been difficult to say definitely that it was gone.
I suppose to detect a noise is one thing, to know what it is is another. The ocean must be full of underwater volcano eruptions, tectonic activity, oil rigs banging and drilling, etc. One of the rescue boats was a commercial cable-laying vessel, presumably laying cables and making noise.
U.S. Navy Detected Titan Sub Implosion Days Ago
Underwater microphones designed to detect enemy submarines first detected Titan tragedy
WASHINGTON—A top secret U.S. Navy acoustic detection system designed to spot enemy submarines first heard the Titan sub implosion hours after the submersible began its mission, officials involved in the search said.
The Navy began listening for the Titan almost as soon as the sub lost communications, according to a U.S. defense official. Shortly after its disappearance, the U.S. system detected what it suspected was the sound of an implosion near the debris site discovered Thursday and reported its findings to the commander on site, U.S. defense officials said.
“The U.S. Navy conducted an analysis of acoustic data and detected an anomaly consistent with an implosion or explosion in the general vicinity of where the Titan submersible was operating when communications were lost,” a senior U.S. Navy official told The Wall Street Journal in a statement. “While not definitive, this information was immediately shared with the Incident Commander to assist with the ongoing search and rescue mission.”
This was quite prescient of you. At first (hours before they confirmed the debris was from the sub), I thought your comment was a stretch, but still plausible- yet impossible to prove. All too often, we dismiss these conspiratorial hypotheses, but now that the WSJ all but confirms your suspicions, I’m scared to find out what other inconvenient truths there are to life
I was a Navy OT A during the Cold War. I worked in the SOSUS community meaning my shipmates and I detected and tracked submarines day in and day out. The fact that it was a small vessel could have made detection of an implosion more difficult. But most definitely not impossible. They also had the last known coordinates which helps triangulate location and a search area for debris fields. This was always something we trained for and hoped to never see an implosion in real time. Sadly, this was not to be.
In an instant unless OceanGate's patented monitoring system actually worked. If it did work, they would've had at least a couple of seconds to panic.
>Rush planned to pilot the sub himself, which critics said was an unnecessary risk: Under pressure, the experimental carbon fiber hull might, in the jargon of the sub world, “collapse catastrophically.” So OceanGate developed a new acoustic monitoring system, which can detect “crackling,” or, as Rush puts it, “the sound of micro-buckling way before it fails.”
I'm guessing these guys didn't even have a black box on this thing so we can't hear the last second of audio in the thing being a the CEO saying "Ohshi--" because his "you are about to die" alarm has gone off.
In an interview with James Cameron, he mentions[1] that he and other submersible industry experts believe that they did in fact have warning, as they had dropped the weights (which were found far away from the debris field) and were attempting to resurface before the implosion:
[1]: "This Oceangate sub had sensors on the inside of the hull to give them a warning when it was starting to crack [...] they probably had warning that their hull was starting to delaminate. [...] It's our belief - as we understand from inside the community - that they had dropped their ascent weights and they were coming up trying to manage an emergency." https://youtu.be/rThZLhNF_xg?t=472
I seriously doubt the victims knew how risky this trip was, even though they signed the waivers. Why would you bring along your 19-year-old son if you thought the chance of death was 1/100 or even 1/1000. The CEO, who obviously overestimated the safety of his cost-cutting design, had raised $20M in venture capital, it's not as if he had a death wish either.
Mike Reiss took the sub trip to the Titanic in the summer of 2022, and in his podcast he says his wife didn't go with him because she failed a Covid test right before. It's unclear whether it was her decision or OceanGate's decision to play it safe. Reiss notes that during Covid, his wife had traveled to every continent without catching it until now, so she wasn't extremely paranoid. If OceanGate denied her, then it means they were worried more about the health risk of Covid in late 2022 than having to (partially) refund her $250k ticket.
I don't think Covid is by any means "just the flu", but I definitely think the risk of dying from it is significantly less than a visit to the Titanic.
I would estimate the chances of that sub not making it back to the surface at least 10%. The carbon fiber hull concept has me seriously worried, especially if the goal is repeated use of the same hull. Everybody seems to be focusing on the electronics and the UI, I don't see those as particularly problematic if the hull stays in one piece. But if it doesn't then none of the rest matters. Given the debris field the chances are better than even that the sub did implode.
Repeatedly cycling carbon fiber in compression is a bad idea, and a CEO that throws out the rulebook and shows a very cavalier attitude to safety is fine if it is just you on board but with paying passengers it is utterly irresponsible.
Family member claims he was terrified and did it because it was important for his titanic obsessed father. So, it is more of 19 years old overcomes fear to get fathers validation and make father happy. Then both him and dad dies and there, I blame the dad.
> I seriously doubt the victims knew how risky this trip was
I'm quite curious about this, too. I'm not so sure. I think even if you are not an engineer, it should be quite easy to understand how under-tested this vehicle is compared to, say, a commercial jet airliner, and how much more difficult the application is at the same time. These were business men running companies of some size. It should come with basic work experience to reason about how proven processes or articles are.
I think it's more likely that the threshold for "you know what? let's take our chances" works differently for different people.
For example: I would never get LASIK eye surgery, safety statistic be damned, because the consequences in the unlikely event of failure are too large for me. And yet many other people know the data just as well and make a different call.
The average human is more likely to die driving to the supermarket than in a commercial jet airliner crash, so I don't know how useful any of these comparisons are, especially for laymen.
We're comparing technology where safety is measured in incidents per hundred million miles traveled to one where the total number of annual travelers can fit into a single jumbo jet.
Right. I wonder if the layperson passenger's assessment was that the Titanic sub was as extremely catastrophic as flying in a helicopter, in the sense that if something goes wrong, you're obviously going to die. But most helicopter passengers probably assume that the trip will be safe and uneventful, 999 out of 1000 times.
As Dave Barry assured us, LASIK eye surgery is perfectly safe, as long as the doctor remembers to change the laser setting to "delicate" from "vaporize bulldozer".
I've seen that point brought up during a conference tech talk and when asked, most of the audience raised their hands up saying they would fly on a Space Shuttle regardless.
The Space Shuttle was terrible, but not because it was dangerous.
For policy purposes, killing people has a cost that can be estimated by the statistical value of a human life (especially if the people are volunteers with full knowledge of the risk.) The value of a human life is about $9 M (which comes from estimates of how much government spending is needed to save 1 life, for example by medical care, installing guard rails on roads, etc.). If there was a 2% risk of death of the seven crew on a flight, this would have added $1.26M to the expected cost of a launch. This was small compared to the actual cost of a launch.
Viewed another way: a $900 M (say) shuttle launch would be killing 100 statistical people each and every launch (in the sense that the money spent on the launch, if spent elsewhere, could avoid 100 deaths). If the results of the launch are worth that many statistical deaths, why not .14 more?
This is a whole other can of worms, but the requirement that space exploration be manned was made for political rather than scientific reasons and has held back the progress of space exploration for decades. We could have done so much more if we hadn't had to worry about getting a robot back.
The purpose was wildy different. What about those odds for Bezos space tourism? Those shuttles were actually used to expand human knowledge. Both titan or blue origin only expand the reach of capitalist tourism.
I might feel this way to the first people to land on Mars or something. This was not a "mission" to advance human knowledge. To me, it's one step away from "hold my beer"
Each and every mission had scientific objective and research being carried out, precisely to help combine entertainment/adventure with technological and scientific progress. The same will be true on Mars. The earliest guys going over, as colonists, are going to be quite well to do - which I'm sure the news will frame in a completely fair and reasonable way.
I don't think this is fair to say. The sub hull was built by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center as part of a program to help commercial companies develop technologies that could be used for space exploration.
Just in our solar system, we have found evidence of oceans on Saturn’s moons Titan and Enceladus; Jupiter’s moons Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto; Neptune’s moon Triton; and on Pluto.
If we want to explore these oceans we will need to understand how to build lightweight subs that can tolerate extream pressures.
This tragedy will help humanity explore the solar system. I for one salute the explorers who died they have helped push us all forward.
Yeah. Being legally adult only means something when you are 19yo yourself. If I was in the same shoes I would've followed my dad on a cool adventure without question and definitely could not have spotted any of the glaring red flags that presented themselves before the dive.
Yeah, legally adult is several years off minimum from neurologically developed prefrontal cortex...
I'm sad for everyone that died TBH. The website for OceanGate was taken down, but when I took a look yesterday it was full of stuff about how their pedigree and NASA/MIT tech, etc. I can see myself buying that, I'm not exactly a marine expert.
Not to mention it went down there something like 40 times already? It's not really fair to assume the passengers would have known the things that have come out since the submersible went missing.
Most damning to me, is that the sub's design was derived from Virgin's DeepFlight Challenger, which was scrapped because they could only be sure it was safe for a single dive due to the carbon composite hull.
As a final point, one of the victims was a seasoned explorer (Paul-Henri Nargeolet) and Titanic expert, having gone on multiple prior expeditions. Kind of arrogant to assume we'd all know better and somehow have all this knowledge that has come out since the sub disappeared.
>Hopefully future subs will have more safety features.
From an engineering standpoint, Titan didn't have any safety features at all. What any sane engineer would recommend as a last-ditch backup system Oceangate relied on as a single-point-of-failure.
No phone. No beacon. Budget bluetooth controller and touchscreens. Electronics you'd expect to find in an RV. All from a CEO who flaunted his corner-cutting and apathy towards safety.
We should never do this again.
After this, anyone boarding a future tourist sub to the Abyssal Zone or deeper is asking for it.
> From an engineering standpoint, Titan didn't have any safety features at all.
This isn't quite true. It had multiple redundant ways to drop ballast, for example.
What I would say from what I was able to find out (and with some familiarity of safety engineering processes from work; I make cars) is that it's safety-concept was very spotty. It had solutions to some problems, but also large gaps in the safety concept. Safety was not addressed in holistic fashion.
It's interesting to compare this with solutions found in other subs. For example, Titan had four different ways to drop ballast, but from the list I saw, all of them required manual intervention by a non-incapacitated crew and electronics to be working.
On Cameron's Deepsea Challenger--by another rich guy who funded a vanity dive, and relying on homebrew innovations in material science--ballast was held by corrosible wire that would be corroded by seawater in a set time, so the sub would eventually surface automatically. Ballast drop was also triggerable remotely by an acoustic signal, more reliable than radio. The available info is pretty bad, but Titan may not have had those solutions in place.
I'm very much out of my depth (no pun intended) on naval/submarine engineering, and I'm hoping for someone with better knowledge to extend that comparison somewhere.
There were apparently timed-release (bags of lead shot on dissolvable links) and manual-release (rock the sub to tip lengths of steel pipe off their racks on the sides) ways of jettisoning ballast as well.
Why don't you get off your lazy ass and perform some own research? I am not here to please and hot-serve you or anyone else, sorry. Or spending my hours to 'discuss things through' with strangers.
From the article it seems like this ROV doesn't have sonar, and can only search visually at a short distance. They claim a distance of around 20 feet. I'm surprised they could find a debris field so fast with such a small range of observation.
Turns out that the debris field was only a few hundred meters from the bow of the Titanic which is approximately where they lost contact in the water column, so I suspect their search consisted of diving to the last known location of the Titan and then just going to the sea floor from there.
It appears to me that for all the rushing about (which was appropriate and neccessary if there were any surviors or surface debris to be found at all) the somewhat grim reality is:
1) hydrophones heard it implode at the same time it lost contact
2) it took until early 6/22 to get a deep-diving ROV on site
3) once the ROV got to the bottom, it swiftly found the debris from the implosion as expected
If it did implode in multiple pieces it means the experts were right; many said that carbon fiber was a poor choice because while it's light, it breaks like glass, contrary to steel which tends to "open" slowly.
This quote shines light on his hiring philosophy:
“When I started the business, one of the things you’ll find, there are other sub-operators out there, but they typically have, uh, gentlemen who are ex-military submariners, and they — you’ll see a whole bunch of 50-year-old white guys,” Rush told Teledyne Marine in a resurfaced interview.
“I wanted our team to be younger, to be inspirational and I’m not going to inspire a 16-year-old to go pursue marine technology, but a 25-year-old, uh, you know, who’s a sub pilot or a platform operator or one of our techs can be inspirational,” said Rush.
Ah, I see he's got the 'Elon Musk school of thought' in regards to cutting corners in vehicles carrying people's lives and seeing safety regulations as a nuisance hindering his "visionary progress" that these pesky gray-beard engineers just can't grasp.
Fucking idiot CEO, took 4 innocent people with him. Aero, naval, automotive, all have a a history written in blood, and all those rules and regulations aren't to hinder innovation but to save lives based on what we've learned from all the people who lost their lives in the past.
It's the government's job to regulate people not being allowed to pay for trips to the bottom of the ocean in submarines that look like they were built on Linus Tech Tips.
The ship has to be under some countries flag, it's not like international waters are a totally lawless zone where you can loot, murder and rape without consequence.
Sadly, being able to "shop" for a county with minimal safety, inspection, and enforcement standards is a valued feature of the modern ship registration system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_convenience
(And, so long as you keep your rape and murder within your ship - that is also a feature. If you are a crime victim on a cruise ship, and the cruise company feels that looking into what happened to you is not in their own business interest... OTOH, you or your survivors may be able to sue the cruise company for damages in a shore-based court. Google for the obvious if your want to see stories about that.)
"Ah, I see he's got the 'Elon Musk school of thought' in regards to cutting corners in vehicles carrying people's lives and seeing safety regulations as a nuisance hindering his "visionary progress" that these pesky gray-beard engineers just can't grasp.
Fucking idiot CEO, took 4 innocent people with him. Aero, naval, automotive, all have a a history written in blood, and all those rules and regulations aren't to hinder innovation but to save lives based on what we've learned from all the people who lost their lives in the past."
I agree, except maybe on the notion of "innocent billionaire". They too usually have a history of blood. Except maybe the 16yo tho. Maybe.
"50 year old white guys have a lot of experience but would cost a fuck ton of money. I prefer to exploit, er, um, employ, 25 year old white guys and gals because they are about 1/4 the cost."
When you take all the BS justifications out of it, that's really what the guy was saying. Elon Musk school of capitalism. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
The main problem with steel is that it can only withstand such pressures if it's of spherical shape (i.e. a bathysphere). This usually only leaves enough room for two to three people (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DSV_Alvin).
So it seems it's more a matter of cost and passenger space than just weight alone.
Carbon fiber is a lot easier to work with than metal in this case because welding metal creates failure points. I don't think they could afford building a titanium pressure vessel. Weight is a factor too, carbon fiber is lighter so you can make the pressure vessel thicker and still have enough buoyancy to reach the surface(probably a good thing).
From their perspective it kinda made sense even though its not safe at all.
> I don't think they could afford building a titanium pressure vessel
If they could they probably still wouldn't have done so. The founder who was onboard the Titan was known for calling safety regulations unnecessary and a barrier to "innovation", like a window only rated for a depth of 1300m used at 4000m.
Obviously there seem to be some compelling reasons why the choice of a carbon hull was a faulty idea to begin with. The CEO would have been familiar with those critiques and proceeded anyway, presumably because of counter arguments he put more confidence in. Anyone out there familiar with what some of those counter points may have been?
No, it’s not easier to work with, unless you consider your work done completely once it’s manufactured without a thought to the ongoing testing and inspection regime required. And even then, laying CF is more niche than welding metal.
Carbon fibre is a ply. Plies are much harder to nondestructively inspect for flaws. That is an immediate, obvious risk in a use case involving cyclic pressure of hundreds of atmospheres. It is also brittle, so strain deformation does not occur nearly as much before fracture.
Welds are a vastly more well-understood feature that is possible to easily design around and - more critically - inspect afterwards. Metals also stretch before snapping, which is why you can go and measure the spacing of links on your bike chain and know when it’s time to replace it. All of this makes through-life maintenance and inspection much easier.
Carbon fibre was an incredibly poor design choice, selected to prioritise cost over safe operation.
Plain old steel seems to work and I'd imagine would be better given most subs are made of it. The Deepsea Challenger was made with 2.5 inch thick walls and went to 3x the depth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepsea_Challenger
My guess would be that the window wasn't the failure point, assuming that pressure hull was indeed found in many pieces. If the window did go first, the pressure delta on the rest of the hull immediately begins to equalize, so the amount of force the hull is under immediately goes down, making failure of the hull instantly less likely. The inertia of all the water rapidly entering the vessel might do some damage, but that inertia would have to overcome both the pressure of the ocean pressing in on the outside of the hull, and the tensile strength of the carbon fiber, which is stronger in tension than compression. So my guess would be that if the window failed, it would result in mostly just the titanium end caps being blown off rather than a complete destruction of the hull.
If the hull itself failed, however, given the way carbon fiber fails, finding the hull in many pieces seems to be the expected result.
> the submersible was designed to reach depths of 4,000 metres, but Lochridge said the passenger viewpoint (window) was only certified for depths of up to 1,300 metres
It’s definitely better for them, but its infuriating that this CEO died thinking he was a genius for building this shitty sub with very few safety precautions.
Well his actions lead to several other people dying too. Maybe the ticket they bought has a contract that exempts OceanGate (tragic name for a company going through their own #OceanGate a la Watergate) from any liability, but I hope this company gets annihilated in court with criminal and civil penalties.
Slacking this hard on safety for a submarine engineering company should not be tolerated in our rapidly advancing industrial society.
It's also probably related to the "launch or die" ecosystem that Y Combinator, Sand Hill investors, and pretty much the entire ecosystem promotes.
When was the last time an investor handed an additional $10 million check for 0% to a startup to improve and test their safety systems before launching? Instead their usual mandate is "launch yesterday or die". Which is okay for a SaaS platform or grocery delivery app, but not a deep sea vessel.
Today's version of capitalism is every bit responsible for tragedies like this. While the CEO is directly at fault for certain things, the system is equally at fault for raising and educating a CEO (and huge numbers of post-2000s CEOs) to be like that.
> their usual mandate is "launch yesterday or die". Which is okay for a SaaS platform or grocery delivery app, but not a deep sea vessel
Hypothetical users of the SaaS platform or grocery delivery app who find out later that their personal information wasn't handled with the appropriate safeguards might disagree with that one.
> Today's version of capitalism is every bit responsible for tragedies like this
Well "move fast, break things" is fine in certain contexts... SpaceX could be said to have done that. Their first few launches exploded. But they put in the engineering discipline, extensively tested all new/innovative processes, and they didn't dare put a human or even a paying payload on top of their rocket until they'd done extensive work on the test stand and actual launches.
You can move fast and innovate in life-critical systems so long as you prioritize the engineering and testing.
Honestly given all the red flags he ignored it seems like he had a death wish, or at the very least got a thrill from risking his life on these trips. Otherwise I can't wrap my head around the stupidity of the whole thing.
In his mind he never properly died though, it was damn near instant. He got to live his whole life and never realize the consequences of his actions through a slow, violent epiphany.
Do you have any particularl inside info on this other than what you’ve read in the news over the last couple of days? They’re pretty strong accusations you're making.
>Classing assures ship owners, insurers, and regulators that vessels are designed, constructed and inspected to accepted standards. Classing may be effective at filtering out unsatisfactory designers and builders, but the established standards do little to weed out subpar vessel operators – because classing agencies only focus on validating the physical vessel.
[...]
> The vast majority of marine (and aviation) accidents are a result of operator error, not mechanical failure.
Did they not consider that the reason for this fact is, oh I don't know, maybe because the vessels have passed the checks for mechanical integrity?
Can someone walk me through what would have happened, physically, to a human body in the moment this happened. I’m curious. Similar to wondering what happens to people in space.
> When a submarine implodes, a variety of fairly ugly things will happen to the crew. If we assume that a pressure hull implodes at 2000 feet (~60 atmospheres), the pressure will increase from 14.7 to about 875 PSI almost instantly. In the parts of the submarine that have volumes of trapped air, it would be like being inside a diesel engine cylinder when begins its compression stroke.
> Anything flammable would burst into flames until a huge wall of water slams into the area and snuffs it out again. The impact of the water would cause significant injury to anyone unlucky enough to still be alive and there would be no time to suffer the effects of oxygen poisoning or anything else.
> As others have stated, most human tissues are fluid-filled and are for the most part, incompressible. Human lungs and sinuses would be crushed instantly and the immense shock would render them unconscious immediately. Of greater concern would be the surge of incoming seawater, bulkheads, decks, heavy equipment, motors and other random bits of equipment being slammed into the crew at high velocity.
> Essentially, the crew would be killed several times over in less than a blink of an eye.
and from another answer:
> When a submarine hull collapses, it moves inward at about 1,500 miles per hour - that’s 2,200 feet per second. A modern nuclear submarine’s hull radius is about 20 feet. So the time required for complete collapse is 20 / 2,200 seconds = about 1 millisecond.
> A human brain responds instinctually to stimulus at about 25 milliseconds. Human rational response (sense→reason→act) is at best 150 milliseconds.
> The air inside a sub has a fairly high concentration of hydrocarbon vapors. When the hull collapses it behaves like a very large piston on a very large Diesel engine. The air auto-ignites and an explosion follows the initial rapid implosion. Large blobs of fat (that would be humans) incinerate and are turned to ash and dust quicker than you can blink your eye.
> Sounds gruesome but as a submariner I always wished for a quick hull-collapse death over a lengthy one like some of the crew on Kursk endured.
---
While specifics differ, it would be over very fast.
Outer space is vastly different due to the significantly lower pressure differential.
For this case: To put it simply, picture an unexpected scenario where an airplane plummets from above and lands directly on top of you. The impact would be quite painless.
In outer space, you pass out in about 15 seconds from lack of O2 to the brain, then your heart stops and eventually you freeze. NASA has done the experiments:
> Chimpanzees can withstand even longer exposures. In a pair of papers from NASA in 1965 and 1967, researchers found that chimpanzees could survive up to 3.5 minutes in near-vacuum conditions with no apparent cognitive defects, as measured by complex tasks months later. One chimp that was exposed for three minutes, however, showed lasting behavioral changes. Another died shortly after exposure, likely due to cardiac arrest.
Then there was this oops:
> In 1965 a technician inside a vacuum chamber at Johnson Space Center in Houston accidentally depressurized his space suit by disrupting a hose. After 12 to 15 seconds he lost consciousness. He regained it at 27 seconds, after his suit was repressurized to about half that of sea level. The man reported that his last memory before blacking out was of the moisture on his tongue beginning to boil as well as a loss of taste sensation that lingered for four days following the accident, but he was otherwise unharmed.
Dying in a submarine would be very different. The pressure differential in space is a single atmosphere. Water increases by about one atmosphere every 33 feet. At Titanic's depth it's ~ 368 atmospheres of pressure. Reddit discussion from 3 years ago:
> The collapse of a submarine pressure hull happens quick, just 37 milliseconds in the case of the Scorpion. The incoming water had a velocity of about 2,000 mph. [...] Over such small time scales, there is no time for the water or the steel hull to absorb any heat from the rapidly compressing air inside of the submarine. Because no heat is transferred from the air to the water or hull, the compression is adiabatic. [...] The collapse halted when the air pressure was approximately equal to the water pressure at 1,530 feet, which is 4,630,000 Pa. [...] 1,122°F.
That was at 1,530 feet.
Contact was lost with the Titan at 1 hour and 45 minutes into its dive. A typical dive to the bottom took it 3 hours. So it was likely at least halfway to the bottom (6000 feet). Its implosion would have involved even more spectacular forces.
They were dead before they knew what happened, incinerated and pulverized. There are no bodies to recover.
there isn't "a way carbon fiber fails", it fails according to how the structure was designed, and how the carbon fiber is utilized.
buckling delaminations -- espescially when alongside honeycomb or similar substrates -- very much looks like a 'crumpling'; unless you want to classify all epoxy matrix failures as a 'shattering', but I think that's far too generous given the variety of failure modes.
Not sure about decompression, after all they started at normal pressure before the incident so they wouldn't have unreasonable amounts of gasses in theur bodies that could expand to huge volumes when pressure lessens.
Hey BoxOfRain, sorry for jumping in like this. I would like to Invite you to tilde as you asked earlier, let me know how. If you haven't got one already, cheers.
Gas-filled cavities in the body instantly compress. So this means that your lungs, stomach, etc. instantly get crushed, rupturing in the process. Depending on circumference, depth, etc., the hull itself moves at speeds of ~1000+ mph towards itself, crushing everything inside in less than 100 milliseconds. Someone linked a great safety video of what happens under a pressure column (not gore)[1]. Though as some people mentioned, since carbon fiber was used here, it's more likely that the hull shattered, essentially turning it into shrapnel. I think this depends on the exact proportion of the life support gases they are using, but, due to the relation P ∝ T, the gas inside the submersible can ignite (like an engine piston essentially), turning all organic matter to ash instantly.
Is this actually true? I see it being repeated everywhere but there is a lot of mass in a human body. Can 100 milliseconds of "ignition" (as you put it) really burn off all of that?
I am no expert on any of this but was curious. So I entered some guesstimates in online calculators. Assuming they were at 12,500 ft / 3810m we get a pressure down there of 5546 PSI / 382 Bar.
Compressing the air in the cabin from roughly atmospheric pressure to 382 Bar would heat it to above 1300°C, or 1600°F. As far as I understand, in milliseconds. That’s a lot of heat energy. The water around them will absorb some of that, but they‘d be toast.
Think of it like a shock wave passing through the cabin and everything in it in time measured in milliseconds. Everything gets very hot basically instantly on the other side of that wave. Water less than gas, I’m too lazy to figure out what would be expected to exactly happen to water, but it would definitely be between getting hot enough to kill and disassociating to elemental hydrogen and oxygen gas. The question is what does a 6000 psi step function look like as it propagates through water.
Having gotten hit on the head in a low speed car accident I wouldn’t worry at all about the suffering through the actual implosion. The speed of the shock wave would be much faster than nerves conduct information.
A truly HN discussion -- what percentage of the occupants would be ash and what percentage of the occupants would be molecularly sheared viscous people fluid that rapidly disperses. The oxygen tank would rupture and provide an ignition source too.
One comment regarding the video you shared. The tank shown implodes due to the atmospheric pressure, since they imploded it by creating a vacuum inside.
The sub, on the other hand, would be under something like 350x the atmospheric pressure, so we can expect its implosion to be orders of magnitude more violent.
At that depth, the pressure is quite intense - around 6000 psi. That means 6000 pounds pr square inch - that's almost a Ford F150 truck pr square inch, everywhere. And now imagine how many square inches the surface area of a human is - especially your upper torso where your lungs are located.
The sub (hull) is made of a carbon fiber and titanium mix - and I'm not sure how that would react, if it buckles / collapses like regular metal, or if it simply shatters into millions of pieces like glass.
If the sub just collapsed / imploded into itself, well - that's that. The crew got crushed to death in an instant.
If the sub explode, then that would be a very violent reaction. Probably enough to kill them, purely from that - but let's say they don't die instantly from the crushing influx / wave of water:
Air / gasses in the body would compress significantly, if not allowed to exit the body. Your lungs would collapse in an instant, and your chest cavity would collapse on itself, until all air has escaped, and then replaced by water. Your ear eardrums would also rapture in an instant. With a severely collapsed upper torse, which would happen in an instant, I think your heart and major arteries would also become destroyed in an instant.
All that space would instantly get filled up with water.
I personally think that the violent process would kill them instantly - as in milliseconds...and then when all air has escaped the body, water would fill that space, until the pressure has reached an equilibrium.
EDIT: I personally don't think they suffered. The sub likely imploded in an instant, without little prior warning (noises) if the material behaves in the way I suspect it does. Just lights out, and that's that. Brain didn't even get time to react.
So let's say that they by some miracle survive implosion without getting knocked out, and have lungs full of air - well, that air would still compress by a huge amount. And with negative buoyancy, they would sink. Pressure at 2000 feet is still a bit over 400 PSI.
A 10 psi pressure wave can kill you instantly, which is just 22 feet of pressure under the surface. At any depth that a pressure vessel can rupture and implode spontaneously, it will just crush any humans within it.
depending on the failure type (shear, compression, tension) carbon fiber behaves differently. but when the fibers actually break it pops so quickly that it exceeds human perception.
This video will give you an idea of how quickly things likely imploded, and they never even got to the kind of pressures they would have experienced in that sub.
It seems the bullet is likely faster, bullet moves about 2.6 feet per millisecond which is more than enough distance traveled to kill a human, but the sub takes about 29 milliseconds to implode and kill occupants.
Just speculation, but since the majority of the hull was made by carbon fiber - it depends on how that carbon fiber imploded / collapsed. So far they've found the titanium parts, which are the front- and end parts. If they don't find any huge chunks of carbon fiber, I think it is safe to say that the fiber splintered like a bomb, inwards, like a bomb. And many of those fibers would still projectile in air, at the very moment of the implosion. Imagine carbon fiber shrapnel from the inside of the hull traveling toward the center of the hull.
I think it would be like a heated, oxygen bubble filled
with human soup & debris blast
Out both ends of the failed
hull whenever the titanium ends
were blasted off essentially they became exhaust waste. How quick the titanium ends were blasted off versus full compression of the capsule
must be in milliseconds also
but must have some lag time
even though it seems the titanium ends being blown off
are acting as relief from the
initial event.
Considering the current geopolitical weather and the presence of Russian submarines, you'd think the US army would be able to locate the missing object in no time, even with a triangulated location, they failed
That is a submersible. Military submarines (things that can travel thousands of miles, support themselves, have weapons, etc) appear to bottom out at ~2000m. At least one US military sub imploded well above 2000m.
I keep seeing reports that they've search an area "the size of" Massachusetts or Connecticut. Shouldn't OceanGate have recorded the exact coordinates where it was released and then been able to localize its possible location to a small area around that by modeling ocean currents or something? My understanding the Titan was designed to sink to the bottom and could only move very slowly under its own power. I know OceanGate was cocky and cut a lot of corners, but I just can't believe they wouldn't have the exact release location recorded somewhere, even if it was just an automatic track log on their ship's GPS navigation system.
> Shouldn't OceanGate have recorded the exact coordinates where it was released and then been able to localize its possible location to a small area around that by modeling ocean currents or something?
Modelling and knowing surface currents is one thing, but this submersible was thousands of meters deep. Deep ocean currents can be very fast, change often, and we have way less data on them.
Why are you assuming it's wireless? ROVs use data tethers with the spool kept on the base ship. Or you could have a black box recorder attached to the sub by a cable that blows its connection and floats to the surface if it loses contact for more than a few minutes.
I can think of 10 different ways to maintain some contact with the surface and store some data about dive conditions. Honestly perplexed at all the people who are still buying into Oceangate's demonstrably bad way of doing things and just saying it's impossible to do any better.
I'd assume they were assuming a worst case scenario of something like a ballast malfunction paired with a propulsion malfunction, so you have a partially buoyant (enough to stay off the ground, not enough to surface) craft being pushed both by currents, and possibly its own propulsion, in an unknown direction in some radius outside of the Titanic. I've no idea of the depth sonar can accurately ping, so they may also have been considering the 3-d area around the Titanic in which case you're hitting radius cubed, and so even a "small" max distance could be huge.
Ever use a fish finder / depth finder? A narrow beam is sent in one direction, generally down, and reflections back are calculated. I would imagine that was the start of their search.
After enough time or support: military grade sonar? https://man.fas.org/dod-101/navy/docs/es310/SNR_PROP/snr_pro...
Yip, but the issue is the depth. The Titanic's at 3800 meters. An average military sub isn't going to hit 1000 meters. So I'm reluctant to make any assumptions about deep search systems.
Most work class ROVs top out around 3,000 meters but there are plenty of ultra-deepwater ROVs that go to 4,000 meters and beyond that are specialized for search and rescue operations. The usual ROV players like Oceaneering International, Saab SeaEye, TechnipFMC, etc. all make them.
The Navy & Coast Guard would definitely have access to their own fleets
This sounds a lot like https://xkcd.com/793/ - "and then add some secondary terms to account for <complications I just thought of>."
They lost contact 105 minutes into a 120 minute, 2.5 mile descent. The release point for that descent was well known, and currents estimated closely enough to allow the sub to descend close enough to the shipwreck that the submersible's thrusters could move it very slowly to viewing locations.
They don't know what happened to cause it to lose contact more than a quarter mile above the ocean floor. They didn't know whether it went neutrally buoyant at that point, whether it ascended quickly, or slowly, or stayed near the bottom of the ocean and continued looking at the Titanic and only later drifted off course - they've done that before. Those ocean currents, unknowns, and distances are large; merely pulling the release point from a GPS track does not suddenly make the search point tiny.
They looked on the surface because they didn't have anything that could go down to the Titanic. A ship with an ROV that could go to the Titanic arrived and they found the debris on the sea floor.
Right. It's my understanding that two remote submersibles that arrived earlier were lost trying to reach the sea floor—they weren't rated for the depth but the attempts were made anyway. (Don't have a link, I think it was nytimes)
because the distance is so far that the sub even departing a few degrees from its intended destination means it can be anywhere along a huge swath of the sea floor, plus it's pitch dark and very far and cold and inhospitable to both human and machines.
drop a penny into a swimming pool vs drop it into the ocean.
> We have just had an update from dive expert David Mearns, who says the debris includes "a landing frame and a rear cover from the submersible".
> Mearns is a friend of passengers aboard the Titan.
> Mearns has told the BBC that the president of the Explorers Club (which is connected to the diving and rescue community), provided this new information.
Oof. Well, that's the end of this. At least this means they had a quick death. I read that a submarine implosion would actually happen faster than your brain would be able to register that anything is even happening.
