> They [inspections] do not ensure that operators adhere to proper operating procedures and decision-making processes – two areas that are much more important for mitigating risks at sea.
As a former tall ship captain:
No Shit. Ships stopped sinking when we started requiring inspections and design rules around stability and watertight compartments.
We largely eliminated a common failure mode, designer error, through inspections and classing, so now we are left with the harder failure modes: operator error.
I’m curious if the flag state will get involved here. It’s one thing to push the limits with experimental design (happens all the time in boats, airplanes and cars). It’s a while other thing to use experimental designs in commercial applications. There’s a good reason that the FAA doesn’t allow commercial operators to use experimental registered aircraft…
As another tall ship, and for that matter in-shore commercial captain I found this quite telling.
> While classing agencies are willing to pursue the certification of new and innovative designs and ideas, they often have a multi-year approval cycle due to a lack of pre-existing standards, especially, for example, in the case of many of OceanGate’s innovations, such as carbon fiber pressure vessels and a real-time (RTM) hull health monitoring system. Bringing an outside entity up to speed on every innovation before it is put into real-world testing is anathema to rapid innovation. For example, Space X, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic all rely on experienced inside experts to oversee the daily operations, testing, and validation versus bringing in outsiders who need to first be educated before being qualified to ‘validate’ any innovations.
Gamble with money all you want. Don't gamble with people. Things get fixed, people don't. That is quite a hard lesson for inexperienced people to learn.
OT - and passé to say it, probably - but the fact that one can come here and read back and forth between commercial ship captains is a fine example of what makes this place so unique.
You guys are tall ship masters. Your vessels are generally well understood these days but let's not forget some comparable disasters: Vasa and Mary Rose. Yes both are from a long time ago but both were based on top of a lot of good solid engineering but both pushed the envelope somewhat and perished. Vasa design basically forgot to sort out the various CoGs for a ship - it was top heavy. Mary Rose loss is a bit more complicated but for me water ingress via lower open gun ports, compounded by heavier loading was a possible failure scenario.
I'll also recall the sinking of the Herald Of Free Enterprise - a roll on/roll off ferry that departed Zeebrugge and "rolled over" in shallow water due to the bow door being left open - ie stupidity and a lack of monitoring. That wasn't a tall ship but the same general rules apply.
Those are three samples from 400 years of maritime history. The Vasa was a daft design from the outset (meta vs cog), Mary Rose a daft refit after 30 years of service (it was OK for 30 years and then wasn't) and Herald was basically abused by her crew and lacked monitoring.
Now submarines are pretty new. We do have a fairly long history of making pressure hulls from steel and some other materials but they all build upon earlier designs and they have all been tested with a lot of loss of life for failed designs - the history of submarines is pretty sad.
I gather that all very deep sea hulls are basically spherical. The Titan's pressure hull was made of carbon fibre which I gather no one else has used like that. As well as a novel material its shape was elongated to allow more passengers - that's two changes. Finally we also have a viewing port at the front that was actually tested but never rated for 4000m.
No one really knows what happens to carbon fibre pressure hulls when they go from one atmosphere to 180 and back again, repeatedly, then they are picked up out of the water - more stress and strain. Also, no one really knows what happens at the interface of a "window" to carbon fibre at 180 atmospheres.
There are lots more questions to be answered but frankly I see a company trying to run a submarine with DevOps attitude (move fast and break things) rather than proper maritime grade engineering. At 180 times atmospheric pressure, you die within seconds. No ifs and no buts.
I absolutely stand with you guys in insisting on standards for this sort of thing. It isn't the same as running up Everest or going into space. Deep sea is way, way more dangerous.
I recommend watching the interview with Cameron. You say deep sea diving history is pretty sad, well actually there have been amazingly few incidents (and even fewer deaths) in the history of deep sea diving. And the engineering challenges are pretty well understood. They were just ignored in this case.
Cameron went so far to say the design mythology itself was inherently flawed at the principal designed of his own vehicle. That said, his vehicle wasn’t certified either, rationale being it wouldn’t carry passengers.
With respect, the "DevOps attitude" is not "move fast and break things". That's the Facebook attitude.
DevOps is, in part, about using repeatable methods of automation and extensive testing throughout the software development lifecycle to try and make sure that the software you deliver in production will do exactly what it should do and nothing else, and so long as it is properly designed, should be able to withstand significant scaling stress but just getting slower and slower but not less reliable.
From what I can tell regarding the Titan incident, there was no part of a proper DevOps mindset or approach that those people adopted. They people in charge were just damn stupid cowboys out to make a fast Buck from people who were too stupid to know how much in danger they were of losing their lives.
Space has different issues but basically -1 atmosphere vs 180 atmospheres is a constant. 180 atmospheres is absolutely brutal.
Without any real justification, I invite you to imagine an elephant pirouetting on top of your skull. Hmmm, nice image, does it stack up:
180 atmos is 186 kg/cm^2 according to random online calculator. That's 2645 psi in old money, according to Google calc. An adult african elephant is about 5-6 tonnes according to several sites (max 6.8 tonnes). So 6000/186 = 32 cm^2. root 32 is about 5.7cm. I really did pluck the elephant thing out of the air and it does seem to work out (please check my 'rithmetic).
Imagine that every 5.7cm^2 of your body/vessel/submarine has an adult african elephant's weight bearing on it.
Now in space we have a bit of a problem with keeping everything in, instead of out but we can lower the internal atmospheric pressure and up the oxygen content (fire risk - procedures!) and other tricks and we have to scrub the CO2 (and so below surface). We also have to worry about very, very fast moving anything, radiation and other issues.
But in space you do not have an elephant's weight crushing each 2.5" square of your body, all the time! That's why deep sea is far more dangerous than space (which is also very dangerous).
With current technology the most dangerous part about space isn't being in space, it's getting there (and back). So far, nobody has ever died just sitting in orbit. (Closest was the Soyuz 11[1] and even that was a result of an incident during the re-entry process.)
It sounds like there was little reason not to get it certified. If it’s not regulated they could have just kept diving while working on certification. If their liability insurance provider let them dive without certification they probably wouldn’t have cared if they did that.
> The vast majority of marine (and aviation) accidents are a result of operator error, not mechanical failure. As a result, simply focusing on classing the vessel does not address the operational risks.
Aka "classing doesn't mitigate all problems, so we're not going to do it at all"
Technically correct, too. The vast majority of marine and aviation accidents are the result of operator error… because engineering standards are so good and mechanical failures are so rare.
And app sandboxing, and masks during covid, and seatbelts, and gun control, and …
The relative merits differ, and any given thing is debatable, but “it doesn’t solve everything so it’s no better than nothing” is a nakedly dishonest argument.
I've heard the same argument against not using heroin.
