I feel so horrible for his family. It makes it hard to be cynical about this tragedy.
What she said I think more likely has some truth than the wife of the deceased father the statement throws shade on. Aren't we talking about billionaires here? Mom is likely quite concerned about appearances and her future.
Bear in mind that some people just like to stir up shit. So they say stuff based on no evidence / their imagination / whatever they suspect will cause controversy.
No idea of the situation in this case, but don't discount it could be that too.
Also I think she's only done this one interview. Even the question of "How are you?" was answered with contemplation, not hysterics...
Don't get me wrong, it's still horrible, and I still believe he shouldn't have gone down there. But he wasn't freaking out and terrified for weeks like his aunt said.
He strikes me as someone who could have had a very bright future, looks like a smart and confident young man.
It’s said that money just gives you the ability for you to be you. That someone would willfully put his child in that dangerous situation really disgusts me.
I hate arguments like these. The same one for the drinking age and joining the army. The world isn't black and white. There are merits to 18+ enlistment and 21+ drinking age both (along with downsides).
It's just noise in the form of words that doesn't go towards any way of proving a point.
Untrained smart people can be really bad at risk - a good shorthand is: can you get insurance for it and what is the price?
Because the adjusters have to price the risk objectively - house burn down? Risk relatively low. Submarine go pop? Probably not insurable at any price - either because risk is too high or they can’t evaluate it. And if they can’t, you likely can’t, unless you’re Cameron or someone similar.
That doesn’t mean uninsurable risks aren’t worth taking sometimes. Just be aware and realistic.
FWIW, fatal experimental submarine accidents aren't the weirdest thing insurers have insured. https://havenlife.com/blog/craziest-things-insured-lloyds-lo...
Even if you put the risk of death ridiculously high (say, 90%) for each trip, it probably wouldn’t be impossible to insure it. The premium per trip would just likely be roughly the maximum payout and so it wouldn’t necessarily be worth it.
Whole life policies are basically investment vehicles that are an attractive asset class to a specific segment of the population because of tax reasons.
For those unaware term life pays out if you die within a certain time period. There's a chance that they won't pay out - you're pooling your risk of dying along with that of other people because statistically you're not all likely to die. So the premiums you pay in go to pay out someone who does in fact die.
For whole life the policy is for well your whole life - so the payout rate is 100% because everyone dies eventually. People take out whole life policies which they pay premiums into and those policies accumulate value allowing them to take out loans against the value of the policy. And because of a tax loophole in the United States this allows you to avoid paying taxes on the (what is essentially) investment dividends.
When I worked in the industry the cut off for term life at almost every carrier was 65 years old, though I vaguely remember people introducing policies for 70 year olds which might be a false memory.
Whole life can obviously be sold no matter how old you are. A 103 year old could probably find a carrier willing to issue them a whole life policy for the right price.
The insurers just look at the tables and give you what it will cost. It looks like an 89 year old has between 4-5 years life expectancy so expect to pay in premiums about 20% of the payout. Usually the payout is “burial insurance” at these ages.
Stuff like this triggers costly (and sometimes dangerous) search & rescue parties.
A regular boat has to be registered in most US states. I'm not a boating expert, but it would seem some combination of "well its not a boat" & "International waters" lead to it being less regulated/inspected than Joe 6 packs fishing boat.
Or more specifically, because the sub is taken out to international waters by its support ship, it would seem the sub falls under less regulation than the support ship carrying it, despite being a higher risk profile..
I don't think this situation is a particularly good example, but I don't think blanket condemning experimental deep sea vehicles is the right response.
Not only that, but we have known how to reach ever lower depths for decades now. A human being has already reached the bottom of the Challenger Abyss. We know how to do this stuff and, while there's certainly room for improvements, ignoring the properties of the materials you're using and not doing proper testing is not how you get any improvement done. At best, all the advancement this tragedy will bring is a more comprehensive regulation of this kind of activities. Which is exactly what the original Titanic brought to the world.
I take your point and I dont quible that in hindsight the mission was reckless. But just to bring some more information to the debate, OceanGate had previously taken the Titan to this depth to visit the Titanic. So, it was "proven". The german entrepreneur who is in this [1] article claims to have visited Titanic twice in the same sub.
[1] https://nypost.com/2023/06/21/former-titanic-sub-passenger-d...
This reminds me of an old joke about an optimist who falls from a 40 story building. As he passes the 30th story he thinks to himself, 'so far so good!'