The most likely first failure is the window. At that instant a rapid turbulent fill event would occur. The outside pressure and the hole diameter will provide a calculable interval for the internal volume to fill. At 12,000 feet = 800 atmospheres, this would be on the order of 1/20th of a second, with intense crush/shear forces = instant death as perceived. That interval can be related to the speed of sound and wavelength to make a variable frequency 'chirp' that would be of low to higher frequency. The low frequency would be in the low hertz as an estimate. At the same time inner pressure and temperature would rise to 800 atmospheres and a temperature a little above ambient. The density of water is around 800 times that of air = 800 times the weight of water would enter compared to the weight of the air within. Local temperature would prevail, increased a little by the work of compression of that air to higher pressure(quite high in concept, but quenched by 800 x mass of water.
Thus the sound will not be very loud or high in frequency.
A sphere of C4 will make a compression wave at somewhere over 500,000 atmosphere propagating at about 4000 meters/second = fourier square wave containing all the odd order harmonics all the way down = heard round the world. Any transient inrush plasma would be swamped and mixed with cold water = transient and of little consequence.
Banging? One would hope nobody would dare bang the window, but it is conceivable they might have banged the hull in desperation if the window did not crack to attract attention? Did the noise cease at some point? or is the noise still hearable = not them?
This is a very interesting comment. You seem to have a firm grasp on the physics of this situation. Out of curiosity, beyond common sense, does adding pressure internally on something with a significant load of external pressure create a compounding/exponential amount of force/pressure on the material overall?
You may have heard 'nature abhors a vacuum' stated. Most solid materials are almost incompressible, either in solid or liquid form.
solid steel, liquid oil, etc only gets smaller when subjected to enormous pressure. To make it smaller you need to reduce the interatomic distances that are dominated by the electromagnetic force.
Gasses on the other hand are compressible and a gas volume will steadily get smaller as you squeeze it. At a high enough pressure you can create a liquid or solid that is then not compressible. All gasses can be charted in a 'phase diagram' that shows the pressure/density relationship. Some gasses do not solidify or liquify - a whole complex area here.
This submersible was a vacuum into which air was added to ~~15 pounds per square inch. It was then surrounded by a wall to keep that gas in. In a normal room - all you need is a balloon, blow up with your lungs.
Down at 12,000 feet underwater = 400 Atmospheres of pressure or ~~6,000 psi. One can think of this as a wall, with you on one side holding it from falling over with your hands at 15 pounds per square inch(psi) and on the other side is this gorilla at 6000 psi = gorilla wins.
Now a thick walled sphere with you inside at 15 psi and the gorilla outside at 6000 psi is the new balloon. A sphere good at beating gorillas, and most deep sea spheres(called bathyspheres) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathysphere
William Beebe went down a few thousand feet in the 1930's - limited by steel cable weight/depth limits as steel cable are only good for about 6000 feet as free hanging cables. Now they use incompressible buoyant solids or liquids to make them neutrally buoyant. His globe in the Wiki has some windows for vision and lights made with thick gasketed quartz - all 100% tested - still risky. They sent it down empty first.
some images https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1CHBF_enCA924CA924&sxsrf...
Getting to your question via this preamble. The bathyscaphe could be pressurised with a helium/oxygen/other gas. The US navy has done many experiments with various gas mixtures - none are good to 6000 psi due to physiological limits. Dissolved oxygen and nitrogen are toxic above certain pressures - look at the Navy stuff for more on that via google. They are between 1000 to 2000 feet more or less - far below 6000 feet and it can take weeks to get the excess gas out of your system via gradual decompression chambers.
There have been experiments with inert freon liquids with dissolved oxygen, tested on mice = lived and some Navy experiments with people who breathed the fluid under close medical control - I doubt this has progressed far, as this wiki shows https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_breathing.
So yes, you can make the sphere thinner if you add pressure to the inside. Fish do it, with nothing, but often die unless they are sirfaced under controlled conditions as chemistry varies slightly as they come up, dissolved gasses fizz etc.
This probably failed via the inadequate window = broke = near instant death for all. However, it may have a carbon shell failure?? if they recover the parts more will be known how the failure occurred.
Complete speculation: They wanted to see something very very upclose through the glass. While getting in close they managed to scrap some wreckage compromising the carbon fiber body leading it to break and implode. The banging noises are some of the equipment dangling on the Titanic wreckage and blowing in underwater currents occassionally.
They lost contact about 1¾ hours into the voyage, while it's expected to take 3 hours to get down to the Titanic wreck. From that, it sounds like they would be somewhere midway down.
The Titan wreck was found 1,600 feet from the bow of the Titanic, it was found on a smooth bottom of the sea floor, per the ongoing Coast Guard press release.
The last press conference today from the US Coast Guard stated that the evidence (debris spread over an area hundreds of meters away from the Titanic) is consistent with the catastrophic failure occurring somewhere in the "water column". So current evidence points to it occurring during the descent.
Part of me has been wondering if the noises being heard might be an unexpected discovery of a military (Russian, Chinese, US) submarine operating in the general area. Don’t they submerge for long periods of time without comms?
Typhoon-class: Test depth 900 m (3,000 ft)
Astute-class: Over 300 m (984 ft 3 in)
Akula-class: 480 m (1,570 ft) test depth for Akula I and Akula I Improved, 520 m (1,710 ft) for Akula II and III, 600 m (2,000 ft) maximum operating depth
Ohio-class: Test depth >240 m (800+ ft)
Virginia-class: Test depth >240 m (800+ ft)
Borei-class: Test depth 950 m
Rubis-class: Test depth 350 m
Barracuda-class: Test depth >350 m
Very true, it is a known factoid that submarines sometimes bump into each other because they can't tell that another sub is there. Doing so much noise as to be spotted from aircraft is crazy.
'just below the surface' -> already at very impressive pressures and given the complex shape of their hulls absolute marvels of engineering. 240 meters below isn't 'just below the surface', that's pretty deep. That the ocean is much deeper is a simple fact but that should not diminish your appreciation for the differences between a 'regular' submarine and a deep sea vessel. Which is also why the latter tend to be extremely simple geometric shapes for the pressure vessel because of the stresses they are subjected to. Ball shape preferred, then cylinder. Something with angles in it would fail for sure.
Each ~30 feet or 10 meters adds an extra atmosphere of pressure. Recreation divers go to 120-130 feet (~4 extra atmospheres). Commercial divers go to ~1000 feet (~30 extra atmospheres). There are rumors that Navi divers can go to ~2000 feet (~60 extra atmospheres).
Not sure why somebody downvoted this. 'Just below the surface' is an odd phrasing, but I had the exact same sort of initial reaction as I think anybody would. The numbers are just so shocking here. The 'average' military sub isn't fit for travel much beyond 300 meters. The peak theoretic technology has subs that may be about to travel to around the 2000 meter mark.
The Titanic is at 3800 meters. That it's reachable, by private organizations no less, is just a marvel.
Russia has a Losharik nuclear submarine that was tested up to 2500m (8200ft) if Wikipedia is to be believed. It got in the news when it had a fire that killed half a dozen decorated officers.
USA probably has something similar.
No doubt, depth capability is one of the big features you go after when building a combat submarine. The deeper you go, the faster you can go while retaining stealth (cavitation is the limiting factor which decreases with the added hydrostatic pressure), and, if you can go significantly deeper than your adversaries, you're more or less invulnerable to attack because they can't shoot at you.
That's also why military specs on things like this are always lies, you don't want anyone knowing how deep you can actually go, which likely includes most of the crew.
I think I read in one of the earlier Titan threads this week that density increases pretty slowly with water depth. Water isn't very compressible, after all. So, to your question, I would guess "yes, but not by much".
I'm really curious about the carbon fibre design, I'm not a material expert but I do dive and for tanks they work because of the internal pressure of tank.
The 'weaving' is supposed to be link connecting your two hands together interlocking fingers, in one direction you will meet a full resistance, but in the opposite direction your fingers will unlock.
I have no idea but seems to me if there is external pressure the weaving would have 'imploded' depending on the design I guess. Really want to know more about this.
Your intuition is spot on, carbon fiber is much better at tensile loads than compressive loads.
Tensile load capacity is pretty much the resin that keeps the fibers from moving.
The most I could find about the design
> The entire pressure vessel is comprised of two titanium hemispheres, two matching titanium interface rings, and the 142 cm (56") internal diameter, 2.4-m (100") long carbon fiber wound cylinder – the largest such device ever built for use in a manned submersible.
suggest that yeah, they relied entirely on its compressive strength of it
It's wild how carbon fibre is a insanely powerful in it's application yet it's misused.
I'd like to say it's caveat being as you mentioned but honestly, given then community in this field, even the technical diving alone. Someone must have said it to them.
Thanks for some numbers, maybe tomorrow will play with the simulations to determine the AP's that could collapse the craft. The titanium hemispheres are probably the best option but the sealing would need to be almost clinical.
I'm anxious just thinking about the construction of this sub.
There is a video going around of the lead guy saying (obviously before this incident) something to the effect of “I will be remembered for innovation and the rules I broke, I was told not to build using such and such materials and I’ve proven people wrong”.
“I’ve broken some rules to make this, I think I’ve broken them with good logic and good engineering behind me. The carbon fiber and titanium, there’s a rule you don’t do that – well I did,” said the CEO in an interview in 2021. [1]
James Cameron was quite interesting on the similarities between the original Titanic disaster where the captain was warned about icebergs but said nah and went ahead and crashed, and this time where the guy was similarly warned.
No, brittle materials like concrete are famously weak in tension and strong in compression. Ductile materials are generally equally strong in both. I can't think of any material offhand that's stronger in tension and weaker in compression.
Buckling is not a material failure, it's a structural failure. In pure buckling [0], the strength of the material is not actually a factor in whether something buckles or not. In most cases, material failure does occur as a side effect of the buckling, but not always. (The material's stiffness does matter, though. All else equal, something that's more flexible will buckle sooner than something stiff.)
The looking glass was only rated for 4,000 feet. Implosion happened around 9,000 feet, which would suggest the glass handled over twice its rated depth.
Pressure cookers that are rated for 15 PSI typically come apart at 75 PSI.
But that’s the thing about ratings. The manufacturer guarantees safe usage at 15 PSI and anything above that all bets are off and you’re on your own. Same with milk and expiration dates. Many times the milk is fine after the date, but the dairy won’t guarantee freshness and food safety.
Same for this looking glass. It says what the CEO thought about safety. He was willing to take chances and roll the dice. And every once in a while you get snake eyes. The consequences of rolling • • at 9,000ft of depth in the ocean is sadly instant soup. The water entering the vessel would likely be 5,000F degrees or so. While some people say it would be an instant death and not consciously detectable, I disagree. I think they were given just enough time for the brain to go oh shit, but only got to the oh part, and lights out.
Stockton Rush (OceanGate's CEO) was known in the Seattle tech community [0]
My understanding (very much not first hand) is that he was seen as an expert in the specific engineering disciplines necessary to safely build and operate deep sea submersibles like Titan.
He was also apparently a father to members of the Seattle tech community, who are no doubt grieving at the moment.
Please remember that, for some members of the HN community, this one hits close to home.
He was not recognized as an expert by other deep-sea submerisble experts. He was repeatedly warned about safety issue with this design. These events are tragic, but they were predictable and avoidable and that makes it frustrating.
I often figure that you only need about 25% more knowledge/expertise on a topic than others to seem like an expert, and for them to be incapable of actually judging your knowledge
Specifically warned 5 years ago by his own employee and fired him as a thank you to boot. "OceanGate fired employee David Lochridge in 2018 after he expressed concern about the submersible's safety"
I hope the other souls onboard fully understood the risk of death, otherwise that isn't fair to them.
To relate it to flying in an airplane, “If you take one flight a day, you would on average need to fly every day for 55,000 years before being involved in a fatal crash.”
I'll take those odds.
Take a deep dive in an experimental vessel with public safety concerns expressed over years, nope I'm out.
I haven't seen the full waiver anywhere. The death being mentioned three times comes from someone who took an earlier Titan dive. However, it is mentioned in David Pogue's story about OceanGate: https://youtu.be/29co_Hksk6o?t=160
It also occurs to me that there should be no more sophisticated consumer than a billionaire. If one really wanted, I'd imagine they could build their own submersible to their own safety specifications.
Many billionaires, including the one on board, frequently demonstrate how wholly unsophisticated and arrogant they are. Extreme hubris was on display by everyone involved.
I would reserve judgment on that, there was a teenager involved and I highly doubt they were of an age which allowed them to absorb the knowledge to properly evaluate the risks. There also was his dad and the CEO of the company on board which may have given him an extra degree of feeling that the risks were acceptable.
Yes. I feel bad for that guy the most. So young, and of course he probably didn’t had the resources to independently verify the safety of the sub. Unlike the millionaire passengers could have just thrown tenth of the ticket price at any marine engineer who would have been able to explain to them how dangerous the whole thing is.
People have to sign those waivers very often for significantly less risky activities like going ziplining, so let's not pretend signing a waiver is the same as actual informed consent.
It also looked so terribly janky. I feel like all the lights were flashing red for this craft, but maybe people were swayed by assurances from people who were a bit too enthusiastic about their product.
Billionaires get to the money by the art of charisma and bullshitting so it is entirely possible they got bullshitted all the way to the bottom on that too
No amount of poor decision making changes the fact that several precious human lives were lost. Frustration over the company's potential negligence and sadness over the loss of life can coexist.
Well I wouldn't agree with either position. Human life is human life, but I guess some people seem to believe that either poor OR wealthy people are less deserving of sympathy, care, and investment of resources.
I feel for them about as much as I do the ~100 people who died today in car accidents in the US. Most of whom were probably also doing reckless things. In a sane world we would do something about that, but people like Rush actively work against sanity in the name of profit, so here we are.
Thank you for calling this out. It's also disheartening and quite frankly scary, to see how the passengers get dehumanized on other online platforms due to their wealth.
I'm not dehumanizing anyone, that's just silly. It's about as dehumanizing as when I don't care when teenagers doing Tik Tok pranks suffer consequences of their ignorant, braggardly actions.
So much hand wringing and I've seen about two whole comments talking about the boat that sank carrying 100x as many people while this saga was unfolding.
How is it dehumanizing for me to not care about one, when virtually no one gave a single shit about the hundreds of non-wealthy people dying?
I'm just trying to understand your philosophical position: I don't have to care about certain people, as revenge for others not caring about a different group of people?
For me all human life is precious and equally worthy of effort to save, as well as sympathy and grief for their loss. I suppose that's not your position, but I don't quite understand what it is.
I guess I'm saying it's a spectrum. Other than the teenager, my empathy extends as far as "at least they didn't suffer as a consequence of doing something that they knew damn well was likely to kill them".
"Equally worthy of effort" - ironic because the amount of money spent trying to save these 5 people could save hundreds or thousands of times as many people. But I don't see people clamoring for equality in helping the disenfranchised.
Same, we regularly see lots of language used in the media and parliaments of Europe to do anything not to refer to these refugees as refugees or even people ("migrant ships") and I've never seen this called out on HN or in similar circles.
Respectfully, I’m not allocating those funds myself. I share your frustration about the unequal devotion of resources to helping people. But that doesn’t mean that these people aren’t worth saving, or grieving.
You realize this thread is about the sub that was lost, not the thread about the ship that sunk. It shouldn't come as much surprise that people aren't talking about migrant ship that sunk.
Here it's off-topic to talk about the sunk ship and the migrants that died. Here it's on topic to talk about the people on the sub that died. People should have empathy with both situations, but are much less likely to express it when they're frustrated by someone complaining about something off-topic.
Yes but the issue is that there is no thread about this ship and the many hundreds who are routinely dying are never brought up. The only time I see it mentioned in the media or in parliament is when we're discussing how we can keep them further away and shed our responsibility to them.
At the same time we're being asked to support tax money going to search for these 5 risk tourists and being accused of ignoring their humanity when we simply point out the utter stupidity and greediness of their escapade.
Because it's much worse when you put people in a group and then attack that group than when you just group. "We need to help the poor", not very problematic. "The poor are lazy and deserve to suffer", very problematic.
Yes, I don't want some communist revolution or othering or dehumanization which frequently is a precursor to violence. Are you sure criticizing how other people spend their time is the best use of yours?
Do you know how much money they donate? I don't, it might be nothing, but I also wouldn't jump to conclusions. It's not like we don't have very wealthy people like Bill Gates put significant time and money into making the world a better.
I don't care how much money they donate, because the tax systems of the world are designed to minimize their losses versus the people who work for them. That's still money they clearly didn't need and certainly didn't earn.
Bill Gates has hubris because Bill Gates has a fuckton of wealth that he did nothing to directly earn. Merely having capital yields capital results.
I wonder to what degree the hubris causes the wealth. You need a high degree of certainty in yourself and your ideas to succeed in many ventures. I've seen people work their way up organizations who I think are much less competent and thoughtful than I'm, but they at least outwardly present themselves with certainty. Often times people liker that already got promoted away before the downsides of their decisions materialize. In other instances we might never hear about them, because nobody cares about the guy under the freeway bridge who has similar character traits to Elon Musk or Steve Jobs, but got less lucky or was slightly less smart or well connected.
I think people are angry when, as others have mentioned, there are more resources and international cooperation going into helping these 5 people who took a needless risk while we watch 100s dying regularly while they try to flee literal war ones in regions we've destabilised for years.
You can also see in this thread people calling them "precious lives" as though that doesn't apply to the people making the ultimate sacrifice to try and bring their families to safety.
I have nothing against people being rich but it's frankly scary to see these refugees be dehumanised, framed as economic immigrants and become victim to to increasing legislation to keep them out of safety on the basis that we can't afford them using our resources when we suddenly have resources enough to spend on extensive missions to search for people who made bad decisions for fun and risked the lives of others for nothing but profit and fame.
I live were those poor people try to go, and I call them refugees. I also say we, because as a voting citizen of one of those countries that did some of said destabilazing over the years, I cannot wash myself of all responsibility.
I’m starting to think that’s the primary purpose of voting - to get people to feel complicit in actions they didn’t want by people they didn’t want in places they didn’t know existed.
Than you have a clearly distorted view of democracy. And I do not feel complicit, why would I? But, as part of the Western democratic world, I cannot simply ignore everything we did all over the world in the last 20 odd years and pretend it was some outside force doing all of that. Democracy, regardless of shape in form, is exactly about giving people a voice in those affaires. Which is a good thing, IMHO.
France, the UK, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands and Italy have each spent a couple centuries having fun destabilising the whole world for their own gain.
The US was a bit late to the game, but appears to have caught up quite well.
And while in Europe these people often first set sail for the western Balkans, it usually isn’t their destination.
"We" would be roughly the members of NATO and its allies, former colonial powers and the countries traditionally within the sphere of Catholic influence.
Where are they sailing to that this doesn't cover? The recent example being spoken about in this thread was trying to make it to Italy, which has been involved in various conflicts in the middle east since the middle ages.
All that's awful and I hope we can make it better. That said, the humans on that silly submarine have very little to do with what we are and aren't doing about refugees in the Mediterranean.
Potential negligence? Dude fired the guy who was trying to get the hull checked for voids before doing crew testing. Then they sued him and proceeded to run this thing with passengers without bothering to do non-destructive testing. Sounds more Stockton Rush went well beyond negligence and straight to malfeasance to me.
He's also on record as saying things like, "It's obscenely safe because they have all these regulations. But it also hasn't innovated or grown — because they have all these regulations." (https://www.insider.com/titan-submarine-ceo-complained-about...)
He seemed especially proud about combining titanium and carbon fibre against the advice of others, which seems to now have been in a pretty active role in the demise of the Titan.
>"I'd like to be remembered as an innovator. I think it was General MacArthur who said "you're remembered for the rules you break." And I've broken some rules to make this. I think I've broken them with logic and good engineering behind me. The carbon fibre and the titanium, there's a rule you don't do that. Well, I did."
> Therefore, there is no significant gap between titanium and carbon-fiber-reinforced composite to create galvanic corrosion. This means that commercially pure titanium and its alloys are completely resistant to galvanic corrosion when they are coupled with carbon composites.
Small things, e.g. insignificant rebellions, ah, gaps, do add up.
I see a problem in stress loads so. Titanium and carbon fibre composites behave differently under load. And at those depths, they are under a lot of load. These small differences induce additional stress at the critical joint between bulk heads and submarine body. That stress causes, over time, material fatigue.
That's why those components are, in most othee use cases, fatigue tested to their breaking point. Knowing that point, allows you to define a save service life for those components and replace thek way before they fail.
The article you cite says "Therefore, there is no significant gap between titanium and carbon-fiber-reinforced composite to create galvanic corrosion. This means that commercially pure titanium and its alloys are completely resistant to galvanic corrosion when they are coupled with carbon composites." This seems to be the opposite of what you are asserting.
James Cameron is extremely critical of the design of the sub, and of Rush's attitude [0]. He says that carbon fiber was a very poor choice and that it had been known for a very long time, and that "deep submerged diving is a mature art".
If you think you're going to reinvent the wheel and bypass regulatory bodies and ignore subject experts, and move fast and break things, you're delusional.
Any baby can break things; any toddler can break rules. What's hard is to discover new rules, make things that don't break.
Exactly. What really gets me is that he would subject passengers - one of which is a teenager - to this kind of risk. It really gets me, that kid probably had absolutely no clue about the real level of risk involved.
Carbon is fantastic stuff if used properly, used improperly it will seem to be perfect right up to the point where it fails catastrophically.
The kid's father seems to bear a lot of responsibility in his son's demise.
> In the days before the Titan vessel went into the ocean off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada, the 19-year-old university student accompanying his father on the expedition expressed hesitation about going, his aunt said Thursday in an interview.
> Azmeh Dawood — the older sister of Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood — told NBC News that her nephew, Suleman, informed a relative that he "wasn't very up for it" and felt "terrified" about the trip to explore the wreckage of the Titanic.
> But the 19-year-old ended up going aboard OceanGate's 22-foot submersible because the trip fell over Father's Day weekend and he was eager to please his dad, who was passionate about the lore of the Titanic, according to Azmeh.
That or he still thought it was safe but was scared regardless.
Even though everyone knows flying commercially is incredibly safe, lots of people are still anxious about it. Its not like this kid, or maybe any of the other customers, knew of any of the safety concerns and just thought it was as safe as flying.
I doubt it felt like a good way to go to someone who was scared to go on the thing in the first place. Maybe it went from no indications of a problem to near instantaneous implosion in a moment, but I kind of doubt it. I’m guessing that carbon fiber was anything but silent as it approached the moment of catastrophic failure. I’d like to think they didn’t know what was about to happen, but it seems unlikely.
This was one of the reasons I always hoped their deaths were as quick as could be. As a parent myself, the idea of looking my child in the eyes for days on end, knowing that I’d condemned them to death with my own hubris… I can’t imagine anything more miserable.
A few weeks ago there was a tragic caving accident at a local school here where a boy drowned when the outdoor adventure group entered the caves even as flood waters were rising from a storm.
I told my 10 year old son that one day his life might depend on being able to recognise danger and not follow the herd. I said that might mean you staying out of the cave even if the teacher and all the other students went in, called you names, etc.
He rightly pointed out that would be almost impossible such is the power of peer pressure. Still I hope if that day comes he remembers it.
You are right and your son is also right. As a father of sons I share your concerns and I hope that I'm able to give them the capability to withstand that peer pressure. I've been - and still am - subject to this on account of not drinking alcohol, smoking or using drugs. To the point that it becomes ridiculous ('don't be boring'). This has been a recurring thing since my teenage years and I really don't get why people feel the need to pressure others into joining them in their stupidity. Just like I don't push them to behave like I do.
But it's been tough, on occasion and I can see the point that your son makes, and I hope with you that if that day comes that he will remember it. FWIW you can tell him this internet stranger agrees with his dad and that peer pressure can be overcome.
> A few weeks ago there was a tragic caving accident at a local school here where a boy drowned when the outdoor adventure group entered the caves even as flood waters were rising from a storm.
That's awful, and if there's one thing that I learned from Thai cave rescue a few years ago (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tham_Luang_cave_rescue) it's that you never want to go swimming in caves when it might start raining.
it isn't just Americans or even First Worlders. In some cultures they're not able to do it, but they all want to. And it's -- guess what? -- peer pressure that makes them do it. Brain scans show that they recognize the danger as well as adults do, but they're more susceptible to the peer pressure.
It's ok to be afraid. No one had to go down to 12,500 feet to see the Titanic.
Are you in Whangarei? The incident at the Abbey caves was really so tragic and preventable. I still don't get what went through the teachers heads, it's to rainy to go rock climbing, so we go caving instead?!
> Carbon is fantastic stuff if used properly, used improperly it will seem to be perfect right up to the point where it fails catastrophically.
It blows my mind that anyone thought it was a good idea to make a deep-sea submersible out of the stuff.
Carbon's tendency to abruptly fail without warning was a source of significant anxiety whenever I'd go riding the more aggressive trails on my ibis mojo hd3. And that wasn't a certain death outcome should the carbon let go...
And even then. If you buy a carbon bike second hand (which I would advise against) you'll have to do an absolutely minute inspection to ensure there are no cracks, especially the front fork and all the places where there are inserts are excellent spots for hairline cracks to develop.
I suppose it is easier to move fast and break things when all you need to do is post pictures of cats, but diving to 4km depth you only get to break once I’m afraid
Cameron says the sub had sensors that would detect if the sub was starting to delaminate. He says the sub was trying to return because they probably had a warning. How terrifying.
I'm curious about this detail, and I have what is surely a very dumb question. Both titanium and carbon fiber are, afaik, known and used for their strength to weight ratio; so aerospace is a natural application. But in deep sea diving is weight a factor at all? Could one just build vehicles with, I don't know, a 30 cm thick steel plate?
> But in deep sea diving is weight a factor at all?
You need to be able to attain both positive and negative buoyancy, which constrains density within a range, right? That limits design choices like “giant block of steel with a tiny passenger cavity”.
It's super easy to add buoyancy by attaching it to the hull outside the pressure vessel. James Cameron's design uses a metal pressure vessel with an advanced foam composite outside of it for buoyancy.
LOL, Guardian published information about documents describing the danger of this thing, the lack of regulations and how deep sea exploration of this kind is probably finished for many years to come.
Him saying "it's obscenely safe" just sounds like a Silicon Valley CEO saying they're going to save the world by selling their users' personal data under the table. EDIT seems like I interpreted this wrong according to comment below.
Those of us making web apps don't have the same safety critical nature as anything carrying souls. Working in aerospace gave me a great appreciation for the complexity of ensuring safety, the engineering hours poured into it, and why regulations exist.
The CEO was quoted[1] as:
> “We only have one button and that's it,” Rush said in the CBS report. “It should be like an elevator.
What an example to reference. Early elevators resulted in many deaths [2] and safety regulations and mechanisms needed to be invented to prevent them [3].
Similar regulations existed for submersibles, but he decided not to take all those lessons learned. I'm thankful building elevator operators do not have a cavalier attitude towards safety like this.
Having formerly worked in safety critical software, it would make me cringe when I would hear people in those industries use phrases like "move fast and break things."
I'm not even a risk-adverse individual. But I can often recognize when people say things like that, not because they're comfortable with the risk, but because they are blind to it. It's hard for me to feel like the teenager aboard was fully cognizant of the risks.
While it’s been 15 years I used to work in telco. Everyday I reminded myself that my software needed to work because someone might need to call 911, or make an equally important call.
The "obscenely safe" remark was directed at "regulated" vessels, not at his own sub. He was acknowledging that he was taking risks by not conforming to regulations.
From what I understand he was also complaining about those regulations holding back the private industry and also it's been stated as of late that he's on record saying how he's broken rules. That among allegations of a safety director being fired in 2015 for pointing out design safety oversights. [0]
I don't think it's great to make this guy into a folk hero just because he was pushing the limits. Imagine, for a second, how this would be reacted to in the aviation space.
If the CEO cut corners then that should be his legacy. Great people can be flawed. Flaws can be fatal. It's just a shame if those flaws weren't properly portrayed to those who dove with him.
It’s ok and even a good thing to cut corners and take a “ask forgiveness not permission” attitude when the results of failure are inconvenience and annoyance. Pushing through layers of accumulated red tape does indeed help when you’re making a taxi service or delivering food or making a social app.
Not so much when you’re building life-critical systems or those where there are real big serious problems when they go down or fail.
Oh I'm all about innovation. Just don't pretend to be innovating when you're charging people $250k for a trip in your experimental vehicle that is thinly veiled with the marketing gimick of "tourism". I believe you're conflating individual risk takers with the new age charlatans looking at this through the lens of profit first, innovation second.
The links you provide show a stark difference in end game from then and now. None of them killed tourists in the name of pushing the limits. That and those risk takers in aviation didn't blindly disregard highly researched and engineered vehicle designs, and oh by the way, publicly state that your design was ultimately against what other experts in the industry have shown to be non-viable with our current build process and manufacturing capabilities using those materials. And to top it off using control mechanisms not even remotely designed for the use case of a real time system that could cause a grave outcome of life. One that you can buy at Walmart to play a video game.
In my mind comparing this situation with those innovators is unfortunate.
"Two months later, OceanGate faced similarly dire calls from more than three dozen people — industry leaders, deep-sea explorers and oceanographers — who warned in a letter to its chief executive, Stockton Rush, that the company’s “experimental” approach and its decision to forgo a traditional assessment could lead to potentially “catastrophic” problems with the Titanic mission."
I don't understand why they didn't just drop it to the bottom of the ocean without people hundred times to see if it still holds. Who experiments with a crew in the age of remote control sensors and computers?
K2 is attempted by experts using their own gear under their own power. They know exactly what risks they are taking.
This submersible was basically a rollercoaster ride that wasn't up to spec. If a participant doesn't need to know or do anything on a trip, they are going for a ride not an adventure, and they aren't expected to be safety experts in the field.
Also one of the passengers was a teenager who was concerned about going, but went along to make his dad happy. Hardly a clear eyed risk taker who was fine with the risk.
1000% this. A previous participant Mike Reiss, former Simpsons producer, did a interview a few days ago where he all but compared himself to one of the astronauts on the Mercury missions. It was nearly borderline delusional.
He even said he was well aware of the risks involved and kissed his wife goodbye not knowing if he would see her again. Just because something is insanely dangerous doesn't make you an explorer, and you're not performing in any research capacity, you're a former writer for the Simpsons and this is TOURISM. Get some perspective.
> In the end all participants consented and were aware of the risks.
They consented, but were they aware of the actual risks? That seems unclear at best, given the active concealment of safety issues and the misleading marketing that has been cited in various reports.
> There’s no absolutely safe way to dive that deep
Nothing is absolutely safe, but deep submersion diving isn’t a new field, there are established safety standards and practices (including in the latter third-party audits to confirm compliance to the former) and OceanGate uniquely among operators of manned vehicles refused to conform to either (though it marketed its subs as exceeding the standards it decided not to be certified against). And its also unique in experiencing a manned disaster.
Now, we aren’t at the point where it can conclusively be shown that those two unique features are directly connected (and practical issues with investigating a disaster at this depth may not make that practical any time soon), but, its not unreasonable to suspect that they are.
> > Now, we aren’t at the point where it can conclusively be shown that those two unique features are directly connected
> I would take that bet.
And I would agree that that is where the smart money is, I’m just acknowledging that the actual specific cause of the disaster and any connection to specific cut safety corners remains unknown.
There are a lot of tell tales in how the debris field is structured.
The fact that the two end bells are separated from the central cylinder and that the cylinder itself can't be located pretty much singles out the carbon fiber structure. The company was aware of problems with previous iterations of the hull of Titan which may have been rebuilt at least once and possibly more than once (this is a bit unclear in what I've been able to dig up about it so far). If the window blew first I would expect things to look a bit different.
I wonder to what extent gross negligence trumps the language in the consent waiver.
> There's no absolutely safe way to dive that deep
That's true, but there are (substantially) safer ways. This design should have never been used for passengers.
I really draw the line there: innovators are free to do whatever the hell they want to do with their own lives and if a professional who really understand the risks decides that they want to take those risks they should be free to do so.
But to charge passengers for a ride requires a completely different attitude towards safety. No matter what you are going to write on your consent forms. Besides being unable to properly evaluate the risks inherent in your design they will be subject to all kinds of pressure to participate which will reduce their ability to properly assess the risks.
This is why we have different classes of aircraft, and why depending on your goals you will be assessed differently by the authorities if you intend to operate one for ferrying (paying) passengers.
> free to do whatever the hell they want to do with their own lives
Is that entirely true? In a scenario like this they're going to incur tremendous costs borne by others in search and recovery, and potentially put rescue personnel in harm's way. Modulo these things being used as useful exercise and training for the military.
> This design should have never been used for passengers.
That's cheap talk. As soon as there is some major accident, some people creep up to declare: it was obvious all along. Of course it wasn't quite obvious enough for them to actually make that declaration in advance.
They didn't change the name and technically the cylinder is just another part but it suggests that the same hull was used which isn't correct as far as I read it.
I think they just didn't think there hull design would implode. In there minds the worst case is, they're stuck in deep ocean for a few hours until the backup dissolvable weights fall off and they pop back up to the surface (and then hopefully located).
From what I've read, in there minds there hull design was the best part of the sub. I inclined to believe he believed it, since the CEO frequently dove in it.
The hull was replaced because the previous one showed damage due to repeated stress cycling:
"This is shaping up as a rebuilding year for the nearly 11-year-old venture, based in Everett, Wash. The main task on the agenda is to build two new submersibles capable of diving as deep as 6,000 meters (3.7 miles), which is more than a mile deeper than the part of the North Atlantic ocean floor where the Titanic is resting.