It's a generic pretend argument: You say doing(or not doing) this thing will be risky. So that means you're saying that people who don't do(or do) the thing have perfect lives with no risks and free ice cream?
If I recall correctly, even NASA found unit testing to be of limited value, finding a small fraction of software bugs. That's not to say "don't do it" but my stance is that the developer should do some ad-hoc testing for everything they write, just don't formalize and document it or you'll land on the wrong end of cost/benefit.
I can point to some subtle logic bugs that no sane unit test would have caught.
"even NASA" implies that NASA is the objective paragon of software development. There are many ways to develop software, and while I have never worked for NASA I can virtually guarantee that their development process is not the same as some random web service.
I've found that it's better to think of unit tests as a contract. You don't write them to check your code for bugs, you write them to declare an explicit (though incomplete) contact that's checked in to source control.
>> "even NASA" implies that NASA is the objective paragon of software development.
Sure. They have some of the highest costs of failure post-deployment of anyone, and they have some solid development practices. I'll cite NASA in this context any time. Feel free to pull in other sources if you don't like them though.
I never said or implied they have poor development practices.
But the constraints, requirements, and priorities for a given project at NASA won't even be the same as every other project there, let alone projects at pretty companies in different fields.
By extension, I would argue that the concept of universally superior development best practices as a whole doesn't make sense.
Yeah, it comes down to cost benefit. Different situations require different qc strategies. But the fact that something is not 100% effective is not. Good argument against it.
It's an argument I encounter way too often in discussions (politics, climate, evolution even) with people who have an "alternative" view of how things work: it doesn't address everything, therefore it doesn't address anything.
There's probably a name for that fallacy. People take all the issues that have been solved/addresses for granted, and pretend the unsolved issues are the only ones that matter. And because current methods don't fix those, they're clearly worthless and should be thrown out.
As much as I love the show, I'd call it Star Trek's approach to OSHA. I mean, Starfleet officers are so well-trained and perfect that they don't need safeguards such as guardrails on elevators moving engineers up and down a three story high room that ends up shaking at least twice per episode. And let's not even talk about seatbelts.
Well, idk, every time the ship gets hit some console on the bridge shorts out and the arcflash blows some noname ensign across the room. So, star trek probably isn't the example I'd pull from.
Titan didn't have a flag, it only operated in international waters. But the surface support vessel has a Canadian flag, and Canada's launching an investigation.
Flag of convenience. Where the country of record allows ships to register under their name as a way of generating revenue from foreigners. Bahamas will not do more than issue a statement, if that. You step foot on a flag of convenience boat with no prior reputation and you are effectively waiving any expectation safety.
Arrogance and overconfidence lead inexorably to hubris and they won a Darwin Award for thinking they "knew better". It's obvious they skimped on testing and were too cavalier with unproven "innovation".
> The vast majority of marine (and aviation) accidents are a result of operator error, not mechanical failure.
Could that be because the vast majority of mechanical designs go through processes designed to validate them and catch flaws?
They also use SpaceX as an example. SpaceX ran a large number of unmanned launches to prove out the design before putting people on board. Several of those ended in loss of the vehicle and the data from that was used to refine.
The first space shuttle launch was crewed. It ended up with a ~2% failure rate. The Titan made about 50 dives. So, from a reliability perspective, on par with the shuttle.
I posit that half the people on HN would volunteer for a hypothetical next shuttle flight without thinking twice.
One of the shuttle missions that resulted in loss of crew was caused by operating the vehicle outside of the rated temperature envelope (for the SSB O-rings). If that requirement was honored, the failure rate could have been halved.
The other loss of crew was caused by a genuine oversight in the design of the system, in that the orbiter was always susceptible to strikes from insulating foam falling from the external tank.
Unlike Titan, neither one of these failures were due to the inevitable cyclic wear of the primary pressure vessel. They were both devils hiding in the details, neither one the result of reckless hubris.
OceanGate full on admitted that its carbon fiber hull, a major red flag component at the center of its design, was highly experimental and did not know exactly when it would fail. They foolishly thought that strain gauges would detect issues well in advance of failure, while completely ignoring how immediately and catastrophically composite structures are known to fail. They recklessly sold tickets to fund their experimental craft, inviting people aboard who were definitely not made fully aware of just how flawed the design was up front. These were not all members of the Explorers Club — a former head writer for the Simpsons went on a dive, for goodness’ sake.
So to return back to your point, I’d rather take a shuttle after a few dozen flights than get inside a Titan II after a few dozen dives.
More specifically, mission control management intentionally chose to launch Challenger after being notified that the launch was rejected by engineering.
Same as Titan -- Management intentionally launched into catastrophe.
At least Rush bet his own life on it, not only innocent victims.
With Columbia, Mission Control knew there was a potential issue pretty much as soon as the shuttle reached orbit, but because there was basically nothing* that could be done about it, they essentially were going to not worry the crew too much about it and hope for the best. As I recall, they modified the reentry procedure somewhat to possibly reduce stress on the affected wing. Obviously it did not work.
* There were a handful of high-risk options that in all probability would have resulted in one or more dead astronauts. One plan would have been to send the Columbia crew on a spacewalk to try to fashion whatever kind of shield they could jerry-rig to cover the ceramic tiles - like bags of frozen water. The most glorious plan would have been putting the Columbia crew on a minimal sustenance/activity schedule right away and then rushing the next orbiter scheduled to fly (Atlantis, I think it was) into orbit on a rescue mission. I get chills even thinking about that kind of mission, but the shuttle was obviously a temperamental vehicle, and if NASA had cut the normal months of prep time into a handful of weeks, who knows what could have gone wrong with that launch. I have no doubt you would have had 100 or more volunteers among the past and present astronaut corps to fly it though.
The shuttle did something nobody had done before and was viewed as a genuine step forward in human capability. It was also over 50 years ago and had to rely on technology of the time - uncrewed tests were much harder to perform.
This wasn't a particularly ground breaking vehicle in terms of capability and was taking paying tourists...
It also wasn't built with parts from camper world and cheap Xbox controller knockoffs.
NASA actually had a strong focus on safety. They just went about it the wrong way, calculating safety ratings backwards.
Considering the pressure vessel of this sub was only meant to handle 1300m as per another article, the way it survived 50 dives at 4000m is pretty amazing though.
There seems to be a lot of confusion around this, let me try to clear it up.
The 1300m limit of the glass number comes from an interview with the "whistleblower" in 2018. That would mean it refers to the Cyclops 1 vehicle they had then. A couple years later they built the Cyclops 2, which has the 5" thick hull, titanium bells, and first dove in 2021. That's the ill-fated Titan.
If you pay close attention to the videos floating around you'll notice two visibly distinct subs - one with a large transparent dome in front (v1) and one with the titanium bell and tiny porthole (v2).
