USCG says ‘debris field’ discovered within search area for missing submersible
cnn.com
cnn.com
> Some expeditions were delayed after OceanGate was forced to rebuild the Titan’s hull because it showed "cyclic fatigue"
This looks bad for their safety track record. Employees raised concerns before and they had failed cyclic fatigues tests but they soldered on.
There is something to be said about the CEO going onboard themselves, so at least he's a believer in his own technology, but dismissing their own employee's safety concerns is not a great look.
Listening to "Sub Brief" video by an 20 year US Navy submariner veteran about this case, there is a bit there that just sounds embarrassing: the CEO is on a call boasting he doesn't like to hire those "50 year old white guys" and instead hired young college graduates who are "inspirational" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dka29FSZac&t=315.
An engineering student said that in the video of OceanGate wrapping carbon fibre, they were making a 2nd year engineering mistake of not doing a cross weave. It's basically unidirectional and likely to fail when force is applied to the right angle.
Front glass is only rated for 1300m, not 4000m.
CEO seems to think the way to test something like this is to take the thing down to 4000m, hear horrible creaking noise. Came back up, and did it again, only to discard the null when it was creaking on the second time. https://www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech/lawsuit-insufficient-prototy...
I bet the CBS reporter that went down with them in a previous trip is thanking his lucky stars...
At least two former OceanGate employees years
ago expressed safety concerns about the vessel’s
hull, including the thickness of the material used
and testing procedures,
It's difficult for me to judge how bad, because I don't know what level of dissent is "normal" for an extreme engineering challenge like this, nor the competency/experience of the employees expressing that dissent.
This is by no means a defense of this company's actions. Clearly, it seems they have erred in a deadly way and have blood on their hands.
Dissent is obligatory in doing your job. If you do not protest, if you do not fight for every inch of assurance you calculate as being necessary, literally no one else in the room will.
This whole affair sickens me. It reeks of corner cutting, complacency, and unjustifiable risk taking.
We should be allowed to take personal risk.
But taking any form of consideration from others -- particularly $250K -- introduces at least moral responsibility for being competent and truthful.
This is not just my opinion -- it's how most guiding professions work. Ski guides, mountain guides, rock guides, etc. all have professional cultures and codes of conduct which make it very clear that a guide's risk tolerance in recreational settings has absolutely nothing to do with appropriate risk management in paid settings with clients.
Take all the recreational risks you want. The moment you take cash from someone in exchange for guiding services, the moral and legal responsibilities change drastically.
If a mountain guide took a client off-route to put up a new line with ratty gear and no beacon -- at the client's request, even -- and they both died? Our response would be "that guide is an irresponsible asshole", not "at least he had skin in the game".
> Listening to "Sub Brief" video by an 20 year US Navy submariner veteran about this case, there is a bit there that just sounds embarrassing: the CEO is on a call boasting he doesn't like to hire those "50 year old white guys" and instead hired young college graduates who are "inspirational"
Indeed. Using DEI as an excuse to justify paying bottom-dollar and not investing in a real competent safety team is pretty deplorable.
"It's safe if you don't do something stupid."
"Those [generic components] should be reliable enough, they often last for years."
"It's a good thing you didn't see the chainsaw work I did at my house last weekend"
"I'd feel perfectly comfortable with that machine if I was going to stand there"
"We've always done it that way"
When you're getting paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to deliver a machine, or using that machine to make millions of dollars worth of product, fighting about a $200 safety relay or $800 light curtain is not the same risk analysis as lighting fireworks in your backyard. Because it's not about your risk, it's about the risk of the new high school grad with no options except a $15/hr factory position, who has neither the knowledge nor the freedom to mitigate that risk.
Yes - because, in general, large rewards can disproportionately skew a decision maker's risk evaluation. Especially in a situation where there may be only verly limited opportunities to get paid.
For an example see the 1986 K2 disaster [1].
I'm not saying this did or didn't happen in the present tragic situation. But its a risk.
Personally I think a $250K luxury service falls pretty firmly into the realm of buyer beware.
This isn't some student loan for a degree in fortune telling an 18 year old was scammed into, you have to have some real wealth to consider doing this and have a responsibility to do your own research before you go diving 12,000 feet in the ocean.
More importantly, my critique isn't about the degree of informed consent to risk. It's about competent guiding and professionalism.
Don't get me wrong: guiding people on dangerous objectives is fine. Good guides die. Clients die in circumstances that are truly accidental where there is no blame to assign, or where the client deserves the blame. That's not my critique.
But if your client dies because you use el cheapo carabiners that failed cyclic load tests or weren't certified for the application, then that would be completely inexcusable incompetence.
My critique is about incompetence, not failure to inform about risk. guides are paid both for the equipment/outfitting and also for the guiding. Being incompetent in a guiding setting is, at the very absolute least, an immoral failure to provide the goods for which you've been paid.
Again, this isn' just one internet guy's opinion. Guiding is now a mature profession, and the conduct of OceanGate runs afoul of ethical guiding conduct. And, again, the issue isn't about informed risk.
> This isn't some student loan for a degree in fortune telling an 18 year old was scammed into
Suleman Dawood was 19.