OceanGate will take advantage of lessons learned during the construction of its carbon-hulled Titan submersible, which was originally built for Titanic journeys. Rush said tests that were conducted at the Deep Ocean Test Facility in Annapolis, Md., revealed that the Titan’s hull “showed signs of cyclic fatigue.” As a result, the hull’s depth rating was reduced to 3,000 meters.
With a new hull. But this was then also subjected to multiple dives but I'm not aware of any subsequent testing. Possibly if they had tested it defects would have shown up because that's pretty much the way this sort of structure responds to stress cycling. We'll never know unless a record of subsequent tests surfaces.
That makes sense, but to me that just means "keep dropping it until it implodes and then you can find out exactly how many dives it's good for". I still see absolutely no reason why humans should have been inside that thing. It's easy to criticize from an armchair, but goodness it just boggles my mind.
They did roughly that with the previous hull: it was used until it had to be derated. This accident was on the replacement hull which already had a few cycles on it... tested but supposedly not worn out.
Material science is hard, especially on a budget. This is definitely daredevil territory.
If it's a consumable, they should have tested at least one hull to destruction, just so they could be sure of it's failure modes.
Based on what I've seen, it doesn't sound like OceanGate had decided on a fixed number of dives. Instead they were planning to continually monitor it (x-ray scans after every dive and real-time acoustic monitoring during the dive) with the assumption that they would get some warning before it failed.
This is how they test aircraft... It's very expensive and time consuming. Pilots, technicians, all staff, must be paid. You are subject to weather cancellations. It takes years. Like everyone has said, move fast and break things!
Testing is costly in terms of time and money, particularly with a submersible. It's one thing to test a piece of code, but testing a submersible under realistic conditions means basically arranging a full mission for every test run (which is hugely expensive, requiring a support ship, etc.). There's no such thing as perfect safety, which always has to be balanced with cost. I'm not saying Rush's approach was sound (he apparently eschewed more thorough testing) but testing that submersible a hundred times surely would have been cost-prohibitive.
Also the Titan did successfully complete ~20 deep dives from what I've read, so the design was apparently sufficient to stand up to the pressure more than once, meaning even a non-trivial testing program might not have detected the problem. Unfortunately the problem (as many have stated) seems to be in the choice of carbon fiber, which (particularly when taking into account the interfaces with other materials) will weaken over time even if the initial flaws are very small. All materials experience fatigue but the problem is much worse with carbon particularly under those kind of pressures.
It's sad that they're dead, but all parties had time to brace for this inevitability. I can't imagine any engineer (save a software engineer) seeing this guy's attitude and not seeing this coming from a mile away.
You’d be surprised. I used to work at a hazardous test site and there was a lot of complacency. Sometimes it was just bad engineering, sometimes it was arrogance about their ability, or something else. It taught me we’re all humans first, and all susceptible to human biases regardless of credentials or prestige.
I really couldn't care less. As far as I can see he was exactly what's wrong with people chasing money and forgetting about the possible consequences of their attitude towards other people's lives. I'm sure his relatives are grieving, but my sympathy goes to the family of the passengers first.
As for the CEO's credentials: nature can't be fooled.
I don't know the guy, but this seems off the mark. If he wanted to get rich, spending 11 years on a money losing operation seems an unlikely choice. My take is that it was a passion project, a passion he shares with apparently a substantial number of well-to-do people.
"If you're not breaking things, you're not innovating. If you're operating in a known environment as most submersible manufacturers do, they don't break things." (8:49)
"Our rule is we risk capital, we don't risk people." (9:56)
"We used the same prepreg that's used on the 787." (11:15)
And my favorite: "When you're outside the box, it's really hard to tell how far outside the box you really are." (8:30) He does seem to be far outside the box now.
But the most significant quote IMHO is the one about "the same prepreg that's used on the 787". Like they often tell you that phone holders for bikes are made of "aircraft-grade aluminium" (which usually means it's 6061, the most common alloy). It's a strong indication of bullshit -- name dropping that doesn't have anything to do with the subject matter.
In the rest of the presentation he seems nice enough, and truly passionate about deep sea exploration. So maybe he was a cool guy, I don't know. But in the end it's his hubris that killed him and his clients.
> name dropping that doesn't have anything to do with the subject matter
This is a good point.
However, it's probably worth pointing out that in the past few decades -- at least here in the PNW -- carbon fiber availability to the hobbiest and small producer has been spotty.
I'd refer to Boeing and being the same 787 carbon fiber for my personal projects, but that's just because they're made from Boeing offcuts donated to a local University. At the time (ca 2006), even bare weave was hard to obtain from private suppliers.
Its feasible that Rush may have had help from Boeing sourcing his material, which puts comments like that in a different light.
the comment above you is correct that consumer goods will often brag about "aircraft grade" when referring to 6061. like flashlights, tools, combs, pens, cufflinks, money clips, etc.
This made me realise how little I know about alumiunium and made me summarise this from a quick wiki search:
- “2024 aluminium alloy is an aluminium alloy, with copper as the primary alloying element. It is used in applications requiring high strength to weight ratio, as well as good fatigue resistance. It is weldable only through friction welding, and has average machinability.
- “7075 aluminium alloy is an aluminium alloy with zinc as the primary alloying element. It has excellent mechanical properties and exhibits good ductility, high strength, toughness, and good resistance to fatigue. It is more susceptible to embrittlement than many other aluminium alloys because of microsegregation, but has significantly better corrosion resistance than the alloys from the 2000 series.”
- “6061 is a precipitation-hardened aluminium alloy, containing magnesium and silicon as its major alloying elements. It has good mechanical properties, exhibits good weldability, and is very commonly extruded. It is one of the most common alloys of aluminium for general-purpose us.”
There are 8 basic alloys of aluminum based on the alloying element(s) (or none for 1000, which is pure) with the 8000 serving as a sort of catch-all for various combinations that don't warrant a category all their own. The total number of formulations is quite large and the properties, machinability, weldability, various strengths, density, resistance to fatigue (and post processing options, such as hardening) vary considerably.
> It's a strong indication of bullshit -- name dropping that doesn't have anything to do with the subject matter
It means you're using a material that's been vetted over decades in life-critical applications in harsh conditions by expert engineers all over the world. Aerospace aluminums today are derived from Japanese alloys invented in WW2 and were a major innovation in metal aircraft. It's much more expensive than steel, but we use it because of favorable characteristics. Here's an overview of different aluminums and where they're used: https://www.aircraftaluminium.com/blog
The reference to "aircraft" wasn't about airplanes or submersibles, it was about how the term "aircraft-grade" is a meaningless marketing buzzword. It's obvious to me, and I imagine a lot of readers, that a submarine isn't an aircraft. I think the reference to the use of the bullshit marketing term is also obvious.
"Military grade" is another one of those marketing phrases that pisses me off. What does it even mean? That it is green and is more expensive than it should be?
I think I read a comment on HN that described what "military grade" meant: stuff made as cheaply as possible by the lowest bidding contractor that sometimes is fit for purpose.
That said, I think there are times when it does mean something. I believe military grade/milspec chips/ICs are often engineered to be more resilient to environmental factors like heat and vibration, interference, etc. If I'm wrong about that, I suspect it won't be long before we learn if I'm right.
There are some compabies that actually do test theor products according to military standards. Now, ideally they would tell you which ones. Whether or not those standards are better than theor civilain counterparts is a different story.
Occasionally, they will identify a particular MIL-STD (or MIL-SPEC) that the product supposedly complies with; whether or not there is any substance to this claim and whether or not, if you looked up the standard, it would have any bearing on suitability for the purpose the product is marketed for is a mixed bag.
In my (very short, many years ago) stint as an EE it meant that parts (transistors, ICs, etc.) were guaranteed to work within certain specs within certain operating conditions (temp, etc.).
It did not guarantee anything outside of that. Soundness of design and ensuring inputs and environmental factors conformed to the spec was up to the engineers.
Military grade does not mean it is any better built than anything else. it does however mean it is often better specified. So it does not mean anything in regards to suitability to purpose it does mean there is a document that describes the product and the product meats the requirements of the document. Which can be nice if your requirements are also matched by the document.
The problem, it is a military specification so the public may not be able get access to it.
In this context, he was talking about carbon fibre, not aluminium (though, aluminium would also be a less than ideal material to make a deep-water submersible out of).
> It means you're using a material that's been vetted over decades in life-critical applications in harsh conditions by expert engineers all over the world.
If I start using a screwdriver to hammer in nails, it doesn't matter how many expert engineers use screwdrivers. I'm using it for a purpose it is unfit for.
Just because it's aircraft grade doesn't mean that it is (or isn't) suitable for building a submarine.
Why use novel vessels when tried and true work. Why did they have to try a carbon-fiber wrapped vessel? The bathysphere went all the way down to the Marianas trench --many decades ago. Why try something new in unforgiving environments?
Why fire an engineer after he started raising questions about safety?
It seems like there was a bit of a cavalier attitude that cost five people their lives.
I don't believe that one was particularly safe in its design either? Just quoting the most colorful parts of Wikipedia's history:
- "Oxygen was supplied from high-pressure cylinders carried inside the sphere, while pans of soda lime [hn: sodium hydroxide?] and calcium chloride were mounted inside the sphere's walls to absorb exhaled CO2 and moisture.[6] Air was to be circulated past these trays by the Bathysphere's occupants using palm-leaf fans.[2]"
- "Suddenly, without the slightest warning, the bolt was torn from our hands, and the mass of heavy metal shot across the deck like the shell from a gun. The trajectory was almost straight, and the brass bolt hurtled into the steel winch thirty feet [9.1 m] away across the deck and sheared a half-inch [13 mm] notch gouged out by the harder metal. This was followed by a solid cylinder of water, which slackened after a while into a cataract, pouring out the hole in the door, some air mingled with the water, looking like hot steam, instead of compressed air shooting through ice-cold water.[6]"
- "The ocean during this dive was rougher than it had been during any of their previous dives, and as the Freedom rocked on the surface, its motion was transmitted down the steel cable, causing the Bathysphere to swing from side to side like a pendulum. As the Bathysphere descended, Barton succumbed to seasickness and vomited inside it. However, the first half of the radio transmission had already been broadcast, and neither Beebe nor Barton wished to cancel its second half, so they continued their descent.[5] ... the Bathysphere was still rocking wildly and Beebe and Barton were both bruised and bleeding from being knocked about inside it."
- "During their first test dive, they demanded to be pulled up after descending only four feet (1.2 m) because the sphere had begun to leak; they soon discovered this was because Tee-Van had neglected to fasten all of the bolts that hold the hatch shut.[2] Another problem occurred on their second test dive, during which they discovered that the lower end of the rubber hose holding the power cable and phone line had begun to deteriorate, and they spent the rest of the day reversing the hose's direction so that the end which was deteriorating would be the end above the water.[5]"
I grant you that; but that was decades ago and it went down to the Marianne’s trench. People have developed safe vessels. Why did this guy think he needed to reinvent it with experimental of unproven materials. Dunk it dozens of times into 2x depths see if it remains intact. No, the Navy or someone deemed a vessel a 3,000 meter rating. And they were like ooops, I guess it’s not good enough. Damned right you don’t just meet the minimum rating. You should have a healthy margin of safety.
The thing about the Seattle tech community is that they have no idea about building submarines, so who they think is an expert on building submarines is irrelevant.
People really need to remember that tech bros aren't really smarter than most people, they're usually just more willing to take risks.
I'm going to be very blunt here. I've seen enough interview footage in the last 48 hours to know that this guy comes off as the Elizabeth Holmes of ocean exploration. Five people are now dead (including himself) because he convinced them to climb into his Lyle Lanley water contraption and pay him a quarter of a million $ each to do so. Anyone that has sat through 15 minutes of year one engineering ethics would know what he was doing was extremely reckless and the obvious consequences prevailed. I have zero empathy for this guy.
What I don't understand is, if it imploded, why didn't the boat hear the implosion? Surely that would be really loud. Louder than the 15 min audio ping that the boat is normally listening for.
I don't know. But sea water isn't a homogeneous medium as far as sound propagation is concerned. There are layers of changing salinity, temperature etc and these can effectively cut off sound propagation. Submarines (used to?) depend on such effects to avoid detection.
Also, would the implosion necessarily be that loud? It would be like crushing a large tin really. Maybe blends in with background noise.
The size is irrelevant, the energy released is significant either way and definitely beyond the thresholds of hydrophones. During the USCG press conference today it was stated that the implosion made a significant soundwave as a result of the implosion, and I think in the coming weeks we'll hear reports of findings in regards to hydrophones which picked up the noise.
Was interested by this comment and wanted to note a few things. The Titan is significantly smaller (in terms of length ~1/10th the size although obviously displacement is the real measure)[1][2]. And the depth of the implosion is about 4x deeper[1][3]. So there are things that could definitely affect the sound signature.
Yes, and as far as I can tell it's not even certain that what was picked up from the San Juan was an implosion. But on the other hand, the Polar Prince was sitting right on top of the Titan listening for pings, and apparently it didn't hear anything.
I'm not suggesting anything nefarious, I'm just hoping someone who understands these things better than I do comes along.
The ocean is not a homogenous mass. As you go down you can measure temperature, pressure and salinity changes. These all individually and together affect the speed of sound in the water. Given the right circumstances a layer can form which bends the sound waves away from an observer. It is possible that they couldn’t hear the implosion precisely because they were on top of them. Perhaps they could have heard the implosion better if they were off to the side a few kilometers, or if they would have had a hydrophone dangling to the other side of the layer. More info on the layer. [1]
This perhaps also can explain why they routinely lost contact with the sub during dives. (And normalisation of deviance explains how they become okay with that. [2])
I'm speculating, but their ping detector may have had a filter for the frequency they were interested in. A low frequency explosion could easily have been ignored.
My guess would be that the Oceangate ship ignores everything that it's not 'expecting' to hear. I don't really know anything about deep sea exploration, but having general purpose microphones in the water seems like a bit of an oversight to me, given the marginal cost of having them.
So many things about this venture were not really considered. I am terrified that this guy was an aerospace engineer. It feels like he threw the book about engineering safety out the window.
The big one is designing the sub to travel to 95% of the expected maximum depth, leaving a 5% margin of safety. I was taught to aim for a margin of safety of (I think it was) 50% back in the day. Operating so close to the safe limit for the sub is appalling. That doesn't even include all the other warning signs about the design that were brought up.
The missing beacon on the sub, in case of loss of radio contact, is another standout. No consideration given for loss of power or anything. Consideration of contingency plans is so important.
A minor one that is really indicative of the overall attitude is drilling screws into the carbon fiber hull, possibly exposing the hull to stress fractures from both the screws and the constant weight of holding a monitor. It's... just a silly thing that could have been avoided. I'm not saying those screws are why it failed, but if you can use an adhesive to hold your monitor in place, wouldn't you rather do that then by drilling directly into the hull keeping ~100 atm of ocean out of your face?
It just makes me so sad for so many reasons. It definitely could have been avoided...
Some people saw that they had affixed things to the inside of the craft. There is almost assuredly an inner liner that is not structural that these were attached to. Just like an airplane.
> The big one is designing the sub to travel to 95% of the expected maximum depth, leaving a 5% margin of safety.
Wouldn't a a 5% margin of safety mean the sub was designed to survive at 105% of the trip's expected maximum depth? 95% sounds like the opposite of a margin of safety.
> The big one is designing the sub to travel to 95% of the expected maximum depth, leaving a 5% margin of safety.
Sorry, but this does not follow. I believe you are confused about the fact that the Titan was designed to go down to 4,000 meters, and the Titanic lays at 3,840 meters.
And because 3,840 is so close to 4,000 you believe they had no safety margin. Do I understand you well?
But the thing is when you design a submarine which can go down to 4,000m you don’t design a hull which instantly implodes at that precise depth. You add a safety margin on top of your design requirement and that is what you design for. And then using calculations, simulations and tests you convince yourself that your submersible is still safe even at that extra safety padded depth.
I’m not saying that this is how they designed it. After all it seems their engineering culture was deficient in several ways. But you simply can’t conclude that they had no safety margin because they dove close to their design limit.
Safety factors are in terms of the yield stress. So, if they had a safety of factor of 3, this means that they should be able to withstand 3x the expected stress. Pressure is linearly related to depth, so it should have been designed for 12,000 meters with a reasonable safety factor like that. Of course, this doesn't take in to account sharp impacts, which, especially for carbon fiber, dramatically change the strength requirements.
Some ballpark typical numbers for safety factor: spacecraft ~1.2, airplanes ~1.5, automobiles ~3
Yes but you also don’t want to operate so close to the safety margin. If you need to travel to 3800m, you design a sub to safely withstand 1.5x that. And then agreed that yes it should not implode right if it were to reach that depth. At least this is how I remember learning it, which I admit was a long time ago.
I think I’m misinterpreting what “rated for 4000m” means. My impression is this is the maximum safe depth the sub is capable of reaching without damage. And that they are bring it regularly to 95% of that depth.
My understanding of safety margins, as I was taught, is that one should design such that you have a safety margin of 1.5x the intended use case. In other words, for 3800m expected frequent usage, it should be able to reach a depth of 5700m.
Alvin, for example, can reach a depth of 6500m.
But you’re right, we don’t know what that 4000m means, really. I’m just assuming it means safe depth without damage.
I would be surprised if the supporting vessel would have heard (were they listening?) or recognised that. Probably from the data from other hydrophones somebody will write an article on this sooner or later.
I can't imagine it was loud: vessel was tiny, and the energy will reduce at the order of 3 quite a bit at 4 km distance. I can imagine it would be detectable with the right equipment and that this equipment is installed in the Atlantic.
Turns out the Navy heard it, based on a WSJ article. They started actively listening when notified that contact was lost, and shortly after they picked up what sounded like an implosion or explosion.
"The Navy began listening for the Titan almost as soon as the sub lost communications, according to a U.S. defense official. Shortly after the submersible’s disappearance Sunday, the U.S. system detected what it suspected was the sound of an implosion near the debris site discovered Thursday and reported its findings to the Coast Guard commander on site, U.S. defense officials said. [...] The Navy said it shared its findings Sunday with the Coast Guard, which led the search, U.S. defense officials said. " https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-navy-detected-titan-sub-imp...
It is notable how much news-coverage this received (for understandable reasons [1]) relative to the almost simultaneous disaster in the Mediterranean [2], where a shipwreck killed hundreds of people.
[1] What springs to mind: Dramatic search action well suited for live blog coverage; psychological impact of the idea of people stranded in a submarine for days; And of course the average person here is probably a lot closer to taking a holiday trip in a submersible than to taking a refugee boat across the Mediterranean.
Something about tragedies, and something about statistics...
But there's also the concern of frequency, [2] occurs more frequent than [1], people generally don't care about the people at [2] because they are "unimportant", and not prominent in any way. They are background characters on the other side of the world for many, they are not well dressed, they do not perform functions with significant influence on the broader society.
Or at least so they are perceived by the general public. They are labelled illegal immigrants, or leeches, or whatever else because people in many places can't fathom being born in a third world or very poor country and doing everything in your power to make it out.
Imagine, feeling so low, that you'd give everything, your life even, for a chance, a sliver of chance, at what others are born into.
The comparison between these two stories is being made (elsewhere on the Internet) because humans were literally still being found and fished out of the Mediterranean, alive, while entire nation states mobilized to try to rescue a few wreckless rich guys who were likely already dead.
The point being made is about misallocation of resources, not news coverage. (Novel stories will always grab more attention.)
The US Navy/Coast Guard sending an ultra deepwater ROV isn't even comparable to the Greeks actively monitoring the boat enough to take a photo of it before it capsized, let alone is anyone mobilizing "entire nation states"
> The point being made is about misallocation of resources, not news coverage.
The families of the missing rich people have the resources to fund the search. The families of the missing people in the Mediterranean obviously do not.
I lived in South Asia for a while and the thing that would strike me is the everyday catastrophes. For instance, there was a recent Indian derailment that you barely heard about here in the US https://apnews.com/article/india-passenger-train-derail-dead...
Fair enough. Same places as the Greek migrants, so I suppose we were operating with a false premise. Most things are quite well covered irrespective of whom the victims were.
I agree with your observation but Mediterranean disaster had coverage since last week at least in European news I am following.
This accident will also soon disappear from the news since we now know the fate.
How many rescue ships were deployed to the med incident? How many to the titanic? The victims/ships ratio demonstrates that one garnered exponentially more government attention.
different countries of very different sizes and capabilities were near the incidents.
the US and Canadian coast guards don't operate in the Mediterranean, and (presumably) couldn't have gotten ships there fast enough to do anything about it, anyways.
Splitting hairs here but the US Navy has several bases in the Mediterranean. Though I don’t know where vessels were related to the refugee boat or how quickly that tragedy began and ended.
I reflected on this too. I think the key differentiator is the context of the submarine situation unfolding in realtime, with action which could still be taken, and an unknown future outcome, as opposed to an event which was reported on retrospectively, after the disaster had happened.
But the contrast is still striking between both the situations and media reporting of 5 rich men vs 700 of some of the world’s poorest and most desperate people.
Both are unbelievably tragic.
The reporting on the Mediterranean disaster seems to have gone a lot quieter than I would have expected given what we now know about how the Greek authorities story simply does not match up with what actually seems to have happened. (It seems like there may have been an opportunity to prevent that disaster).
Not all countries at the same time. But one country at random which would affect that random person. The rest of the world would watch and think that it never could have happened to them, just as that random person may have thought not long before.
I think they meant trying to cross the ocean as opposed to one of the great lakes. crossing either ocean in a shoddy boat is much more dangerous than going across the Mediterranean.
The difference is when Libya collapses into civil war (or 3 governments or whatever) Libyan refugees migrate to other countries that are stable.
When China, Western Europe, or the US collapses into civil war refugees from those countries do indeed migrate. The problem is other countries start collapsing as well because they were dependent on some form of trade with those regions. As a result its unlikely there will ever be a large scale exodus of people from the US. We'll all just be survivors in the wasteland at that point.
Relocate :D In the city I was born I don’t think there is room for a couple with kids anywhere near $250k. Probably I’d need $400k or more there for any kind of suitable housing. In the city where I rent currently, maybe just barely. But my hope is to scrape together enough savings and then buy a house or flat for us somewhere in the world where $250k or thereabouts would be sufficient.
I think the idea of being trapped in a confined space kilometers under the sea has a visceral effect on the imagination that a boat voyage on the surface doesn't, regardless of how tragic the outcome is in both events. It pokes and prods many of our deep phobias.
Similar stories like the Thai boys trapped in the cave, or the Chilean miners, had a similar effect.
A bit like "Snakes on a plane". Again, trapped with your phobias.
Regarding drowning people in the Mediteranian and eslewhere, yes, there should be more, and constant, outrage. It says a lot about Western society that there isn't, that it doesn't even really make the news anymore...
Oh, there should be outrage about the kere fact we allow those disasters, the migrants and not the rich people at the Titanic, to happen. There isn't, and some news coverage is by no means enough.
But hey, we in the West are fine not worrying too much about some poor folks Africa dying at our door steps. Because doing so, would force us to face the fact that we are by no means as morally superior than we like to think, and just convinced ourselves to be with all the help Ukrainian refugees got. So, we prefer not to think about it, as a society.
Sure I do "rant", because I consider the loss of inocent life, especially easily avoidable loss, a tragedy. One that os not aligned witj our self proclaimed democratic values. But apparently, ranting is all I can do, since all EU governments seem to be OK with the status quo...
I think being trapped on an overcrowded ship, bodies pressed into you, as the ship capsizes, is also viscerally terrifying. You don't know where you are. You don't know who is around you. You have nothing except what you could've carried. You are trying to leave a downed ship with hundreds of pressing bodies. The waters are rising. There's too much froth to see where you're going.
Everyone is screaming, death is all around you. People are drowning, and in their drowning flailing limbs they are pulling others to their deaths.
[Edited to add: The migrants would've had time to process what was happening to them. There would be many long minutes of terror, suffocation, as they died. Hundreds. Women, children.]
I agree with you but I also realise it’s very hard to imagine what a proper tempest on the sea feels like if you are never experienced it on a ship. It’s an experience which is so far removed from a modern person traditional experience - a sunny summer day at the beach - that they just can’t grasp it.
It's just that experimental submarines vanishing on their way to the Titanic are much more unusual and intriguing than boating accidents. There was also an element of suspense since the fate of the sub was unknown (similar to flight MH370).
In European news both events received significant coverage.
Local news trumps global.
I am sure in Greece the Messenia migrant boat disaster got more coverage than Titan.
That said, the big factor is how sadly common migrant boat disasters are (just like liquid gas exploding in a restaurant in China and killing 10+ people, happened yesterday).
Carbon fiber submersible on the way to Titanic containing cocky inventor, plus billionaire, plus kid hits so many spots for news cycle.
> And of course the average person here is probably a lot closer to taking a holiday trip in a submersible than to taking a refugee boat across the Mediterranean.
My opinion is the complete opposite, I think it has more coverage because it's a feel good event for 90% of the world who absolutely despise rich fucks in that specific part of the dumb X rich venn diagram
I haven't seen a single post about how sad the sub story is... it's all memes and people amazed at how stupid humans can be
It's not so much stupidity as knowingly embarking on a dangerous adventure for the purpose of fun, basically.
Someone who took the trip before said they had to sign a waver which mentioned death multiple times. It's like climbing Everest, walking to the north pole, commercial space flights, base jumping etc.
The med disaster was people embarking on a dangerous "adventure" out of what they perceived as being a necessity.
Of course all lives should be regarded as being equal.
This all feels like a parody to be honest, at least previous explorers were.... exploring
Now people _pay_ to be carried on the Everest, pay for a ticket to space, pay for a ticket to the titanic, &c. There is nothing left so they fight for the crumbs, looking for the next dumbest idea on the list
Yeah couldn't agree more. "Into thin air" about a disaster on Everest describes very well how some, if not most, of the people in the group had never been anywhere near a mountain half as challenging as Everest.
Some even had brand new boots, which anyone with half a brain knows is a bad idea. A few did turn out to be tough bastards though, spending several days up there alone in a state of delirium and eventually making it back down on their own accord.
Guardian also mentioned a Mexican Youtuber having taken the trip down to the Titanic in that titanium coffin, just for clicks & views.
They died close to the shipwreck. Maybe the Titanic site will slowly fill up with corpses, just like Everest is doing.
> Of course all lives should be regarded as being equal.
Lives sure. But not deaths. Bringing yourself in a confirmed dangerous situation just for the thrill of it, even being so desperate for it as to pay what post people would dream of earning over multiple years, and then dying during this adventure ... in contrast to desperate refugees trying to escape into a better life and then dying because traffickers don't care about their survival.. Idk man, doesn't sound equal to me.
I’ve signed “you could die” waivers several times in my life. That might be more a commentary on the state of our legal system than on my level of risk-seeking.
I read that more people have been to outer space than have been to the wreck of the Titanic. Anybody who didn't think this was an extremely dangerous thing to do was lying to themselves.
> Someone who took the trip before said they had to sign a waver which mentioned death multiple times.
Just nitpicking here but this is quite normal. Any somewhat physically involved commercially offered activity has waivers to sign that mention potential death and that absolve the business from responsibility. Gyms for example do this.
Exactly. Most people are bothered to see how rich folks like this waste money when most people struggle to survive. Being paid ok in tech does not make me feel any closer to the sort that spends 250k on a fun trip.
Also the coastguards were tripping over each other to save these 5 men, while for the refugees the speculation is if the coastguard contributed to the wrecking.
The Greek coast guard gave conflicting statements about having tied a rope to the boat to try and tow it to the shore. First they did, then they didn't.
I thought to have read the boat capsized while being towed, as claimed by one of the survivors. Being towed could be an involuntary act, while throwing a line seems solely meant to help.
> The 104 survivors of the tragedy have very limited mobility and access to communications. Some of them said Greek Coast Guard vessels threw them a line shortly before their vessel capsized [1]
On a personal note. I myself got once rescued by the navy with their Zodiac. That was a mutually fantastic experience. I believe that coastguards anywhere would prefer to rescue above anything else, that is what they signed up for. I hope this dual tragedy will help the leadership to remove anything that creeps between that objective.
Sometimes I wonder what it is that enables some people to have empathy for strangers but others not. Is it mostly your upbringing? Genetics? Can people like you be fixed, or are you incorrigible?
Because they are fellow human beings struggling. People migrating illegally don't do it for pleasure. They have usually run out of other solutions.
Can you imagine having to decide to do such a risky thing? They know they risk their life doing so. Which is on top of having to leave your family, friends and the place you probably love to eventually probably find a shitty job and having to be subjected to a lot of difficulties, administrative non-sense, and everything else.
Maybe the EU has its fair share of responsibility in the causes pushing people migrating "illegally" too.
Migrants are not the issue. The system that forces them to migrate is.
I would not read too much into it. Media coverage in this context is mostly about how sensentional and novel the news is. People get lost at sea all the time, in particularly in fishing and shipping industry. The average person is very similar to those people and yet such events dont generally create international news.
It is less about the media but more about the response of officials. How many boats were send to look for a single submarine? All the way from the France? When they could have been sent to Mediterranean sea as well.
Exactly. You use a lot of resources to send help on the other side of the world for people who volunteeringly went to bottom of the ocean knowing risks and just for fun.
But you don't use resources to help people who are forced to leave their country and now are drowning in the sea.
How many boats are sent international if a fishing boat outside Thailand or Norway don't return home? What if a old transport ship goes missing in a storm?
Occasionally we can see here on HN stories about lost sailors being rescued after weeks lost in the water, or shipwrecked on some remote rock. The common theme for those stories is that there wasn't a bunch of ships that went looking for them for weeks. For every person who survived such event, many more died.
When there is a lot of media coverage you also tend to get more reaction by officials, which then generate even more media coverage. It is the same concept why a individual can create a story on HN and reach people at google/facebook/apple, while thousands of users can have an identical situation and never reach a single person from support. It not a fair system but its a very well understood phenomenon.
The response on sending rescue teams was high even before it got popular on the news. I remember reading some statements that "we sent everything we can" in the very first news.
> How many boats are sent international if a fishing boat outside Thailand or Norway don't return home? What if a old transport ship goes missing in a storm?
The problem is that there's no immediate feedback when they go missing so the search areas are too pointlessly large to even attempt SAR operations. Areas where there's lots of immigration traffic are always monitored, like the Greeks were monitoring the boat before it capsized (enough to get that aerial photo of the overcrowded decks).
The vast majority of Coast Guards aren't stretched to their limits, they're sitting there ready to launch SAR operations if anyone calls, all largely operating for free as a cheap way of supporting maritime trade. The USCG alone responds to tens of thousands of cases a year, rescuing thousands of people. Some corrupt nations skimp on their CGs but that wasn't really the case here.
There is a difference between litterally sending multiple Navies (A), sending whatever SAR assets there are (B) and actively preventing and even prosecuting private SAR assets trying to stage their own rescue ops (C).
The Titan was A, your average fishing boat or other vessel is B. And all those migrants are, and that pisses me off to an incredible degree, C.
There wasn't really a discrepancy in response though, and if you are lost at sea and have nothing to hang onto...you aren't going to last long. I saw someone ask why the US didn't send ships to look for migrants, well...that's a 10-day ride across the Atlantic & Mediterranean. Even surrounding countries were sometimes hours away.
The average human can't tread that long without a life jacket, the average is ~2-3 hours and that's in still water (to be a lifeguard you have to last 30 minutes), not a choppy ocean/sea. By the time any country other than Italy or Greece came to the location, they'd already be dead. It's tragic, but there is no discrepancy. If there were a chance of actual survival for days, there would have been a much larger response.
Also, apparently the Greeks offered aid before the boat even sank and the boat declined because they didn't want to go to Greece, they wanted to go to Italy. There are mixed reports on that though as now some are blaming the Greek coast guard for tipping the boat over by accident.
If you want something to be upset about, be upset about practically every country on Earth's broken immigration systems that cause these tragic events.
There are multiple reports, and investigations, into illegal push backs of migrant vessels by FRONTEX and, yes, the Greek Coast Guard and Navy. Enough for me to not cut them any slack anymore.
Regarding the US Navy, well, they do have a Fleet in the Mediterranean, it's not like they had to sail all the way from Pearl Harbour.
The US Navy isn't capable of rescue missions like that, the US Coast Guard is. The nearest US Navy vessel were still probably hours away, even if they were equipped. So much reaching here to find an impossible task when you have 2-3 hours to operate the rescue. By the time a US ship arrived everyone would be dead. Not to mention that requires Greece and Italy to ask for help.
One has to love how over the last decade or so, we were all convinced that all sea going vessels do not have the obligation to help others in distress. Because they absolutely do.
Also, what people also forget, the Mediterranean is under almost comlkete surveillance. So no big surprise if a vessel goes down, most of the time authorities knew of said vessel before.
The US has quite a few shops scattered around the world at all times. The 22nd, 24th, and 26th Marine Expeditionary Units patrol the Atlantic and Mediterranean.
And yet, still all probably hours away from the incident, which renders them going there pretty pointless. Especially when they aren't equipped for these sort of rescue operations like the Coast Guard to begin with.
I don't think it has much to do with refugees vs. holiday trip. Other stories of (potentially) trapped people such as the Thai soccer team or the Chilean miners received similar nonstop coverage and media attention.
Its because theres not much to do in case of the mediterranean disasaster. The thing sanked, you rescue the the survivors, then departed them back to the country of origin. Also, this happened before.
In the case of the sub, there where a chance to find them alive. This makes the story more compelling.