EDIT: This video (taken from a commenter on this page) includes film of the previous sub, playing next to the guy talking:
The report by the whistleblower David Lochridge is specifically about Cyclops 2, also called Titan, and the quality control of the carbon fiber cylinder. It also mentions the viewport only being certified to 1300 meters. Some of it can be read in the lawsuit that came from Oceangate firing David.
> The shuttle did something nobody had done before
Put spy satellites into orbit and then later retrieve them? That's not to be critical, but we could have done much of the scientific and space station work with a different platform and likely had a much lower mission failure rate. The design of the shuttle wasn't solely about this criteria, though.
Which incidentally was exactly what the engineering studies predicted while it was being designed. Which really says something about the quality of engineering analysis which went into creating the Shuttle.
For reference you can nerd out on the following awsome books:
"Space Shuttle Decision, 1965-1972 (History of the Space Shuttle, Volume 1)"
"Development of the Space Shuttle, 1972-1981 (History of the Space Shuttle, Volume 2)"
First, it did way less than 50 dives. I'm finding it really hard to find any solid numbers, but I've only found reference to only 3 or 4 previous dives to the Titanic, a test dive and a few dives to much shallower depths. That would put the failure rate for dives to this depth closer to 20%.
Second, the space shuttle never carried any paying passengers.
I'm very much of the opinion that the second you start accepting paying passengers, the safety standards should massively go up. Consumers have an expectation that if a company is offering a service to the general public, that service will meet a minimum level of safety. Companies shouldn't be able to hide behind liability wavers (well, not for a ~2% risk and absolutely not for a 20% risk) as even with a waver explictly stating death is an option, they will under estimate it.
Third, NASA engineers actually quantified the risk all the way back in the design stage and had it at ~2%, remarkably accurate in retrospect. NASA decided that was an acceptable level of risk for their mission profile and went ahead (it would have been way safer if the air force hadn't put insane mission profiles on it)
With everything we now know, there is no way in hell that OceanGate had any level of risk calculation. They were denying any risk at all, asserting that their real-time monitoring procedures would catch any failures before they became critical.
"OceanGate has stated that the Titan completed over 50 test dives, including to depths similar to those of the Titanic, both in waters around the Bahamas as well as in a pressure chamber."
Other articles mention 200 dives among three subs. So overall it's hard to know exactly.
I don't see what paying passengers have to do with it. If you could get a space shuttle ride for a few thousand bucks, half of HN would put nonrefundable deposits in today and happily accept a 2% risk of death.
I think the real difference is that more people romanticize space than the deep ocean. That's fine, but don't be smug about it.
The space shuttle carried politicians, though! The mission that landed right before Challenger carried the now-administrator of NASA and then Florida Congressman Bill Nelson. They also took up a republican rep or senator from Utah (where the SRBs were built).
That’s pretty much the NASA equivalent of “paying customers.”
I actually don’t disagree with your point at all, it’s just funny to look back at the teacher in space and who preceeded McAuliffe and who would have been next if Challenger hadn’t blown up (probably Walter Cronkite or Dan Rather).
I don't think I'd go on a shuttle, but I would definitely on a crew dragon and I'd probably go on new shephard (I might buy a ticket if the price comes down a bit).
There's no way in hell I'm getting on one of virgin galactic's death traps, that looks 10 times worse than the space shuttle.
The Shuttle was driven by USAF "military" needs that didn't matter. Gliding and maneuvering served zero mission purpose. It should've reduced horizontal delta v to zero like a Falcon engine and had an ablation shield. Like many military-involved projects, it was also far too expensive, complex, and fragile. These fundamentals made the Shuttle unnecessarily risky that proved out in its lifecycle.
Its a big hackernews meme that NASA spends way too much on safety/beurocracy instead of innovation. Plenty of other submarines companies do the same (and get classed).
I don't think this is a very insightful comparison.
Consistency isn’t possible at a sufficient level of context.
I mean, I light campfires and I put them out. At a level of reductionism very common in online conversations, I am totally hypocritical about whether I want a fire or not.
It’s not large groups of humans posting on a given HN story. It is entirely unsurprising to have different moods in different threads, because different people with different opinions are driven towards different stories. It’s not actually the same people saying both black and white, it’s just that HN has a polarised audience on some topics, with both sides quite vocal.
The space shuttle was known to be a borderline death trap (the platform was temperamental at best, the abort maneuvers for several segments of the launch were laughable, it was considered to be a flying brick, it couldn't do go-arounds... Etc) that never took paying passengers.
A) I expect many HN readers are familiar with how stupid and bureaucratic the shuttle program was and would never agree to fly in one
B) comparing the shuttle to titan is a pretty obvious false equivalence
It's funny you should bring up the shuttle, I don't know if you've seen the documentary on the challenger disaster? Yet another case of managers not heeding the concerns of engineers.
That's exactly it. If OceanGate had build and dropped a few dozen of these hulls empty, as many times as needed to reach failure, whatever design flaw caused the implosion almost certainly would have been noticed. It's the hubris of diving in what amounts to a prototype that's at issue here, not any fundamental technical mistake.
The design flaw was that they used a construction material strong in tension, but weak in compression. For a task that is almost entirely compression. On a vehicle that has no need for weight savings. Also in a couple photos looks like they have drilled and screwed a monitor mount directly into the pressure vessel, creating future failure points, rather than gluing a piece of plywood to the hull and screwing into that, which is standard procedure.
Most deep sea submersibles only seat a couple people, which wouldn't work for the 'titanic tourism carnival ride' business model. I would guess the weight savings were intended to enable a sub with more capacity that could still be winched on and off the support ship without more complex/expensive heavy lifting equipment.
> the 'titanic tourism carnival ride' business model.
That was more marketing; the main biz model was to create enough buzz with the oil/gas industry to get bootstrapped and produce a product fleet of cheap subs for independent contractors to use for oil rigs.
I guess he didn’t know how safety conscious and risk averse the oil and gas industry actually is. You can be at a meeting in a conference room in downtown Houston, and they’ll start the meeting — like, every single one — with a safety minute and directions to the nearest stairwell.
The operators with the kind of risk tolerance to support this kind of, uh, venture can’t afford to do deepwater exploration - that’s solely the domain of the industry mega-giants, which are the most safety conscious and risk averse of all. The odds of getting a contract with, say, Exxon for anything resembling that piece of shit submarine are just vanishingly small. I actually don’t think the accident makes that prospect any less likely - it was already about as close to 0 as you can get.
I thought subs have strict weight requirements. Which makes sense since their buoyancy is, to a first order approx, like a blimp's (ie a hot air balloon's with lift surfaces)
I think a smaller N number of more dives would yield better results. Down, up, down up...repeat until failure.
In parallel do it with another hull at the same time. Or maybe more than one. Compare.
Testing to failure is a nice option because it finds certain types of unwelcome surprises.