(The submarine got weaker each time they used it.)
Otherwise, we are all in this boat.
This situation is an interesting statistical anomaly. Given that the Titan had a carbon fiber hull which was known to degrade more and more after each dive, the probability of failure increases after each successful dive. So you might think your chances of success are better the more times it came back safe, but the chances are actually worse.
If we criminalize puns, only criminals will make puns!
Vote No on Pun control.
For argument's sake, let's say it would follow the bathtub curve. You could summarize all the warnings they were given as basically saying that the wear out curve crosses the other two curves all the way on the left. You could also say that they took the bathtub curve for granted, not realizing that it's the result of deliberate work. So again, still no bathtub curve, no matter which way you look at it.
[1] https://abc7chicago.com/missing-titanic-sub-oceangate-lawsui...
I would say certainly the second trip was safer than the first, as the first trip ruled out lots of non carbon fibre related failures (e.g. the porthole)
The average HN knowledge of engineering.
“Scalability turned out to be harder than we thought!”
Or it was statistical reversion to the mean.
One less than the number that it did.
Surely there was a large amount of tail risk.
With this sub the number of safe operation cycles wasn't even part of the design considerations.
Meh. The release forms were pretty clear. And if you aren't capable of judging the technical merit - well, that is a decision too. You're deciding to take a leap of unknown risk.
We need to stop being this judgy. People should be allowed to make decisions - including the decision to trust someone else - that turn out badly. They paid for those decisions both figuratively and literally. They weren't exactly tricked.
I think the good lesson here is that if you aren't capable of judging the risk of something, you shouldn't participate in it. Some people will violate that rule and some of those people will die. It's ok. People die for stupider reasons and nobody lives forever. It doesn't make the world a better place by trying to eliminate every possible source of death.
Had the company not be deluding itself and be more responsible, they would never have opened the sub to the public.
A test pilot or an astronaut are highly technical people who really understand the risks they get into. And they know that dying is not an unlikely event.
Expecting a 16 year old to be technically competent to know he shouldn't have boarded that death-trap is disingenuous.
You can only be capable of judging the risk of something if you're told the honest truth about the actual risk, or if you have enough inside knowledge to assess that risk. Dying because you've been tricked -lied- into thinking it's safe enough, is a high price to pay for anyone. Saying it's alright to die because you've been tricked is pretty callous.
With a company owner who shrugged off safety to the point of deluding himself, do you think the passengers had any honest way of knowing how unsafe that sub really was and make an informed decision?
It's easy to say they should have done due diligence after the fact. It's like blaming passengers from boarding a doomed flight with a maverick pilot who thinks loading the plane by 300% is alright because nothing ever happened before.
There's a long tradition of rich people getting themselves killed with experimental toys. Usually it's general aviation. Did John Denver know the risks of having the fuel tank selector valve over his left shoulder? Obviously not, or he probably wouldn't have crashed. But we let people buy and sell airplanes anyway - or at least, we did up until the 80s when we sued aircraft manufacturers into oblivion.
I'd rather live in a world with general aviation and a small but steady stream of deaths, rather than a world with no deaths because we've eliminated general aviation.
I ask you personally: Would you fly on a hypothetical next shuttle launch? Because I think most HNers would, even though the shuttle has historically had about a 2% failure rate. Which, if the 50 dives claimed by the oceangate website is correct, is on par with the Titan.
The 1300m rated viewport was on the (retired/rebuilt) 1st gen sub, not the one that failed. If you pay attention to the photos, the Titan has an obviously different viewport.
If you are this mistaken on such a simple matter of fact, please look inward and maybe reconsider being so assertive and judgmental.
You won't because it doesn't fucking exist because there was zero certification of the vehicle. There's no way for potential customers to verify any safety claims of the sub.
You can, today, buy any manner of uncertified experimental aircraft and fly them in general aviation. What is the surprise? Experimental vehicles are a thing. If you don't like them, don't fly/float on them.
No you can't. Experimental aircraft have to get certified by the FAA.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultralight_aircraft_(United_St...
Imagine being told that the gluing of titanium to carbon fiber is a risk, but the guy telling you that is saying it's no big deal - just innovation. How are you supposed to have any meaningful understanding of that risk? Like is it a huge red flag or just a YOLO issue? I wouldn't know, I'd have to defer to the "experts" who I am entrusting my life to.
>I wouldn't know, I'd have to defer to the "experts" who I am entrusting my life to.
