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Oceangate Statement, “We now believe that [all crew] have sadly been lost.”
- lostmsu 3y agoWas there a black box on board? Will an attempt to recover it be made?
- cmpbl 3y agoOceangate's 2019 blog post Why Isn't Titan Classed (now only available in internet caches), is a stunning display of either deeply flawed logical thinking or a willful attempt to confuse people. The post basically says, (1) the "vast majority of marine (and aviation) accidents are the result of operator error, not mechanical failure", and (2) the vehicle classification guidelines are too stringent and stymie innovation. A rationale person might interpret that as: (1) mechanical-related incidents are very infrequent as a percentage of total incidents, because (2) vehicle guidelines successfully minimize rates of mechanical failure, such that remaining incidents are generally operational in nature. Oceangate ignores this implication and bluffs its way from pointing out that most incidents are operational in nature (for a sample set of largely mechanically certified crafts) to implying that a focus on operational safety is a reasonable way to minimize total risk (for an uncertified craft). ref: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Y_6RrxM5IesJ:https://oceangate.com/news-and-media/blog/2019-0221-why-titan-is-not-classed.html&cd=19&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Y_6Rrx...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- post_break 3y agoSub debris found: The tail cone of the submersible was found approximately 1,600 feet from the bow of the Titanic on the sea floor, the US Coast Guard said Thursday. Officials said it was consistent with a "catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber."
- downWidOutaFite 3y ago"catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber" is a much better way to die than slowly running out of air in a super cramped container with a bunch of people.
- paulddraper 3y agoIt could have been the latter, followed by the former.
- paulcole 3y agoI thought they said that during the rescue effort they've been listening and haven't heard anything that sounds like what a rapid implosion would sound like. So the conclusion (publicly at least) seems to be that the implosion happened before they suffocated.
- dmix 3y agoThey said the sonar buoys would have heard the explosion so it likely happened during the initial dive
- SkyMarshal 3y ago[flagged]
- paulddraper 3y ago"The Titan began its descent Sunday to explore the wreckage of the Titanic, located about 13,000 feet below sea level in the North Atlantic Ocean, with an estimated 96 hours of life support. The expedition was billed as “a chance to step outside of everyday life and discover something truly extraordinary” and cost each participant $250,000, an archived version of OceanGate’s website shows. "However, the cramped vessel lost contact with its mother ship about 1 hour and 45 minutes into its dive, did not surface as expected and has not been heard from since. "Aboard the Titan were Rush, the OceanGate CEO and founder, along with Harding, a British businessman; Pakistani billionaire Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood; and Nargeolet, a French diver, according to relatives and social media posts. "Earlier Thursday, the US Coast Guard said it found a “debris field” in the search area near the Titanic that, according to a memo obtained by CNN, has been assessed to be from the external body of the submersible." [1] The ocean is very, very deep. The Titanic is 13,000 feet below sea level, and the submersible was scheduled to take 2.5 hours just for the descent. EDIT: corrected feet/meters [1] https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/22/us/submersible-titanic-oceangate-search-thursday/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/22/us/submersible-titanic-oceang...
- mikerg87 3y agoI think you meant 3800 meters which is about 12500 feet
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- seanalltogether 3y agoFrom that same article, I guess he got the recognition he always wanted. Rush, the CEO of OceanGate Expeditions, told a Mexican travel blogger in 2021 he wanted to be known as an innovator who broke the rules. “I think it was (US Army) Gen. (Douglas) MacArthur who said, ‘You’re remembered for the rules you break,’” Rush told Alan Estrada, who documented his trip to the Titanic, including an aborted attempt in July 2021 before a successful visit in 2022. “And you know,” Rush added, “I’ve broken some rules to make this.”
- 3y ago
- bonif 3y agoMove fast, break things, ignore safety protocols :-(
- meepmorp 3y agoYou're not ignoring safety protocols if you don't have them to begin with.
- nickff 3y agoDid Oceangate or its founder(s) say they intended to 'move fast and break things', or are you just imputing that they held those beliefs? The company purported to "maintain[] high-level operational safety".
- lamontcg 3y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20230619161930/https://oceangate.com/news-and-media/blog/2019-0221-why-titan-is-not-classed.html https://web.archive.org/web/20230619161930/https://oceangate... Pretty much says it there along with a rationalization about why the company should ignore any outside experts due to "innovation".
- jacquesm 3y agoYes. The founder is on record as saying that he thinks safety is wasteful or something to that effect and many other choice quotes besides. https://www.google.com/search?q=stockton+rush+quotes https://www.google.com/search?q=stockton+rush+quotes
- Natsu 3y agoWell, this explains a lot... they didn't have a window rated for the right depth and weren't really testing whether the hull was de-laminating according to the whistleblower, so we have a few guesses as to why the sub would just implode. The lack of contact would be because nobody was alive to contact, which is honestly better, at least they had a quick death instead of slow suffocation. And the banging noises are probably either the sub imploding or from debris falling to the ocean floor.
