James Cameron slams OceanGate safety, regrets not speaking up more | Hacker News Reader

James Cameron slams OceanGate safety, regrets not speaking up more

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63 pointsevo_976 comments

My opinion that no one needs:

We don't need more regulations on extreme deep sea submersibles. There are on average approximately 0 deaths per year, and fewer than 1000 users per year. This number is extremely unlikely to go up.

On average, Classic Cars kill AT LEAST an order of magnitude more people than extreme deep sea submersibles per year. People want to drive their old cars because they look cool. People want to do all kinds of dumb stuff.

When proposing regulations, ask at least these three questions: Is it a big problem? Will it become a big problem? Is it truly voluntary?

You can still argue about these questions and their answers, but at least it's not a binary or knee jerk response.

not to mention unnecessary car trips even in just normal cars! Do I really need to go from point A to point B? I could just stay point A and that's safer.

There are more people doing deep dives that you probably suspect. Safety regulations involving things like ships, subs, and airplanes are quite literally written in blood.

Is it too onerous to require a ship have navigation lights and life jackets?

Subs should have at least some basic safety minimums.

Dont they dive in a part of sea that is international, so no rules apply?

The companies are incorporated in some country however. And ships that go out to sea must be flagged under some country, and those ships have to follow the rules/regulations of the country they're under.

And their failures cause those same countries non-trivial amounts of money.

Consider the Coast Guard and Navy efforts for this latest event.

According to the news I read, Titan did not need to be classed/certified because it didn't launch from any port. Even if the mother ship did. I'll try to find the citation.

Why? You are comparing ships, which have passengers whose goal is to get somewhere (not necessarily be on a ship) and don’t self-identify as final-frontier risk takers with subs which are the exact opposite. Nobody takes a sub as regular or holiday transport. The point of the (non-military) sub is to go where almost nobody goes, where only a sub can go. And you don’t leave the sub.

We do need regulations on submersibles offering transport to passengers.

1) Dead people 2) How much is this debacle costing taxpayers?

If your private actions can impose significant cost on the public, the public has a right to ensure you're minimising risk.

On (2), I think there's some general policy discussions we should have around government spending rescuing people willing and knowingly doing obviously dangerous/stupid things.

Americans fucking around in North Korea or active war zones is another example that comes to mind.

I think that would be a better use of time than spinning up a 100-person government licensing program to regulate the 1000 people playing with submarines.

Yeah, the costs of SAR when people made very dumb decisions is an ongoing debate.

In my country at least, the consensus is that we don't want people to _not_ call for help when they need it because they're afraid of being invoiced.

I used to be a ranger, so was involved in SAR to a small extent, usually triggering them, manning the radio, and hitting up other hikers who might have seen something for info, but a lot of our rangers were also volunteers with LandSAR, as they had the techical skills and the local knowledge.

And as far as I'm aware, there was only one serious attempt to invoice someone for a search.

An American serviceman with Operation Deep Freeze had left his intentions for a multi-day hike with the rangers, and when he didn't make contact within 24 hours of his expected date out, a search was initiated. The personal details he'd left weren't great, we knew that an American called Mike was following the Casey Stream - Poulter River - Lake Minchin - Townsend Pass - Taramakau River route, and we knew he hadn't signed out.

No details of his car (if any), or where it was parked, no local contact details, nothing much but an overdue Yankee Mike who was headed into an area where the route he was following wasn't quite here-be-dragons, but you'd certainly stumble into dragons if you made navigation mistakes or bad choices in general.

Volunter searchers on foot spent about 6 weeks scouring his route, and possible wrong turns he could've taken for, which involves very challenging terrain, they brought in both kinds of SAR dogs (the kind that are trained to find people, and the kind that are trained to find bodies) and, significantly more expensively, there was a lot of helicopter flight hours expended trying to find him. The rescue choppers had the IR cameras, ideal for finding warm bodies in the cold, and night vision great at enhancing any light emitted on the ground. Plus the massive spotlight and the winch and the trained paramedics etc.

(Apparently a small torch is very damn visible at night with the NVG, just don't be under trees, it doesn't help).

After those six weeks, the search was called off. A few months later he was eventually located by our Police who'd been following up every angle to identify him.

He was safe and sound at home, in Utah. He'd returned to the US shortly after his hike.

I'm guessing his deployment (or the season for flights to the Antarctic) had been at an end, so he went on one last hike and just forgot to sign out.

The Police took it personal, and desperately wanted to invoice him for the rescue, even suing him in a US court if need be, but the diplomats nixed it as the US is very protective of its citizens, especially when they're in the service.

This debacle has been a nice bump for the economy. People will be taking about it for weeks. The costs of the search are quite low. Basically a training exercise.

Broken window fallacy?