We shouldn't consider someone an expert just because they run a business. Stockton was clearly not an expert in any of this, except maybe marketing.
Shouldn't at the very least, rich people be expected to have some personal responsibility? They have no excuse.
Again, watch some videos, he downplays the risk all the time. It's a form of manipulation, like buying a junk car from a used car salesman. Yes you could have a mechanic look at it, but it's such a great deal, if you walk away someone else will snap it up. All along the salesman is neglecting to mention the wheels are glued on because the bolts sheared, and the brake lines are held together with duct tape.
A completely unsustainable philosophy. There's a threshold past which a customer certainly would be tricked, and it's possible this situation passes that threshold. We are in situations constantly where we are paying for the guidance and expertise of someone more experienced than us to navigate potentially dangerous situations.
> It doesn't make the world a better place by trying to eliminate every possible source of death.
Straw man.
They are the same release forms that you'll see when you pay some college kid $90 to take you down some cat 3 rapids.
The difference in risk involved in those two activities is many orders of magnitude. As is the difference in recklessness and 'yolo' mindset of the vendor.
A release form isn't an excuse to operate your firm in an unsafe[1] manner.
[1] 'Safe' is defined 'as safe as can be reasonably made, given what we know'. The Titan did not meet this criteria.
There's an implicit assumption that the risks are somehow reasonable, or at the very least, that the other party isn't being reckless or negligent.
If you ride a roller coaster after signing such a disclaimer, it's still reasonable to expect that people are tightening the damn bolts. And it's insane to expect both roller coasters to remain a viable business and individual riders to check that they are safe. At best, your attitude makes it nigh impossible to conduct business.
Only a few states have roadworthiness inspections of vehicles; and Tesla autopilot may have driven into a truck; Or we could talk about texting while driving and drunk driving that endanger others, yet 60%/30% of Americans admit to it regularly, while 30k people die.
The important distinction is whether people can make an informed decision to trust someone. If you're going to take non-expert passengers on some experimental craft and using loopholes like labeling them as "crew" I don't think you can say they're really making an informed decision.
OceanGate had no rescue plan! Their entire "Plan" for what to do WHEN, not if, something went wrong, was to call in the coast guard / navy and have the taxpayer fund their rescue and from where I'm sitting this whole oeuvre of dangerous, rich-guy-ego-stroking vanity bullshit is an egregiously entitled abuse of the commons that should regulated out of existence with extreme prejudice.
Some people might just figure that a once in a lifetime experience is worth it even knowing it's dangerous.
I'm not sure a full risk analysis is really needed here. As long as the participants knew there was a real risk they'd die, perhaps it was worth it to them.
Its not unusual for a death to be caused by the expert guides being wrong and in the minority of opinion on the right way to do something or planners being wrong on how many tourists can be handled, which tourists are fit enough, etc.
I think many more people who already survived a one time sub trip with that company will ultimately die in safer equipment due to cumulative risk, so one really has to factor in quality of life explanations to argue it is unacceptable, but then maybe from a quality of life POV a once in a lifetime trip was fine.
The real issue I think is the pilot risk which wasn't approaching 100% only because there were other failures that could have shelved the sub besides catastrophic ones.
Tip: hubris is a tell.
> In 1984, President Ronald Reagan announced the Teacher in Space Project, and McAuliffe learned about NASA's efforts to find their first civilian, an educator, to fly into space. NASA wanted to find an "ordinary person," a gifted teacher who could communicate with students while in orbit. McAuliffe became one of more than 11,000 applicants.
…
> On January 28, 1986, McAuliffe boarded Challenger with the other six crew members of STS-51-L. Only 73 seconds into its flight at an altitude of 48,000 ft (14.630 km), the shuttle broke apart, resulting in the deaths of all seven crew members
Wasn't drilling in the actual dangers of climbing onto the Space Shuttle, and that she was taking on the same kind of risk as a test pilot would part of her training?
If so, I don't see an issue. Going to space only looks safe in the movies and press releases, everyone actually working on it knows that it is an incredibly dangerous thing to do.
If it wasn't, NASA really dropped the ball on the training part.
(It also, obviously, really dropped the ball on the O-rings part, but the institutional and bureaucratic failures surrounding that are really well documented.)
If it was regular tourists who save up for a once in a lifetime experience, I would feel differently.
If people want to do risky things, that's their business.
All of those require search and rescue type operations, should we ban them?