But it's not really complete, either -- there are probably a lot of ways that a submersible can be compromised, and there's no way to be sure what caused this particular failure.
It had already been down quite a few times. Do you mean 100's of drops? Although, couldn't they just leave it at the bottom for a month and see if it implodes?
> Although, couldn't they just leave it at the bottom for a month and see if it implodes?
No, cyclic stresses are a different animal altogether.
But considering it's just a matter of attaching ballast to sink it, dropping ballast to raise it, there's nothing preventing cyclic testing vs. static @ max depth over the same duration.
It seems obvious to me that you'd want to burn through a few test hulls characterizing the fatigue limits and verifying they are at least consistent hull-to-hull with a deterministic failure point you can plan for retiring before approaching.
You just need resources to burn on destroying enough hulls for the data.
And there's a rub there; as you inform the process via destructive iteration, odds are you'll first find the manufacturing process isn't even controlled/consistent enough to make progress on answering the "so how many cycles before go boom boom?" question until you've gone through a good chunk of runway figuring out how to even make it properly multiple times.
> You just need resources to burn on destroying enough hulls for the data.
Unmanned submersibles have plenty of market value. You may still be losing money, but you can strap sensors and cameras to the thing / undercut on price for research missions and substantially reduce the cash burn while building investor confidence.
This is a really good point... from what I've seen they estimated the strength with Finite Element Analysis in Solidworks, and went for a ~2x margin of safety. There seems to have been no attempt to experimentally determine the expected number of load cycles to failure, they only considered the theoretical case of a perfectly flawless composite with no wear and tear.
Is 2x abstractly reasonable in this context? My [probably flawed] understanding in contexts such as hoisting is that safety margins of 5x are considered a bare minimum. Even crappy "Don't use this to lift things" chain is sold with 3x margins.
Yes, I don't know what the norm is in submarines, but I don't really trust simple engineering models, and think at least 5x is what I'd want in almost any context.
I did see that DeepFlight Challenger, Steve Fossett's unused/untested carbon fiber sub which used the same basic design as Titan, was only built to a 1.5x margin of safety. Experimental tests suggested it was only safe for a one time use, and shouldn't be used for multiple dives.
I'm no sub nerd but it seems obvious that unless you can otherwise alter your buoyancy somehow, your only option is to drop weights.
I think submarines use ballast tanks they flood with sea water and empty with pumps to vary their buoyancy. Titan had none of that complexity AIUI, and multiple articles I read mentioned dropping "ascent weights".
Ballast tanks don't work at these depths because of the extreme pressure, which is why all these deep sea vehicles are submersibles rather than submarines. In fact I think if a submarine goes below a certain depth then it can't adjust its buoyancy to return to the surface again, but I am also not a sub nerd.
You can use compressed air. The COPV Spacex uses for tank pressurization are rated higher than the Titanic depth. And as depth increases the differential decreases.
So you really only care about their structural integrity at the surface.
> I believe the stresses of the hull going through changing pressures is relevant.
It certainly does for aircraft, and I doubt the material science would be much different for subs (with the added challenge(s) that (salt) water often brings):
Pressure at 330ft (aka 100m, way way shallower than Titanic depths) is 10 atmospheres higher than what it is at the surface. Even at 50k feet (higher than most planes operate) air pressure is still > 0.1 atmospheres.
Titanic depths are around 380 atmospheres pressure. So equivalent to the difference of about 133,700 feet and sea level.
That's spot on - it's like survivorship bias. If the majority of fighter planes returned with bullet holes on their tops, Oceangate would have armoured the tops.
I think the point is that while SpaceX had a lot of explosions, they fundamentally approached rocket development very responsibly as regards to human risk. It's not about observation bias.
> 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.
> No other submersible currently utilizes real-time monitoring to monitor hull health during a dive. We want to know why. Classed subs are only required to undergo depth validation every three years, whereas our RTM system validates the integrity of the hull on each and every dive.
Completely, completely bizarro in my opinion. I'll take the hull that is proven to actually withstand the pressures it was designed for over some system that gives me a heads up before I get crushed to death.
Related question for those more knowledgeable. I always thought the primary benefit of carbon fiber was tensile strength. I don't even understand how it could sufficiently resist the compressive pressures at the bottom of the ocean - it is a fiber after all. Edit: After seeing the comments below about James Cameron, apparently I'm not alone. From James Cameron's Wikipedia page: "He was also critical of the use of carbon-fiber composite in the company’s Titan submersible, stating that the material has “no strength in external compression” when withstanding the pressure in deep sea environments."
Truly bizarre. Failures like this happen in milliseconds, it doesn't matter how realtime your realtime monitoring is.
I'm not arguing in favor of the classification system, but, I think if you went to them and framed things as simply as they are here "you require validation every 3 years, we're doing it on every single dive" they would say "that's more than once per 3 years, APPROVED!" so the situation is clearly far more complicated than they are indicating.
Yes, I don't understand this acoustic monitoring concept... I'm curious what the logic behind it was. It just doesn't seem like there would be enough time to take action once the monitor starts to detect failure.
It seems they felt this was one of the novel innovations that enabled this design - that the monitoring system was so good, they'd never be at risk in the pressure hull at depth.
James Cameron said it looks like they had dropped their emergency ascent ballast before the implosion, so they may have gotten enough warning to take action. But I would guess that system was never tested to failure in real life.
It will be interesting to see which of the novel innovations supposedly enabling this unconventional design failed, if it can be determined. Rush also lampshaded the fact that his company had "successfully" bonded the titanium endcaps to carbon fiber despite that being contradictory to conventional materials science wisdom, reading the patent for the monitoring system it looks like it may have been intended to provide warning about those bonds failing too.
It seems like it would be trivial to test how much early warning such a system gives by bringing smaller/cheaper test hulls to failure, either in the ocean, or in a pressure testing chamber. I wonder if they did that?
I looked over the patent yesterday, I think someone linked it in this thread. It would “listen” for the sounds of impending structural failure, by comparing the sounds in the hull to a dataset of previous test dives. One of the passengers on Titan’s 2nd dive said it made cracking and popping noises as it got deeper but the patent intended to detect a change in acoustics (in conjunction with stress sensors) far enough in advance for corrective action.
I think the confusion about tensile strength comes from imagining a single carbon fibre. It very obviously has little strength in compression, like a bicycle spoke. But the fibres don't act alone.
Even under tension, you need the epoxy to transmit loads between fibres, or else the carbon fibre is pretty useless which is why the finished material CFRP (carbon fibre reinforced plastic) is used. Unlike metals which are generally equal strength in compression and tension, CFRP is roughly half as strong in compression. But it's very light so from a strength point of view it's not automatically the worst material choice. I get Cameron's point but if it really had "no strength in external compression" then it would be a useless material in general.