The one happened once, the other happens every day. That doesn't make it any less sad but that's the reason why the one got disproportionate coverage, it's 'news' by definition, it happened the first time. If it would happen every day it would definitely not be covered to this degree, plus there is the 'race against time' component which allows the news to be stretched over several news cycles.
It’s the novelty of the situation, even absurdity and even the inspired incredulity……. on the other hand the poor trying to get richer and dying trying does not create new pathways in the brain
> And of course the average person here is probably a lot closer to taking a holiday trip in a submersible than to taking a refugee boat across the Mediterranean.
The average person here might think they are, but they'd be deluding themselves.
First time I read the comparison with the Med disaster and couldn't agree more.
I'm never the first one to start whining about refugee related disasters but hundreds of women & children drowning on a boat after having been in a miserable state for days on end is just the worst. Other boats had been circling it for days and apart from providing some food & water nothing was done. Maybe an attempt to tow it, which could well have led to the capsizing.
How could such a ship have been rescued? Any attempt at evacuation would have probably led to a capsizing anyway due to people moving around in a panic, unless ... the boat was wedged between two strong boats?
I think the migrant boat disaster is horrible. But I was more interested in this missing sub because it was a bit mysterious what happened to it initially. Then it all comes out how badly built it is, how it's a death trap, etc. It's just more interesting personally. It doesn't mean it's worse than the migrant boat, it's just more interesting and I'd rather read about it.
Mysterious cases always get more traction on social media too. There was an instance in the UK where a woman went missing near a river. People were speculating for weeks about what had happened. They would travel to the location and try and be detectives. It's was insane. People said it was because she was a white woman, but I don't think it's that. It's just the mystery of not knowing what happened and a body not being found straight away after divers searched the area. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Nicola_Bulley
Same goes for the sub. It's not because it was full of billionaires. It was because it was from a company infamous for cutting corners and people wanting confirmation that it did in fact implode. It also just boggles the mind why people who are so wealthy would get in something so shoddily put together. They have the money to fund a whole expedition like James Cameron did, but they'd rather increase the risk of death by an order of magnitude.
The contrasting coverage is IMHO largely due to the novelty of the situation, and nothing to do with any moral judgement on the victims. Tragically, migrant boat disasters are common.
Do you have any details about why it was a death trap?
I watched one video that complained about off the shelf parts being used, but the two examples was an RV light (not safety related) and the gaming controller (which they had multiple back ups).
They also claimed to have been reviewed by Boeing and University of Washington. There was 7 different mechanisms that could force a return. Some of those were purely mechanical.
Clearly the sub wasn’t safe enough, but I’m not seeing anything that makes it obviously badly built.
Using off the shelf components is probably the best thing they did. You don't want to reinvent the wheel if you can help it. I don't know why the game controller is a sticking point for most of social media. It's funny to think of a vehicle being piloted by one, but they really are designed to be used for thousands of hours. Game controllers have been used in all sorts of military applications.
The issue as far as I have read is that the hull was made of carbon fibre. There hasn't been any submersible that has reached those depths before made of that material. The effect continued pressurization/depressurization had on the carbon fibre wasn't understood. Composite materials are so much more complicated to model and understand. There was no non-destructive testing to see what effect the repeated cycles had on the hull, no way of knowing whether cracks could form beneath the surface. The failure mode at depth is catastrophic, there's no room for error. Someone pointed all this out to them and was fired https://newrepublic.com/post/173802/missing-titanic-sub-face....
In response to them knowing the sub wasn't fit for purpose they opted to install a "real time health monitoring system" which acoustically checked the integrity of the hull. But it's pointless. By the time any acoustic monitoring system picked something up it would be too late, because carbon fibre just shatters into a million pieces. It's not like Steel where it can gradually fatigue, it's crack BOOM dead.
Using carbon fibre for the hull is like rolling your own crypto. Maybe you can get it to work but unless you properly scrutinize it there is most likely fundamental flaws in your implementation and it's just better to use tried and true methods. In the sub world that tried and true method is just thick steel.
The carbon fibre is interesting angle because I have seen in the last 5-10 years a change in fire fighters, under water rescue services and military to go from using steel cylinders for breathing gas (300 bar) to a composite of aluminum and carbon fibre with the same pressure of 300 bar. The benefit being targeted is the reduction in weight. Those tanks do get tested regularly but those tests might just be as pointless as in this case. If they explode they will do so with a shattering boom.
I wonder if this event will cause some changes, or if it is an expensive step in figuring out how to properly test this material.
I think the behavior of the material is probably more understood when it's internal pressure vessel. I think in general that's a much more understood problem and carbon fibre probably is perfectly fine for that sort of vessel. Similar to how a thin aluminum can of beer can be pressurized quite high, but it'll quickly buckle when poked on the outside.
> Using off the shelf components is probably the best thing they did
No. Not really. It's a horrible idea. It's irresponsible. It's negligent.
Consumer grade components are not designed for the kind of reliability and failure tolerance requirements these kinds of applications have to face every mission. A simple example of this would be no conformal coating anywhere to prevent failures due to condensation on the circuit board. Also, tin whiskers due to RoHS solder. No redundancy or failure tolerance in any portion of the design. It isn't enough to say "we have extra game controllers". That's not how you build reliable failure-tolerant systems where people's lives depend on things working perfectly 99.9999% of the time.
Also, it is a fallacy to say that millions of people use these controllers. The most obvious problem with this statement is that we have zero data on failure rates and failure modes. And, of course, nobody dies. As a parallel example, you would be hard-pressed to find toy controllers on medical equipment, even in situations where there might be time to deal with failures.
> the hull was made of carbon fibre <snip> In the sub world that tried and true method is just thick steel.
Yup. Fundamental principle: Carbon fiber is best used under tension, not compression. Not a good choice for a life-support compartment under incredible external pressure. One way I think of it is: In compression you are mostly relying on the epoxy to keep things together. Without epoxy carbon fiber will support as much compression as a common string. Zero.
I agree the electronics could be better, but from what I am understanding, even if the electronics completely failed, they could mechanically safely return to the surface.
The carbon fiber seems to be the critical nail in the coffin.
> they could mechanically safely return to the surface
That's what it sounds like.
> The carbon fiber seems to be the critical nail in the coffin.
If the CF vessel failed it would have instantaneous and violent beyond comprehension. What little reliable info is out there seems to indicate that's what happened.
> Clearly the sub wasn’t safe enough, but I’m not seeing anything that makes it obviously badly built.
A lot of this is bewilderment at the choice of carbon fibre for the pressure vessel, which is sensitive to impact damage and wear from repeated load cycles, damage is hard to diagnose, and as it's very brittle, prone to catastrophic failure. It's not commonly used for this sort of application, and there may not be good data on (1) when it would eventually fail and (2) whether you'd be able to tell before use.
As I understand, the choice was motivated by wanting the sub to have the large interior space necessary to bring along that many passengers. Deepsea subs usually don't attempt that either.
What I learned so far: porthole not rated for the depth of the Titanic, apparently no testing done on the balast release mechanisms, screens screwed directly into the carbon fibre hull, flammable interior materials, mixing three materials in pressure vessel (carbon fibre tube, titanium end bulk jeads, transparent port hole).
All more or less untested and uncertified. Throw in the reported comms issues that were common during past operations, a highly inexperienced engineering team, a culture promoting unsafe practices and you get a death trap of a vessel.
Thanks for that link, I love the way James Cameron talks about it. He knows what he's talking about. The fact people were warned just points to complete gross negligence. Everyone knew it was a death trap. It's sad.
There were a lot of issues with the design, which I found helpfully explained in this video. [1]
A major concern was intentionally hiring fresh college graduate engineers without keeping older submarine veterans on staff as well. There were some good questions raised about their breathing system. Were they just continually releasing oxygen in to the cabin to compensate for CO2, thus leading to a potentially high oxygen environment where a fire would be a major issue? Did they have isolated breathing equipment in case of a fire? After a previous dive it was noted that the vehicle was hard to visually locate even after surfacing, but it did not have a position beacon onboard, nor was it painted orange to make it easier to see. Why did they fail to include these suggested measures?
I think there was a fair bit of other concerns. I thought this video was informative and the kind of thing the HN crowd would appreciate, so take a look.
In addition to all of the specific examples already shared, the CEO boasted numerous times about flouting standard safety protocols and expert opinions.
These design flaws weren't an unfortunate mistake, they were part of a very deliberate pattern that went predictably wrong.
* Design inspired by the "DeepFlight Challenger" - but DeepFlight said their craft was only rated for one dive, and weakens with each cycle, and could not be used for five dives.
* Hull designed by subcontract manufacturer in 6 weeks - scarcely enough time to do much testing.
* In an early dive the CEO performed solo, lost contact with the surface ship for approximately one hour
* While diving with a journalist, lost contact with the support vessel for 5 hours.
* It was impossible to open the sub from inside (admittedly, this is only relevant if you first manage to ascend to the surface)
* Hull started showing showing signs of cyclic fatigue in January 2020 (they got it repaired)
* Assembly and testing procedures so sloppy they managed to attempt a dive with a thruster installed the wrong way around.
* Employee called for a stronger front window, and nondestructive testing of the hull. Company fired him and sued him.
* CEO on record as saying ship safety laws "needlessly prioritized passenger safety over commercial innovation" and that "At some point, safety just is pure waste. I mean, if you just want to be safe, don't get out of bed."
* Couldn't get certified by a ship classification society, claimed that was OK because most marine accidents are operator error not mechanical failure; and the standards didn't give them adequate credit for their corporate culture of safety.
The other thing that indicates it was a deathtrap is the deaths.
With that said, personally I support the right of people to expose themselves to the risk of death in search of adventure. Normal folks can buy motorbikes and quadbikes, millionaires can buy cessnas, why shouldn't billionaires have deadly entertainment options befitting their wealth?
> than to taking a refugee boat across the Mediterranean.
A migrants boat. Most of the people crossing the Med into Europe are economic migrants but in the past decade it has become known that claiming asylum on arrival (or at least if caught) is a good strategy so many do.
Interesting point, I wasn't aware of the distinction between economic migrant and refugee
> Refugee immigrants are unable or unwilling to return home for fear or threat of prosecution, and thus, must make a life in the country that gives them refuge. Economic immigrants, on the other hand, are free from this constraint and can return home whenever they so desire.[1]
But then further clarification of the term 'economic migrant' is also interesting:
> The term ‘economic migrant’ has no legal definition. It is not mentioned in any international instruments of migration law.
and
> The inaccurate dichotomy between ‘economic migrants’ and refugees creates two fixed categories and gives the misleading impression that only refugees have and deserve legal protection and rights at the international level.
> Yet, the reality is different and far more complex. Migratory movements are composed of various types of migrants who may have specific protection needs, even if they are not fleeing persecution or a conflict. These include accompanied or unaccompanied migrant children; victims of human trafficking; migrants attempting to reunite with their families; and migrants affected by natural disasters or environmental degradation, including as a consequence of climate change. [2]
A 'refugee' has a legal definition because this is a status that is created and governed by international treaties, which is what makes it interesting for migrants because in 'nice' countries like in Europe this means that they are protected from deportation while their claim to refugee status is processed, which can take a very long time. They are provided accomodation during that time.
All other migrants are simply people who migrate for whatever reason people move to other countries, which are mainly family and economic reasons. When people from poor countries want to move to rich countries the main reason is very obviously economic. All those migrants fall into normal national laws of the countries they move to, in general this means that if they enter without visas they face a form of arrest and deportation.
That's it. There is indeed in a clear dichotomy. The rest is purely a political/ideological point of view as to whether people have effectively a right to migrate vs. whether countries have a right to decide who to let in.
Bad things happening to well-off people gets outsized attention not because people care more about the rich, but because it knocks the wheels off one of the foundational beliefs of capitalism: that moving up the wealth ladder will shield you from the miseries that befall the poor. If being rich doesn’t protect you, then nothing can, and that makes capitalism rather meaningless.
Might not be true in this case - the very idea of people locked up in a submarine is attention grabbing - but its certainly true for countless similar laments where people will point out the outsized attention a random investment banker getting attacked would get vis-a-vis the many murders in the inner city on any given day.
I don’t think people should be too surprised that the news cycle doesn’t exactly reward the biggest tragedies. Not to mention the fact that it only became such a big story largely because so many people were dunking on the company/passengers. Unless you’re suggesting we should be spending more time dunking on dead refugees?
A better comparison is to the round-the-clock coverage of the Chilean miners who were stuck underground, and the boys who were eventually rescued from the cave in Thailand. Your comparison is apples to oranges.
The Messenia disaster was over by the time it hit the news (and it was covered extensively in the UK press), whereas the Titan situation was ongoing. Watch how quickly it disappears from the news cycle now it's been resolved.
I understand that it is difficult to speculate on why the news covers one subject or another, and certainly the other comments have a point about being trapped being scary, or people laughing at the misfortune of the powerful being good for clickbait.
I just want to say, another issue is that to be perfectly honest, we don't like to humanize migrants, nor do we want to examine our culpability in their misfortune and demise. We want to mine resources from foreign countries even if that means destabilizing their governments, but we absolutely do not want to deal with the people fleeing those places whether we had nothing to do with their misfortune or we were in some way complicit.
The misfortune of a few rich guys is much easier for us to process than the avoidable death of hundreds, which was reportedly ultimately caused by the European Coast Guard who attempted to tow the vessel and in doing so supposedly caused it to sink. [1]
Well, that's a conclusion that I suppose many expected. It's rather tragic, yeah. What I can't say I expected is the gleeful tone from:
- class warfare enthusiasts because the passengers were rich
- regulation enthusiasts because the pilot espoused weakening them
You'll see this online when a pedestrian or cyclist gets hit by a driver (along with "right of way doesn't mean anything when you're dead!" and "was he wearing a helmet?")
At some point, the personal tragedy for me is realizing that a lot of people in this world really take great pleasure in others' suffering even if those people have done them no harm. Makes me want to use the Internet less, if I'm being honest, since I don't want to encounter this kind of glee at others's suffering.
We're not allowed to "eat the rich" anymore because of the repressive nature of the neo-liberal system, so incidents like this one where not one, but two billionaires find their gruesome death is the closest to a Middle Ages egalitarian-imposing peasant revolt that we could ever get.
Sucks for the 19-year old kid involved in all this, that I agree with.
The ghoulish take are the 110,000 deaths of despair recorded in the US between February 2021 and February of 2022. The ghoulish take is this 19-year old kid from Chicago [2], definitely not a billionaire's son, saying how most of his friends and male acquaintances are usually gone by the age of 21.
You saying that there’s no connection between a bunch of rich capitalists throwing away 250k a piece to go sit in a tube and the socio-economic disaster now hitting America head-on is part of the problem.
In pure HN spirit, that of problem-solving, I don’t see a reasonably quick solution to this, on account of that repressive nature of the current socio-economic regime that I mentioned earlier.
And nice privileged use of a Latinism, I’ll give you that.
Are you suggesting that addiction, depression, and lack of opportunities are somehow not present in whatever alternative communist utopia you apparently have in mind?
Celebrating a Pakistani billionaire’s death because of the existence of poverty in America is not surprising for a tankie. Pretty on-brand in terms of ghoulishness and level of logic.
This occurred only a couple of days after a migrant boat sank in the Mediterranean, with probably 500 people dead. The people on the Titan signed a waiver that mentioned the risk of death three times on the first page. They knew the risk and chose to take it with informed consent.
The fact of the matter is that this entire story is way overblown by the news, and many people die of much more tragic (and not self-inflicted) causes every day. Give these people their Darwin awards, and let's move on.
Does the search team/agency simply eat the cost or does the cost get passed back to the insurance for the company, the company itself, or the CEO personally since he has the means to pay. Further, everyone on board has the means to pay for a recovery, should they too share some of the cost?
I believe almost all Search and Rescue is free because S&R organizations don’t want people to hesitate to call 911 (or equivalent) because of cost concerns, and have the situation deteriorate while they delay calling.
As to who should share in the cost… my take is that it’s time to discuss whether some expeditions (e.g. risky commercial tourist rides) should sign a Do Not Rescue pledge before they head out and/or self-fund a commercial rescue operation.
From anecdotal evidence, the few search and rescue units I've been involved with (all non-technical volunteer units) have been overwhelming against charging subjects, at least as a general rule.
But the considerations for something like this are pretty much entirely different, risk to non-technical rescuers is pretty minimal and the costs are just gas and the time spent on what is essentially just an unplanned hike with some extra gear.
There has been at least one case in the White Mountains where the leader of a search and rescue team recommended charging the person they rescued, because that person acted with negligence and put the lives of the search and rescue team in unnecessary danger.
There are some places where that outcome is explicitly listed on the warning signs. Less dramatically, places like Sleeping Bear Dunes list the cost for a rescue at the top to warn people that otherwise might make bad decisions;
Mountain climbers and tourists in Europe who need help have to pay for rescue. Unless they have insurance in which case insurance pays. (It is affordable).
> The mission of the United States Coast Guard is to ensure our Nation's maritime safety, security and stewardship
> We will serve our Nation through the selfless performance of our missions.
> We will honor our duty to protect those we serve and those who serve with us. [1]
In answer to your question: No. That's what taxes are for.
There could be other legal penalties if the SAR mission is prompted by negligence or illegal activity but the Coast Guard doesn't chase anyone down for operating costs.
There's more to be said, but I'd say the training experience in a real-world situation alone is probably valuable. Helps identify actual stress points in the rescue process, for example.
Effective Altruists would point out buying several castles with stolen crypto money is more effective than this search and rescue because the castle vibes improve their work on raising more money and growing the community.
You can easily find 10 people in any metropolis who are down on their luck. Spending the equivalent amount of resources on those 10 people you could achieve a lasting positive impact on their lives. Why not spend the money on those 10 people? Did Jesus teach us that a5es in submarines are more valuable than a5es in an ER or sleeping in an underpass?
You can make this argument for literally anything. It's cheaper to feed 100 kids in Africa for a month than to give someone treatment after a car accident. It's cheaper to give mosquito nets to African villages to fight malaria than to put out a house fire started by someone that ignored warnings of grease fires.
Basically everyone in this thread is in the top 1% of global wealth (not just industrialized or western wealth) and does stupid things all the time and get treatment or are rescued. Happens every day. So, the argument is really weak.
> Did Jesus teach us that a5es in submarines are more valuable than a5es in an ER or sleeping in an underpass?
No, and that's not what I am saying. The poor people you mention deserve help or assistance, not forgiveness, they did nothing wrong. You're making a categorical error, I think. Forgiveness is a separate deal from charity or inclusion or equality. We forgive actions, not living conditions.
Real-world training for the newbies, exercise for the journeymen, and teaching moments for the experts. That alone is worth my tax dollars for keeping a robust search and rescue force.
At least some of the CEO's estate should go to paying for it, but pay out to victims' families first.
> Real-world training for the newbies, exercise for the journeymen, and teaching moments for the experts. That alone is worth my tax dollars for keeping a robust search and rescue force.
This. When the shit hits the fan, and lives could be at stake, the participants in responsive operations seem to focus more intently, and the lessons learned seem to get imprinted more firmly, than when it's a drill.
(There was a reason that when Pearl Harbor was attacked, the emergency radio transmission that went out was, "Air raid Pearl Harbor X This is no drill." [0])
I suspect the psychology might be related somehow to Samuel Johnson's dictum that "When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully."
Yes I get the training aspect. My point was around charging them for this. There are other such rescue missions where our brave men and women risk their lives because of reckless behavior of some. We should at least have such reckless actors take a bigger burden where possible.
Depends a great deal on who is doing the rescuing and whether the people rescued are considered negligent. Iceland's SAR team, for example, has gone back and forth on whether to charge people because when people believe they'll have to pay, they're less likely to call for help until the situation has gotten way worse and way more dangerous for the team.
The same would happen for the fire department. Can you imagine if an investigation blamed you for a house fire, then the fire department charged you for services? Many fewer people would call the fire department, and many more would die in house fires. People seem pretty casual here about wagging the finger. Just wait until they make an accidentally poor decision and need to be rescued.
In general, certainly at smaller scale (e.g. hikers who get lost/injured in winter), they're not charged in many places unless there was clear negligence. Which is mostly how you want it to be. You don't really want people to avoid search and rescue and just hope things work out because they're afraid of a big bill.
Exactly. Same reason that, even setting aside basic humanitarian ethics, it made sense for fire departments from all over America to send their crews to help out after 9/11 even though the victims didn't fund them; the experience is well worth the expense.
You're comparing a terrorist attack (9/11) to reckless malfeasance (this sub). The more apt comparison would be of 9/11 to the Andriana disaster. It's a bit ridiculous to champion the humanitarian benefits of sending a throng of people to look for a handful of people in a very unusual situation while ignoring the larger humanitarian disaster that is far more likely to happen again (ergo far more important to practice for).
And, yes, it's a zero sum game. People looking for the five rich guys are people that cannot look for the hundreds of children trapped on a sinking ship.
At this point, we don't know that there was reckless malfeasance at play. However, there is plenty of circumstantial data to indicate that may have been the case. There was certainly an explicit and willful disregard for expert advice or battle-tested opinions. However, we don't have enough information yet (and may never get it) to conclude that was the cause of the accident.
It could be that someone/something damaged the hull (oceans and boats are notoriously hostile environments) and that created a weak spot that failed under pressure, or that some other mechanical failure occurred. However, those are both every bit as speculative as what I'm cautioning against. They are provided for illustration, only.
Could be? The whistleblower found visual defects in the carbon fiber before they even started using the sub. That's why they fired him. They eventually found more damage and repaired the hull in 2020/21.
You're assuming these searchers would actually be able to get to the sinking ship with children in time. The Mediterranean Sea (near Greece specifically) is quite far from the Titanic site. Exactly how fast do you think ships can travel?
Besides any sort of altruism, there's also fame-seeking or marketing to consider; pulling off a high-profile rescue puts you and your company's name in the news, and makes people think of you as a business that can solve other difficult problems.
Agreed. Hopefully, this will result in a requirement for "black boxes" or "flight recorders" for this type of recreational/tourist endeavour going forward. They aren't going to prevent the accident that just occurred, but they provide valuable data to prevent future accidents.
I think there is value in living in the kind of society where you know that if you are lost at sea there will be arguably irrational levels of resources thrown into trying to find you. And not just the rich either, no matter what Twitter would have you believe.
I think there is value in living in the kind of society where you know that if
you are lost at sea there will be arguably irrational levels of resources thrown
into trying to find you.
Sure, if you're rich.
And not just the rich either, no matter what Twitter would have you believe.
If you're poor you'll end up like the hundreds of children still stuck on the Andriana.
What about them? The warnings about the cave admonish people to not enter it between July and November, the group went in towards the end of June.
Oceangate had been warned by pretty much anyone with any knowledge of their efforts. They fired and sued their Director of Marine Ops who tried for stricter safety measures. They've already had to repair stress damage to the hull before the final dive. They were using parts not expected to hold up to 4000m dives, they were using flammable materials inside the sub.
The Thai team did something generally recognized as safe, and got caught up in a bad situation. The Oceangate folks did something that they'd been warned against repeatedly and consistently, something nobody thought was safe. Oceangate took every opportunity to do the wrong thing and try to profit off of it.
Insofar as wealth has anything to do with it, pedo guy happens to be pretty damn wealthy (ex financial broker). If those Thai kids hadn't caught a rich guy's attention their misadventure would've been a mere footnote.
> I think there is value in living in the kind of society where you know that if you are lost at sea there will be arguably irrational levels of resources thrown into trying to find you
I wouldn’t know, because i live in the kind of society where if you are lost at sea and you call for help but the call handler assumes that you have the wrong kind of passport they just tell you to call some other country and then hung up on you. [1]
But i would rather live in the kind of society where we spend our pooled resources to heal those who have fallen sick, than in one where we spend our pooled resources to rescue statistical anomalies. Everyone can become sick one day, not everyone will get suckered to buy a deluxe sea going group coffin by a conman.
Pretty disingenuous when those 'refugees' were simply planning on illegally entering the UK, and everyone involved knew it.
>The refugee said it was his fourth attempt to cross the Channel. During the previous three attempts French police had caught them on the beach and punctured their dinghies with knives.
Honestly didn't realize though refugees thought the benefits in the UK were better than France's.
Not disingenous at all. They were lost at sea and there were no irrational levels of resources thrown into trying to find them. There were not even rational level of resources thrown into trying to find them. There were not even half-assed-pretending-to-care level of resources thrown into trying to find them.
This is a simple observation of facts. If you don’t like some implication if it so bad for you. I don’t like it either, but I suspect we disagree in what way we don’t like the implications.
Absolutely irrelevant. When hundreds of peoples' lives are at risk, and you have the opportunity to save them, you do so. If they're doing something you fundamentally disagree with (like piloting an obviously-unsafe vessel to 4km underwater), you do your best to rescue them anyways.
Impromptu rescue sessions like this provide tremendous training opportunities. The US Navy was going to be out there sailing around anyway.
Solving an unknown problem with whoever is available on hand at that moment. Coordinating between that ad hoc group and analyzing the results afterward is a real world activity that can't truly be simulated.
Of course we'd want that. But here's a rich CEO who fired safety whistleblower. Why take all that burden? A bunch of rich people who were lost at sea - we could charge all of their estates for this.
That’s not a sound argument. I would like the government to give me a billion dollars. That doesn’t necessarily mean I’d like the government to give a randomly selected person a billion dollars.
What's your definition of reckless? Were the boys stuck in the cave in Thailand reckless? Should we not have rescued them? Where is the line of who is deserving of our sympathy?
The Thai boys got stuck when rains came too soon. They were in cave where they were allowed to be and followed usual seasonal rules. They were unlucky.
The owner of subversive bragged about safety being useless, punished employee warning about safety ossies, by all reports pushed the luck again and again and his missions had track record of failures and issues.
> how we (the society) justify the shared costs incurred in searching for people involved in such a reckless mission
Nobody asked me if I want to pay for it or not. So i don’t feel that the “we” is justified. But if they would have asked me i would have voted to not move a finger unless some private entity (the company or the families, or literally anyone who wants to) pays for it.
They went out of their way to do something knowingly recklesly dangerous, and the cost of any rescue attempt is enermous.
I understand. I’m not doubting that. What I’m saying is that I don’t need to justify anything. The people who have control over spending the money or not need to justify it. And since that is a very small set of people I don’t feel it is fair to ask how “we “ justify it.
But even in a hypothetical where the government sent out a snap poll saying “Sup citizen. 5 fellas lost in a sub. Need $140m for rescue attempt. Send yay or nay.” I would have responded with “nay”. So even in that hypothetical I wouldn’t feel I need to justify why we should spend money to rescue these people. (By the by, this hypothetical sounds crazy, but we could totally have this kind of direct say in matters. We have the tech for it.)
So who gets to arbitrate whether some activity is "unnecessarily" dangerous? I'm sure I do things that some people who mostly stick to good weather urban activities would consider unreasonably dangerous.
Here in the alps, if you have an injury hiking and need a helicopter ride then you are required to pay for the ride (normally a few thousand euros). I assume it's the same if you're lost.
yes, same in Canada afaik. seems quite plausible to me that some of these bills will be sent to OceanGate, we don't know. ofc their ability to pay is another question.
As someone who isn't very reckless, if I'm ever in trouble I'd love if people would search for me without trying to debate exactly how reckless I was being.
Then recoup what you can from me or my estate if you determine I was reckless after the fact, when you have plenty of time to evaluate the facts.
Ah, in fact, search & rescue organizations are pretty outspoken in their view that compensation is never sought from the people they rescue. It's a heavily-discussed topic and they are really steadfast in this view. Our provincial organization BC Search & Rescue Association actually published a series of videos on this subject, where they go into quite some detail about the rationale behind different arguments and why they've settled on this stance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sR6hxFphCSc (and more info and links to the other videos at https://bcsara.com/no-charge-for-sar/ )
You now get to have a say in how someone else lives their life because you are held financially responsible for the consequences of their own actions. Aren’t government services wonderful?
The Navy gets to learn, perhaps make good use of the information learned in the future. They occasionally need to conduct rescue and other times recovery missions and this could help inform those missions in the future.
Maybe it makes sense to think of it as something similar to insurance. We pay into it (through taxes), hope we don't need it, and really appreciate it when we _do_ need it.
Even if it doesn't balance out or make sense financially, I'm much happier living in a world where we care about each other rather than one where we're weighing the value of saving a life.
I had this same thought when watching The Martian. If you're unfamiliar, an astronaut is accidentally left on Mars. The story is about how he survives and the immense measures those at NASA and the CNSA go to just to save one life. It's an inspiring thought.
so let's say you're in an implosion event at 5000 ft.
Do you feel it? The brain stays alive for 20 seconds after your heart stops. I would imagine your skull doesn't get crushed because fluids are only a tiny bit compressible with that much pressure
I imagine your ribcage would collapse, stopping your heart immediately
Besides the "what about this other accident with 500 victims!!!", "these people are dumb", and the "look how they ignored safety!" comments, I can't help but be amazed at how events like this make people crawl out of the woodworks spouting complete falsities as if they're facts. I've seen so many boneheaded comments over the last few days that I don't even know how to list all of them out, from people saying that Titanic is "relatively shallow" in the ocean, to people speculating that the passengers may have drowned as opposed to being /literally/ instantly vaporized. I think, per usual, this whole event has gone to show just how quickly (some) people assume an authoritative position in areas they have absolutely no expertise or knowledge about. Rant over.
would they be vaporized or instantly compacted? my morbid curiosity kind of wants to see what would happen to a body under such insane pressure conditions.
As I understand it: the pressure vessel was full of air, and at the moment it failed, that air-filled space became the equivalent of the cylinder of a 2-stroke engine, instantly heating as the air compressed.
You probably meant diesel engine. The compression pressure of those is around 300-500psi, and that's sufficient to heat the air to a few hundred degrees and ignite the injected fuel.
For comparison, what happened in this sub was 10x that pressure.
(Yes, 2-stroke diesels also exist, and sound absolutely amazing.)
Much higher than that. The external pressure was ~6000psi, but water has inertia. The peak pressure as the bubble imploded was many orders of magnitude higher than that.
Those are two different meaning of the same word though, and the one in your usage is not specifically nautical, so I’m not sure it qualifies. But a good pun nonetheless.
Ah -- I was confused for like 10 minutes by this comment, since technical divers have gone as deep as 1,000 ft without "anymore than a wet suit" and commercial divers go beyond 300 feet all the time. It isn't the absolute pressure that's the problem (in this video)
> to people speculating that the passengers may have drowned
In layman terms “drowned” simply means that you died under water. It is not a sophisticated statement about the manner of anyone’s passing. People in the know understand that on a submarine you can die of hypoxia (if they mismanage the oxygen), or die of hypothermia (if they get stuck on the bottom with an intact pressure vessel, but no electricity) or die in an implosion, or burn to death in a conventional fire. In an everday conversation these all would be described as “drowned” by virtue of dying underwater even though none of them are what a coroner would report as drowning.
I really don't think that's true at all. I consider drowning to be inhaling water and being unable to breathe, not just any death that happens underwater, and I imagine most people would think the same.
Sure. The people who said they have drowned probably think the same. But it doesn’t mean that they have carefully considered all the possible failure modes of a submersible and postulating that one which leads to a drowning is the most likely in this case. It expresses more a vibe that the speaker thinks they are dead.
But why not make it more concrete. Can you find a single example where someone says that they have drowned and the speaker means it as a carefull engineering analysis regarding failure modes, as opposed to a general vibe of “they dead”?
Who died and made you the authority on layman terms? I'm pretty sure most people if they heard "drowned" would assumed that it was because they had water in their lungs
> Who died and made you the authority on layman terms?
Fair. I'm not an expert on it or anything. But I do listen to how people speak, and what they mean. Many people are using words loosely.
I searched on twitter for tweets with the term "drowned". Scrolled through a few hundred, and filtered out the ones which were talking about the Titan incident and which said or implied that the people on-board "drowned". I found 5 such tweets. This is of course not an exhaustive sample, but is what I have now.
Here are the five tweets (please don't harass any of these people, also I'm not endorsing these tweets in any way)
Do read them. Do you have the impression that these people considered the failure modes of a submersible and concluded that the people on-board died due to a slow leak filling up the cabin and their lungs filling up with water? Or it is more likely that they use the word "drowned" as a loose shorthand for "died under water / died due to the sea"?
I think they more likely did the second. Either never considered how one dies on a submarine, or they were writing without care for exactitude. In fact I have evidence for this second one in one of these cases. Devin_Young_ who claims to be a veteran submariner and he was called out[1] in a later tweet for the implications of the term "drowned".
His answer was "I used “drowned” loosely. You are correct; it would be violent, and instantaneous.".
Also NagaSlateTTV used the hastag "implosion" right after calling those lost "drowned". Which to me implies that they are using the term in a more general way, rather than precisely per the definition.
There's some merit to this. The hatch not opening from the inside means that even if they did manage to reach the surface of the ocean, if they didn't find their way back to either their own mothership or something else capable of opening the hatch from the outside they still would have died due to lack of oxygen when the oxygen ran out.
It apparently had dissolving straps on a ballast so it would (almost) surface on its own in case of issues.
If it wasn’t an explosive event they would have been stuck just under the surface with no way to get out. That said, opening a hatch in that scenario would be an absolute last resort anyways. It’s not like the people that went overboard on the Titanic lasted long and it’s in the same exact place.
I’m working on the right way to express this correctly but it seems to me pretty reliable that willingness to comment in public on any topic makes it much more likely that the commenter is demonstrably wrong / an extremist.
