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Comment by Ambroos | Hacker News Reader

Is there any way for this to end (other than sabotage and other outlandish options) in which this was not caused by a company trying to make money in an extremely unsafe way?

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You may be right in a colloquial sense, but it's an engineering forum, you know? If someone dies while skydiving you could argue they were doing something risky-unsafe and unnecessary and had it coming, too, but as an engineer I'd still want to know why the chute didn't release, whether it was actually predictable, and how to fix it.

This may absolutely make a great tale about hubris one day, if we ever find out.

I agree, but the whole set-up seems to have so many massive safety issues that it seems like they were relying on pure dumb luck more than anything else.

This feels more like someone went skydiving with a homemade parachute in strong winds above an active volcano.

Conversely, if we can't find out (eg the wreck isn't located, or is so damaged we can't be sure) then a probabilistic assessment is the best we can do. Refusing to speculate at all essentially gives a pass to predictable failures.

Sure. I wasn't advocating we shouldn't speculate, but gloating seems a bit early.

If it turned out that the failed parachute had a history of using and misusing a number of cheap parts that weren't up to spec, I'm not sure there would be much of interest left to speculate about.

In this case, OceanGate has a well documented history of making poor and reckless engineering decisions. The fact that things went horribly wrong is probably related to one of the many corners they cut.

It will be interesting if/when we get more solid information but until then most of the speculation seems pretty on point to me.

I'd rather listen to expert opinions on the matter rather than software engineers who think they know all. People dunk on then using off the shelf equipment but that is rather common even for the military.

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