Regardless of material the main failure mode of a tube with external pressure is buckling, so the strength in compression is much lower than what you expect from a hand calculation that doesn't consider buckling anyway[1]. But CFRP is a risky choice for at least 4 reasons: analysis is not as straight-forward/easy-to-trust, signs of fatigue are harder to detect, delamination is difficult to control[2], and interface to other materials is tricky, especially when temperature changes and water are involved.
[1] You can use hand calculations to check buckling as well but they depend on analytical models which, if they even exist for CFRP, would be quite difficult to trust because there are so many more variables compared to metals.
[2] Delamination must be really nasty when coupled with buckling. Local weaknesses greatly affect buckling, and a even a small void between plys is a local weakness where the plys don't transmit load to each other.
When I heard Cameron speaking about this recently, I thought he was referring to two different materials being used, rather than the carbon fibre per se.
Honestly, the "real time health monitoring" felt like almost every tech "innovation" over the last decade or so - a half-baked excuse not to do things correctly. And when you can't switch your lights on because the cloud is down, it's inconvenient, but clearly the results of applying this thinking to critical safety are self-evident.
Yes, this doesn't make sense to me either. I suppose it could help prevent bucking and crack propagation, because as the walls of the sub started to bend, one side would have to suddenly be in tension? Still, I wonder if a pure plastic/epoxy hull would have actually been stronger than composite in this situation.
It is a carbon fiber tube with a hemispherical titanium cap on each end. The caps push inward under pressure putting the carbon fiber hull under compression, not tension.
The craft survived several launches - that proved it can do it.
Whether it can do it reliably / survive fatigue accross repeated cycles is a different question. Imagine we'll find out as the investigation progresses.
James Cameron gave an interview where he claimed the carbon fiber hull concept was tested by a team competing to get down to Challenger Deep at the same time his team was - and the concept failed in testing. He also claimed many within the deep submersible community wrote letters to OceanGate warning them their plan was flawed and would result in catastrophic loss.
Specifically, the failure mode was delamination.
I can't vouch for how credible this all is - but, given how much disregard the OceanGate team had for safety, it doesn't seem too far fetched.
That was a great interview IMO, thanks for posting. I think some people might find it hard to both convey sympathy and compassion for the deceased and their families as well as being adamant that the submersible design was nuts (especially since the man primarily responsible died), but I think Cameron in particular did that very well.
> The craft survived several launches - that proved it can do it.
Exactly, that's my point. I didn't realize that (this present catastrophe notwithstanding) that carbon fiber could even begin to have such compressive strength. How is the fiber formed in such a way to maintain that strength?
align layers of fibers in different directions and you can get strength in different directions. But it is tricky! The glue holding the metal end caps to the carbon tube is also a possible failure point. Imagine a metal ring slid over a carbon tube held on with glue. If pressure deforms the metal differently than the carbon, you get a gap at the interface and BOOM
or if sea water degrades the glue, or if the carbon fiber degrades after each trip and eventually isn't strong enough any more, etc.
A point raised by James Cameron (and others) was the titanium bands mated to the carbon fiber hull. Apparently in the material science community, that's a huge no-no, and a well known one to boot. Galvanic corrosion or something like that...
It’s a dumb idea for numerous reasons. The titanium and carbon fibre will expand and contract in relation to temperature and pressure at different rates, they are two different materials with totally different material properties. So you’ve added a second force on the vehicle which is the pulling and pushing of the carbon fiber and titanium from one another. And all you have to hold that together is fancy glue, the glue is taking all that force. A 5 year old could do better.
It’s counter-intuitive, but the so-called hoop stress on a cylinder being compressed from the outside actually results in tensile stress not compressive. This is because the material as it resists shrinking to a smaller radius is being pulled apart.
Is this accurate? All of the examples I found online about hoop stress had diagrams where the pressure inside the cylinder was higher (as in a water pipe for example).
Tensile strength would make sense in that scenario, but I don't see how it would apply when the cylinder is empty and being crushed by outside forces.
>Whether it can do it reliably / survive fatigue accross repeated cycles is a different question. Imagine we'll find out as the investigation progresses.
Seems like we already found out the answer is “no”. The overall ship design failed.
OceanGate vs Lochridge [0] is an interesting lawsuit which may interest some of the readers here.
It doesn't matter into which page you scroll, all things you get to read are related to concerns of the security of the sub. Ok, it basically starts at page 9, all before it is legalese bootstrapping.
> Defendant David Lochridge has extensive background as a submarine pilot and training of the same [...] Underwater Inspector, and trained to recognize flaw and points out failure in subsea equipment
> May 2015 [...] began working with OceanGate as an independent contractor
> As a part of his job duties, Lochridge was the Director of Marine Operations and was tasked with "ensuring the safety of all crew and clients during submesible and surface operations."
> Issues of quality control with the new submersible Titan were raised, as there were evident flaws throughout the build process [...]
> Lochridge worked on his report and requested paperword [...] was met with hostility and denial of access to the necessary documentation.
> Lochridge first expressed verbal concerns over the safety and quality control issues regarding the Titan to OceanGate executive management. These verbal communications were ignored.
> They do not ensure that operators adhere to proper operating procedures and decision-making processes – two areas that are much more important for mitigating risks at sea.
It is exactly survivorship bias: its taking the population produced by a selection filter (to wit, classing/certification) and assuming that the traits of that population are representive of what would exist without the filter.
Giving them the benefit of the doubt, they're saying the biggest problem with submersibles is operator error. Of course it is, when the classing system effectively eliminates the majority of mechanical failures. That doesn't mean the classing system is failing, on the contrary, it means its working.
Reminds me of some code that I've written which got passed off to other teams who ripped it out because all they saw was the complexity and they didn't recognize what issues it was preventing (Chesterton's Fence).
And yet they allowed passengers to control the sub. Theres a video out there where one of the passengers hit the ground with a loud thud while at the controls
I have a friend who is a professor of history. He jokes that human history is basically us creating systems to solve problems, then time passes and we remove those systems causes “those types of problems never happen.”
> Chesterton’s Fence is a principle that says change should not be made until the reasoning behind the current state of affairs is understood. It says the rash move, upon coming across a fence, would be to tear it down without understanding why it was put up.
What strikes me is that this all sounds like bluster and prevarication around safety, rather than a situation where the safety has actually been thought through. This blog post also doesn't have any kind of links or references to any more in-depth discussion and ultimately seems even on the surface as though it would fall apart under scrutiny. For instance it's quite obvious that the reason the majority of accidents are the result of operator error is because mechanical failures are rare precisely due to classing and other forms of regulation. It does very little good to have "high-level operational safety" if the vessel you are in catastrophically implodes due to mechanical failure.
It's even worse. The "thing that doesn't completely solve the problem" might have actually solved the biggest problem for classed vessels, that's why they don't see it as a problem in the first place.