There was never an indication the comment was supposed to be excluded from the generality. If anything, this thread is just showing it to be more likely (me included). The only way not to show it as such is to get an actual expert on the topic to post an informed opinion with reasoning or citations. This, as the original comment suggested, seems much less likely than us continuing to talk about it instead :).
You absolutely can - so long as you don't get other people killed in the process. The CEO of this company convinced customers to join him on his death march, which IMO is a worth crying about.
The problem was they sold tourist trips in this deathtrap. Sure, do whatever you want by yourself, if it hurts only you. Selling this as a product, by tapping into the existing market for adventure tourism was borderline evil. The difference with this and generic adventure tourism is that this was about as survivable (I guess) as a round of Russian roulette.
> OceanGate’s submersibles are the only known vessels to use real-time (RTM) hull health monitoring. With this RTM system, we can determine if the hull is compromised well before situations become life-threatening, and safely return to the surface. This innovative safety system is not currently covered by any classing agency.
Given that Stockton Rush risked and lost his own life, he must have believed these words. He ignored pleas from others in the industry that what he was doing was unsafe. What was he thinking?
It's an interesting question. (One of very few on this subject that are really interesting.)
Those who cause progress to happen to some extent have to have something in them that causes them to ignore conventional wisdom. Because they're swimming against the current. And if they succeed it may well pay off, both in credits and financially.
Montgolfier brothers, Lilienthal, the Wright brothers and so on, and that's just a small slice of aviation. Every one of them went against conventional wisdom and the laws of physics as they were known or suspected to be at the time.
But there is a final arbiter, and those are the real laws of nature, and it's first order derivative: materials science. And this is where it gets much more complex. To design something that can work is an accomplishment in itself, even if it works only once. That one mr. Rush can chalk up as a victory. Where he fails is to take into account the fact that safety knowledge is written in blood and that the difference between 'device safe enough to take passengers on' and 'device safe enough that I, the builder/designer will travel on it' is very, very large. And if all of the industry, including some of your own employees say that you are doing it wrong and you still persist, and risk the lives of others then you are crossing over into irresponsibility, rather than being a pioneer.
Whether or not he realized this himself seems a foregone conclusion: he likely thought this was all perfectly safe and those others were needlessly concerned but they were simply more aware of the real risks involved than he was. Fine line between 'god complex' and 'innovator'.
This makes me wonder how we went from Wright brothers to commercial flight. Despite being the longest Wikipedia article I've ever seen the Wright Brother's wiki doesn't seem to cover it. Maybe it's a poorly defined question.
Florida man [1]. More seriously, you have to remember that this was in a time before there were a million rules, regulations, and lawsuits for everything. The first commercial airline was a man with a plane, likely largely "self built" (whatever that means in a time before aviation industrialization), who started offering flights in Florida across a peninsula. It worked, it was profitable, there was a market - commercial aviation was born.
> The first commercial airline was a man with a plane,
The Florida Man you linked was the pilot for two other men [1], the first commercial air service was Delag operating Zepplin airships .. followed by Aero Rt in Hungary .. then followed by [1] in Florida.
I can't (right now at least) determine if Aero Rt was operating airships or airplanes ... so you may or may not be correct wrt planes at least.
Yeah, I'm only referring to airplanes, and Florida man was definitely the first there. But zeppelins, hot air balloons, and other methods of air transport obviously came well before airplanes.
> Every one of them went against conventional wisdom and the laws of physics as they were known or suspected to be at the time.
This is not true of the Wrights. Their first step was to gather together all the known aeronautical knowledge at the time. They relied on them, too, until they discovered the coefficient of lift was off by a factor of two. Then they built their own wind tunnel to determine the correct value.
They also discovered there was no theory of propellers. So they developed their own theory, which turned out to be 90% correct. Their propellers were twice as efficient as their contemporary experimenters were. This means they only needed half the horsepower! A tremendous advantage.
Correcting knowing knowledge always comes with the chance that what you're observing may be invalid for reasons you aren't considering. So in this regard you're largely agreeing with the post you're ostensibly arguing against. Everybody else says e.g. the coefficient of lift is x, I say it's y - is not just a "discovery", but going against the conventional knowledge of laws of physics of a given time.
It's not like the aviation enthusiasts prior to the Wright Bros were just strapping aluminum sheeting to their backs and jumping off cliffs. Well I mean maybe somebody somewhere at some time did do that, but for the most part people always try to start from a basis of what's known, and work their way up from toy experiments. Same with this story, or even the 'flat earth guy' who was launching himself in rockets. [1] For those who didn't 'get it', the flat earth stuff was just an overtly transparent schtick for interest/funding.
> Correcting knowing knowledge always comes with the chance that what you're observing may be invalid for reasons you aren't considering.
They set up experiments to prove the existing theory was wrong. That is completely counter to what you write. Nobody else did that.
> It's not like the aviation enthusiasts prior to the Wright Bros were just strapping aluminum sheeting to their backs and jumping off cliffs. Well I mean maybe somebody somewhere at some time did do that, but for the most part people always try to start from a basis of what's known, and work their way up from toy experiments.
That's pretty much what the Wright's contemporaries were doing. Trying random things in a disorganized manner with eyeballed designs. It's very, very different from the Wrights who:
1. researched all available material
2. identified the fundamental problems that must be solved
3. developed prototypes to solve each problem
4. put the results into a new design that worked
Nobody else was doing that. And that's why the Wrights succeeded, and the others failed miserably. Later, when the Wrights took their Flyer to Europe, they astonished the European aviators by literally flying circles around them. (European designs could not turn.)
Mindlessly strap some wings on yourself and the only place you're going is six feet under. In aviation everybody was building on the shoulders of those that came before them. That included Wright Brothers who heavily credited Otto Lilienthal among others. You could draw a tree of aviation and it'd be going back with Clement Adler, Percy Pilcher, George Cayley, and many more names. And these guys were all brilliant inventors, engineers, and entrepreneurs in their own right. All engaging in a similarly rigorous process, but starting with less available information at their fingertips.
In many problems where we're all just standing on the shoulders of those who came before us, somebody's going to eventually get high enough to grab the flag. And while that final achievement deserves distinguished recognition, marginalizing the merit, impact, and ability of the countless individuals holding us up is just crass.
> And while that final achievement deserves distinguished recognition, marginalizing the merit, impact, and ability of the countless individuals holding us up is just crass.
Nothing I wrote marginalizes Lilienthal. I never wrote that the Wrights started from zero. In fact, I wrote that they researched all the available knowledge of flight from the start.
Wind tunnels and a scientific approach to aviation were already in use in Europe at the time. In fact you can see all of the steps you list in the work of the early British pioneers e.g. Sir George Cayley.
"About 100 years ago, an Englishman, Sir George Cayley, carried the science of flight to a point which it had never reached before and which it scarcely reached again during the last century."
Except Cayley did not solve the problems of powered, controlled flight. If Cayley had, then Langley's Aerodrome would have flown.
Curtis later attempted to prove that the Aerodrome could fly. He did this by adding a new wing, a working control system, and a much more powerful engine. I.e. he cheated.
I'm not trying to diminish the accomplishments of the Wrights, I'm just noting that applying the scientific method to flight had a significant history before the Wrights came on the scene. I felt that your earlier comment gave the impression that this was the unique key differentiator for the Wrights, but I don't think it was as simple as that.
Sorry to reply to myself here, but I found this comment really interesting on the difference between 'tower jumpers' and 'arm whirlers': https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36412847
None of the Wright's contemporaries used the scientific method to develop a working airplane. AFAIK, nobody else had done a directed research and development program to create controlled, powered airplane.
I did not claim that the Wrights invented the scientific method.
Whether Edison's research labs were true R+D programs is debatable. From my reading about them, Edison eschewed theory and did not understand what he was doing. He just tried things until he found something that worked. His efforts to develop the multiplex telegraph, while eventually successful, showed little understanding of electricity. The same with the light bulb - trying thousands of materials for the filament instead of trying to figure out why the filaments didn't last is going around the horn.
Edison invented the vacuum tube by accident, and did not recognize what he had done, because he didn't understand what he was doing.
That said, Edison certainly was a great inventor and deserves the credit for his inventions. But it was not the modern way of doing things - the Wrights get the credit for that.
> None of the Wright's contemporaries used the scientific method to develop a working airplane. AFAIK, nobody else had done a directed research and development program to create controlled, powered airplane.
There were certainly contemporaries of the Wrights attempting to use the scientific method to develop a working airplane.
By the time of the Wright's success at the end of 1903, The Aeronautical Society of Great Britain was already 34 years old. They sponsored the first wind tunnel in 1870 designed by Francis Wenham, one of their members who had also given the inaugural lecture on flight, and the principle by which lift is generated by wings.
This was very much a scientific society, with regular reports and lectures and its members were scientists or engineers, not crazy people strapping sheets of metal to their arms and jumping off towers.
"The organization has never been a large one, and probably years will pass by before the importance of its twenty-nine years of work will be fully understood and appreciated. Even as the missal painters kept art alive during the Dark Ages, so has this band of men kept aeronautics alive during the years in which their branch of science has been by the many regarded almost as a pseudo-science." James Means, Aeronautical Annual Vol 1 (1895), a passage probably read by the Wright brothers, after receiving the journal from the Smithsonian.
Percy Pilcher ('a pale serious fellow, with a great bent for invention, and a brain that was razor keen.') completed his powered triplane in 1899, based on his own research, correspondence with Lilienthal, his work with Hiram Maxim (who had legal battles with Edison over which of their companies invented the light bulb in the US) and correspondence with Octave Chanute (who advised the Wright brothers to choose the mid atlantic coast for their experiments and visited them) and his correspondence with Lawrence Hargrave. It is assumed that the triplane would likely have needed some modification to be practical but it was never tried, since he died in a glider accident before he got chance to try it.
This is just one example of a person at the time who did extensive research, communicated with many of the other key figures of the time, and built lots of prototypes to test approaches. There were lots of others too.
If your point is just that the Wrights succeeded first, then I agree, but to characterise all these characters as approaching the problem in an essentially stupid way is just not true, if anything, I'm struck by how much the early aviation pioneers seemed to be in touch with each other and understood some of the basic principles of aerofoil design and the science behind how lift works.
None of those other experimenters identified 3-axis control as a critical problem to be solved, none of them knew about adverse yaw, none of them built a series of prototypes aimed at solving each problem, and none of them built a controllable powered airplane.
Keep in mind that the Wrights built a series of gliders, each one was to test a particular aspect of the flight problem.
Pilcher's designs were not capable of flight:
"Cranfield built a full-sized working replica of Pilcher's aircraft, but, based on wind tunnel tests with a scale model, they made several alterations to Pilcher's original designs, which they speculated Pilcher would have made, including filling in cut-away sections of the wings to increase the wing area, and therefore lift, and adding a swinging seat to aid control of the aircraft through shifting body weight; a refinement developed by Octave Chanute, which they believed Pilcher would have been aware of. They also added the Wright brothers' innovation of wing-warping as a safety backup for roll control. Pilcher's original design did not include aerodynamic controls such as ailerons or elevators."
and he left no lasting contribution to aeronautical advancement.
It is interesting, however, how many people assert that Wright's rivals designs would have / could have flown, and they set out to "prove" it by modifying those designs by incorporating the Wright innovations.
Besides that, the fundamental reason these competitors could not get into the air is pretty simple. The Wrights had a propeller design that was double the efficiency of everyone elses' propellers. This means the Wrights doubled the effective engine power. Still, the Wrights could not find an existing engine with the needed power/weight ratio, and so they designed and built the very first lightweight aero engine. The Wrights also were the first to create an efficient wing cross section. It still required a much bigger wing than the Wrights originally anticipated.
I.e. even tossing aside the lack of control the rival machines had, there is SIMPLY NO WAY they had the power/weight to get it off the ground. They didn't have the engine, the propeller, or the wing section.
P.S. Even a brick shithouse will fly if you attach a powerful enough engine.
I don't consider myself an expert on this topic, but from my reading, some of what you're saying is correct, and some of it is not.
My disagreement is not at all about whether the Wrights had their own insights and strengths or can justly claim priority to have the first human carrying powered and controlled aircraft. I know it can seem like I'm doing them down in some way, but I do not intend to. So, I recognise their advances and their focus on building their vision of an actually useful flying machine.
Where I disagree is when you say things like:
> Keep in mind that the Wrights built a series of gliders, each one was to test a particular aspect of the flight problem.
as if that were unusual. Almost all of the names I mentioned in my previous comment did exactly that too.
We probably disagree on precisely which of the Wright's achievements meant a significant advance on state of the art (some of the advances you mention were being systematically investigated by others too), but my main point of departure from you is really just the apparent characterisation of the Wrights contemporaries as not following the scientific method and approaching the whole problem in a haphazard and isolated way.
My own impression of those days is of a small group of pioneers that were in touch with each other, building on each others advances, and with incomplete but growing knowledge of the science behind what they were trying to do.
> my main point of departure from you is really just the apparent characterisation of the Wrights contemporaries as not following the scientific method and approaching the whole problem in a haphazard and isolated way.
It's not about the scientific method. It's about a directed research and development program. I just don't see any of the other experimenters doing that. I didn't say they were isolated, either, but they were haphazard. They tried to leap right from an unproven theory to a working airplane. Their airplanes were not even close to flying, which is evidence of their haphazardness. The other evidence is the lack of a trail of documentation - notes, calculations, drawings, etc. Disorganized and haphazard, absolutely.
Which one of them identified control as a crucial element of flight, for example? Which one did the calculations to show they had enough power? Heck, which ones did the calculations to make the airframe strong enough? The Langley Aerodrome fell apart on launch, Pilcher died because his glider broke up in flight. Many copied bird designs rather than trying to figure out what the right shape should be.
An airplane is not like inventing a car, where you can just attach an engine to some wheels, eyeball the whole thing, and it'll work. You have to do the math and the engineering. Eyeballing something that looks like a bird and sticking an engine on it will NEVER WORK.
> with incomplete but growing knowledge of the science behind what they were trying to do.
One of them would have eventually succeeded, just like the Japanese eventually figured out how to make a Samurai sword after centuries of trial and error, but no knowledge of metallurgy.
And that is why the Wrights were different.
You can see the Wrights' notebooks in the Smithsonian. Take a look at that, and you'll see they are not mere bicycle mechanics. We still have the 1903 Flyer, too, and people have built exacting replicas of it - that fly, and fly the way the Wrights described how it flew.
The only rival with some documentation is the Aerodrome, and we know it does not fly for many reasons. The other rivals left next to nothing behind, and nobody has successfully gotten a replica (built from guesswork) to fly at all.
> He developed a triplane that was to include a 4 hp (3 kW) engine.
Pilcher's design did not have remotely enough power, showing he hadn't done the math. The Wrights calculated a needed engine engine power of 8 hp, but the result produced 12 hp.
It's worth adding that they invented the first successful control system for an aircraft. [0] Personally I think that was the single most important step, because it enabled their aircraft (including test gliders) to fly safely.
They needed all of them to fly. All modern aircraft can trace their designs back to the 1903 Wright Flyer, and none of the other contenders. It's a stunning achievement, and all at a cost of $1,500. (The Langley project cost $50,000 and solved none of the problems.)
In my not-so-humble opinion, the 1903 Wright Flyer is the start of the modern technological age.
It was an outstanding advance. Personally I rate them as the greatest engineers of all time, but I'm also very fond of aircraft. Would be interested to hear opinions on who else might be considered peers of the Wrights.
In an interview with James Cameron, he mentions[1] that he and other submersible industry experts believe that the system worked and that they did in fact have warning, as they had dropped the weights (which were found far away from the debris field) and were attempting to resurface before the implosion:
[1]: "This Oceangate sub had sensors on the inside of the hull to give them a warning when it was starting to crack [...] they probably had warning that their hull was starting to delaminate. [...] It's our belief - as we understand from inside the community - that they had dropped their ascent weights and they were coming up trying to manage an emergency." https://youtu.be/rThZLhNF_xg?t=472
Just fucking insane. In aerospace everyone knows that when a crack starts, IT'S OVER. Crack propagation is extremely rapid after that once nucleation has occurred. Your only hope is to prevent nucleation sites in the first place. Except it's extremely hard to characterize fatigue limits without tons of testing and even for metals there is wide variation for identical parts, not even getting into composites. Which of course we all know they did not do.
Air pressure decreases as you go up at a far lower rate than water pressure increases as you go down. Air pressure at 30K feet is ~0.3 Bar compared to 1.0 Bar at sea level.
Water pressure increases by 1 Bar every 32ft (10m) of depth. To see the equivalent change in pressure in water (0.6 bar) as you see going up to 30K in the air, you only have to go down ~20ft (6m). The pressure on the submersible at 9000ft (2750m) is 276 Bar.
F16s and other planes with composite body panels will sometimes lose a panel due to water buildup between layers of the composite. The water freezes between the layers popping the panel loose from the frame or retainers holding it in place. That is usually not a life-threatening problem (though not desirable). A crack in a submersible pressure vessel at more than a couple hundred feet is usually fatal.
There may have been monitors that detected structural issues in the hull (nucleation above), but at the pressures that the Titan was operating at, the amount of advanced warning is likely very, short--_maybe_ a second or two, if that. Probably not enough time to notice and reduce the pressure on the hull in any meaningful way.
The slow-motion porthole cracking you see in movies like "The Abyss" is a fiction created by Hollywood for dramatic effect. The reality is far more likely to be like water freezing in a pipe: everything is fine until it isn't.
The pressure the pipe exerts on the water inside of it keeps the water in liquid form until the temperature drops below the temperature/pressure equilibrium (~10F/-12C for residential copper pipe in the US). At that moment, the super-cooled water transitions from liquid to solid virtually instantaneously. <poof>.
The pipe analogy is the opposite of what would happen in the submersible: the pipe explodes due to internal pressure, instead of implodes due to external pressure. But the pressure going from sustainable to unsustainable in very short order is the same.
Cameron implies that the system did detect a crack in the hull, giving them at least a few minutes of warning.
Obviously, a few minutes isn't enough, but the point is that the occupants were likely aware something was wrong because of this system, as opposed to being vaporized without having enough time to comprehend their reality.
I only take issue with saying that the system worked. It didn't work, since it was designed to detect failures well in advance which it did not do. Almost only counts in horse shoes and hand grenades.
I wonder if they knew they were doomed or whether Rush was telling them not to worry to the very end. Personally, I think I would have rather been vaporized without the minutes of terror beforehand.
Consider Charles Lindbergh. A lot of people thought he was crazy:
1. trying to fly the Atlantic
2. flying without a relief pilot
3. flying with only one engine
4. flying without a radio
I don't recall if he had a life raft.
Previous attempts had resulted in disappearing forever, and being incinerated in a fireball on takeoff.
BTW, during WW2 the air crews ferried their own B-17s across the Atlantic. Quite a few left Newfoundland and were never seen again. There was no rescue if they went down. Navigation was still primitive. My dad (navigator) was immensely pleased that they hit Ireland within a mile of their goal.
In addition, weather models weren’t nowhere near as good as they are now (thus hard to estimate wind correction over long flight). And radio beacons / stations were off due to the war as well. However, given enough fuel, it’s pretty hard to miss England if you go roughly in the right direction.
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 342 ms ] threadThough they could not confirm that it was really the sub (they probably thought that it was, but they can't officially say it).
The latter is more probable to me as it has never been tested under water for more than a few hours at a stretch.
This will also be consistent with your banging hypothesis which was only heard after a day or two when it got lost. And also with the fact that no immediate sound disturbance was registered with the controlling ship.
I of course would very much hope it imploded way before any psychological trauma was inflected on the passengers, but sadly I think the most consistent hypothesis with the little data we have is that it got lost and went astray for around two days then imploded.
They got lucky with that until they didn’t.
They even fired a guy for whistle blowing about the porthole.
It’s a shitshow from start to finish.
"It imploded later" requires at least two failures, first of power/comms, and THEN of the structure itself.
Occam's Razor
It imploded later requires only one failure (the structural failure), just as the relatively short time duration option requires only one failure. Right away is also a later event.
We have no way of knowing what its structural true condition was in terms of whether it was more likely to make it a very short duration or something more like a day.
is only good as a heuristic for finding which hypothesis to test first.
It's basically a scientist's "where there's smoke there's fire".
Wouldn't an implosion be really loud?
"Lost then imploded" explains both by adding only a small extra assumption so by occam's razor is strictly superior to imploded straightaway as far as I can see.
My money is on simple catastrophic failure of the hull and it not being detected either because the private company is run by jokers who weren't listening for it or because they have been running around like chickens with their heads cut off because the CEO and paying customers just died and they don't want to have to report that to the family, government, media, insurance company, etc... Either explanation is plausible, but I'm slightly more inclined to go with the second simply because they were actively trying to communicate with the sub when it happened and it seems so improbable that they could miss it.
As for the banging sounds heard days later, there are a thousand possible sources of those, especially with a dozen or more other vessels on the scene. Anything from a buoy with a loose part clanking away, to some waves breaking and clapping on the surface, to a whale slapping its tail, to extraneous noise from one of the search vessels or its equipment, to other sources of sea life making a racket. It's a bit like trying to listen for the buzzing of a bee in a basketball stadium with a game going on. Any signal you get is far more likely to be something else, but when you have literally no better options, every signal, no matter how unlikely, is worth investigating. Then they report they investigated and found nothing, and in a bit of target fixation, people assume it must have been people in the sub. Understandable, but it's not necessarily the most likely/logical conclusion.
> The latter is more probable to me as it has never been tested under water for more than a few hours at a stretch.
That's not true, they've successfully reached the Titanic several times over a dozen or so expeditions. Mike Reiss (a famous writer for The Simpsons) said his trip reached the Titanic but got lost for most of the ~8 hour trip, but that another group on his trip had several hours to explore the Titanic.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65957709
https://unsungscience.com/news/back-to-titanic-part-2/
is there more information on these dissolvable ties? or their redundant ballast systems?
https://unsungscience.com/news/back-to-titanic-part-1/
Excerpt from the transcript:
But what if the hydraulic system breaks? Well, then they have roll weights.
KYLE: Ah, so, we’ve got these weights here on the side, these are roll weights, we can actually roll the sub and those come off, and that gains us some buoyancy to come back to the surface.
These are pipes that sit on a shelf that juts out from either side of the sub, held in place only by gravity. If everyone inside the sub shifts their weight to one side, the sub tips enough to let these pipes roll off.
If that doesn’t work, there are ballast bags, full of metal shot, hanging below the sub.
KYLE: These bags down below, we drop those off using motors and electric fingers.
OK. But what if the electronics go out, and the hydraulics fail, and everyone inside has passed out unconscious?
KYLE: There’s fusible links within these that actually can dissolve and come back in time if it’s drop off.
Fusible links are self-dissolving bonds. After 16 hours in seawater, those bonds disintegrate, the weight bags drop off automatically, and you go back to the surface.
You'd think - but past passengers have said that when they dove they lost contact as well.
Mutiple trip passengers said they lost contact every time.
So multiple anecdotes of loss of contact with the same vehicle without an implosion. The jankiness of this operation continues to be discovered bit by bit.
ETA:
https://abcnews.go.com/US/former-titanic-submersible-passeng...
David Pogue seems to concur with this [1]. He saw them lose track of where the sub was located (wrt to the Titanic wreck), but he said the support ship never lost the ability to communicate with the sub.
[0] https://bleav.com/shows/what-am-i-doing-here-with-mike-reiss...
[1] https://twitter.com/Pogue/status/1671524465736335366
That indicates a certain blase, routine attitude to communication loss.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RAncVNaw5N0
This is more concerning, given that metal fatigue is an understood phenomenon (1).
(1) https://www.faa.gov/lessons_learned/transport_airplane/accid...
...With titanium hemispheres at each end, so some sort of poorly understood titanium carbon-fibre interface.
That would mean it had two mostly independent failures (which is less likely than one).
The only way it wouldn't have already surfaced on day 1 is if it got stuck on something (and lost power, unlikely), or it imploded.
https://community.sw.siemens.com/s/article/what-is-a-sn-curv...
If the were too cheap to design and build it properly then they were too cheap to check for wear and tear properly.
A sub is subjected to static stress mostly. Quite a lot actually at these depths. And having it certified for 1.3 km hints to over stressing.
As was pointed out, the submersible is pretty large and its a essentially a large cylinder which induces stress in the middle. Usually you make deep sea submersibles out of a sphere or spheroid because you don't have this failure modes.
It isn't surprising it failed. They were strong claims that the company did do enough test, rejected safety advice and even had the CEO claim that at one point the titan wouldn't be able to reach the titanic because it (a model maybe?) had experience a pressurization failure. To say nothing of the materials they were using.
Just comically bizarre that anyone involved in the project thought it would somehow survive let alone be safe.
So saying it got lost and imploded after a few days solves two problems. Explains why there was no implosion noise originally, and that the banging heard afterwards was the implosion. Also it has a history of losing contact in its previous tours.
Why would they be listening? They would be looking at a device that was communicating via SMS or some radar screen at best.
> and that the banging heard afterwards was the implosion
Every 30 min?
We don't know that. There's a chance a noise was recorded but it wasn't made public in order not to compromise rescue attempts.
Weren't there a lot of boats and other resources listening once it was reported missing?
It's one thing for the tender to not hear an implosion when no one else was following this excursion. It seems harder to explain no one hearing an implosion when a growing number of resources were trying to detect any signs of activity from the sub.
I watched most of the press conferences and don't think I heard anyone ask about it. But hearing loud noises across thousands of miles is certainly within the U.S. military's capability.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOSUS
https://www.amazon.com/Red-November-Inside-U-S-Soviet-Submar...
I mean the thing was a tiny 7x3m cylinder located 700Km from the nearest coast...
Crossmatch that with the time of loss of communication and it's safe to assume that it's it.
Without any actual knowledge, I imagine that a ship or sub could be festooned with hydrophones, enabling it to detect faint noises, but also to determine their direction from phase information.
Here's a naval study where they measured underwater sound propagation: https://www.navymarinespeciesmonitoring.us/files/7514/2780/4...
They found that a 10lb block of C4 exploding produced ~210db of underwater sound. If we use that sound level as an approximation of the implosion of 200 cubic meters of submersible, which seems not completely unreasonable, then we can use the inverse square law to calculate the perceived sound far away.
Halifax, NS is 1100km from the Titanic wreck. A sound that is 210db at 1 meter, is 89db at 1100000 meters. Boston is 1700km away; at that distance it would be 85db.
85db is really quite loud. You would be able to hear that, if you were underwater and paying attention.
If the implosion was instead, say, 180db, then it would have been 55db in Boston harbor. Still easily detectable by instruments.
For reference, when divers are performing construction using e.g. rock drills, those commonly reach 170db. The implosion of close to 200 cubic meters of air seems like it would produce a louder noise than a rock drill.
A former employee claims they were fired after brining up concerns about safety. The glass apparently was not rated for the depth required to see the titanic.
IMHO this was a get rich scheme the two founders spun up that went sideways. They spent the absolute minimum on safety and repeatedly cut corners on the sub in order to get it up and running, then charged people a ton of money to take a trip down deeper than the sub was clearly capable of going.
Perversely, a bunch of near-disasters can reduce people's concern and make them less likely to demand fixes because "it did that last time too and everything turned out okay" is a powerful rationalization.
Meanwhile, smart organizations have decades-ago stopped tracking (primarily) "Time-Lost Work Accidents" and replaced that with tracking "Close Calls".
I've seen prominent signs for "N Days Since a Time Lost Accident", and more recently "X Days Since a Close Call".
Sadly, it is so obvious that this CEO clown was doing everything possible to avoid experienced people ("not as inspiring to hire 50yo white guys as hiring young upstarts") so he could overrule any safety or redundancy concerns, firing people as soon as they raised things like "this porthole window is only rated to 1500m and we're going to 4000m", using cheap scrap scaffolding as ballast, and completely ignoring any kind of redundancy in case something went wrong. He seems to have gotten a just end, but his deceived customers didn't deserve that.
In the absence of a proper means to report "That could have been bad" as you say it can cause normalization. But it's understandable that you don't implement something like ASRS when you haven't solved most of your "That was bad" problems. If you regularly have CI failures due to the code not even compiling, "We need more unit tests" isn't top of the list of your problems.
https://twitter.com/Pogue/status/1671524465736335366
http://resource.npl.co.uk/acoustics/techguides/seaabsorption... -- here is a quick calculator for sound loss by distance. I think actual geography is important too but from understanding whether or not it's hypothetically possible, it certainly looks like it.
For example, at the default inputs we see .061 db/km absorption. This is at 1khz. Higher frequencies attenuated more and lower frequencies less.
I have no idea what frequencies an implosion generates, but given that, a sound at 120db might still be 60db 1000km later. Certainly seems possible and in fact given what we have seen from the US Navy (detecting imploding soviet subs in the middle of the pacific ocean) it seems totally possible to me that this small sub could be detected if microphones were places in quiet spots offshore of the continental US and Canada.
I think we don't have enough information to rule out that this was detectable.
Also, I wonder, if sound of explosions propagate that well, can one install multiple sensors to detect and map source of gunfire and artillery positions in realtime? (I hope I haven't disclosed NATO military secrets here).
I would think another failure mode could be water rushing in without the overall structure catastrophically failing, which would actually relieve pressure on the structure as it happened and be much less energetic.
"The Spencer-built composite cylindrical hull either was repaired or replaced by Electroimpact and Janicki Industries in 2020 or 2021, prior to the first trips to Titanic."
Solid 5inch thick carbon composite OR a sandwich design with thick outer facesheets of carbon fiber? I suppose under that pressure not much would take the hydrostatic loads other than carbon, but that seems thick compared to everything I've seen made out of composites.
I think it was in Sub brief YouTube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dka29FSZac&pp=ygUJc3ViIGJya...
https://www.compositesworld.com/articles/composite-submersib...
...since that article is from 2017, it is not clear that this was the unit that actually failed.
Not saying they are related at all but I am reminded of this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VSS_Enterprise_crash
Composite Overwrapped Pressure Vessels (COPVs) are fairly common in cases where a pressurized system needs to be relatively lightweight (e.g., spacecraft). To your point though, the failure mechanisms can be hard to model.
For a sub you have the opposite problem, which carbon fiber is very weak at.
What motivates this idea?
Not only does it explain nothing, it requires additional explanation.
"Coast guard gets report of lost sub and searches for a while".
Why would you turn that into
"USN knows that a sub imploded. Did nothing observable. Coast guard gets report of lost sub and searches for a while."
I looked at the link, I can't see any reason to interject into that more capability than was demonstrated. It may exist, it may not. There is no reason to comment on additional capabilities based on this event.
Whether they did or not, nothing would presumably change about the Coast Guard conducting search-and-rescue/recovery operations (since they still don't know for sure what happened). Worth pointing out that private explorers, led by Richard Garriott (aka Lord British, apparently), complained that they had optimal rescue equipment but got pushback from the U.S. officials:
https://archive.is/HXtFn
> “Magellan has received mixed signals, first hearing from US Gov to get ready, waiting for plans, then getting told to stand down,” Garriott wrote in an email sent to Vice Admiral William Galanis, commander of Naval Sea Systems Command, U.S. Coast Guard Rear Admiral John W. Mauger, who is leading the recovery mission, Congressman Lloyd Doggett, and Representative Eric Swalwell on Wednesday afternoon.
Again, hard to know if this is just standard operating procedure or not. If it's the case the U.S. govt already had things figured out by now, then it makes sense they weren't going to expedite Garriot's group, given that the search effort had already resulted in the loss of 1 (maybe 2) search vehicles:
> In addition, at least one ROV, possibly two, was damaged or destroyed during the search-and-rescue mission—a testament to the difficult conditions currently facing rescuers.
A lot of people are saying sounds travel far under water that's true.. but laterally and not between the typical layers of the sea.
Not to mention that these hydrophone systems are at critical choke points not littering the ocean floor uselessly.
It seems motivated by a sci-fi understanding of the physics.
Don't get me wrong things like this happen as cover ups. In this specific instance it seems driven by nonsense.
Rather than any information specific to this event leading to the conclusion that USN can.
This is the same reasoning "UFOlogists" use to insist area 51 has aliens.
1. Aliens must exist.
2. US must be able to detect any aliens.
3. The US must be covering up that aliens exist.
I don't believe I said that. You can draw your own conclusion from the fact that it is within their capabilities to detect, localize, and to some extent classify a wide range of sources in this region of the ocean.
What you won't find is a lot of information about those capabilities in the public domain. Just consider that what _is_ known tells us that we had these capabilities in the 1950s, and that they were continuously improved upon throughout the cold war. This is not Area 51 conspiracy speculation; it is bread-and-butter NRL stuff that is more than half a century old at this point and is classified for good reasons.
As far as I can see not only is the answer to that is "nothing" but the claim itself is non-falsifiable.
Detecting extraterrestrial aliens requires technology that is not publicly known. Therefore, it is not at all logical to compare "hearing an imploding submersible in the Atlantic" to "detecting aliens/UFOs"
You've got to be kidding!
* submarines make loud noises when they implode
* the navy can hear loud noises underwater
* the submersible is thought to have imploded based on debris
therefore,
* the navy heard the submarine implode
[0] https://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/explorations/16challenger/wel...
Doesn't matter, I was curious why people were speculating this and that's clarified.
You believe that USN would detect this, and it's not motivated by any factor in the story. And a conspiracy to cover up capabilities is the only way you can sustain that belief.
Let's assume that in our current reality, U.S. agencies did not detect an anomalous sound. So what we've observed is how they would operate if they had zero foreknowledge or data other than the initial report to the Coast Guard.