- 2-718-281-828 3y ago> The lack of contact would be because nobody was alive to contact also no radio left to contact somebody with
- jonah 3y agoIn the press-conference they said both end bells were found separately - no mention of whether the window was still intact. It'll be interesting to see the failure analysis. [Edit] Link to video with a description of the major debris found: https://youtu.be/A0xJ220Fod4?t=263 https://youtu.be/A0xJ220Fod4?t=263 "the front end-bell of the pressure hull - that was the first indication that there was a catastrophic event" "the aft end-bell which basically...comprised the totality of that pressure vessel"
- lamontcg 3y agoThe root cause was just hubris. Ironically.
- SV_BubbleTime 3y agoSounds like if the bells were found, but not the tube, we have the answer. If the window failed, I would expect to have none or one bell separated from the tube, but not both. I imagine the glass being shot inside the tube and the water jet would vaporize the people inside and maybe blow one bell off. If the tube failed, would expect both bells to be sitting on the ocean floor. I’m not a professional mechanical engineer, just a guess.
- TheCaptain4815 3y agoIf the sub imploded shortly after reaching the titanic, how exactly did the people on board die? Was it an instant pressurized death? Do they drown or something?
- tedivm 3y agoSomeone on reddit did out the math- they were crushed before they had any idea what happened.
- andrewmunsell 3y agoThere's obvious differences between the Oceangate sub and this (1 atm difference, this is a thinner steel(?) railroad tanker not a sub), but I think it effectively demonstrates how violent and quick an implosion would be: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zz95_VvTxZM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zz95_VvTxZM Video contents: An experiment where the vacuum safety valves were removed from an oil tanker railroad car, and a vacuum was placed inside the car, resulting in it crumpling in an implosion. There is no gore or other specific disturbing content
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Dave_TRS 3y agoInteresting a commenter on the video notes the pressure there is equivalent to only 10 meters underwater. Imagine the force 2 miles below
- soneil 3y ago10 meters of water is one atmosphere, so they're right - 0 on the inside and 1 on the outside is a pressure differential of one atmosphere. "almost 4000 meters of water" is "almost 400 atmospheres". About 2.7 tons per square inch. I find that that absolutely unimaginable. - I can't find any equivalence that my brain can make sense of.
- 3y ago
- fnord77 3y agowonder if the window imploded or the whole thing just crushed like a soda can experiment
- ilyt 3y agoIt's carbon fiber. It doesn't break like soda can, it breaks like eggshells or hard plastic. It would probably look like something exploded on side of it, when any small hole/crack started it would just isntantly make rest of it rip till the pressure equalizes
- Solvency 3y agoEmpty eggshells implode into thousands of increasingly smaller little shards. Is that what happened here?
- jacquesm 3y agoDepends on the speed of the change. The pressure differential is what causes the material to fracture, the longer the differential exists the more fracturing you will get. Carbon fiber fails much like wood, you'll end up with a couple of larger fragments and a much larger number of smaller fragments, some too small to even see with the unaided eye. Unlike say a metal vessel during an implosion which would remain mostly connected but crushed or ripped into a few larger chunks depending on where the initial fault was. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/VNvEpDyUhvo https://www.youtube.com/shorts/VNvEpDyUhvo Shows nicely how a fault propagates through carbon fiber.
- ilyt 3y ago> Shows nicely how a fault propagates through carbon fiber. That's tensile fault, in sub it would be compressed, for which carbon fiber is much worse for. But yeah, it would be equally if not more violent Edit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYqOMjoz_i8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYqOMjoz_i8 https://youtu.be/PlvyZ1r1DCM?t=266 https://youtu.be/PlvyZ1r1DCM?t=266 https://youtu.be/Iedj9OZlEfI?t=330 https://youtu.be/Iedj9OZlEfI?t=330 not explosive because hydraulic press doesn't move as much but still shows it will instantly lose strength the second it is breaking
- abdussamit 3y agoStockton was the CEO, PH was GOAT of sea expeditions, Hamish had experience with sooo many expeditions above and beyond, the 2 odd ones were Shahzada and Suleman. Them 2 would have been the most panicked about this situation, that is, if they were given time to think by God.
- InCityDreams 3y agoDoes this qualify for a Darwin award?
- routerl 3y agoYesterday, people involved with the Darwin awards were saying "let's wait 24 hours". For the pilot and co-founder, yes, he deserves the award. For the passengers, I predict lawsuits. But apparently the contract included a clause about accidental death. The guy who brought his son also probably deserves a Darwin award.
