Titanic director James Cameron accuses OceanGate of cutting corners
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
As a private pilot who is considering building a kit aircraft, this is certainly true. It can be exceedingly expensive to prove safety standards have been met for new designs, which is why so few new certified aircraft are on the market and old designs are so expensive. This leads to the whole industry slowing to a crawl. But that absolutely doesn't mean safety standards haven't been met with new designs.
However, if I build a kit plane, the FAA will require it be emblazoned "Experimental" and commercial activity - such as paying passengers - is forbidden.
I hope the paying customers of this sub were well aware of the level of risk they were taking.
All that being said, I'm supportive of anyone's right to go and build a contraption that may end their life, so long as they don't take anybody or anyone else's property with them.
unless you're a big company
https://www.reddit.com/r/flying/comments/ono50t/ever_see_a_m...
Its the same as people freaking about speed tape.
>...An experimental submersible vessel, that has not been approved or certified by any regulatory body, and could result in physical injury, disability, emotional trauma, or death. Where do I sign?
Probably not enough of a disclaimer, especially if they had people read and sign it once they were already miles out at sea. The passengers were technically advised of the risks, though.
The approach the FAA takes is perfectly reasonable: you can do this dangerous thing, but you can't legally make money from it, and if you "forget" to tell your passengers, the aircraft itself is labelled "Experimental."
So what? Rapid innovation is not always what should happen. It always comes with pretty serious risks and not insignificant costs.
But I'm not a fan of people like this guy vaguely shaming those who don't like to take lots of risks. I'm not a daredevil, if I got on a plane I would expect it to be safer than the trip to the airport.
The FAA, and the elevator industry, are two of the groups that actually do things the way I like to see them done. If there is one single crash, they will train pilots and update firmware or even retrofit hardware to stop that one specific scenario.
If there's a near miss, and someone could have crashes, they might do the same.
Anywhere else, we just say "Yeah, we know this kills X people a year, but if ya wanna be safe don't get up".
Innovation is largely overrated. A lot of the useful stuff seems to be held up on the basic science rather than willingness to do hands on experiments.
If there's tech to save fuel, they'll do it because it's cheap. If there's tech to make it safer, the FAA will probably require it.
If there's some really clever trick that does neither but makes it simple and cheap and interesting, I'm quite happy for it to just remain in the experimental stuff.
Whenever people talk about innovation being more important than safety it always sounds like typical hacker ethos "I want a world full of lots of different random technical ideas that are simple and can be understood"..... "love of ideas" more than love of engineering progress in the modern sense.
Christ they even used the word “paradigm.” Put this down in the list of crazy startup stories that needs to be in the Silicon Valley reboot.
Anyone who works in DSVs needs to take the Ballad of James Cameron very seriously:
No budget too steep, no sea too deep
Who's that? It's him, James Cameron!
• it tends to fail catastrophically, without warning, after repeated stress
• it's very difficult to predict how many stress cycles it can endure
• it's very difficult to detect stress cycle damage
Considering every dive and resurface is a huge stress cycle, and the fact OceanGate didn't seem to have any sort of independent certification of their submersible's endurance, this kind of hull implosion event seems inevitable. Their real-time hull monitoring system was a boondoggle, n
Edit: In another interview, Cameron elaborated on these exact concerns: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-yu_wixdgE&t=1m20s
They also apparently didn't even report it until 8 hours after noticing it didn't resurface once communications stopped.
If that's true, James Cameron's assessment rings true.
I guess you can have smaller motors to drive you around on the bottom, but the vast majority of the travel is controlled via ballast/buoyancy.
To me, planes and cars have much more obvious gains from lighter materials. Not so much for the sub.
It's always a cost tradeoff - I think Challenger Deep (Cameron's former sub) was steel construction which required a large volume of syntactic foam that can resist high pressures to counteract the weight of the steel. That makes for a much larger vessel.
Titan's submersible for exploring the Mariana Trench I believe is largely titanium so much lighter than steel, but at a hugely increased cost.
Not having to bond expensive foam to it to make it buoyant. I also think it may have something to do with the shape of the hull in this case, but I have not seen any commentary on that yet.