Now imagine the alternate scenario in which Navy or NOAA buoys pick up a suspicious sound near the Titanic. There might be a flurry of U.S. gov activity (e.g. communication between NOAA, the military, and intelligence agencies) to make sure it's not a Russian sub, but that would be completely hidden to the public, and for all we know, is something that happens relatively routinely.
In this alternate scenario, what would change about how the Navy, Coast Guard, or any other U.S. official has responded? Coast Guard rescue ships would still conduct search-and-rescue, the Navy would still send a deep sea salvage ship. You honestly think the Navy would volunteer information about an intelligence report that, as far as they know, may or may not be related to a now-missing civilian sub?
Maybe they kept it quiet to not reveal the satellite was still operational? I doubt it given the current situation, mostly likely it'd be all over telegram and we'd have known about it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot#Analysis
https://archive.is/pSpem
> The Navy began listening for the Titan almost as soon as the sub lost communications, according to a U.S. defense official. Shortly after its disappearance, the U.S. system detected what it suspected was the sound of an implosion near the debris site discovered Thursday and reported its findings to the commander on site, U.S. defense officials said.
Instead they leaked it once the debris was found?
As for why they revealed their foreknowledge now? I don't speak for the military, but admitting to it vaguely, well after the fact is a significantly different situation than talking about it at the time and making it actionable intelligence. Furthermore, something may have leaked to a journalist, who then pressed them to make some kind of answer.
Are you aware that there is, in fact, a such thing as "classified" information? If you'll pardon me linking to that hotbed of conspiratorial thinking, the Cornell Law School, here's some of the basic, completely open, law covering such things: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/798
Where on Earth do you get the idea that everyone in the world is operating in a regime where they tell you everything you want to know simply because you want to know it?
You are operating at personally dangerous levels of naivety, like, levels that are going to cost you money when you fall for a big scam because you thought someone was just informing you of a great money-making opportunity, as everyone always does when they find a way to make money. Or worse. You're light years beyond "rejecting conspiracy theories", you're operating on a Theory of Mind that has no visible correspondence to the real world. This is not how the world works. People and organizations do not rush to reveal everything they are, everything they can do, everything they know, to everybody, all the time, for free, simply because it would be really nice, and the military least of all!
I asked what about that link made them think that. The answer nothing.
They were making up explanations about how to maintain a pre-existing belief.
I've seen a bit of discussion around time of release, especially around it being a putative "distraction" from the Hunter Biden news stories, but that doesn't make any sense; those have been going on for a while now and will continue to go on for a while regardless of this. What I see here is roughly the expected speed of the military internally deciding this is safe to release, through several layers of bureaucracy, all of which are concerned about being court martialed if they are too excited to say "yes" without making sure their butts are 100% covered. I'd even call this a surprisingly fast release, honestly, probably because the physics of this are such that they weren't fooling very many people (and none of the ones who really mattered), except, apparently, psychphysic.
/r/UFO must be leaking.
A complete non sequitur to assume it was detected with no observable action taken.
Yesterday the Coast Guard spokesman [0] said he hadn't even heard the notion that the banging noises were made at regular 30-min intervals, even though Rolling Stone published a leaked DHS report the day before [1], something which completely dominated the news coverage and gave people hope that there were survivors. When directly asked about most anything, the officials frequently demurred. Giving out the least amount of info necessary is their standard operating procedure, not a conspiracy
[0] https://www.dvidshub.net/video/887852/coast-guard-partners-h...
[1] https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/titani...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_ARA_San_Juan
>On 23 November the Argentine Navy said an event consistent with an explosion had been detected, on the day the submarine lost communications, by CTBTO seismic anomaly listening posts on Ascension Island and Crozet Islands
>The organization had been asked to analyse data from the search area by the Argentine government on the week of the disappearance, but no leads had materialised until 22 November when the CTBTO informed the government.
>The Navy added that it received information on the explosion on the afternoon of 22 November, adding that it would have concentrated search efforts in that area had it known sooner.
- Pro: increased chance of saving a few people's lives
- Con: risk of leaking info about U.S. sonar sensitivity
I.e., the decision would depend on the magnitude of the "pro" and "con" probabilities.
The actual Pro would be "minor calibration opportunity for our secret sensor network".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOSUS
Relays don't really work because you'd need a LOT of them and they'd all have to keep themselves positioned within like 30 meters of each other which is very hard with ocean currents. That's with very low bandwidth VLF radio.
The real reason is that they were stingy as fuck and that it's mildly impractical which outweighed their complete disregard for safety.
Those also carry electrical power to supply the inline repeaters on those cables. If the cable does not have repeaters, it wouldn't need this, and the shielding could be greatly reduced.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-short_baseline_acoustic_...
https://archive.is/pSpem
U.S. Navy Detected Titan Sub Implosion Days Ago Underwater microphones designed to detect enemy submarines first detected Titan tragedy
WASHINGTON—A top secret U.S. Navy acoustic detection system designed to spot enemy submarines first heard the Titan sub implosion hours after the submersible began its mission, officials involved in the search said. The Navy began listening for the Titan almost as soon as the sub lost communications, according to a U.S. defense official. Shortly after its disappearance, the U.S. system detected what it suspected was the sound of an implosion near the debris site discovered Thursday and reported its findings to the commander on site, U.S. defense officials said. “The U.S. Navy conducted an analysis of acoustic data and detected an anomaly consistent with an implosion or explosion in the general vicinity of where the Titan submersible was operating when communications were lost,” a senior U.S. Navy official told The Wall Street Journal in a statement. “While not definitive, this information was immediately shared with the Incident Commander to assist with the ongoing search and rescue mission.”
>Rush planned to pilot the sub himself, which critics said was an unnecessary risk: Under pressure, the experimental carbon fiber hull might, in the jargon of the sub world, “collapse catastrophically.” So OceanGate developed a new acoustic monitoring system, which can detect “crackling,” or, as Rush puts it, “the sound of micro-buckling way before it fails.”
https://worldwide.espacenet.com/patent/search/family/0776658...
I don't suppose there is a huge line to license this technology.
[1]: "This Oceangate sub had sensors on the inside of the hull to give them a warning when it was starting to crack [...] they probably had warning that their hull was starting to delaminate. [...] It's our belief - as we understand from inside the community - that they had dropped their ascent weights and they were coming up trying to manage an emergency." https://youtu.be/rThZLhNF_xg?t=472
Stuff like this can not be done without risk.
Hopefully future subs will have more safety features.
It should be safer, but everything is done to a price point and I'm sure those on board recognised the risk of such an expedition.
Optimist.
I don't think Covid is by any means "just the flu", but I definitely think the risk of dying from it is significantly less than a visit to the Titanic.
https://twitter.com/MikeReissWriter/status/15450925299718184...
https://bleav.com/shows/what-am-i-doing-here-with-mike-reiss...
Repeatedly cycling carbon fiber in compression is a bad idea, and a CEO that throws out the rulebook and shows a very cavalier attitude to safety is fine if it is just you on board but with paying passengers it is utterly irresponsible.
I'm quite curious about this, too. I'm not so sure. I think even if you are not an engineer, it should be quite easy to understand how under-tested this vehicle is compared to, say, a commercial jet airliner, and how much more difficult the application is at the same time. These were business men running companies of some size. It should come with basic work experience to reason about how proven processes or articles are.
I think it's more likely that the threshold for "you know what? let's take our chances" works differently for different people.
For example: I would never get LASIK eye surgery, safety statistic be damned, because the consequences in the unlikely event of failure are too large for me. And yet many other people know the data just as well and make a different call.
We're comparing technology where safety is measured in incidents per hundred million miles traveled to one where the total number of annual travelers can fit into a single jumbo jet.
Even helicopters have a fatal accident rate that's at most 1 per 100,000 flight hours (in the US at least).
This sub seems to have a fatal accident rate of 1 per 1,000 hours at best
Challenger's disaster was the 25th shuttle flight.
Columbia's disaster was the 113th shuttle flight.
I'm pretty sure you could find large numbers of people who would happily climb on board a shuttle mission today, even knowing that history.
For policy purposes, killing people has a cost that can be estimated by the statistical value of a human life (especially if the people are volunteers with full knowledge of the risk.) The value of a human life is about $9 M (which comes from estimates of how much government spending is needed to save 1 life, for example by medical care, installing guard rails on roads, etc.). If there was a 2% risk of death of the seven crew on a flight, this would have added $1.26M to the expected cost of a launch. This was small compared to the actual cost of a launch.
Viewed another way: a $900 M (say) shuttle launch would be killing 100 statistical people each and every launch (in the sense that the money spent on the launch, if spent elsewhere, could avoid 100 deaths). If the results of the launch are worth that many statistical deaths, why not .14 more?
[0] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/1461368.stm
But I still hope that this will bring some innovation - in form of stricter regulation for tourism.
Just in our solar system, we have found evidence of oceans on Saturn’s moons Titan and Enceladus; Jupiter’s moons Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto; Neptune’s moon Triton; and on Pluto.
If we want to explore these oceans we will need to understand how to build lightweight subs that can tolerate extream pressures.
This tragedy will help humanity explore the solar system. I for one salute the explorers who died they have helped push us all forward.
I'm sad for everyone that died TBH. The website for OceanGate was taken down, but when I took a look yesterday it was full of stuff about how their pedigree and NASA/MIT tech, etc. I can see myself buying that, I'm not exactly a marine expert.
Not to mention it went down there something like 40 times already? It's not really fair to assume the passengers would have known the things that have come out since the submersible went missing.
Most damning to me, is that the sub's design was derived from Virgin's DeepFlight Challenger, which was scrapped because they could only be sure it was safe for a single dive due to the carbon composite hull.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeepFlight_Challenger
As a final point, one of the victims was a seasoned explorer (Paul-Henri Nargeolet) and Titanic expert, having gone on multiple prior expeditions. Kind of arrogant to assume we'd all know better and somehow have all this knowledge that has come out since the sub disappeared.
From an engineering standpoint, Titan didn't have any safety features at all. What any sane engineer would recommend as a last-ditch backup system Oceangate relied on as a single-point-of-failure.
No phone. No beacon. Budget bluetooth controller and touchscreens. Electronics you'd expect to find in an RV. All from a CEO who flaunted his corner-cutting and apathy towards safety.
We should never do this again.
After this, anyone boarding a future tourist sub to the Abyssal Zone or deeper is asking for it.
This isn't quite true. It had multiple redundant ways to drop ballast, for example.
What I would say from what I was able to find out (and with some familiarity of safety engineering processes from work; I make cars) is that it's safety-concept was very spotty. It had solutions to some problems, but also large gaps in the safety concept. Safety was not addressed in holistic fashion.
It's interesting to compare this with solutions found in other subs. For example, Titan had four different ways to drop ballast, but from the list I saw, all of them required manual intervention by a non-incapacitated crew and electronics to be working.
On Cameron's Deepsea Challenger--by another rich guy who funded a vanity dive, and relying on homebrew innovations in material science--ballast was held by corrosible wire that would be corroded by seawater in a set time, so the sub would eventually surface automatically. Ballast drop was also triggerable remotely by an acoustic signal, more reliable than radio. The available info is pretty bad, but Titan may not have had those solutions in place.
I'm very much out of my depth (no pun intended) on naval/submarine engineering, and I'm hoping for someone with better knowledge to extend that comparison somewhere.
Would an iPod glued to the inside that played yellow Submarine by the Beatles.
At what range would that be detectable? How long could it last?
Edit: even better this banger on loop https://youtu.be/uzR5jM9UeJA
'FSD' scam killing people and the myriads other problems aside:
1. https://www.autoevolution.com/news/we-need-to-talk-about-tes...
2. https://www.slashgear.com/1075194/whats-up-with-teslas-whomp... https://www.flickr.com/photos/136377865@N05/albums/721576584...
I wouldn't even buy a used carbon fiber road bike.
> Debris patch was found by an ROV from the Horizon Arctic, a Canadian commercial vessel which arrived last night near the Titanic wreckage site.
> It was loaded with support equipment and was also carrying an Odysseus 6k ROV that can reach depths of 6,000m.
https://www.bbc.com/news/live/world-us-canada-65967464?at_bb...
(Submitted URL was https://twitter.com/USCGNortheast/status/1671907901542211584)
1) hydrophones heard it implode at the same time it lost contact
2) it took until early 6/22 to get a deep-diving ROV on site
3) once the ROV got to the bottom, it swiftly found the debris from the implosion as expected
EDIT: Looks like the US Navy heard it happen, as per the WSJ:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-navy-detected-titan-sub-imp...
EDIT2: HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36439661
https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-navy-detected-titan-sub-imp...
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12224913/Top-secret...
kind of funny pun...
“I wanted our team to be younger, to be inspirational and I’m not going to inspire a 16-year-old to go pursue marine technology, but a 25-year-old, uh, you know, who’s a sub pilot or a platform operator or one of our techs can be inspirational,” said Rush.
Fucking idiot CEO, took 4 innocent people with him. Aero, naval, automotive, all have a a history written in blood, and all those rules and regulations aren't to hinder innovation but to save lives based on what we've learned from all the people who lost their lives in the past.
Arguable...but which government? They were operating in international waters, and it's not like the UN runs an Ocean Engineering Safety Police Dept.
(And, so long as you keep your rape and murder within your ship - that is also a feature. If you are a crime victim on a cruise ship, and the cruise company feels that looking into what happened to you is not in their own business interest... OTOH, you or your survivors may be able to sue the cruise company for damages in a shore-based court. Google for the obvious if your want to see stories about that.)
You're thinking only of FSD. That is a legitimate observation. But objectively, Teslas tend to score highly for safety in independent tests.
Tesla is one of the safest car brands to drive, SpaceX has yet to kill or maim anyone.
Fucking idiot CEO, took 4 innocent people with him. Aero, naval, automotive, all have a a history written in blood, and all those rules and regulations aren't to hinder innovation but to save lives based on what we've learned from all the people who lost their lives in the past."
I agree, except maybe on the notion of "innocent billionaire". They too usually have a history of blood. Except maybe the 16yo tho. Maybe.
"50 year old white guys have a lot of experience but would cost a fuck ton of money. I prefer to exploit, er, um, employ, 25 year old white guys and gals because they are about 1/4 the cost."
When you take all the BS justifications out of it, that's really what the guy was saying. Elon Musk school of capitalism. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
EDIT: "Hide yo kids, hide yo wife; the karma snatching Tesla fanbois are rife"
Here, it’s in compression, not tension. And its light weight doesn’t matter.
So it seems it's more a matter of cost and passenger space than just weight alone.
From their perspective it kinda made sense even though its not safe at all.
If they could they probably still wouldn't have done so. The founder who was onboard the Titan was known for calling safety regulations unnecessary and a barrier to "innovation", like a window only rated for a depth of 1300m used at 4000m.
It probably did, but unfortunately, I think the window of time was not enough the return to the surface (perhaps milliseconds, but who knows)
Carbon fibre is a ply. Plies are much harder to nondestructively inspect for flaws. That is an immediate, obvious risk in a use case involving cyclic pressure of hundreds of atmospheres. It is also brittle, so strain deformation does not occur nearly as much before fracture.
Welds are a vastly more well-understood feature that is possible to easily design around and - more critically - inspect afterwards. Metals also stretch before snapping, which is why you can go and measure the spacing of links on your bike chain and know when it’s time to replace it. All of this makes through-life maintenance and inspection much easier.
Carbon fibre was an incredibly poor design choice, selected to prioritise cost over safe operation.
If the hull itself failed, however, given the way carbon fiber fails, finding the hull in many pieces seems to be the expected result.
> the submersible was designed to reach depths of 4,000 metres, but Lochridge said the passenger viewpoint (window) was only certified for depths of up to 1,300 metres
The carbon fiber hull was a much bigger concern.
Slacking this hard on safety for a submarine engineering company should not be tolerated in our rapidly advancing industrial society.
39 to beam up.
When was the last time an investor handed an additional $10 million check for 0% to a startup to improve and test their safety systems before launching? Instead their usual mandate is "launch yesterday or die". Which is okay for a SaaS platform or grocery delivery app, but not a deep sea vessel.
Today's version of capitalism is every bit responsible for tragedies like this. While the CEO is directly at fault for certain things, the system is equally at fault for raising and educating a CEO (and huge numbers of post-2000s CEOs) to be like that.
Hypothetical users of the SaaS platform or grocery delivery app who find out later that their personal information wasn't handled with the appropriate safeguards might disagree with that one.
> Today's version of capitalism is every bit responsible for tragedies like this
Correct.
There’s a lot of sleight of hand with confounding governments and financial systems, however.
You can move fast and innovate in life-critical systems so long as you prioritize the engineering and testing.
This event reads like nature going "no, seriously, you monkeys aren't anywhere nearly as clever as you think you are".
https://www.forbes.com/sites/katherinehamilton/2023/06/21/oc...
(already submitted minutes ago)
I live in this little personal bubble.
Believing with great confidence that the edge of my bubble and the edge of reality are one and the same is actually quite empowering.
Those who Dunninger Kruger with greater intensity tend to win.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230619161930/https://oceangate...
>Why Isn't Titan Classed?
[...]
>Classing assures ship owners, insurers, and regulators that vessels are designed, constructed and inspected to accepted standards. Classing may be effective at filtering out unsatisfactory designers and builders, but the established standards do little to weed out subpar vessel operators – because classing agencies only focus on validating the physical vessel.
[...]
> The vast majority of marine (and aviation) accidents are a result of operator error, not mechanical failure.
Did they not consider that the reason for this fact is, oh I don't know, maybe because the vessels have passed the checks for mechanical integrity?
You can't make this stuff up...
> When a submarine implodes, a variety of fairly ugly things will happen to the crew. If we assume that a pressure hull implodes at 2000 feet (~60 atmospheres), the pressure will increase from 14.7 to about 875 PSI almost instantly. In the parts of the submarine that have volumes of trapped air, it would be like being inside a diesel engine cylinder when begins its compression stroke.
> Anything flammable would burst into flames until a huge wall of water slams into the area and snuffs it out again. The impact of the water would cause significant injury to anyone unlucky enough to still be alive and there would be no time to suffer the effects of oxygen poisoning or anything else.
> As others have stated, most human tissues are fluid-filled and are for the most part, incompressible. Human lungs and sinuses would be crushed instantly and the immense shock would render them unconscious immediately. Of greater concern would be the surge of incoming seawater, bulkheads, decks, heavy equipment, motors and other random bits of equipment being slammed into the crew at high velocity.
> Essentially, the crew would be killed several times over in less than a blink of an eye.
and from another answer:
> When a submarine hull collapses, it moves inward at about 1,500 miles per hour - that’s 2,200 feet per second. A modern nuclear submarine’s hull radius is about 20 feet. So the time required for complete collapse is 20 / 2,200 seconds = about 1 millisecond.
> A human brain responds instinctually to stimulus at about 25 milliseconds. Human rational response (sense→reason→act) is at best 150 milliseconds.
> The air inside a sub has a fairly high concentration of hydrocarbon vapors. When the hull collapses it behaves like a very large piston on a very large Diesel engine. The air auto-ignites and an explosion follows the initial rapid implosion. Large blobs of fat (that would be humans) incinerate and are turned to ash and dust quicker than you can blink your eye.
> Sounds gruesome but as a submariner I always wished for a quick hull-collapse death over a lengthy one like some of the crew on Kursk endured.
---
While specifics differ, it would be over very fast.
For this case: To put it simply, picture an unexpected scenario where an airplane plummets from above and lands directly on top of you. The impact would be quite painless.
> Chimpanzees can withstand even longer exposures. In a pair of papers from NASA in 1965 and 1967, researchers found that chimpanzees could survive up to 3.5 minutes in near-vacuum conditions with no apparent cognitive defects, as measured by complex tasks months later. One chimp that was exposed for three minutes, however, showed lasting behavioral changes. Another died shortly after exposure, likely due to cardiac arrest.
Then there was this oops:
> In 1965 a technician inside a vacuum chamber at Johnson Space Center in Houston accidentally depressurized his space suit by disrupting a hose. After 12 to 15 seconds he lost consciousness. He regained it at 27 seconds, after his suit was repressurized to about half that of sea level. The man reported that his last memory before blacking out was of the moisture on his tongue beginning to boil as well as a loss of taste sensation that lingered for four days following the accident, but he was otherwise unharmed.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/survival-in-space...
Dying in a submarine would be very different. The pressure differential in space is a single atmosphere. Water increases by about one atmosphere every 33 feet. At Titanic's depth it's ~ 368 atmospheres of pressure. Reddit discussion from 3 years ago:
https://old.reddit.com/r/submarines/comments/gy1wc6/what_exa...
> The collapse of a submarine pressure hull happens quick, just 37 milliseconds in the case of the Scorpion. The incoming water had a velocity of about 2,000 mph. [...] Over such small time scales, there is no time for the water or the steel hull to absorb any heat from the rapidly compressing air inside of the submarine. Because no heat is transferred from the air to the water or hull, the compression is adiabatic. [...] The collapse halted when the air pressure was approximately equal to the water pressure at 1,530 feet, which is 4,630,000 Pa. [...] 1,122°F.
That was at 1,530 feet.
Contact was lost with the Titan at 1 hour and 45 minutes into its dive. A typical dive to the bottom took it 3 hours. So it was likely at least halfway to the bottom (6000 feet). Its implosion would have involved even more spectacular forces.
They were dead before they knew what happened, incinerated and pulverized. There are no bodies to recover.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Titan_submersible_inciden...
See "Why the USS SCORPION (SSN 589) Was Lost 50 years Ago"
https://www.iusscaa.org/articles/brucerule/scorpion_loss_50y...
buckling delaminations -- espescially when alongside honeycomb or similar substrates -- very much looks like a 'crumpling'; unless you want to classify all epoxy matrix failures as a 'shattering', but I think that's far too generous given the variety of failure modes.
[0]:https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Compressive-failure-mode...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zz95_VvTxZM
Is this actually true? I see it being repeated everywhere but there is a lot of mass in a human body. Can 100 milliseconds of "ignition" (as you put it) really burn off all of that?
Do the bodies themselves get hot from being compressed? I’d assume largely no with our water content.
Having gotten hit on the head in a low speed car accident I wouldn’t worry at all about the suffering through the actual implosion. The speed of the shock wave would be much faster than nerves conduct information.
The gas can heat to thousands of degrees but there isn't much energy in it. It wouldn't do much damage by itself.
The sudden change in pressure causes the majority of the destructions through purely mechanical effects.
The sub, on the other hand, would be under something like 350x the atmospheric pressure, so we can expect its implosion to be orders of magnitude more violent.
The sub (hull) is made of a carbon fiber and titanium mix - and I'm not sure how that would react, if it buckles / collapses like regular metal, or if it simply shatters into millions of pieces like glass.
If the sub just collapsed / imploded into itself, well - that's that. The crew got crushed to death in an instant.
If the sub explode, then that would be a very violent reaction. Probably enough to kill them, purely from that - but let's say they don't die instantly from the crushing influx / wave of water:
Air / gasses in the body would compress significantly, if not allowed to exit the body. Your lungs would collapse in an instant, and your chest cavity would collapse on itself, until all air has escaped, and then replaced by water. Your ear eardrums would also rapture in an instant. With a severely collapsed upper torse, which would happen in an instant, I think your heart and major arteries would also become destroyed in an instant.
All that space would instantly get filled up with water.
I personally think that the violent process would kill them instantly - as in milliseconds...and then when all air has escaped the body, water would fill that space, until the pressure has reached an equilibrium.
EDIT: I personally don't think they suffered. The sub likely imploded in an instant, without little prior warning (noises) if the material behaves in the way I suspect it does. Just lights out, and that's that. Brain didn't even get time to react.
real time view of tensile failure: https://youtu.be/gmMRPmEYWhU
high speed 10m fps view of tensile failure: https://youtu.be/OePpVwCvCZg
when compressed along an axis that's not properly reinforced by carbon fibers, it will just disintegrate: https://youtu.be/BaSXRoD2xaQ?t=61
another interesting example of rapid failure: https://youtu.be/DM6J-yw8yjA?t=226
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WD7CfnQC5HQ
I hope at least these souls died instantaneously from an implosion when Comms first dropped.
Considering the current geopolitical weather and the presence of Russian submarines, you'd think the US army would be able to locate the missing object in no time, even with a triangulated location, they failed
Worrying times
https://www.livescience.com/chinese-submarine-record-dive.ht...
I keep seeing reports that they've search an area "the size of" Massachusetts or Connecticut. Shouldn't OceanGate have recorded the exact coordinates where it was released and then been able to localize its possible location to a small area around that by modeling ocean currents or something? My understanding the Titan was designed to sink to the bottom and could only move very slowly under its own power. I know OceanGate was cocky and cut a lot of corners, but I just can't believe they wouldn't have the exact release location recorded somewhere, even if it was just an automatic track log on their ship's GPS navigation system.
Modelling and knowing surface currents is one thing, but this submersible was thousands of meters deep. Deep ocean currents can be very fast, change often, and we have way less data on them.
- Oceangate, probably
I can think of 10 different ways to maintain some contact with the surface and store some data about dive conditions. Honestly perplexed at all the people who are still buying into Oceangate's demonstrably bad way of doing things and just saying it's impossible to do any better.
I'd assume they were assuming a worst case scenario of something like a ballast malfunction paired with a propulsion malfunction, so you have a partially buoyant (enough to stay off the ground, not enough to surface) craft being pushed both by currents, and possibly its own propulsion, in an unknown direction in some radius outside of the Titanic. I've no idea of the depth sonar can accurately ping, so they may also have been considering the 3-d area around the Titanic in which case you're hitting radius cubed, and so even a "small" max distance could be huge.
The Navy & Coast Guard would definitely have access to their own fleets
This sounds a lot like https://xkcd.com/793/ - "and then add some secondary terms to account for <complications I just thought of>."
They lost contact 105 minutes into a 120 minute, 2.5 mile descent. The release point for that descent was well known, and currents estimated closely enough to allow the sub to descend close enough to the shipwreck that the submersible's thrusters could move it very slowly to viewing locations.
They don't know what happened to cause it to lose contact more than a quarter mile above the ocean floor. They didn't know whether it went neutrally buoyant at that point, whether it ascended quickly, or slowly, or stayed near the bottom of the ocean and continued looking at the Titanic and only later drifted off course - they've done that before. Those ocean currents, unknowns, and distances are large; merely pulling the release point from a GPS track does not suddenly make the search point tiny.
drop a penny into a swimming pool vs drop it into the ocean.
This was the size of the search _on the surface_.
> We have just had an update from dive expert David Mearns, who says the debris includes "a landing frame and a rear cover from the submersible".
> Mearns is a friend of passengers aboard the Titan.
> Mearns has told the BBC that the president of the Explorers Club (which is connected to the diving and rescue community), provided this new information.
(Submitted URL was https://twitter.com/USCGNortheast/status/1671907901542211584)
A bit under 400 atmospheres at the depth of the Titanic. But I don't think that meaningfully changes your conclusion. It's instant.
Getting to your question via this preamble. The bathyscaphe could be pressurised with a helium/oxygen/other gas. The US navy has done many experiments with various gas mixtures - none are good to 6000 psi due to physiological limits. Dissolved oxygen and nitrogen are toxic above certain pressures - look at the Navy stuff for more on that via google. They are between 1000 to 2000 feet more or less - far below 6000 feet and it can take weeks to get the excess gas out of your system via gradual decompression chambers. There have been experiments with inert freon liquids with dissolved oxygen, tested on mice = lived and some Navy experiments with people who breathed the fluid under close medical control - I doubt this has progressed far, as this wiki shows https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_breathing.
So yes, you can make the sphere thinner if you add pressure to the inside. Fish do it, with nothing, but often die unless they are sirfaced under controlled conditions as chemistry varies slightly as they come up, dissolved gasses fizz etc.
This probably failed via the inadequate window = broke = near instant death for all. However, it may have a carbon shell failure?? if they recover the parts more will be known how the failure occurred.
However, it sounds like they've had comms issues on most of their previous dives, so perhaps the 1hr 45 is just a red herring here.
The wireless Logitech controller was still in pairing mode.
> "debris is consistent with a catastrophic implosion of the vessel"
> "1600 feet (487 meters) from the wreck of the Titanic"
> "it is a smooth bottom", "there is no wreckage of the Titanic in the area"
> "size of the debris field is consistent with an implosion in the water column"
> "there doesn't seem to be any connection between the noises and the location of the debris on the seafloor"
https://navalpost.com/how-deep-can-a-submarine-dive/ The depth limits of the most known nuclear powered submarines’ depth limits, as follows;
Typhoon-class: Test depth 900 m (3,000 ft) Astute-class: Over 300 m (984 ft 3 in) Akula-class: 480 m (1,570 ft) test depth for Akula I and Akula I Improved, 520 m (1,710 ft) for Akula II and III, 600 m (2,000 ft) maximum operating depth Ohio-class: Test depth >240 m (800+ ft) Virginia-class: Test depth >240 m (800+ ft) Borei-class: Test depth 950 m Rubis-class: Test depth 350 m Barracuda-class: Test depth >350 m
We really don’t know what depth the noise was comming from.
That being said it is vanishingly unlikely that an unrelated submarine trying to remain stealthy would be banging on their hull every half an hour.
The Titanic is at 3800 meters. That it's reachable, by private organizations no less, is just a marvel.
That's also why military specs on things like this are always lies, you don't want anyone knowing how deep you can actually go, which likely includes most of the crew.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOSUS
https://www.iflscience.com/for-15-years-sweden-thought-enemy...
The 'weaving' is supposed to be link connecting your two hands together interlocking fingers, in one direction you will meet a full resistance, but in the opposite direction your fingers will unlock.
I have no idea but seems to me if there is external pressure the weaving would have 'imploded' depending on the design I guess. Really want to know more about this.
Tensile load capacity is pretty much the resin that keeps the fibers from moving.
The most I could find about the design
> The entire pressure vessel is comprised of two titanium hemispheres, two matching titanium interface rings, and the 142 cm (56") internal diameter, 2.4-m (100") long carbon fiber wound cylinder – the largest such device ever built for use in a manned submersible.
suggest that yeah, they relied entirely on its compressive strength of it
I'd like to say it's caveat being as you mentioned but honestly, given then community in this field, even the technical diving alone. Someone must have said it to them.
Thanks for some numbers, maybe tomorrow will play with the simulations to determine the AP's that could collapse the craft. The titanium hemispheres are probably the best option but the sealing would need to be almost clinical.
I'm anxious just thinking about the construction of this sub.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD5SUDFE6CA&t=1446s&pp=2AGmC...
(in the vid https://abcnews.go.com/US/james-cameron-compares-submersible... about 3 mins in)
I guess it's in the spirit of the Titanic to kill your passengers doing dumb stuff.
Buckling is not a material failure, it's a structural failure. In pure buckling [0], the strength of the material is not actually a factor in whether something buckles or not. In most cases, material failure does occur as a side effect of the buckling, but not always. (The material's stiffness does matter, though. All else equal, something that's more flexible will buckle sooner than something stiff.)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler%27s_critical_load
Rope.
I think this might have been the first one. In minimal fairness, at least the owner put his money where is mouth was.
Sidebar : The owner/ceo did a 10 hour overall at max ~3kMeteres
A lot of measure of units thrown around in this thread too.
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/david-pogue-misinforma...
There’s also a documentary on bbc about one of those trips
I took that to mean this was their 5th trip with this submersible
But that’s the thing about ratings. The manufacturer guarantees safe usage at 15 PSI and anything above that all bets are off and you’re on your own. Same with milk and expiration dates. Many times the milk is fine after the date, but the dairy won’t guarantee freshness and food safety.
Same for this looking glass. It says what the CEO thought about safety. He was willing to take chances and roll the dice. And every once in a while you get snake eyes. The consequences of rolling • • at 9,000ft of depth in the ocean is sadly instant soup. The water entering the vessel would likely be 5,000F degrees or so. While some people say it would be an instant death and not consciously detectable, I disagree. I think they were given just enough time for the brain to go oh shit, but only got to the oh part, and lights out.
Looking glass rated 4k 'feet' around 1200 meters..
Not sure as there is a video of the ceo going to 3k meters solo in the titan on a 10~ hour trip..
That said, not much of this craft was 'rated' for anything..
Would make a great long-overdue post for bustedcarbon.com
My understanding (very much not first hand) is that he was seen as an expert in the specific engineering disciplines necessary to safely build and operate deep sea submersibles like Titan.
He was also apparently a father to members of the Seattle tech community, who are no doubt grieving at the moment.
Please remember that, for some members of the HN community, this one hits close to home.
[0] Talk at last year's GeekWire Summit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PGpjEDc96I
source https://www.cbsnews.com/news/titanic-submarine-oceangate-hul...
To relate it to flying in an airplane, “If you take one flight a day, you would on average need to fly every day for 55,000 years before being involved in a fatal crash.”
I'll take those odds.
Take a deep dive in an experimental vessel with public safety concerns expressed over years, nope I'm out.
You sign similar waivers for all kinds of benign things - including amusement park tickets, concerts, skateboard parks, etc.
I have a feeling the safety of this contraption was grossly oversold to the passengers...
When you have to start putting that on coffee cups, it loses all meaning.
I happen to disagree, but you do you.
"Please don't fulminate."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
So much hand wringing and I've seen about two whole comments talking about the boat that sank carrying 100x as many people while this saga was unfolding.
How is it dehumanizing for me to not care about one, when virtually no one gave a single shit about the hundreds of non-wealthy people dying?
For me all human life is precious and equally worthy of effort to save, as well as sympathy and grief for their loss. I suppose that's not your position, but I don't quite understand what it is.
"Equally worthy of effort" - ironic because the amount of money spent trying to save these 5 people could save hundreds or thousands of times as many people. But I don't see people clamoring for equality in helping the disenfranchised.
The hypocrisy is staggering.
Here it's off-topic to talk about the sunk ship and the migrants that died. Here it's on topic to talk about the people on the sub that died. People should have empathy with both situations, but are much less likely to express it when they're frustrated by someone complaining about something off-topic.
At the same time we're being asked to support tax money going to search for these 5 risk tourists and being accused of ignoring their humanity when we simply point out the utter stupidity and greediness of their escapade.
Starving? Homeless? Too bad. We have so much money that we gotta blow it to go look at this thing over here instead.
Bill Gates has hubris because Bill Gates has a fuckton of wealth that he did nothing to directly earn. Merely having capital yields capital results.
Also tragic. Being sad over this does not preclude being sad about those events.
You can also see in this thread people calling them "precious lives" as though that doesn't apply to the people making the ultimate sacrifice to try and bring their families to safety.
I have nothing against people being rich but it's frankly scary to see these refugees be dehumanised, framed as economic immigrants and become victim to to increasing legislation to keep them out of safety on the basis that we can't afford them using our resources when we suddenly have resources enough to spend on extensive missions to search for people who made bad decisions for fun and risked the lives of others for nothing but profit and fame.
If you want to call them refugees then take them home. They are economic migrants where “we” live.
And delegitimising all others forms of feedback and expression.
The US was a bit late to the game, but appears to have caught up quite well.
And while in Europe these people often first set sail for the western Balkans, it usually isn’t their destination.
Where are they sailing to that this doesn't cover? The recent example being spoken about in this thread was trying to make it to Italy, which has been involved in various conflicts in the middle east since the middle ages.
If you die doing something dumb, then yeah, people are gonna point that out.
If you die doing something dumb that you spent house money to do, the pointing out will be much more pointed.
>"I'd like to be remembered as an innovator. I think it was General MacArthur who said "you're remembered for the rules you break." And I've broken some rules to make this. I think I've broken them with logic and good engineering behind me. The carbon fibre and the titanium, there's a rule you don't do that. Well, I did."
https://www.reddit.com/r/titanic/comments/14ekh3r/stockton_r...
Can read more here: https://www.corrosionpedia.com/galvanic-corrosion-of-metals-...
I see a problem in stress loads so. Titanium and carbon fibre composites behave differently under load. And at those depths, they are under a lot of load. These small differences induce additional stress at the critical joint between bulk heads and submarine body. That stress causes, over time, material fatigue.
That's why those components are, in most othee use cases, fatigue tested to their breaking point. Knowing that point, allows you to define a save service life for those components and replace thek way before they fail.
https://youtu.be/K_7k3fnxPq0
If you think you're going to reinvent the wheel and bypass regulatory bodies and ignore subject experts, and move fast and break things, you're delusional.
Any baby can break things; any toddler can break rules. What's hard is to discover new rules, make things that don't break.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rThZLhNF_xg
Carbon is fantastic stuff if used properly, used improperly it will seem to be perfect right up to the point where it fails catastrophically.
> In the days before the Titan vessel went into the ocean off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada, the 19-year-old university student accompanying his father on the expedition expressed hesitation about going, his aunt said Thursday in an interview.
> Azmeh Dawood — the older sister of Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood — told NBC News that her nephew, Suleman, informed a relative that he "wasn't very up for it" and felt "terrified" about the trip to explore the wreckage of the Titanic.
> But the 19-year-old ended up going aboard OceanGate's 22-foot submersible because the trip fell over Father's Day weekend and he was eager to please his dad, who was passionate about the lore of the Titanic, according to Azmeh.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/titanic-submersible-shahw...
Even though everyone knows flying commercially is incredibly safe, lots of people are still anxious about it. Its not like this kid, or maybe any of the other customers, knew of any of the safety concerns and just thought it was as safe as flying.
Its also good to remember the titanium wings bear the full weight of the plane.
When corners aren't cut building the planes, and Boeing has never cut corn... oh, crud.
I told my 10 year old son that one day his life might depend on being able to recognise danger and not follow the herd. I said that might mean you staying out of the cave even if the teacher and all the other students went in, called you names, etc.
He rightly pointed out that would be almost impossible such is the power of peer pressure. Still I hope if that day comes he remembers it.
But it's been tough, on occasion and I can see the point that your son makes, and I hope with you that if that day comes that he will remember it. FWIW you can tell him this internet stranger agrees with his dad and that peer pressure can be overcome.
That's awful, and if there's one thing that I learned from Thai cave rescue a few years ago (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tham_Luang_cave_rescue) it's that you never want to go swimming in caves when it might start raining.
https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/how-about-not-overcoming...
it isn't just Americans or even First Worlders. In some cultures they're not able to do it, but they all want to. And it's -- guess what? -- peer pressure that makes them do it. Brain scans show that they recognize the danger as well as adults do, but they're more susceptible to the peer pressure.
It's ok to be afraid. No one had to go down to 12,500 feet to see the Titanic.
https://i.stuff.co.nz/national/132006337/dad-who-stopped-son...
It blows my mind that anyone thought it was a good idea to make a deep-sea submersible out of the stuff.
Carbon's tendency to abruptly fail without warning was a source of significant anxiety whenever I'd go riding the more aggressive trails on my ibis mojo hd3. And that wasn't a certain death outcome should the carbon let go...
You need to be able to attain both positive and negative buoyancy, which constrains density within a range, right? That limits design choices like “giant block of steel with a tiny passenger cavity”.
I know little about the topic but it sounds terribly early to rule what exactly had 'a pretty active role' in the incident. Is it not?
Him saying "it's obscenely safe" just sounds like a Silicon Valley CEO saying they're going to save the world by selling their users' personal data under the table. EDIT seems like I interpreted this wrong according to comment below.
Most software doesn’t implode though.
The CEO was quoted[1] as:
> “We only have one button and that's it,” Rush said in the CBS report. “It should be like an elevator.
What an example to reference. Early elevators resulted in many deaths [2] and safety regulations and mechanisms needed to be invented to prevent them [3].
Similar regulations existed for submersibles, but he decided not to take all those lessons learned. I'm thankful building elevator operators do not have a cavalier attitude towards safety like this.
[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2023/06/20/david-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_elevator_accidents [3] https://blog.ansi.org/history-of-elevators/#gref
I'm not even a risk-adverse individual. But I can often recognize when people say things like that, not because they're comfortable with the risk, but because they are blind to it. It's hard for me to feel like the teenager aboard was fully cognizant of the risks.
I don't think it's great to make this guy into a folk hero just because he was pushing the limits. Imagine, for a second, how this would be reacted to in the aviation space.
If the CEO cut corners then that should be his legacy. Great people can be flawed. Flaws can be fatal. It's just a shame if those flaws weren't properly portrayed to those who dove with him.
[0] https://fortune.com/2023/06/21/titan-titanic-missing-sub-dav...
Not so much when you’re building life-critical systems or those where there are real big serious problems when they go down or fail.
https://www.planecrashinfo.com/famous1910s.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Aviators_killed_in_av...
progress in both aviation and undersea exploration stopped about 50 years ago when we stopped doing that
The links you provide show a stark difference in end game from then and now. None of them killed tourists in the name of pushing the limits. That and those risk takers in aviation didn't blindly disregard highly researched and engineered vehicle designs, and oh by the way, publicly state that your design was ultimately against what other experts in the industry have shown to be non-viable with our current build process and manufacturing capabilities using those materials. And to top it off using control mechanisms not even remotely designed for the use case of a real time system that could cause a grave outcome of life. One that you can buy at Walmart to play a video game.
In my mind comparing this situation with those innovators is unfortunate.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/20/us/oceangate-titanic-miss...
letter (pdf): https://int.nyt.com/data/documenttools/marine-technology-soc...
There's no absolutely safe way to dive that deep, just like there's no absolutely safe way to ascend K2. People still want to do it.
This submersible was basically a rollercoaster ride that wasn't up to spec. If a participant doesn't need to know or do anything on a trip, they are going for a ride not an adventure, and they aren't expected to be safety experts in the field.
Also one of the passengers was a teenager who was concerned about going, but went along to make his dad happy. Hardly a clear eyed risk taker who was fine with the risk.
He even said he was well aware of the risks involved and kissed his wife goodbye not knowing if he would see her again. Just because something is insanely dangerous doesn't make you an explorer, and you're not performing in any research capacity, you're a former writer for the Simpsons and this is TOURISM. Get some perspective.
They consented, but were they aware of the actual risks? That seems unclear at best, given the active concealment of safety issues and the misleading marketing that has been cited in various reports.
> There’s no absolutely safe way to dive that deep
Nothing is absolutely safe, but deep submersion diving isn’t a new field, there are established safety standards and practices (including in the latter third-party audits to confirm compliance to the former) and OceanGate uniquely among operators of manned vehicles refused to conform to either (though it marketed its subs as exceeding the standards it decided not to be certified against). And its also unique in experiencing a manned disaster.
Now, we aren’t at the point where it can conclusively be shown that those two unique features are directly connected (and practical issues with investigating a disaster at this depth may not make that practical any time soon), but, its not unreasonable to suspect that they are.
I would take that bet.
> I would take that bet.
And I would agree that that is where the smart money is, I’m just acknowledging that the actual specific cause of the disaster and any connection to specific cut safety corners remains unknown.
The fact that the two end bells are separated from the central cylinder and that the cylinder itself can't be located pretty much singles out the carbon fiber structure. The company was aware of problems with previous iterations of the hull of Titan which may have been rebuilt at least once and possibly more than once (this is a bit unclear in what I've been able to dig up about it so far). If the window blew first I would expect things to look a bit different.
I wonder to what extent gross negligence trumps the language in the consent waiver.
That's true, but there are (substantially) safer ways. This design should have never been used for passengers.
I really draw the line there: innovators are free to do whatever the hell they want to do with their own lives and if a professional who really understand the risks decides that they want to take those risks they should be free to do so.
But to charge passengers for a ride requires a completely different attitude towards safety. No matter what you are going to write on your consent forms. Besides being unable to properly evaluate the risks inherent in your design they will be subject to all kinds of pressure to participate which will reduce their ability to properly assess the risks.
This is why we have different classes of aircraft, and why depending on your goals you will be assessed differently by the authorities if you intend to operate one for ferrying (paying) passengers.
Is that entirely true? In a scenario like this they're going to incur tremendous costs borne by others in search and recovery, and potentially put rescue personnel in harm's way. Modulo these things being used as useful exercise and training for the military.
Besides the legal complications of being in a place that technically is outside of the legal boundaries of all countries, so who would enforce that?
That's cheap talk. As soon as there is some major accident, some people creep up to declare: it was obvious all along. Of course it wasn't quite obvious enough for them to actually make that declaration in advance.
That he fired.
Then sued.
No, but using a vessel built the same way as the one James Cameron used would be safer (he did 33 dives).
https://www.geekwire.com/2020/oceangate-raises-18m-build-big...
They didn't change the name and technically the cylinder is just another part but it suggests that the same hull was used which isn't correct as far as I read it.
From what I've read, in there minds there hull design was the best part of the sub. I inclined to believe he believed it, since the CEO frequently dove in it.
"This is shaping up as a rebuilding year for the nearly 11-year-old venture, based in Everett, Wash. The main task on the agenda is to build two new submersibles capable of diving as deep as 6,000 meters (3.7 miles), which is more than a mile deeper than the part of the North Atlantic ocean floor where the Titanic is resting.
OceanGate will take advantage of lessons learned during the construction of its carbon-hulled Titan submersible, which was originally built for Titanic journeys. Rush said tests that were conducted at the Deep Ocean Test Facility in Annapolis, Md., revealed that the Titan’s hull “showed signs of cyclic fatigue.” As a result, the hull’s depth rating was reduced to 3,000 meters.
“Not enough to get to the Titanic,” Rush said."
From:
https://www.geekwire.com/2020/oceangate-raises-18m-build-big...
> Because Titan was once known as Cyclops 2, the working titles for the new submersibles will be Cyclops 3 and 4.
So they lowered the depth rating of Titan back in 2020 .. but then continued to dive down to the Titanic with it?
Even the diver that piloted it imagined at least one way how it could implode (window).
Material science is hard, especially on a budget. This is definitely daredevil territory.
Based on what I've seen, it doesn't sound like OceanGate had decided on a fixed number of dives. Instead they were planning to continually monitor it (x-ray scans after every dive and real-time acoustic monitoring during the dive) with the assumption that they would get some warning before it failed.
Also the Titan did successfully complete ~20 deep dives from what I've read, so the design was apparently sufficient to stand up to the pressure more than once, meaning even a non-trivial testing program might not have detected the problem. Unfortunately the problem (as many have stated) seems to be in the choice of carbon fiber, which (particularly when taking into account the interfaces with other materials) will weaken over time even if the initial flaws are very small. All materials experience fatigue but the problem is much worse with carbon particularly under those kind of pressures.
I do feel awful for the kid seemingly unhappily dragged into the trip.
As for the CEO's credentials: nature can't be fooled.
By my estimation he committed manslaughter with his recklessness. He's every bit as bad a drunk driver that kills 4 people in an accident.
I don't judge.
"If you're not breaking things, you're not innovating. If you're operating in a known environment as most submersible manufacturers do, they don't break things." (8:49)
"Our rule is we risk capital, we don't risk people." (9:56)
"We used the same prepreg that's used on the 787." (11:15)
And my favorite: "When you're outside the box, it's really hard to tell how far outside the box you really are." (8:30) He does seem to be far outside the box now.
But the most significant quote IMHO is the one about "the same prepreg that's used on the 787". Like they often tell you that phone holders for bikes are made of "aircraft-grade aluminium" (which usually means it's 6061, the most common alloy). It's a strong indication of bullshit -- name dropping that doesn't have anything to do with the subject matter.
In the rest of the presentation he seems nice enough, and truly passionate about deep sea exploration. So maybe he was a cool guy, I don't know. But in the end it's his hubris that killed him and his clients.
This is a good point.
However, it's probably worth pointing out that in the past few decades -- at least here in the PNW -- carbon fiber availability to the hobbiest and small producer has been spotty.
I'd refer to Boeing and being the same 787 carbon fiber for my personal projects, but that's just because they're made from Boeing offcuts donated to a local University. At the time (ca 2006), even bare weave was hard to obtain from private suppliers.
Its feasible that Rush may have had help from Boeing sourcing his material, which puts comments like that in a different light.
6061 is more commonly used in automotives than in aircraft.
- “2024 aluminium alloy is an aluminium alloy, with copper as the primary alloying element. It is used in applications requiring high strength to weight ratio, as well as good fatigue resistance. It is weldable only through friction welding, and has average machinability.
- “7075 aluminium alloy is an aluminium alloy with zinc as the primary alloying element. It has excellent mechanical properties and exhibits good ductility, high strength, toughness, and good resistance to fatigue. It is more susceptible to embrittlement than many other aluminium alloys because of microsegregation, but has significantly better corrosion resistance than the alloys from the 2000 series.”
- “6061 is a precipitation-hardened aluminium alloy, containing magnesium and silicon as its major alloying elements. It has good mechanical properties, exhibits good weldability, and is very commonly extruded. It is one of the most common alloys of aluminium for general-purpose us.”
Materials science is a fascinating field.
It means you're using a material that's been vetted over decades in life-critical applications in harsh conditions by expert engineers all over the world. Aerospace aluminums today are derived from Japanese alloys invented in WW2 and were a major innovation in metal aircraft. It's much more expensive than steel, but we use it because of favorable characteristics. Here's an overview of different aluminums and where they're used: https://www.aircraftaluminium.com/blog
That said, I think there are times when it does mean something. I believe military grade/milspec chips/ICs are often engineered to be more resilient to environmental factors like heat and vibration, interference, etc. If I'm wrong about that, I suspect it won't be long before we learn if I'm right.
It did not guarantee anything outside of that. Soundness of design and ensuring inputs and environmental factors conformed to the spec was up to the engineers.
The problem, it is a military specification so the public may not be able get access to it.
If I start using a screwdriver to hammer in nails, it doesn't matter how many expert engineers use screwdrivers. I'm using it for a purpose it is unfit for.
Just because it's aircraft grade doesn't mean that it is (or isn't) suitable for building a submarine.
Why use novel vessels when tried and true work. Why did they have to try a carbon-fiber wrapped vessel? The bathysphere went all the way down to the Marianas trench --many decades ago. Why try something new in unforgiving environments?
Why fire an engineer after he started raising questions about safety?
It seems like there was a bit of a cavalier attitude that cost five people their lives.
- "Oxygen was supplied from high-pressure cylinders carried inside the sphere, while pans of soda lime [hn: sodium hydroxide?] and calcium chloride were mounted inside the sphere's walls to absorb exhaled CO2 and moisture.[6] Air was to be circulated past these trays by the Bathysphere's occupants using palm-leaf fans.[2]"
- "Suddenly, without the slightest warning, the bolt was torn from our hands, and the mass of heavy metal shot across the deck like the shell from a gun. The trajectory was almost straight, and the brass bolt hurtled into the steel winch thirty feet [9.1 m] away across the deck and sheared a half-inch [13 mm] notch gouged out by the harder metal. This was followed by a solid cylinder of water, which slackened after a while into a cataract, pouring out the hole in the door, some air mingled with the water, looking like hot steam, instead of compressed air shooting through ice-cold water.[6]"
- "The ocean during this dive was rougher than it had been during any of their previous dives, and as the Freedom rocked on the surface, its motion was transmitted down the steel cable, causing the Bathysphere to swing from side to side like a pendulum. As the Bathysphere descended, Barton succumbed to seasickness and vomited inside it. However, the first half of the radio transmission had already been broadcast, and neither Beebe nor Barton wished to cancel its second half, so they continued their descent.[5] ... the Bathysphere was still rocking wildly and Beebe and Barton were both bruised and bleeding from being knocked about inside it."
- "During their first test dive, they demanded to be pulled up after descending only four feet (1.2 m) because the sphere had begun to leak; they soon discovered this was because Tee-Van had neglected to fasten all of the bolts that hold the hatch shut.[2] Another problem occurred on their second test dive, during which they discovered that the lower end of the rubber hose holding the power cable and phone line had begun to deteriorate, and they spent the rest of the day reversing the hose's direction so that the end which was deteriorating would be the end above the water.[5]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathysphere
Very poor taste to say this now.
And yet he called safety "pure waste"...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-06-21/titanic-t...
People really need to remember that tech bros aren't really smarter than most people, they're usually just more willing to take risks.
Being seen as an expert doesn’t mean you are one, and it’s unfortunate the Seattle tech community didn’t have a better role model to look up to.
Also, would the implosion necessarily be that loud? It would be like crushing a large tin really. Maybe blends in with background noise.
exploitation of heterogenous and anisotropic ocean conditions definitely remains the crux of submarine warfare.
400 atmosphere of seawater pressure suddenly slamming together creates massive pressure wave.
Or maybe they did and the data hasn't been processed/made public yet.
Titan was 10 tons and mostly made of carbon fibre.
I don't think that submarines explosively decompress under the ocean.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARA_San_Juan_(S-42)
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Titan_submersible_incid...
[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titanic
I'm not suggesting anything nefarious, I'm just hoping someone who understands these things better than I do comes along.
The ocean is not a homogenous mass. As you go down you can measure temperature, pressure and salinity changes. These all individually and together affect the speed of sound in the water. Given the right circumstances a layer can form which bends the sound waves away from an observer. It is possible that they couldn’t hear the implosion precisely because they were on top of them. Perhaps they could have heard the implosion better if they were off to the side a few kilometers, or if they would have had a hydrophone dangling to the other side of the layer. More info on the layer. [1]
This perhaps also can explain why they routinely lost contact with the sub during dives. (And normalisation of deviance explains how they become okay with that. [2])
1: https://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/explorations/sound01/backgrou...
2: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance
at this point i expect it had imploded before the coast guard or anyone who knew what they were doing was on-site.
The big one is designing the sub to travel to 95% of the expected maximum depth, leaving a 5% margin of safety. I was taught to aim for a margin of safety of (I think it was) 50% back in the day. Operating so close to the safe limit for the sub is appalling. That doesn't even include all the other warning signs about the design that were brought up.
The missing beacon on the sub, in case of loss of radio contact, is another standout. No consideration given for loss of power or anything. Consideration of contingency plans is so important.
A minor one that is really indicative of the overall attitude is drilling screws into the carbon fiber hull, possibly exposing the hull to stress fractures from both the screws and the constant weight of holding a monitor. It's... just a silly thing that could have been avoided. I'm not saying those screws are why it failed, but if you can use an adhesive to hold your monitor in place, wouldn't you rather do that then by drilling directly into the hull keeping ~100 atm of ocean out of your face?
It just makes me so sad for so many reasons. It definitely could have been avoided...
Wouldn't a a 5% margin of safety mean the sub was designed to survive at 105% of the trip's expected maximum depth? 95% sounds like the opposite of a margin of safety.
Sorry, but this does not follow. I believe you are confused about the fact that the Titan was designed to go down to 4,000 meters, and the Titanic lays at 3,840 meters.
And because 3,840 is so close to 4,000 you believe they had no safety margin. Do I understand you well?
But the thing is when you design a submarine which can go down to 4,000m you don’t design a hull which instantly implodes at that precise depth. You add a safety margin on top of your design requirement and that is what you design for. And then using calculations, simulations and tests you convince yourself that your submersible is still safe even at that extra safety padded depth.
I’m not saying that this is how they designed it. After all it seems their engineering culture was deficient in several ways. But you simply can’t conclude that they had no safety margin because they dove close to their design limit.
Some ballpark typical numbers for safety factor: spacecraft ~1.2, airplanes ~1.5, automobiles ~3
How do you know they were operating close to their safety margin?
My understanding of safety margins, as I was taught, is that one should design such that you have a safety margin of 1.5x the intended use case. In other words, for 3800m expected frequent usage, it should be able to reach a depth of 5700m.
Alvin, for example, can reach a depth of 6500m.
But you’re right, we don’t know what that 4000m means, really. I’m just assuming it means safe depth without damage.
I can't imagine it was loud: vessel was tiny, and the energy will reduce at the order of 3 quite a bit at 4 km distance. I can imagine it would be detectable with the right equipment and that this equipment is installed in the Atlantic.
[1] What springs to mind: Dramatic search action well suited for live blog coverage; psychological impact of the idea of people stranded in a submarine for days; And of course the average person here is probably a lot closer to taking a holiday trip in a submersible than to taking a refugee boat across the Mediterranean.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Messenia_migrant_boat_dis...
But there's also the concern of frequency, [2] occurs more frequent than [1], people generally don't care about the people at [2] because they are "unimportant", and not prominent in any way. They are background characters on the other side of the world for many, they are not well dressed, they do not perform functions with significant influence on the broader society.
Or at least so they are perceived by the general public. They are labelled illegal immigrants, or leeches, or whatever else because people in many places can't fathom being born in a third world or very poor country and doing everything in your power to make it out.
Imagine, feeling so low, that you'd give everything, your life even, for a chance, a sliver of chance, at what others are born into.
The point being made is about misallocation of resources, not news coverage. (Novel stories will always grab more attention.)
Who?
The US Navy/Coast Guard sending an ultra deepwater ROV isn't even comparable to the Greeks actively monitoring the boat enough to take a photo of it before it capsized, let alone is anyone mobilizing "entire nation states"
The families of the missing rich people have the resources to fund the search. The families of the missing people in the Mediterranean obviously do not.
what resources? were US and canada supposed to ship deep sea ROVs over to the Mediterranean to help refugees?
even if you wanted the US/Canada to help, it wouldn't have been the north atlantic coast guards doing it.
Do you have a detailed list of rescue vehicles deployed for each event ?
I lived in South Asia for a while and the thing that would strike me is the everyday catastrophes. For instance, there was a recent Indian derailment that you barely heard about here in the US https://apnews.com/article/india-passenger-train-derail-dead...
275 deaths.
It was only covered in the NYT, LAT, WaPo, Chicago Tribune, WSJ, USAT, NPR, CNN, MSNBC, ABC News, NBC News, and CBS News....just to name a few.
the US and Canadian coast guards don't operate in the Mediterranean, and (presumably) couldn't have gotten ships there fast enough to do anything about it, anyways.
I don't know. Do you ?
From wikipedia: "Immediately following the sinking, the Greek Coast Guard and the military initiated a massive search and rescue operation."
It wouldn't be surprising that some of those rescue ships were funded by the families of the victims, considering the size of their bank accounts.
But the contrast is still striking between both the situations and media reporting of 5 rich men vs 700 of some of the world’s poorest and most desperate people.
Both are unbelievably tragic.
The reporting on the Mediterranean disaster seems to have gone a lot quieter than I would have expected given what we now know about how the Greek authorities story simply does not match up with what actually seems to have happened. (It seems like there may have been an opportunity to prevent that disaster).
There is no way in hell I would pay $250k to board a janky-ass sub going deep into the ocean.
For $250k, I could buy a nice house for me, my girlfriend and our future family.
And even that is not possible yet. Because I don’t have that kind of money.
A lot of the Central American refugees are fleeing very sharp increases in gang violence.
Fukushima a) happened and b) Japan and the world are still there
There's a reason migrants take the Mediterranean route, instead of the Atlantic route.
Why? As a Minnesotan, the first thing I'm doing is hopping on my boat and heading north to Canada.
When China, Western Europe, or the US collapses into civil war refugees from those countries do indeed migrate. The problem is other countries start collapsing as well because they were dependent on some form of trade with those regions. As a result its unlikely there will ever be a large scale exodus of people from the US. We'll all just be survivors in the wasteland at that point.
That's not even enough of down payment for a tear down where I live!
Similar stories like the Thai boys trapped in the cave, or the Chilean miners, had a similar effect.
A bit like "Snakes on a plane". Again, trapped with your phobias.
But hey, we in the West are fine not worrying too much about some poor folks Africa dying at our door steps. Because doing so, would force us to face the fact that we are by no means as morally superior than we like to think, and just convinced ourselves to be with all the help Ukrainian refugees got. So, we prefer not to think about it, as a society.
Everyone is screaming, death is all around you. People are drowning, and in their drowning flailing limbs they are pulling others to their deaths.
[Edited to add: The migrants would've had time to process what was happening to them. There would be many long minutes of terror, suffocation, as they died. Hundreds. Women, children.]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_A8dq2fA5o
A friend of mine was involved with computer forensics on recovered cellphones on this one. Just awful.
Local news trumps global.
I am sure in Greece the Messenia migrant boat disaster got more coverage than Titan.
That said, the big factor is how sadly common migrant boat disasters are (just like liquid gas exploding in a restaurant in China and killing 10+ people, happened yesterday).
Carbon fiber submersible on the way to Titanic containing cocky inventor, plus billionaire, plus kid hits so many spots for news cycle.
My opinion is the complete opposite, I think it has more coverage because it's a feel good event for 90% of the world who absolutely despise rich fucks in that specific part of the dumb X rich venn diagram
I haven't seen a single post about how sad the sub story is... it's all memes and people amazed at how stupid humans can be
Someone who took the trip before said they had to sign a waver which mentioned death multiple times. It's like climbing Everest, walking to the north pole, commercial space flights, base jumping etc.
The med disaster was people embarking on a dangerous "adventure" out of what they perceived as being a necessity.
Of course all lives should be regarded as being equal.
Now people _pay_ to be carried on the Everest, pay for a ticket to space, pay for a ticket to the titanic, &c. There is nothing left so they fight for the crumbs, looking for the next dumbest idea on the list
Some even had brand new boots, which anyone with half a brain knows is a bad idea. A few did turn out to be tough bastards though, spending several days up there alone in a state of delirium and eventually making it back down on their own accord.
Guardian also mentioned a Mexican Youtuber having taken the trip down to the Titanic in that titanium coffin, just for clicks & views.
They died close to the shipwreck. Maybe the Titanic site will slowly fill up with corpses, just like Everest is doing.
> Of course all lives should be regarded as being equal.
Lives sure. But not deaths. Bringing yourself in a confirmed dangerous situation just for the thrill of it, even being so desperate for it as to pay what post people would dream of earning over multiple years, and then dying during this adventure ... in contrast to desperate refugees trying to escape into a better life and then dying because traffickers don't care about their survival.. Idk man, doesn't sound equal to me.
Just nitpicking here but this is quite normal. Any somewhat physically involved commercially offered activity has waivers to sign that mention potential death and that absolve the business from responsibility. Gyms for example do this.
I thought to have read the boat capsized while being towed, as claimed by one of the survivors. Being towed could be an involuntary act, while throwing a line seems solely meant to help.
> The 104 survivors of the tragedy have very limited mobility and access to communications. Some of them said Greek Coast Guard vessels threw them a line shortly before their vessel capsized [1]
On a personal note. I myself got once rescued by the navy with their Zodiac. That was a mutually fantastic experience. I believe that coastguards anywhere would prefer to rescue above anything else, that is what they signed up for. I hope this dual tragedy will help the leadership to remove anything that creeps between that objective.
[1] https://english.elpais.com/international/2023-06-20/greece-i...
And from what I’ve read about, the U.S Coast Guard are awesome folks that’ll trip over each other to save anyone if they can..
We (I say this not from my point of view) don't want to see poor people.
We don't relate to them and we think they should just be successful in their countries.
In contrast there is someone who is part of us, not poor, has achieved something and entertained us in an interesting way.
Of course we will try to help them and not those refugees.
The mental issue of us living great while 3th world countries exist is nothing new for a long time.
It's now even so old that there is research done on how to help people because the obvious things didn't work.
Can you imagine having to decide to do such a risky thing? They know they risk their life doing so. Which is on top of having to leave your family, friends and the place you probably love to eventually probably find a shitty job and having to be subjected to a lot of difficulties, administrative non-sense, and everything else.
Maybe the EU has its fair share of responsibility in the causes pushing people migrating "illegally" too.
Migrants are not the issue. The system that forces them to migrate is.
But you don't use resources to help people who are forced to leave their country and now are drowning in the sea.
Occasionally we can see here on HN stories about lost sailors being rescued after weeks lost in the water, or shipwrecked on some remote rock. The common theme for those stories is that there wasn't a bunch of ships that went looking for them for weeks. For every person who survived such event, many more died.
When there is a lot of media coverage you also tend to get more reaction by officials, which then generate even more media coverage. It is the same concept why a individual can create a story on HN and reach people at google/facebook/apple, while thousands of users can have an identical situation and never reach a single person from support. It not a fair system but its a very well understood phenomenon.
The response on sending rescue teams was high even before it got popular on the news. I remember reading some statements that "we sent everything we can" in the very first news.
The problem is that there's no immediate feedback when they go missing so the search areas are too pointlessly large to even attempt SAR operations. Areas where there's lots of immigration traffic are always monitored, like the Greeks were monitoring the boat before it capsized (enough to get that aerial photo of the overcrowded decks).
The vast majority of Coast Guards aren't stretched to their limits, they're sitting there ready to launch SAR operations if anyone calls, all largely operating for free as a cheap way of supporting maritime trade. The USCG alone responds to tens of thousands of cases a year, rescuing thousands of people. Some corrupt nations skimp on their CGs but that wasn't really the case here.
The Titan was A, your average fishing boat or other vessel is B. And all those migrants are, and that pisses me off to an incredible degree, C.
The average human can't tread that long without a life jacket, the average is ~2-3 hours and that's in still water (to be a lifeguard you have to last 30 minutes), not a choppy ocean/sea. By the time any country other than Italy or Greece came to the location, they'd already be dead. It's tragic, but there is no discrepancy. If there were a chance of actual survival for days, there would have been a much larger response.
Also, apparently the Greeks offered aid before the boat even sank and the boat declined because they didn't want to go to Greece, they wanted to go to Italy. There are mixed reports on that though as now some are blaming the Greek coast guard for tipping the boat over by accident.
If you want something to be upset about, be upset about practically every country on Earth's broken immigration systems that cause these tragic events.
Regarding the US Navy, well, they do have a Fleet in the Mediterranean, it's not like they had to sail all the way from Pearl Harbour.
Also, what people also forget, the Mediterranean is under almost comlkete surveillance. So no big surprise if a vessel goes down, most of the time authorities knew of said vessel before.
And some lights to try if it gets dark.
That’s not in any way to detract from the tragedy, just pointing out one reason why it’s barely covered.
Once something becomes common, it’s not news anymore.
In the case of the sub, there where a chance to find them alive. This makes the story more compelling.
The average person here might think they are, but they'd be deluding themselves.
I'm never the first one to start whining about refugee related disasters but hundreds of women & children drowning on a boat after having been in a miserable state for days on end is just the worst. Other boats had been circling it for days and apart from providing some food & water nothing was done. Maybe an attempt to tow it, which could well have led to the capsizing.
How could such a ship have been rescued? Any attempt at evacuation would have probably led to a capsizing anyway due to people moving around in a panic, unless ... the boat was wedged between two strong boats?
Mysterious cases always get more traction on social media too. There was an instance in the UK where a woman went missing near a river. People were speculating for weeks about what had happened. They would travel to the location and try and be detectives. It's was insane. People said it was because she was a white woman, but I don't think it's that. It's just the mystery of not knowing what happened and a body not being found straight away after divers searched the area. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Nicola_Bulley
Same goes for the sub. It's not because it was full of billionaires. It was because it was from a company infamous for cutting corners and people wanting confirmation that it did in fact implode. It also just boggles the mind why people who are so wealthy would get in something so shoddily put together. They have the money to fund a whole expedition like James Cameron did, but they'd rather increase the risk of death by an order of magnitude.
People can't survive for long in cold seas. By the time a migrant boat disaster makes the news, hopes of finding survivors may already have faded.