But true, as a training exercise it has some value, so long as those resources weren't needed elsewhere at the time.

It's also got a lot of people suddenly interested in deep sea exploration.

The FAA has a tiered framework of safety regulations based on the relationship of the passengers to the flight that makes sense to me:

Tier 1: Scheduled airline service -- Passengers generally can't choose the model of aircraft and might even get a different airline via codeshare. They have no ability to evaluate the pilot before the flight.

The airline, flight related employees, and the aircraft are all subject to heavy regulation.

Tier 2: Charter aircraft -- Passengers are usually choosing the aircraft and can speak to the pilots. Still very substantial regulation but less than airlines.

Tier 3: Private flying -- pilots can't charge for the flight, only share costs, and have to be traveling together even to share costs. Passengers will generally know the pilot personally and be able to evaluate their judgment. Regulations are much lighter.

Tier 4: Experimental aircraft -- Airplanes that haven't been certified have to have EXPERIMENTAL in big letters as you get on the plane, and you can't charge passengers money at all. Bigger and faster experimental aircraft like jet fighters are more regulated in where and when they can fly so that they're less likely to kill people on the ground when they crash, but the FAA is relatively hands-off if it's only the pilot's life at risk.

Yeah I was thinking of the regulatory difference between taking your mates up in your Piper Cherokee and taking paying passengers in your Piper Cherokee.

The regulatory requirements change significantly based on that alone. (E.g., PPL for friends, CPL for paying passengers).

I don't even know if you're allowed to take paying passengers in a homebuilt.

> (E.g., PPL for friends, CPL for paying passengers).

PPL also cannot charge money besides (at most) cost-sharing, e.g.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/$100_hamburger

I agree that car safety and regulations (and probably even more importantly, replacing car trips with safer modes of transport wherever possible) are more pressing than submarine safety regulations, but why does one preclude the other? We should have both.

Instead of targeted regulation specific to submarines, I would look at the laws around legal liability and depth of disclosures. That would scale across many more types of activity rather than any single one.

1. Is what you're doing dangerous?

2. Did you tell your customers about the danger?

3. Do they really understand the danger, including past incidents?

4. Is anyone else being harmed or are you just gambling your own life?

Even then, I would posit that this case probably passes this bar - OceanGate was quite clear in their waiver and there's a level of due diligence that a reasonable person spending 250K should be expected to make.

This gets attention because it’s a unique and horrific way to die. Car accidents are boring and routine. Being instantly compacted into ice cube sizes by Poseidon evokes all kinds of narratives about mankind’s hubris and whatnot and is tied up with the entire history of Titanic itself. It’s a lightning rod for popular interest that some senators will try to latch onto to wedge themselves in the minds of the voting public.

Mysterious Peril = Interesting

Normal Peril = Annoying

It’s not at all horrific. It’s likely the most humane (if ecologically expensive) way I can think of. Assuming you don’t have any build-up which causes stress, it’s unbelievably fast and this painless.

To paraphrase Hank Green, you cease to be a biological organism and become physics.

Not to mention the risk in which you place others, when things go wrong and they come looking for you.

There is another cost of not regulating:

If I live in a society that is keen on regulation, then I feel more safe doing things. I can not have information in my head about what all is regulated and how much. When I do things in the US, I feel safe (relative to known risks), because I believe we are a high-regulation society (feel free to argue that). If that image starts to slip, then I have to start asking myself: Should I take my kids on this helicopter ride at the county fair? Should I go down this remote cliffside road on public transport? Should I get in this old elevator? Should I leave this electrical appliance running while I sleep?

Maybe it's a little thing in the big picture, but some people value it immensely, and many Americans appear to be those people. Declining to regulate deep-sea subs, or whatever else, maybe doesn't have any practical effect, but it is one little chip out of the image of high-regulation.

When I was 16 years old I took a job at a travelling carnival that was in town for a long weekend. My job was to run a helicopter ride for little kids. The green button started the ride, the red button stopped it. And if it didn’t start, I was instructed to give the control unit a moderate smack. It worked.

This was in Canada, ~1990. Awhile ago admittedly, but I haven’t looked at travelling fair rides the same way since.

I agree, but as a counterpoint, I don't think that deep sea submersibles should feel safe.

I agree that we don't need new regulations, but I do think liability waivers will come under scrutiny. I expect this will come under the courts as lawsuits are filed against the company, and thus tighten up standards about liability and safety expectations for businesses like this. I also think a degree of insurance will become required for these waivers.

In the end it's dolts like OceanGate that make it more difficult for the rest of us.

On the one hand, yeah, maybe it's fine if the 100 morons per year have to sign a waiver acknowledging "this experimental submarine has not been approved by any verification provess. There is no reason to believe you will survive this trip."

On the other hand, last week I had to sign a waiver saying essentially the same thing when I rented a frisbee golf kit.