>Lochridge also questioned OceanGate’s plans to install a monitoring system on the vessel to detect the start of hull breakdown. His court filing argued “this type of acoustic analysis would only show when a component is about to fail—often milliseconds before an implosion—and would not detect any existing flaws prior to putting pressure onto the hull.”
Found this article [1] about the employee where this "millisecond warning" is mentioned.
It's been in most media on the past few days.
And yes, one has to wonder about a warning system that does not warm in advance and which operates in situations where no-one can do anything about it, anyway...
> Lochridge had alleged major safety issues: there had been almost no unmanned testing of the craft; the alarm system would only sound off “milliseconds” before an implosion
James Cameron has been giving various interviews where he speculates they probably audibly heard the delamination occurring with enough time to cause them to drop the weights and try to abort based on what he's hearing from people in the know within the circle of deep sea explorers involved in the search and rescue.
None of this validates using the audio sensor as a warning system because whether you have milliseconds or as much as a couple of minutes warning prior to rapid decompression makes no difference at the depth it occurred, but it does suggest the passengers knew they were doomed prior to the actual decompression.
> [...]minutes warning prior to rapid decompression
Do you mean rapid compression (i e. implosion)? The internal pressure in such subs is kept at roughly 1 atmosphere at all depths. The massive pressure difference at depth is why hull integrity is of the utmost importance, if it's compromised, things go south rapidly.
I remember seeing in the news that it is possible they released the ballast before the implosion, according to the findings, and they may have done that because of a warning
In which case the fired engineer could have been off by orders of magnitude, and the crew actually had multiple seconds in which to feel they might avert disaster as they mashed the X button on the Logitech game controller to release the ballast.
I would say that is different. A steel part will make sounds as it rapidly flexes under pressure or temperature cycling, but those sudden movements can be within the "endurance limit" of the material, and not lead to fatigue or failure.
The hull sounds they were hearing in Titan were likely snapping of carbon fibers (based on the linked video above), which means a permanent reduction in strength each time it happens.
DeepFlight Challenger, the unused submarine that pioneered this type of design, was intended only for single use:
"But the company that built DeepFlight Challenger has told The Telegraph it refused to back the project, insisting the submarine was suitable for only one dive and could not be reused because of the pressure on its structure at such depths."
Yep I think there's plenty of growth/shrinkage creaking from small gaps opening and closing and from structures sliding around on normal metallic subs. But, I bet this sounded different and more terrifying, and was fibers/matrix breaking and cracking. And amplified by the total lack of acoustic materials inside the sub.
I thought about this last night and it kept me up a bit. Most of my experience now with carbon, after a little work on structural analysis of layups, has been masts for windsurfing. I've had a couple high performance carbon masts that use 90% carbon and 10% glass break on me. The outer glass is to help against impacts. I've had a case where I heard a little cracking noise then pow, the mast totally collapses into two pieces and I'm in the water.
The consequences are usually much much lower when you're on a board floating in water than when underwater thousands of feet down, but the sound in that thing must have been horrible. I want to see his video though.
True. Those metals have flex and recovery to them though, not nearly as rigid as carbon fiber
FWIW, archers tap or attempt to flex arrows and listen to them to tell if the carbon has cracked. An intact arrow will flex a little, silently where damaged ones will crackle and sometimes splinter or shatter.
Which is why the aviation industry is extremely careful. The limit for steel is like 80% for it to recover while for aluminum it is 20-30%. Not including micro cracks.
Thus you need to carefully control the number of cycles, which the aviation industry is extremely diligent about.
Navy subs literally deform while diving. If you tie a string tight from one bulkhead to another (from left to right, not front to back), as you dive, the string will go slack and you can tug on it. Destin (smarter every day) demonstrates this in one of his submarine videos.
You hear those in conventional subs, too, as you go deeper the hull makes all sorts of worrying creaks. (During a sea trial, I had to be aboard a sub from $NAVY diving to 900 feet and change - the crew assured me the sounds were normal...)
Interesting, he says the theory he currently finds most plausible and has heard from other experts is that water was able to penetrate the flange connecting the titanium caps to the pressure hull.
So the hull itself may not have been the first to go. But of course that failure is intrinsically connected to the carbon fiber nature of the sub.
The acoustic signature predictive of a material compromise or potential
failure may include a large magnitude, high frequency acoustic burst followed by a
sustained interval of acoustic signals of slightly lower magnitude and high frequency,
but still well above a predetermined healthy structure condition.
The patent concedes that a structural failure may be presaged by a "large magnitude ... burst", but does contemplate thst such a burst may be unsurvivable.
It's true - for example, waveform analysis that detected the CEO saying "bringing an outside entity up to speed on every innovation before it is put into real-world testing is anathema to rapid innovation" could have raised warnings as much as four years before the fatal accident.
Which is helpful if the material is somewhat ductile. That’s what they do with aircrafts that are checked for microcracks. In a brittle material such as carbon fibre composites, the step between “a crack appears” and “the whole piece shatters” is typically measured in milliseconds. So monitoring crack propagation is not that useful. Both stresses and strains would look completely normal up until the point of failure.
It’s the same for the bond between the titanium and carbon composite bits. These things deform differently and at different rates. Stress monitoring is much more difficult than in a single piece.
This has to be one of my favorite sentences in the whole page:
> However, this does not mean that OceanGate does meet standards where they apply, but it does mean that innovation often falls outside of the existing industry paradigm.
in particular:
> ... this does not mean that OceanGate does meet standards where they apply ...
> While classing agencies are willing to pursue the certification of new and innovative designs and ideas, they often have a multi-year approval cycle due to a lack of pre-existing standards
"...and although that approach is perfectly reasonable from an engineering standpoint, our commercial model can't accommodate it."
Interesting. I'd say that for systems, defense-in-depth usually relies on various forms of maintenance, and consistent effort to maintain functional parity in redundancies. In other words, just having a redundancy or secondary system is not enough. There's a lot of care and feeding when a secondary uses a different method of achieving the same ends as the primary. That requires effort -- which is all too often skipped or falls out of common knowledge.
One should note that carbon composites are not for external pressure situations since they delaminate...in shorts words they were playing a dice rolling game and lost on damn stupidity.
The whole reason they were not classed is that carbon composites would not pass any class certifications due to the limits indicated above.
I'm still trying to understand why they wanted to use carbon composites. Cost to manufacture? Low mass? I read somewhere that the carbon pressure vessel was about five inches thick. I'm not sure how thick a comparable titanium vessel would be, or how much that would cost.