It seems the company misrepresented the safety risk.
And his father had half a million dollars to blow on seeing the Titanic in person.
Again, people hire guides to do things that they cannot do on their own. Being competent and making appropriate risk assessment choices for your client, where possible, is a huge part of the service that a guide is being paid to perform. OceanGate failed on both counts.
You hire a shitty guide to take you to the bottom of the ocean because you're bored and the guide gets you killed, that's two mistakes, not one.
That's certainly fair. OceanGate and its investors should be wiped out, to the extent liability allows, and I would be supportive of a prosecutor who pierces the veil if capital was extracted. The proceeds should go to the only set of victims who didn't have a say in risk -- perhaps the 19 year old, but BY FAR most importantly the taxpayers of the nation states who paid for this ridiculous SAR exercise.
This assumes a level of rational, clear-headed thinking in the face of an unanticipated lethal situation. I am not convinced that most people would arrive at that state of reasoning. Especially because, as time goes by without rescue, a somewhat reasonable line of thinking will increasingly become:
"The more time they have, the more likely search & rescue is to find the vessel. I can maximize that time by minimizing the # of people using up limited resources. Let me calculate the approximate speed at which a wireless Logitech game controller must be swung in order to induce a lethal head injury to the other resource consumers..."
What I wonder is how long before someone realizes they've passed the point of resurfacing alive and happen to have the man responsible for this, trapped in what's now a deep-sea cage-match to the death.
If it's lights out either way with high confidence, one of these paths is far more interesting.
Most likely it was lost, i.e. imploded, long ago when they initially lost comms.
They wouldn't have time to even register the event.
It wasn't confirmed at the time I wrote that comment...
> Some expeditions were delayed after OceanGate was forced to rebuild
> the Titan’s hull because it showed “cyclic fatigue” and wouldn’t be
> able to travel deep enough to reach the Titanic’s wreckage,
> according to a 2020 article by GeekWire, which interviewed the
> company’s CEO.
Of course rebuild is pretty ambiguous, so it could mean repair, which reminds of a famously incorrectly repaired aircraft[0].
[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Air_Lines_Flight_123
And also the gold standard of podcasts Well Theres Your Problem has done a few plane crashes.
Sometimes that can be OK, if the cyclic fatigue was from high levels of testing.
If on the other hand it happens quickly and you haven't even tested it at anywhere near the depth you expect to take it and don't have tons of testing yeah, it's really bad idea. (which seems to be the case here)
It's expected for cracks to form in aluminum parts of such planes, IIRC they're X-Ray'd on a schedule to discover cracks and replace the relevant parts.
I don't know if CF is expected to behave similarly. You certainly don't see it as an obvious quality of CF bicycle frames, as is visible with aluminum frames. The aluminum bikes have such thick beefy tubes and harsh/rigid ride quality to eliminate crack-forming cyclic stresses. CF bikes are considered more comfortable since they don't have to prevent all the flex, as well as being lighter.
this sub was made out of a carbon fiber composite.
This stuff is known to develop micro fractures.
The OceanGate/whatever company deserves the Karma that is rapidly coming their money-grubbing way. The passengers? Hope this ends well for you as I write this but using the brains you were born with is NOT an optional exercise so tears right now are for a cat who died yesterday (put to sleep) because her exploration resulted in a broken back - she died on-the-edge as she lived - dont know what to say about you guys if you dont make it.
You've probably heard of Kim Wall. She wasn't rich, but she was murdered on a submarine so that became international news too.
Thinking about refugees, on the other hand, is depressing and there is also almost nothing anyone can do about it. As macabre as it is, the "startup sub kills rich guys" story is just more fun.
Specifically he left to "make a better life for [his] family" because of economic conditions.
So while you are certainly free to empathize with people taking desperate measures to improve their lives, it's important not to confuse them with people seeking refuge from imminent harm, such as government oppression or something similar.
The later is unfortunately a story about instance of something happening since years and has wide social implications, unlike the billionaire sub. It’s a politically charged topic, these people did not choose the sketchy boat because all the flights were booked. They were on these boats because large number of Europeans don’t want them there for this reason or another.
I get the impression that this submersible situation has been continuously in the news for days because the status has been unresolved for days.
Edit: I meant this literally. I didn’t know about this or that it also happened this week.
By the same token you could just argue that since both cases involved people who were certainly already dead, the pageantry of a search serves purposes other than efficient use of resources.
The Navy heard it as it happened. Apparently they were aware of the loss of communications nearly in real time.
> However, on Wednesday a U.S. Navy official told ABC News it had sent a portable crane system that can reach 20,000 feet deep to St. John’s, Newfoundland, so it can be welded onto a ship to take it to the search area for the missing submersible.
> Additionally, the Navy announced it was sending experts and a Flyaway Deep Ocean Salvage System, or FADOSS, which it described as a “motion compensated lift system designed to provide reliable deep ocean lifting capacity for the recovery of large, bulky, and heavy undersea objects such as aircraft or small vessels.”
https://abcnews.go.com/amp/US/missing-titanic-tour-sub-rescu...
And the Sixth Fleet operates out of the Mediterranean, so, sure, there’s no political valence to any of this: