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Urwumpe said:
Looks like the hull never underwent a classic certification, because it wasn't mandatory....
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Yes. And it has a carbon fiber composite pressure vessel. It was "rated" for 4,000 m which is just a couple hundred meters lower than the Titanic/sea floor in that area. Some sources reference that 4,000 m as the crush depth, which I sincerely hope is incorrect as it would mean the safety factor would be just barely over 1 even for a pristine pressure vessel.

The thought of cycling this pressure vessel through large fractions of its design load even for a low number of dives makes the hairs on my head stand up. Composite strength degradation due to fatigue loading is poorly understood, especially in compressive loading. The fibers, instead of being under tension as in compressed gas pressure vessels, can compress and buckle. The buckling deforms the laminations, which causes stress concentrations, which can cause more buckling. Those buckling and deformations would occur under load, but they would relax when unloaded (at the surface). OceanGate apparently had some acoustic NDI system to inspect the hull between dives, but acoustic NDI of composites is also a bleeding edge and immature technology. Their magic acoustic NDI system may not be able to see the degree of distortion and fiber damage that occurs at maximum depth.

Just because the technology exists doesn't mean it is mature and well understood. A lot of engineers and tech organizations don't understand this and never learn this lesson. It's rather ironic that they were exploring the wreck of the Titanic, touted to be "unsinkable" in a fit of engineering hubris.

techcrunch.com

A whistleblower raised safety concerns about OceanGate’s submersible in 2018. Then he was fired.

The director of marine operations at OceanGate was fired after raising concerns about its first-of-a-kind carbon fiber hull.
techcrunch.com techcrunch.com
 

It seems that there is some redundancy in getting to the surface in case of a non-catastrophic failure or loss of power. That's great, assuming you can still get out of the thing in less than 96 hours. But if they are at the surface without power, they won't be transmitting anything. They likely do not have an EPIRB or any other type of emergency transponder (really). A white and gray hull riding in any sea state will be a challenge to see visually (I guess safety orange didn't look good on the advertising literature). Sonar won't see it in the waves. Since it is small and made mostly of titanium and composites, finding it with a magnetic anomaly detector might be very difficult if not impossible. They essentially made a stealth sub.

There is a non-zero possibility that they could asphyxiate while bobbing around at the surface, looking out of the window at the sea and sky, maybe even get to watch one or more search planes flying over, rocked about by the oxygen-rich wind, simply because the sub hatch can't be opened from the inside. They are 100% at the mercy of somebody putting eyeballs on them and getting a wrench to them before their oxygen runs out. If the thing is capable of diving to 4000 m I'd say it's unlikely they can smash their way out with a game controller.

This all assumes that the thing didn't implode at 3800 m, or is still sitting on the bottom waiting for weights to fall off through some "fail-safe" mechanism.

People pay money to do this to themselves? My God...

EDIT: I didn't realize the CEO of the company is also on this sub. I guess he can't pull a J.B. Ismay and get on a lifeboat. If they are alive, it must be something being in a can with four other people, all facing death, all asking you pointed questions like "WTF do you mean, there is no emergency beacon?"
 
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There's apparently banging been heard in the area at 30 minute intervals. This would indicate that they're alive and that a pressure vessel failure is not the cause of the accident (a pressure vessel failure would likely have been accompanied by some very loud noises, so I feel the search would likely have been called off by now if that were the case). I feel it also indicates that they're likely not at the surface, but I'm less certain about that conclusion. If so, it indicates that not only was there an emergency, but a failure of the vessel to handle the emergency as designed.
 
jedidia said:
Reading that article rings just about all the alarm bells. If all of this is accurate, that's certainly not a company fit for dangerous work. They mention "safety culture above classification", and while that's not wrong in and of itself, a significant part of true safety culture is that you use any safety measures available...
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If it were a software company, they dumped unit and service testing because software made with their new special programming language and compiler is more error-safe and because of the revolutionary language dogma can't be tested by classic test methods.
 
I mean, this had more red flags than a small communist country. From the inability to open the hatch by themselves, to having been damaged and lost comms several times on previous dives, to using a gaming controller. I play almost daily on the Xbox, and I have 5 or 6 controllers laying about in various states of disrepair. Just sayin' , you wouldn't want the down button to get stuck while you're near max depth.

Some dude reportedly pulled out of the trip at the last moment, and he says that they took their time reporting the emergency exactly because loss of comms had happened before, but the sub resurfaced after a few hours.

And how on earth were they doing this without at the very least an ROV able to dive down to them in case something went wrong?
 
steph said:
I mean, this had more red flags than a small communist country. From the inability to open the hatch by themselves, to having been damaged and lost comms several times on previous dives, to using a gaming controller. I play almost daily on the Xbox, and I have 5 or 6 controllers laying about in various states of disrepair. Just sayin' , you wouldn't want the down button to get stuck while you're near max depth.

Some dude reportedly pulled out of the trip at the last moment, and he says that they took their time reporting the emergency exactly because loss of comms had happened before, but the sub resurfaced after a few hours.

And how on earth were they doing this without at the very least an ROV able to dive down to them in case something went wrong?
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Exactly.

I'm not an expert or submarine nerd. But from my limited knowledge it seems to me they were looking for the least amount of challenges during design - make it as simple and minimalistic as possible.