For the same reason we are the only nation that builds water-cooled, graphite-moderated reactors with a positive void coefficient. (beat) It's ''cheaper''. — Valery Legasov
Required thickness ≈ 39,200,000 Pa / (434 × 10^6 Pa × 2)
Required thickness ≈ 0.045 meters or 1.48 inches
Therefore, at a depth of 4,000 meters, the titanium walls of the submersible sphere with a 10 ft diameter would need to be approximately 1.48 inches thick to resist implosion, assuming a safety factor of 2. Again, please note that this estimation may vary based on the design, shape, and structural considerations of the submersible sphere. Consulting with experts is essential for accurate calculations and safety assessments.
As for amount of titanium required:
First, let's convert the wall thickness to meters. Since 1 inch is approximately 0.0254 meters, the wall thickness of 1.5 inches would be approximately 0.0381 meters.
Now, let's calculate the internal volume of the sphere by subtracting the volume of the inner sphere (10 ft diameter minus 2 times the wall thickness) from the volume of the outer sphere (10 ft diameter):
Finally, we can calculate the mass of titanium using the density of titanium (4,506 kg/m³):
Mass of titanium = Titanium wall volume * Density of titanium
Mass of titanium ≈ 0.125 cubic meters * 4,506 kg/m³
Mass of titanium ≈ 563.25 kg
Therefore, with a wall thickness of 1.5 inches, the approximate amount of titanium required for the walls of the submersible sphere with a 10 ft diameter would be approximately 563.25 kilograms.
Titanium is currently around $6/kg, so ~$3.4k for just the titanium that made up the wall.
"[F]or example, in the case of many of OceanGate’s innovations, such as carbon fiber pressure vessels"
This ain't the innovative win they thought it was. In fact, it's a self-own.
I recently saw a material scientist that specializes in carbon say there wasn't enough money in the world to get her to ride inside a carbon fiber submarine. Why? Carbon fiber has a very high tensile (i.e. stretching) strength. However, it's quite weak when under compression.
Guess which strength is important when operating in a high pressure environment?
Submarines, including deep submersibles, are kind of a solved problem. That doesn't mean there aren't risks involved, but when was the last time a submarine imploded above it's intended operating depth? The 1950s?
It's not classed because nobody would have signed off on it with the level of testing they had done. Carbon fibre reinforced polymers don't have a defined fatigue limit, so stress cycle failure can't be ruled out, and it's difficult to estimate how much a design based around that material can endure. To get certified, OceanGate would have had to do destructive endurance testing on a replica hull, but they only proved it could survive a single dive! Their more serious competitors wouldn't dare take that risk.
Having read enough plain crash stories, first thing I though of was material fatigue. Like in the early days fan blades snapping off jet engines causing catastrophic failure after so many takeoffs. Now they have to inspect these closely in manufacturing and during maintenance cycles. Wouldn’t surprise me if they use ML now as it seemed a difficult human observation task.
The stress/unstress cycle of a vessel going that deep must be immense.
> Another simple risk mitigation step we take, that we believe to be unique to OceanGate is that we draw a small vacuum on the inside of the sub at the start of each dive. This step verifies the integrity of the low-pressure O-ring seal and eliminates the risk of leaks
I wonder what that low-pressure o-ring is sealing. I assume the vacuum would only simulate a one atmosphere differential, so that o-ring must not be sealing something exposed to the external pressures at the depths they go down to.
One thing I'm curious about, as someone who knows nothing about the engineering of these things... why wouldn't anyone building something like this choose to over-pressure the sub once people were inside it and it began descending? Wouldn't 2 atmospheres inside represent a 50% reduction in the pressure differential on the hull at depth?
Separate from the comments about pressure differential - even 2 atmospheres is probably enough to risk decompression sickness if they just popped the hatch at the end of the dive. So you'd need some way to reduce the pressure gradually. That either needs a way to vent gas out (which means adding a hole in the hull, which you'd really rather avoid having to deal with), or having a compressor inside the hull, or do the entire hatch popping in another pressure vessel. All of those options seem to odds with the 'go cheap and fast' approach.
I'm not sure why it seems intuitive to me that the external to internal pressure ratio would be the measure of force exerted... i.e. that 2psi vs 1 would have the same net force as 100 vs. 50. I guess it's wrong, hence the responses, but it's still bothering me. Like, it seems intuitive that twice the mass in the same volume should exert twice the force on the inside of the container. I don't completely understand my error. Yes there's still 299 more atmospheres outside, but it's only 150x the inner pressure.
I'm not willing to concede this yet, I'll need to watch some youtube demos of why I'm a dumbass. hah.
As far as decompressing the hull on ascent, I was imagining that if they were testing it by pulling vacuum in it (as mentioned above) there must be some kind of auxiliary air release port...?
The internal pressure would have to be hundreds on atmospheres to offset the pressure outside. They would have to carry a lot more air at very high pressure on on the surface with more complicated and robust equipment to handle it. It would also make buoyancy management much harder. There's also the additional problem that there is a risk of gas narcosis above 3 atmospheres of pressure.
So remember "The Abyss"? (James Cameron)... the aquanauts were living in a habitat that was pressurized at the bottom of the Mariana Trench or something. Was that just done before he realized it was physically impossible for humans to live in that kind of hyperbaric situation...? Or is it possible at any pressure with the right gas mixture?
Strange that they use SpaceX as an example. Titan used manned missions as they “tested” their designs commercially. Had SpaceX done the same they would have killed a lot of people.
Anyone else wondering what was causing the banging every 30m the media seems to have forgotten about? There were reports saying nothing in nature could cause that...
“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.”
It sounds like a reasonable explanation. I'm glad other people are willing to make these experiments and I think it is quite reasonable that they would put all these things out in public so we know what their stance is. It sounds like informed consent was quite available in this situation.
It's also worthwhile to be able to experiment with breaking the rules. All said, as someone who jumps from bridges and rides his motorcycle, I support the right of people to take risks and die in the process. Even Russian roulette! Do as you will with your life. You are a pure free agent. Things will happen as a consequence, but that is for you to account for.
It takes all kinds to make this world, and just as we learned from the guys who shoved their head in particle beams, and who over-reflected the demon core, and who mishandled FOOF, and from Carrion's disease, we will learn from this - yep Chesterton's fence was there for a reason.
And on the other side we've got cardiac catheterization, a cure for h. pylori, neurotrophic electrodes. People tried in all cases to tell people not to do things and they keep doing them! I love it. Personally, I, as my part in the human composite organism do all sorts of dangerous things, and it's just part of the process of humanity learning and growing.
> As an interim step in the path to classification, we are working with a premier classing agency to validate Titan’s dive test plan. A licensed marine surveyor will witness a successful dive to 4000 meters, inspect the vessel before and after the dive, and provide a Statement of Fact attesting to the completion of the dive test plan.