And everything in the state of California is "known to the State of California to cause cancer" .

> On the other hand, last week I had to sign a waiver saying essentially the same thing when I rented a frisbee golf kit.

They are everywhere, which is why I think a court case on them will have far-reaching effects. I have a strong feeling they will not be the get-out-of-liability-free card they once were.

In a way it mirrors the Love Canal liability case against Hooker Chemical about a similar release of liability. [0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Canal#Sale_of_the_site

If I can be honest. This sounded pretty callous to me. Not having regulation or having minimal regulation makes sense when the impact is low not when it is life or death. This was not a submersible somebody built in their backyard and took only their family and friends into the ocean. this was a legit business. They were marketing and the only avenue that customers would have is the word and review of other customers. You can't expect customers to be well versed in the mechanics and engineering of building submersibles to be able to assess the safety of those things and this is why we need that regulation.

Even in your example it is true that car accidents are way more. But the number of miles driven in cars is orders and orders and orders of magnitude more then number of miles of ocean floor traversed!

Edit: this also got me thinking a bit more. I can see why in America the R word seems scary and is a bit triggering. Regulation here can be as simple as insure your customers for say a million dollars of no questions asked policy and pass the cost of that to customers and let them (and the actuaries) decide if it is worth it!

There are only so many hours in the day. Instead of politicians spending time working on this, how about working on any of the other more important problems out there. Like homelessness or wealth inequality or the increasing political divisiveness?

Sure by that logic we shouldn't be fighting wars or funding space exploration

But seriously there has to be some threshold of common sense. You are sending a sealed box 100s (thousands?) of meters into the ocean (or replace with another similarly risky sounding proposition - trying on experimental jet packs, getting shot out of a cannon with a parachute etc). It can't be that unreasonable to ask "if something went wrong who should be responsible and for how much damages and what level of insurance should be mandatory (or atleast available for sale)" - we already do this for mortgages where risks and impacts are a lot lower.

Now if you have more time and patience sure go ahead and enumerate it and do the actual work of passing regulation around it until that insurance premium actually becomes profitable. The free market actually can help if you ensure it is used.

I think the key objection here is taking an experimental vehicle and using it for commercial purposes.

None of those passengers could ever possibly have properly understood the risks they were taking, because the people who made those submersibles didn't understand the risks they were taking.

If it had only ever been the people directly involved in the research of creating deep sea vehicles using carbon fiber pressure vessels, I don't think there would be such an outcry.

But it was charlatans who didn't know what they were doing and taking unwitting passengers out on inherently unsafe vehicles, and they got those people killed.

This is how regulations get made. This is how regulatory agencies like what is now called the FAA are created.

Reading this article leaves me confused about what Oceangate was even trying to achieve.

As I read, James Cameroon had been to the Titanic wreck 33 times. So that means, others have gone there as well. He has even been to the Marina trench. It is even mentioned that deep submergence diving is a mature art.

As per CNN, even back in 2001, people went to the Titanic to get married. And they were able to go there for around $31K.

So why was Oceangate trying to rebuild something that seemed like a solved problem. Why not just stand on the shoulders of existing giants and leverage existing sub designs that have been there.

http://www.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/europe/07/16/wedding.titanic/

Where did you get the $31k figure? The CNN article mentions £400,000 ($560,000).

If you are correct about the $31k price, then it is definitely weird that Oceangate is so much more expensive. I assumed that Oceangate was attempting to make deep sea submarines more affordable.

> I assumed that Oceangate was attempting to make deep sea submarines more affordable.

Why? Especially when their target audience is/was billionaires with plenty of money to spend on novel experiences. I imagine their pricing takes this into account.

Because they want to make more profit.

This BBC article from 2001 states a price of $36k, but says the couple actually won their trip down - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1461368.stm

I agree that the pricing disparity is very odd, but then there is much that is very odd about this story. Maybe it's just another tragic story of human hubris.

For instance, Hamish Harding seemed like a very accomplished aviator and adventurer, having lead the world record "One More Orbit" mission - the fastest circumnavigation of the globe via both poles, over 46hrs, in a Gulfstream G650ER. He holds the world record for the longest duration at full ocean depth by a crewed vessel - 4hrs+/2.88 miles along the sea floor of Challenger Deep, in Deep-Submergence Vehicle (DSV) Limiting Factor - a proper sub which is now technically owned by Gabe Newell I believe. Look at pictures of it - it's a very different beast to the Titan. He's been up in Blue Origin. Amongst many, many other things. He's not a stranger around highly experienced, competent people in very well engineered vehicles.

I just don't understand how a man with that level of experience and knowledge didn't take one look at that sub and crew and instantly nope out. Does the desire for adventure just switch off the risk mitigation part of the brain?