- jacquesm 3y agoThis is not an accident though, this is gross negligence and I somewhat doubt you can contract your way out of that. An accident is when something unexpectedly goes wrong. This end result was baked into the design and it was merely a question of how many times you could cycle that hull before it would implode, not if it would. Death lottery.
- routerl 3y agoI think you're right. There are proven ways to do this without the fatal result, and this company ignored many of the industry best practices. I look forward to seeing this play out in court, because it has the potential to create a really good precedent.
- ilyt 3y agoProbably. Ignore industry practices while bragging about doing same people space companies do (which deal with 0 to 1 atm of pressure), firing guy yelling that's unsafe, shooting potshots at veterans of industry being just not hip enough. And then conning few other people to go into something that looked like what mythbusters built in a week (and if THEY did it it would probably not implode...)
- croes 3y agoRegarding the quality issues of the submarine "Mechanic on ‘record-setting’ Titan dive dismisses criticism from ‘armchair experts’" https://news.yahoo.com/mechanic-record-setting-titan-dive-193717682.html https://news.yahoo.com/mechanic-record-setting-titan-dive-19...
- babypuncher 3y agoWell it turns out he was wrong and the "armchair experts" were right. Though insinuating all critics were "armchair experts" is pretty disingenuous. There were plenty of real experts raising serious safety concerns, including the guy who got fired for not approving manned test dives because of them. If there was a strong consenus among real experts that this thing was safe, then they would have had no trouble getting the relevant safety certifications.
- croes 3y ago"Mathioudakis said that the safety concerns raised by the two former OceanGate employees in 2018, as well as the letter from industry leaders, were "before the extensive testing completed in 2019." He added that OceanGate had responded to those concerns in the past and changed the hull to increase the level of safety."
- croes 3y agoWe still don't know what happened, so we don't know who was right.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- getmeinrn 3y agoSomething I've learned over my life is not to automatically trust that someone has done or will do the right thing just because they stick their neck out. Sometimes they stick their neck out because they don't actually understand the risks and consequences, but they are pretending that they do. They're artificially signaling confidence. In this case, the CEO risking his life on this third(!) voyage means 1 of 2 possibilities: 1) The CEO has done the due diligence and has a thorough understanding of the risks and the safety protocols involved to minimize those risks. 2) The CEO is naive.
- 411111111111111 3y agoThe target of the adventure is also surprisingly ironic. The Titanic is one of the most notorious icons of human hubris. And these tourists died to the same.
- voisin 3y agoIs it an icon of human hubris or simply a tragedy that they didn’t think could happen? I.e. did they take undue risks because of the belief that it was unsinkable? There was another boat not too far off when it sank so presumably they were taking normal risks and it was just an unfortunate way to learn that their belief that it was unsinkable was wrong. Or are you referring to the insufficient number of lifeboats? I haven’t seen any evidence that other ships carried a larger number of lifeboats relative to their size.
- toomuchtodo 3y ago> Is it an icon of human hubris or simply a tragedy that they didn’t think could happen? https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20120402-the-myth-of-the-unsinkable-ship https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20120402-the-myth-of-the-... (Titanic anniversary: The myth of the unsinkable ship) "There is no danger that Titanic will sink. The boat is unsinkable and nothing but inconvenience will be suffered by the passengers." Phillip Franklin, White Star Line vice-president, 1912
- 3y ago
- JumpCrisscross 3y agoDid this project yield any lasting benefits? New productions methods, or science, et cetera?
- facialwipe 3y agoComposite hulls don't work for reusable Full Ocean Depth (FOD) submersibles.
- ChrisArchitect 3y ago[dupe] or merge https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36437120 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36437120
- WORMS_EAT_WORMS 3y agoAlmost as interesting as this story has been the comments online. Everyone, everywhere just parroting and re-parroting the same comments, attitude, pretending to understand the engineering with snippets from comments they’ve read, reactive talking points, etc… Very strange. Did anyone else feel like an alien following this story online?
- guax 3y agoThat is standard human behaviour. We're all like this on almost every topic. Think about how much of your opinions are shaped similarly.
- RajT88 3y agoWelcome to the internet!
- ilyt 3y agoAnd weird focus on that fucking gamepad that they were using, which was probably the least of engineering problems
- toofy 3y agoi didn’t see the game pad as the cause, but an indicator of where they would cut corners. it’s strange on its face to use a game controller when we’ve all spilled soda or water on one and watched it become useless and they’re taking this into… the ocean… and just to add insult to injury, playing on offbrand controllers always irritated me so to see them cut even further was super strange. more than anything it is that combined with the stuff he bragged about buying from camper world—just a sign of strange corner cutting indicating their was likely more that we weren’t seeing.