They clearly did not do this. Simply lowering the thing to the ocean bottom uncrewed would have found this problem. It would not have prevented them from experimenting with crazy designs. It would not have significantly impacted their ability to iterate and move fast. It wouldn't have cost that much to do in the grand scheme of things. I would argue that doing de-risked testing at depth would have expanded their ability to be more radical in their design and overall could have sped up their design iteration. Look at how SpaceX does this, they move fast and break things but make sure that the risk is levered to the reward. The first Falcon rockets did not have commercial payloads at all, nor did the first falcon heavy, Falcon did not fly humans until it was a well-proven rocket. Starship is "failing" constantly but they are doing it in a way which means the impact is minimal and they are learning lots each time.
The really sad part of this is that this probably sets back any innovation in submarine exploration decades. Nobody is going to experiment with carbon composite subs, nobody is going to set out to build a sub with the goal of reducing the per-trip cost by 90% or 99%.
Things, overall, could easily have been so different. Very sad.
How would droppingb it to the bottom found the issue? The theory is that each dive reduced the integrity of the ship and eventually it would fail. Could be 10 or it could be 10,000 drops. And that number would be different if you built a second ship. How many tests do you do?
> The theory is that each dive reduced the integrity of the ship and eventually it would fail. Could be 10 or it could be 10,000 drops.
It is already of high value to know whether the number is more like 10 or 10,000.
> And that number would be different if you built a second ship.
That is why you build the second ship either as similar as possible to the first one or in a way for which there exists evidence that it will have an improved integrity over the first.
> Simply lowering the thing to the ocean bottom uncrewed would have found this problem
It had made several trips to Titanic depth already. A more serious testing and classification probably would have prevented disaster but let’s not pretend this is trivial
They did previously visit the Titanic in the sub, so they may very well have had a guy
> witness a successful dive to 4000 meters, inspect the vessel before and after the dive, and provide a Statement of Fact attesting to the completion of the dive test plan
I had the same false information. It either came from the Sub Brief guy himself, or whoever he used as a source. He explicitly stated that the sub had only been tested down to between 3000 and 4000 meters, not the full 4000 meters. As other links show, this seems to have been incorrect.
I'm sure Ocean Gate is scrambling to NDA all employees, but at some point someone will speak up, and we'll get a better picture if the Titan was indeed routinely inspected for safety.
Everybody seems to be concerned with technical failure. Can we rule out the human factor? What if somebody fired a bullet from the inside? Would it withstand?
This is the Tragedy of Delamination all over again. I coined the phrase half in jest, modeled on a TV-ad phrase (the tragedy of psoriasis, as I recall), after it turned out that a commercial airline flight went down near JFK Airport two months after 9/11 because a carbon-fiber failure allowed its tail to snap off. Now it looks as if a carbon-fiber failure allowed Titan’s pressure hull to implode. Admittedly, we don’t know yet. But a lot of effort will go into finding out, because (as in that plane crash) lives were lost.
Absolutely nothing wrong! We use similar joysticks in more missions critical jobs, but people are ignorant sometimes, joystick is bad but a fuse or transistor or other component costing $0.3 is completely fine.
Nothing is wrong with a consumer grade, wireless, AA battery operated, gaming controller as a steering control interface for a submersible taking you down 10K ft under the ocean to maneuver around a 10 story high entangled mess of steel in pitch darkness with a flash light.
And there's absolutely nothing wrong either with the decision making process of the engineers thinking that was a good (and fun) idea.
TLDR: "The entire shipping industry is doing it wrong, so we're doing it differently."
Also:
> 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.
So I guess that system didn't work? All the accounts I've heard suggest that the hull collapsed instantly.
It’s possible that it did work flawlessly, but the signal that the hull was compromised failed to change the pixel color on a monitor before the monitor was destroyed by the imploding hull.
What a profoundly stupid take by a profoundly irresponsible company. This is a great example of why you should consider anything a company says about itself to be marketing, and treat it with commensurate skepticism.
"We're so innovative we don't have time for safety regulations" - An idiot, destined to harm someone unless pure dumb luck causes their company to fail first
> “I’d like to be remembered as an innovator,” Rush said in the 2-year-old YouTube interview. “I think it was Gen. MacArthur said, ‘You’re remembered for the rules you break.’ And, you know, I’ve broken some rules to make this. I think I’ve broken them with logic and good engineering behind me, the carbon fiber and titanium — there’s a rule you don’t do that. Well, I did.”
Exactly. One could make the same claim about space tourism, but that one has some rational justification at least. I don't see a great benefit in having cheaper deep-water subs.
Rather: for every customer who slightly informs himself, it should be insanely obvious that signing up might be quite dangerous (with a risk that is likely very hard to actually measure - this is a huge red flag for any risk-averse person).
So if you neverthess sign up, you are very aware that things might go insanely wrong (and there is actually a very realistic probability of dying). So you really know what you are up to.
The linked article is very clearly an attempt to persuade its reader that the lack of classing (IE verification of safety by an external auditor) is less of an issue than they might otherwise think. Your advice to a reader of this article is rational here, but I think it's worth also pointing out that the article is meant to persuade said reader to not think that way
Perhaps this might be a cultural issue (I am not a US-American citizen), but to me your quote
> "We're so innovative we don't have time for safety regulations"
reads like "to offer an innovative service which would otherwise not possible, we exchanged known risks (what safety regulations are for to capture and mitigate) for much more unknown risks".
As I wrote: "risks that are likely very hard to actually measure are a huge red flag for any risk-averse person" (and most people are risk-averse), so every customer should be perfectly aware for what he signs up.
This is like a financial adviser who offers a highly innovative finance product with a risk profile that is hard to measure because of its novelty, which the advisor clearly tells. There do exist customers for which such a product is a good choice (say risk-affine, novelty-seeking ones), but such customers are perfectly aware what they are up to.
The linked article is a clear case of the messaging from the company trying to downplay the risk, as I wrote before. The example of financial advisers selling risky products is an apt one, because very famously, the entire finance industry has crashed giant segments of the US economy multiple times via selling products carrying insane risk profiles to customers who were not in actual fact risk-affine and novelty-seeking, and did not in fact understand the risks. They did this because they were incentivized not to be responsible, but to push as much product as possible, and because their risk in this equation was substantially mitigated by deep-pocketed financial backers, including but not limited to bailouts from the government itself, in a way that the risk of their "customers" (Past a certain threshold of deceptiveness, I would consider the term "victims" more appropriate) was not
As a former tall ship captain:
No Shit. Ships stopped sinking when we started requiring inspections and design rules around stability and watertight compartments.
We largely eliminated a common failure mode, designer error, through inspections and classing, so now we are left with the harder failure modes: operator error.
I’m curious if the flag state will get involved here. It’s one thing to push the limits with experimental design (happens all the time in boats, airplanes and cars). It’s a while other thing to use experimental designs in commercial applications. There’s a good reason that the FAA doesn’t allow commercial operators to use experimental registered aircraft…