I watched one video that complained about off the shelf parts being used, but the two examples was an RV light (not safety related) and the gaming controller (which they had multiple back ups).
They also claimed to have been reviewed by Boeing and University of Washington. There was 7 different mechanisms that could force a return. Some of those were purely mechanical.
Clearly the sub wasn’t safe enough, but I’m not seeing anything that makes it obviously badly built.
https://twitter.com/LadyDoctorSays/status/167170098942929715...
The issue as far as I have read is that the hull was made of carbon fibre. There hasn't been any submersible that has reached those depths before made of that material. The effect continued pressurization/depressurization had on the carbon fibre wasn't understood. Composite materials are so much more complicated to model and understand. There was no non-destructive testing to see what effect the repeated cycles had on the hull, no way of knowing whether cracks could form beneath the surface. The failure mode at depth is catastrophic, there's no room for error. Someone pointed all this out to them and was fired https://newrepublic.com/post/173802/missing-titanic-sub-face....
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/06/21/us/titan-sub-safety-ocean...
In response to them knowing the sub wasn't fit for purpose they opted to install a "real time health monitoring system" which acoustically checked the integrity of the hull. But it's pointless. By the time any acoustic monitoring system picked something up it would be too late, because carbon fibre just shatters into a million pieces. It's not like Steel where it can gradually fatigue, it's crack BOOM dead.
Using carbon fibre for the hull is like rolling your own crypto. Maybe you can get it to work but unless you properly scrutinize it there is most likely fundamental flaws in your implementation and it's just better to use tried and true methods. In the sub world that tried and true method is just thick steel.
I wonder if this event will cause some changes, or if it is an expensive step in figuring out how to properly test this material.
No. Not really. It's a horrible idea. It's irresponsible. It's negligent.
Consumer grade components are not designed for the kind of reliability and failure tolerance requirements these kinds of applications have to face every mission. A simple example of this would be no conformal coating anywhere to prevent failures due to condensation on the circuit board. Also, tin whiskers due to RoHS solder. No redundancy or failure tolerance in any portion of the design. It isn't enough to say "we have extra game controllers". That's not how you build reliable failure-tolerant systems where people's lives depend on things working perfectly 99.9999% of the time.
Also, it is a fallacy to say that millions of people use these controllers. The most obvious problem with this statement is that we have zero data on failure rates and failure modes. And, of course, nobody dies. As a parallel example, you would be hard-pressed to find toy controllers on medical equipment, even in situations where there might be time to deal with failures.
> the hull was made of carbon fibre <snip> In the sub world that tried and true method is just thick steel.
Yup. Fundamental principle: Carbon fiber is best used under tension, not compression. Not a good choice for a life-support compartment under incredible external pressure. One way I think of it is: In compression you are mostly relying on the epoxy to keep things together. Without epoxy carbon fiber will support as much compression as a common string. Zero.
The carbon fiber seems to be the critical nail in the coffin.
That's what it sounds like.
> The carbon fiber seems to be the critical nail in the coffin.
If the CF vessel failed it would have instantaneous and violent beyond comprehension. What little reliable info is out there seems to indicate that's what happened.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WD7CfnQC5HQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxhkFyU8NXo&t=236s
A lot of this is bewilderment at the choice of carbon fibre for the pressure vessel, which is sensitive to impact damage and wear from repeated load cycles, damage is hard to diagnose, and as it's very brittle, prone to catastrophic failure. It's not commonly used for this sort of application, and there may not be good data on (1) when it would eventually fail and (2) whether you'd be able to tell before use.
As I understand, the choice was motivated by wanting the sub to have the large interior space necessary to bring along that many passengers. Deepsea subs usually don't attempt that either.
All more or less untested and uncertified. Throw in the reported comms issues that were common during past operations, a highly inexperienced engineering team, a culture promoting unsafe practices and you get a death trap of a vessel.
I think there was a fair bit of other concerns. I thought this video was informative and the kind of thing the HN crowd would appreciate, so take a look.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dka29FSZac
These design flaws weren't an unfortunate mistake, they were part of a very deliberate pattern that went predictably wrong.
Some highlights include:
* Design inspired by the "DeepFlight Challenger" - but DeepFlight said their craft was only rated for one dive, and weakens with each cycle, and could not be used for five dives.
* Hull designed by subcontract manufacturer in 6 weeks - scarcely enough time to do much testing.
* In an early dive the CEO performed solo, lost contact with the surface ship for approximately one hour
* While diving with a journalist, lost contact with the support vessel for 5 hours.
* It was impossible to open the sub from inside (admittedly, this is only relevant if you first manage to ascend to the surface)
* Hull started showing showing signs of cyclic fatigue in January 2020 (they got it repaired)
* Assembly and testing procedures so sloppy they managed to attempt a dive with a thruster installed the wrong way around.
* Employee called for a stronger front window, and nondestructive testing of the hull. Company fired him and sued him.
* CEO on record as saying ship safety laws "needlessly prioritized passenger safety over commercial innovation" and that "At some point, safety just is pure waste. I mean, if you just want to be safe, don't get out of bed."
* Couldn't get certified by a ship classification society, claimed that was OK because most marine accidents are operator error not mechanical failure; and the standards didn't give them adequate credit for their corporate culture of safety.
The other thing that indicates it was a deathtrap is the deaths.
With that said, personally I support the right of people to expose themselves to the risk of death in search of adventure. Normal folks can buy motorbikes and quadbikes, millionaires can buy cessnas, why shouldn't billionaires have deadly entertainment options befitting their wealth?
A migrants boat. Most of the people crossing the Med into Europe are economic migrants but in the past decade it has become known that claiming asylum on arrival (or at least if caught) is a good strategy so many do.
> Refugee immigrants are unable or unwilling to return home for fear or threat of prosecution, and thus, must make a life in the country that gives them refuge. Economic immigrants, on the other hand, are free from this constraint and can return home whenever they so desire.[1]
But then further clarification of the term 'economic migrant' is also interesting:
> The term ‘economic migrant’ has no legal definition. It is not mentioned in any international instruments of migration law.
and
> The inaccurate dichotomy between ‘economic migrants’ and refugees creates two fixed categories and gives the misleading impression that only refugees have and deserve legal protection and rights at the international level.
> Yet, the reality is different and far more complex. Migratory movements are composed of various types of migrants who may have specific protection needs, even if they are not fleeing persecution or a conflict. These include accompanied or unaccompanied migrant children; victims of human trafficking; migrants attempting to reunite with their families; and migrants affected by natural disasters or environmental degradation, including as a consequence of climate change. [2]
[1] https://docs.iza.org/dp1063.pdf [2] https://weblog.iom.int/false-dichotomy-between-economic-migr...
A 'refugee' has a legal definition because this is a status that is created and governed by international treaties, which is what makes it interesting for migrants because in 'nice' countries like in Europe this means that they are protected from deportation while their claim to refugee status is processed, which can take a very long time. They are provided accomodation during that time.
All other migrants are simply people who migrate for whatever reason people move to other countries, which are mainly family and economic reasons. When people from poor countries want to move to rich countries the main reason is very obviously economic. All those migrants fall into normal national laws of the countries they move to, in general this means that if they enter without visas they face a form of arrest and deportation.
That's it. There is indeed in a clear dichotomy. The rest is purely a political/ideological point of view as to whether people have effectively a right to migrate vs. whether countries have a right to decide who to let in.
While another refugee boat sunk is just that.
Might not be true in this case - the very idea of people locked up in a submarine is attention grabbing - but its certainly true for countless similar laments where people will point out the outsized attention a random investment banker getting attacked would get vis-a-vis the many murders in the inner city on any given day.
The Messenia disaster was over by the time it hit the news (and it was covered extensively in the UK press), whereas the Titan situation was ongoing. Watch how quickly it disappears from the news cycle now it's been resolved.
I just want to say, another issue is that to be perfectly honest, we don't like to humanize migrants, nor do we want to examine our culpability in their misfortune and demise. We want to mine resources from foreign countries even if that means destabilizing their governments, but we absolutely do not want to deal with the people fleeing those places whether we had nothing to do with their misfortune or we were in some way complicit.
The misfortune of a few rich guys is much easier for us to process than the avoidable death of hundreds, which was reportedly ultimately caused by the European Coast Guard who attempted to tow the vessel and in doing so supposedly caused it to sink. [1]
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/16/world/europe/greece-migra...
- class warfare enthusiasts because the passengers were rich
- regulation enthusiasts because the pilot espoused weakening them
You'll see this online when a pedestrian or cyclist gets hit by a driver (along with "right of way doesn't mean anything when you're dead!" and "was he wearing a helmet?")
At some point, the personal tragedy for me is realizing that a lot of people in this world really take great pleasure in others' suffering even if those people have done them no harm. Makes me want to use the Internet less, if I'm being honest, since I don't want to encounter this kind of glee at others's suffering.
Sucks for the 19-year old kid involved in all this, that I agree with.
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/rising-physical-p...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycOUwMJmTVM&t=134s
In pure HN spirit, that of problem-solving, I don’t see a reasonably quick solution to this, on account of that repressive nature of the current socio-economic regime that I mentioned earlier.
And nice privileged use of a Latinism, I’ll give you that.
Celebrating a Pakistani billionaire’s death because of the existence of poverty in America is not surprising for a tankie. Pretty on-brand in terms of ghoulishness and level of logic.
the 19 year old was rich too, shouldn't you be celebrating?
This sort of thing on the internet predates many of us being born. The Darwin Awards got their start on Usenet in 85.
The fact of the matter is that this entire story is way overblown by the news, and many people die of much more tragic (and not self-inflicted) causes every day. Give these people their Darwin awards, and let's move on.
As to who should share in the cost… my take is that it’s time to discuss whether some expeditions (e.g. risky commercial tourist rides) should sign a Do Not Rescue pledge before they head out and/or self-fund a commercial rescue operation.
It's just better that they call right away rather than wait too long and die.
If you search around on the internet, you can find people writing this up in much more detail and more eloquently.
But the considerations for something like this are pretty much entirely different, risk to non-technical rescuers is pretty minimal and the costs are just gas and the time spent on what is essentially just an unplanned hike with some extra gear.
I'm sure this is rare though.
https://npca.s3.amazonaws.com/images/11275/93882d38-5217-4aa...
https://preview.redd.it/mx98brhdszg71.jpg?width=960&crop=sma...
> We will serve our Nation through the selfless performance of our missions.
> We will honor our duty to protect those we serve and those who serve with us. [1]
In answer to your question: No. That's what taxes are for.
There could be other legal penalties if the SAR mission is prompted by negligence or illegal activity but the Coast Guard doesn't chase anyone down for operating costs.
[1] https://www.history.uscg.mil/Home/Missions/
Basically everyone in this thread is in the top 1% of global wealth (not just industrialized or western wealth) and does stupid things all the time and get treatment or are rescued. Happens every day. So, the argument is really weak.
No, and that's not what I am saying. The poor people you mention deserve help or assistance, not forgiveness, they did nothing wrong. You're making a categorical error, I think. Forgiveness is a separate deal from charity or inclusion or equality. We forgive actions, not living conditions.
At least some of the CEO's estate should go to paying for it, but pay out to victims' families first.
This. When the shit hits the fan, and lives could be at stake, the participants in responsive operations seem to focus more intently, and the lessons learned seem to get imprinted more firmly, than when it's a drill.
(There was a reason that when Pearl Harbor was attacked, the emergency radio transmission that went out was, "Air raid Pearl Harbor X This is no drill." [0])
I suspect the psychology might be related somehow to Samuel Johnson's dictum that "When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully."
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2015/12/0...
And, yes, it's a zero sum game. People looking for the five rich guys are people that cannot look for the hundreds of children trapped on a sinking ship.
It could be that someone/something damaged the hull (oceans and boats are notoriously hostile environments) and that created a weak spot that failed under pressure, or that some other mechanical failure occurred. However, those are both every bit as speculative as what I'm cautioning against. They are provided for illustration, only.
The 5th passenger from the French, maybe not
Oceangate had been warned by pretty much anyone with any knowledge of their efforts. They fired and sued their Director of Marine Ops who tried for stricter safety measures. They've already had to repair stress damage to the hull before the final dive. They were using parts not expected to hold up to 4000m dives, they were using flammable materials inside the sub.
The Thai team did something generally recognized as safe, and got caught up in a bad situation. The Oceangate folks did something that they'd been warned against repeatedly and consistently, something nobody thought was safe. Oceangate took every opportunity to do the wrong thing and try to profit off of it.
Insofar as wealth has anything to do with it, pedo guy happens to be pretty damn wealthy (ex financial broker). If those Thai kids hadn't caught a rich guy's attention their misadventure would've been a mere footnote.
I wouldn’t know, because i live in the kind of society where if you are lost at sea and you call for help but the call handler assumes that you have the wrong kind of passport they just tell you to call some other country and then hung up on you. [1]
But i would rather live in the kind of society where we spend our pooled resources to heal those who have fallen sick, than in one where we spend our pooled resources to rescue statistical anomalies. Everyone can become sick one day, not everyone will get suckered to buy a deluxe sea going group coffin by a conman.
1: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/dec/13/uk-coastguar...
>The refugee said it was his fourth attempt to cross the Channel. During the previous three attempts French police had caught them on the beach and punctured their dinghies with knives.
Honestly didn't realize though refugees thought the benefits in the UK were better than France's.
This is a simple observation of facts. If you don’t like some implication if it so bad for you. I don’t like it either, but I suspect we disagree in what way we don’t like the implications.
Solving an unknown problem with whoever is available on hand at that moment. Coordinating between that ad hoc group and analyzing the results afterward is a real world activity that can't truly be simulated.
We still rescue them. I never argued against rescuing them.
The owner of subversive bragged about safety being useless, punished employee warning about safety ossies, by all reports pushed the luck again and again and his missions had track record of failures and issues.
not the same
Nobody asked me if I want to pay for it or not. So i don’t feel that the “we” is justified. But if they would have asked me i would have voted to not move a finger unless some private entity (the company or the families, or literally anyone who wants to) pays for it.
They went out of their way to do something knowingly recklesly dangerous, and the cost of any rescue attempt is enermous.
But even in a hypothetical where the government sent out a snap poll saying “Sup citizen. 5 fellas lost in a sub. Need $140m for rescue attempt. Send yay or nay.” I would have responded with “nay”. So even in that hypothetical I wouldn’t feel I need to justify why we should spend money to rescue these people. (By the by, this hypothetical sounds crazy, but we could totally have this kind of direct say in matters. We have the tech for it.)
If training is not real, they create it. They spend billions every year simulating events.
But anyway, I expect them passing at least part of the bill to the company, that will go bankrupt.
Here in the alps, if you have an injury hiking and need a helicopter ride then you are required to pay for the ride (normally a few thousand euros). I assume it's the same if you're lost.
And I would assume it's the same on high sea...
Then recoup what you can from me or my estate if you determine I was reckless after the fact, when you have plenty of time to evaluate the facts.
Obviously there is an insurance for mountain climbing. But search party is not free, just that insurance pays if you have it.
The better question is 'Who do we refuse to help?'
Even if it doesn't balance out or make sense financially, I'm much happier living in a world where we care about each other rather than one where we're weighing the value of saving a life.
I had this same thought when watching The Martian. If you're unfamiliar, an astronaut is accidentally left on Mars. The story is about how he survives and the immense measures those at NASA and the CNSA go to just to save one life. It's an inspiring thought.
Do you feel it? The brain stays alive for 20 seconds after your heart stops. I would imagine your skull doesn't get crushed because fluids are only a tiny bit compressible with that much pressure
I imagine your ribcage would collapse, stopping your heart immediately
For comparison, what happened in this sub was 10x that pressure.
(Yes, 2-stroke diesels also exist, and sound absolutely amazing.)
What other nautical-related terms are a part of common speech?
So it was ... notical?
In layman terms “drowned” simply means that you died under water. It is not a sophisticated statement about the manner of anyone’s passing. People in the know understand that on a submarine you can die of hypoxia (if they mismanage the oxygen), or die of hypothermia (if they get stuck on the bottom with an intact pressure vessel, but no electricity) or die in an implosion, or burn to death in a conventional fire. In an everday conversation these all would be described as “drowned” by virtue of dying underwater even though none of them are what a coroner would report as drowning.
But why not make it more concrete. Can you find a single example where someone says that they have drowned and the speaker means it as a carefull engineering analysis regarding failure modes, as opposed to a general vibe of “they dead”?
Fair. I'm not an expert on it or anything. But I do listen to how people speak, and what they mean. Many people are using words loosely.
I searched on twitter for tweets with the term "drowned". Scrolled through a few hundred, and filtered out the ones which were talking about the Titan incident and which said or implied that the people on-board "drowned". I found 5 such tweets. This is of course not an exhaustive sample, but is what I have now.
Here are the five tweets (please don't harass any of these people, also I'm not endorsing these tweets in any way)
- https://twitter.com/OfSymbols/status/1671581923825668098 - https://twitter.com/samphiresprite/status/167196593855857459... - https://twitter.com/Devin_Young_/status/1671237153446035456 - https://twitter.com/NagaSlateTTV/status/1672006200538570752 - https://twitter.com/martinvars/status/1671994282478010368
Do read them. Do you have the impression that these people considered the failure modes of a submersible and concluded that the people on-board died due to a slow leak filling up the cabin and their lungs filling up with water? Or it is more likely that they use the word "drowned" as a loose shorthand for "died under water / died due to the sea"?
I think they more likely did the second. Either never considered how one dies on a submarine, or they were writing without care for exactitude. In fact I have evidence for this second one in one of these cases. Devin_Young_ who claims to be a veteran submariner and he was called out[1] in a later tweet for the implications of the term "drowned".
His answer was "I used “drowned” loosely. You are correct; it would be violent, and instantaneous.".
Also NagaSlateTTV used the hastag "implosion" right after calling those lost "drowned". Which to me implies that they are using the term in a more general way, rather than precisely per the definition.
1: https://twitter.com/Devin_Young_/status/1671267529392783360
I mean, that’s not what happens either.
5700 pounds of pressure per square inch. Ouch.
Opening the hatch? At 13,000 feet below sea level?!
If it wasn’t an explosive event they would have been stuck just under the surface with no way to get out. That said, opening a hatch in that scenario would be an absolute last resort anyways. It’s not like the people that went overboard on the Titanic lasted long and it’s in the same exact place.
I do on occasion ramble on with unpopular opinions or say things which are probably incorrect
You use an idiom comparing people to insects crawling fourth from woodwork like some master of science laughing at the plebs.
That said of course lots of stupid stuff is said, it's the internet, but your comment is just as stupid which is pretty funny.
Also, "crawling from the woodwork" is an idiom in common usage: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/come-cra...
It's not literally comparing people to insects, or implying that, even though it has a disapproving tone.
I want to climb K2 alone in shorts, don’t cry my loss. I’ll die doing what I love.
Given that Stockton Rush risked and lost his own life, he must have believed these words. He ignored pleas from others in the industry that what he was doing was unsafe. What was he thinking?
https://archive.ph/yBrpk
Those who cause progress to happen to some extent have to have something in them that causes them to ignore conventional wisdom. Because they're swimming against the current. And if they succeed it may well pay off, both in credits and financially.
Montgolfier brothers, Lilienthal, the Wright brothers and so on, and that's just a small slice of aviation. Every one of them went against conventional wisdom and the laws of physics as they were known or suspected to be at the time.
But there is a final arbiter, and those are the real laws of nature, and it's first order derivative: materials science. And this is where it gets much more complex. To design something that can work is an accomplishment in itself, even if it works only once. That one mr. Rush can chalk up as a victory. Where he fails is to take into account the fact that safety knowledge is written in blood and that the difference between 'device safe enough to take passengers on' and 'device safe enough that I, the builder/designer will travel on it' is very, very large. And if all of the industry, including some of your own employees say that you are doing it wrong and you still persist, and risk the lives of others then you are crossing over into irresponsibility, rather than being a pioneer.
Whether or not he realized this himself seems a foregone conclusion: he likely thought this was all perfectly safe and those others were needlessly concerned but they were simply more aware of the real risks involved than he was. Fine line between 'god complex' and 'innovator'.
WW1 happened very quickly after the invention of the plane and there was a huge explosion in quantity and type of airplane in WW1.
I'm no historian though, there could be nuances I'm missing.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Jannus
The Florida Man you linked was the pilot for two other men [1], the first commercial air service was Delag operating Zepplin airships .. followed by Aero Rt in Hungary .. then followed by [1] in Florida.
I can't (right now at least) determine if Aero Rt was operating airships or airplanes ... so you may or may not be correct wrt planes at least.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Petersburg%E2%80%93Tampa_A...
This is not true of the Wrights. Their first step was to gather together all the known aeronautical knowledge at the time. They relied on them, too, until they discovered the coefficient of lift was off by a factor of two. Then they built their own wind tunnel to determine the correct value.
They also discovered there was no theory of propellers. So they developed their own theory, which turned out to be 90% correct. Their propellers were twice as efficient as their contemporary experimenters were. This means they only needed half the horsepower! A tremendous advantage.
It's not like the aviation enthusiasts prior to the Wright Bros were just strapping aluminum sheeting to their backs and jumping off cliffs. Well I mean maybe somebody somewhere at some time did do that, but for the most part people always try to start from a basis of what's known, and work their way up from toy experiments. Same with this story, or even the 'flat earth guy' who was launching himself in rockets. [1] For those who didn't 'get it', the flat earth stuff was just an overtly transparent schtick for interest/funding.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Hughes_(daredevil)
They set up experiments to prove the existing theory was wrong. That is completely counter to what you write. Nobody else did that.
> It's not like the aviation enthusiasts prior to the Wright Bros were just strapping aluminum sheeting to their backs and jumping off cliffs. Well I mean maybe somebody somewhere at some time did do that, but for the most part people always try to start from a basis of what's known, and work their way up from toy experiments.
That's pretty much what the Wright's contemporaries were doing. Trying random things in a disorganized manner with eyeballed designs. It's very, very different from the Wrights who:
1. researched all available material
2. identified the fundamental problems that must be solved
3. developed prototypes to solve each problem
4. put the results into a new design that worked
Nobody else was doing that. And that's why the Wrights succeeded, and the others failed miserably. Later, when the Wrights took their Flyer to Europe, they astonished the European aviators by literally flying circles around them. (European designs could not turn.)
In many problems where we're all just standing on the shoulders of those who came before us, somebody's going to eventually get high enough to grab the flag. And while that final achievement deserves distinguished recognition, marginalizing the merit, impact, and ability of the countless individuals holding us up is just crass.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Lilienthal
Nothing I wrote marginalizes Lilienthal. I never wrote that the Wrights started from zero. In fact, I wrote that they researched all the available knowledge of flight from the start.
"About 100 years ago, an Englishman, Sir George Cayley, carried the science of flight to a point which it had never reached before and which it scarcely reached again during the last century."
— Wilbur Wright, 1909.
Curtis later attempted to prove that the Aerodrome could fly. He did this by adding a new wing, a working control system, and a much more powerful engine. I.e. he cheated.
I did not claim that the Wrights invented the scientific method.
Whether Edison's research labs were true R+D programs is debatable. From my reading about them, Edison eschewed theory and did not understand what he was doing. He just tried things until he found something that worked. His efforts to develop the multiplex telegraph, while eventually successful, showed little understanding of electricity. The same with the light bulb - trying thousands of materials for the filament instead of trying to figure out why the filaments didn't last is going around the horn.
Edison invented the vacuum tube by accident, and did not recognize what he had done, because he didn't understand what he was doing.
That said, Edison certainly was a great inventor and deserves the credit for his inventions. But it was not the modern way of doing things - the Wrights get the credit for that.
There were certainly contemporaries of the Wrights attempting to use the scientific method to develop a working airplane.
By the time of the Wright's success at the end of 1903, The Aeronautical Society of Great Britain was already 34 years old. They sponsored the first wind tunnel in 1870 designed by Francis Wenham, one of their members who had also given the inaugural lecture on flight, and the principle by which lift is generated by wings.
This was very much a scientific society, with regular reports and lectures and its members were scientists or engineers, not crazy people strapping sheets of metal to their arms and jumping off towers.
"The organization has never been a large one, and probably years will pass by before the importance of its twenty-nine years of work will be fully understood and appreciated. Even as the missal painters kept art alive during the Dark Ages, so has this band of men kept aeronautics alive during the years in which their branch of science has been by the many regarded almost as a pseudo-science." James Means, Aeronautical Annual Vol 1 (1895), a passage probably read by the Wright brothers, after receiving the journal from the Smithsonian.
Percy Pilcher ('a pale serious fellow, with a great bent for invention, and a brain that was razor keen.') completed his powered triplane in 1899, based on his own research, correspondence with Lilienthal, his work with Hiram Maxim (who had legal battles with Edison over which of their companies invented the light bulb in the US) and correspondence with Octave Chanute (who advised the Wright brothers to choose the mid atlantic coast for their experiments and visited them) and his correspondence with Lawrence Hargrave. It is assumed that the triplane would likely have needed some modification to be practical but it was never tried, since he died in a glider accident before he got chance to try it.
This is just one example of a person at the time who did extensive research, communicated with many of the other key figures of the time, and built lots of prototypes to test approaches. There were lots of others too.
If your point is just that the Wrights succeeded first, then I agree, but to characterise all these characters as approaching the problem in an essentially stupid way is just not true, if anything, I'm struck by how much the early aviation pioneers seemed to be in touch with each other and understood some of the basic principles of aerofoil design and the science behind how lift works.
Keep in mind that the Wrights built a series of gliders, each one was to test a particular aspect of the flight problem.
Pilcher's designs were not capable of flight:
"Cranfield built a full-sized working replica of Pilcher's aircraft, but, based on wind tunnel tests with a scale model, they made several alterations to Pilcher's original designs, which they speculated Pilcher would have made, including filling in cut-away sections of the wings to increase the wing area, and therefore lift, and adding a swinging seat to aid control of the aircraft through shifting body weight; a refinement developed by Octave Chanute, which they believed Pilcher would have been aware of. They also added the Wright brothers' innovation of wing-warping as a safety backup for roll control. Pilcher's original design did not include aerodynamic controls such as ailerons or elevators."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percy_Pilcher
and he left no lasting contribution to aeronautical advancement.
It is interesting, however, how many people assert that Wright's rivals designs would have / could have flown, and they set out to "prove" it by modifying those designs by incorporating the Wright innovations.
Besides that, the fundamental reason these competitors could not get into the air is pretty simple. The Wrights had a propeller design that was double the efficiency of everyone elses' propellers. This means the Wrights doubled the effective engine power. Still, the Wrights could not find an existing engine with the needed power/weight ratio, and so they designed and built the very first lightweight aero engine. The Wrights also were the first to create an efficient wing cross section. It still required a much bigger wing than the Wrights originally anticipated.
I.e. even tossing aside the lack of control the rival machines had, there is SIMPLY NO WAY they had the power/weight to get it off the ground. They didn't have the engine, the propeller, or the wing section.
P.S. Even a brick shithouse will fly if you attach a powerful enough engine.
My disagreement is not at all about whether the Wrights had their own insights and strengths or can justly claim priority to have the first human carrying powered and controlled aircraft. I know it can seem like I'm doing them down in some way, but I do not intend to. So, I recognise their advances and their focus on building their vision of an actually useful flying machine.
Where I disagree is when you say things like:
> Keep in mind that the Wrights built a series of gliders, each one was to test a particular aspect of the flight problem.
as if that were unusual. Almost all of the names I mentioned in my previous comment did exactly that too.
We probably disagree on precisely which of the Wright's achievements meant a significant advance on state of the art (some of the advances you mention were being systematically investigated by others too), but my main point of departure from you is really just the apparent characterisation of the Wrights contemporaries as not following the scientific method and approaching the whole problem in a haphazard and isolated way.
My own impression of those days is of a small group of pioneers that were in touch with each other, building on each others advances, and with incomplete but growing knowledge of the science behind what they were trying to do.
It's not about the scientific method. It's about a directed research and development program. I just don't see any of the other experimenters doing that. I didn't say they were isolated, either, but they were haphazard. They tried to leap right from an unproven theory to a working airplane. Their airplanes were not even close to flying, which is evidence of their haphazardness. The other evidence is the lack of a trail of documentation - notes, calculations, drawings, etc. Disorganized and haphazard, absolutely.
Which one of them identified control as a crucial element of flight, for example? Which one did the calculations to show they had enough power? Heck, which ones did the calculations to make the airframe strong enough? The Langley Aerodrome fell apart on launch, Pilcher died because his glider broke up in flight. Many copied bird designs rather than trying to figure out what the right shape should be.
An airplane is not like inventing a car, where you can just attach an engine to some wheels, eyeball the whole thing, and it'll work. You have to do the math and the engineering. Eyeballing something that looks like a bird and sticking an engine on it will NEVER WORK.
> with incomplete but growing knowledge of the science behind what they were trying to do.
One of them would have eventually succeeded, just like the Japanese eventually figured out how to make a Samurai sword after centuries of trial and error, but no knowledge of metallurgy.
And that is why the Wrights were different.
You can see the Wrights' notebooks in the Smithsonian. Take a look at that, and you'll see they are not mere bicycle mechanics. We still have the 1903 Flyer, too, and people have built exacting replicas of it - that fly, and fly the way the Wrights described how it flew.
The only rival with some documentation is the Aerodrome, and we know it does not fly for many reasons. The other rivals left next to nothing behind, and nobody has successfully gotten a replica (built from guesswork) to fly at all.
Pilcher's design did not have remotely enough power, showing he hadn't done the math. The Wrights calculated a needed engine engine power of 8 hp, but the result produced 12 hp.
[0] https://www.wright-brothers.org/History_Wing/Wright_Story/In...
1. 3 axis control (as you mentioned)
2. first propeller theory
3. first lightweight aircraft engine
4. wind tunnel tested airfoils
5. solving adverse yaw problem
6. targeted research & development program
They needed all of them to fly. All modern aircraft can trace their designs back to the 1903 Wright Flyer, and none of the other contenders. It's a stunning achievement, and all at a cost of $1,500. (The Langley project cost $50,000 and solved none of the problems.)
In my not-so-humble opinion, the 1903 Wright Flyer is the start of the modern technological age.
[1]: "This Oceangate sub had sensors on the inside of the hull to give them a warning when it was starting to crack [...] they probably had warning that their hull was starting to delaminate. [...] It's our belief - as we understand from inside the community - that they had dropped their ascent weights and they were coming up trying to manage an emergency." https://youtu.be/rThZLhNF_xg?t=472
[0]https://leehamnews.com/2019/09/30/boeings-737-in-another-pic...
http://o-si-sec.com/2018/10/11/5-facts-to-know-about-stop-dr...
Water pressure increases by 1 Bar every 32ft (10m) of depth. To see the equivalent change in pressure in water (0.6 bar) as you see going up to 30K in the air, you only have to go down ~20ft (6m). The pressure on the submersible at 9000ft (2750m) is 276 Bar.
F16s and other planes with composite body panels will sometimes lose a panel due to water buildup between layers of the composite. The water freezes between the layers popping the panel loose from the frame or retainers holding it in place. That is usually not a life-threatening problem (though not desirable). A crack in a submersible pressure vessel at more than a couple hundred feet is usually fatal.
The description of the Byford Dolphin accident in ~300ft (~90m) of water or 9 Bar pressure, is illustrative: https://www.iflscience.com/byford-dolphin-accident-how-livin...
The pressure on the Titan would have been ~30 times greater than what occurred on the Dolphin.
This is an exaggeration, small cracks can develop and grow very slowly over the course of years. There’s lots of types and sizes of cracks.
There may have been monitors that detected structural issues in the hull (nucleation above), but at the pressures that the Titan was operating at, the amount of advanced warning is likely very, short--_maybe_ a second or two, if that. Probably not enough time to notice and reduce the pressure on the hull in any meaningful way.
The slow-motion porthole cracking you see in movies like "The Abyss" is a fiction created by Hollywood for dramatic effect. The reality is far more likely to be like water freezing in a pipe: everything is fine until it isn't.
The pressure the pipe exerts on the water inside of it keeps the water in liquid form until the temperature drops below the temperature/pressure equilibrium (~10F/-12C for residential copper pipe in the US). At that moment, the super-cooled water transitions from liquid to solid virtually instantaneously. <poof>.
The pipe analogy is the opposite of what would happen in the submersible: the pipe explodes due to internal pressure, instead of implodes due to external pressure. But the pressure going from sustainable to unsustainable in very short order is the same.
Cameron did not say "the system worked" nor do I agree with summarizing what he did say as "the system worked."
The claim in the blog post was this:
> With this RTM system, we can determine if the hull is compromised well before situations become life-threatening, and safely return to the surface.
It obviously did not do that. The system failed catastrophically.
In the part you elided Cameron said: "I think if that's your idea of safety, then you're doing it wrong."
Obviously, a few minutes isn't enough, but the point is that the occupants were likely aware something was wrong because of this system, as opposed to being vaporized without having enough time to comprehend their reality.
I wonder if they knew they were doomed or whether Rush was telling them not to worry to the very end. Personally, I think I would have rather been vaporized without the minutes of terror beforehand.
1. trying to fly the Atlantic
2. flying without a relief pilot
3. flying with only one engine
4. flying without a radio
I don't recall if he had a life raft.
Previous attempts had resulted in disappearing forever, and being incinerated in a fireball on takeoff.
BTW, during WW2 the air crews ferried their own B-17s across the Atlantic. Quite a few left Newfoundland and were never seen again. There was no rescue if they went down. Navigation was still primitive. My dad (navigator) was immensely pleased that they hit Ireland within a mile of their goal.