When you try and find solid information about how many deep sea missions were actually done in that sub, you're left in a mess of conflicting numbers and stories. Given the viewport glass was only rated to 1300m, and the hull was supposedly "rebuilt" due to cyclic fatigue in 2021[1], I simply can't believe any numbers like 13+ deep sea missions to the Titanic after that rebuild without catastrophe striking much sooner. How do you even rebuild a carbon fibre hull that was built from: "He said he had gotten the carbon fiber used to make the Titan at a big discount from Boeing because it was past its shelf-life for use in airplanes."[2]

[1] - https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/20/a-whistleblower-raised-saf... [2] - https://www.travelweekly.com/North-America-Travel/Mission-Ti...

When you've worked with dozens of professional genius engineering companies, the idea that a clown is somehow running a fake one exits the realm of possibility for you. Same as when your company hires an idiot coworker who bullshits his way through the interview. Or a grossly incompetent pathological liar Presidential candidate...

Pretty much all the other submersibles that can reach that depth, including the Mir used for that wedding, can only hold 2-3 people including the pilot. The Titan could hold 5 people

Why does that matter?

3 trips vs 1 trip? The people who went didn't need to go all together.

>Why does that matter?

$$$

Cameron's craft is single person only - James always went down alone.

If you haven’t seen Deepsea Challenge, the movie about James Cameron building and taking a sub into the Challenger Deep, I highly recommend it.

I hope he doesn't beat himself up too much. There are probably hundreds of people at least who had enough deep sea experience to have spoken out against OceanGate before this happened, it wasn't James Cameron's sole responsibility. Hopefully somebody close to him can talk to him about survivor guilt. He shouldn't blame himself for this.

Is he beating himself or getting free marketing for his movies?

Another generation can watch Titanic now

seems doubtful that James Cameron would care much about promoting a 30 year old movie that was widely rumored as a vehicle for him to get studio funding for his deep sea explorations (ie not clear he has much attachment to it).

Even strictly monetarily, spending 5 minutes on avatar 3 would probably be a much better return in terms of time spent : money earned.

I saw an interview he gave for a news channel where he said he was having difficulty processing the death of his friend, who was on the submarine. So my read is that he's genuinely distraught. Remember that he's just as human as the rest of us, not a soulless corporate entity. He does have real feelings about things.

He was friends with one of the men who died, and is a recognized expert in both deep sea submersibles and diving to the Titanic specifically. He might not need to blame himself, but it's natural that he'd wonder "should I have raised more awareness of the danger?"

Natural yes, but not necessarily healthy. These kind of "what if" questions can consume people.

At least one engineer was fired after bringing up safety concerns to the CEO.

Manned sea exploration seems even more unnecessary than manned space exploration. Remotely (or autonomously) operated vehicles can do it better, safer, faster, and cheaper.

I see so many similarities between oceangate and FTX. same sort of laid-back culture (which is fine when it's your own money or lives at stake, not others), disregard for safety and security measures and cutting corners (game controller to steer sub), hubris from CEO, and the suddenness it all imploded (literally and figuratively) etc.

When people literally die I think the standard should be a little bit higher

The problem is that the people signed up as crew for a dangerous job. Anybody with a working sense of self preservation wouldn't have needed a regulation.

> game controller to steer sub

People keep picking on this point, but if you have a backup controller, and a safety system that is independent of the controller (I've heard the sub had a way to resurface without the controller), then it's fine. (You also need to make sure you won't do a 360-backflip-barrel-roll if the controller firmware has a bug.)

Bought your interior lights from Harbor Freight? As long as there are multiple independent lights, as well as a safety system to resurface that doesn't require lighting, then it's fine.

Of all the cut corners, the game controller isn't what killed them. Unfortunately, they cut corners on the hull too, and there's no backup for that.

The controller isn't the problem. It's the electronics it's communicating with. I'd bet dollars to donuts it was loaded with hobbyist grade SBCs and an over reliance on whatever the laptop was being used for.

Yeah, clearly the attitude that lead to the controller went too far, even if the controller itself wasn't a problem.

The difference is the insurance.

I don't think this necessarily entirely applies here, since the CEO was in the submarine that failed. Did they put others at risk? Yes. But it's not like they weren't also at risk, not that that makes it ok.

So many disasters are caused by hubris. Titanic and Chernobyl are well known examples, but you can find many more horrifying stories on a YouTube channel called Fascinating Horror.

https://www.youtube.com/@FascinatingHorror

Flagged for changing the title.

It's the HTML doc title, which is legit to use for an HN submission.

“sorry I should have said something” ha sounds a little pretentious

Please don't do this here.

Geez, this James Cameron cat is really milking his 5 minutes.

These deaths seem fine to me. People with a lot of money doing dumb things. That’s okay

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