If I would found such a company and build a submarine to carry people, I would be very aware of the responsibility it takes. Safety and redundency has to be the top priority. A bolted hatch - okay. We had it in space flight as well. But one should at least be able to separate it with explosive charges in an emergency. And that stock game controller thing is really scary too.

Also, for diving there should be always a capability available to rescue the submarine in an emergency. I'm also very curious they never tested the emergency oxygen supply 👀 All in all it seems they have an arrogant attitude...
 
Everybody is touting "96 hours of available oxygen" to the five on the Titan. That's a number on the Titan spec sheet, but I have to wonder what the life support system actually looks like to determine that number. Do they have CO2 scrubbers? If so, do they work effectively without power? Is it just tanks of O2? How much O2? Was the system actually charged and in good working order? Nothing else had to undergo a regulatory design review, so nothing says this magical 96 hour number was simply invented, and some anemic "life support system" was installed with no real understanding of its capacity in the event of an actual emergency.

The CEO seemed to have a disdain for having "50-year-old white guys" on his team (himself being a 61-year-old white guy who seems to be in love with his own brilliance), even though that is, for good or bad, the typical demographic of experienced submarine engineers. He hired a bunch of young engineers to be "inspirational" (read "can be worked hard on the cheap"), which is all well and good until some rookie new kid fresh out of their undergraduate program is put in charge of designing the life support capacity and they mess up the units of time, calculating seconds instead of hours, and there was no experienced engineer looking over their work to catch it. I reckon there are a lot of formerly "inspired" young engineers on that team turning into old engineers very quickly right now.

I've seen this attitude of age-ism a lot in tech, and it literally is murder when these young people are pushed into complicated life-and-death engineering projects with absolutely no oversight or QA process. Besides the experience, having older people in your group that understand the basic concept of death better than a 20-something kid fresh out of college does a lot to temper their "what could go wrong?" attitudes.

It sounds like OceanGate started with a mix of young and experienced engineers, but then the experienced engineers started raising flags, to which the CEO responded in classic fashion by firing them and installing younger, more compliant engineers to make those red flags go away. Rush was not an engineer, but a pilot. He once built a Glasair kit plane that didn't fall apart, and so he probably thought that made him qualified to head an engineering project. Nothing kills like a tech CEO with an ego.
 
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TheShuttleExperience said:
I'm not an expert or submarine nerd. But from my limited knowledge it seems to me they were looking for the least amount of challenges during design - make it as simple and minimalistic as possible.
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That is especially true for German submarines, which are de facto designed by the same people since late WW2. And if you follow the heritage, they are still based on the same design conventions, really conservative designs. But successful.
 
Thunder Chicken said:
The CEO seemed to have a disdain for having "50-year-old white guys" on his team (himself being a 61-year-old white guy who seems to be in love with his own brilliance), even though that is, for good or bad, the typical demographic of experienced submarine engineers. He hired a bunch of young engineers to be "inspirational" (read "can be worked hard on the cheap"), which is all well and good until some rookie new kid fresh out of their undergraduate program is put in charge of designing the life support capacity and they mess up the units of time, calculating seconds instead of hours, and there was no experienced engineer looking over their work to catch it. I reckon there are a lot of formerly "inspired" young engineers on that team turning into old engineers very quickly right now.
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You are right about the abusive subtext there, but in one point, he actually is right: Would I hire people for a bigger project, I wouldn't hire any older engineer if a younger guy could do the job and I wouldn't hire any older engineer, who lacks project experience despite the age. The older people are for mentoring the younger ones and guide in technical questions, but not overrule them by authority. And I don't need too many mentors. For a good project I would need a good mix for characters and ages. I need women and men. Especially if the project (or company) runs for decades, need to hire younger people to be the older people in my company with the experience and skills to lead this project (or company). And I expect the older people to leave the younger people space for this development. Either by looking for a challenge in their competence weight class and quitting the team or by stepping back into the second or third row.

I had seen really bad projects, where we had too many old, experienced, but expensive guys, who really did great work, but were too expensive when the initial design phase is over for the customers and then left us either left us with a gutted team, that lacked the workforce and skills to go on, or no project at all, because a competitor won the follow-up contract with young, cheap, naive people, who maybe lacked our accumulated skills, but are able to realize the design spec we had given our customer.
 
Urwumpe said:
You are right about the abusive subtext there, but in one point, he actually is right: Would I hire people for a bigger project, I wouldn't hire any older engineer if a younger guy could do the job and I wouldn't hire any older engineer, who lacks project experience despite the age. The older people are for mentoring the younger ones and guide in technical questions, but not overrule them by authority. And I don't need too many mentors. For a good project I would need a good mix for characters and ages. I need women and men. Especially if the project (or company) runs for decades, need to hire younger people to be the older people in my company with the experience and skills to lead this project (or company). And I expect the older people to leave the younger people space for this development. Either by looking for a challenge in their competence weight class and quitting the team or by stepping back into the second or third row.

I had seen really bad projects, where we had too many old, experienced, but expensive guys, who really did great work, but were too expensive when the initial design phase is over for the customers and then left us either left us with a gutted team, that lacked the workforce and skills to go on, or no project at all, because a competitor won the follow-up contract with young, cheap, naive people, who maybe lacked our accumulated skills, but are able to realize the design spec we had given our customer.
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I agree. I'm not against young engineers (I myself was one long ago), but there has to be a proper mixture of enthusiasm, capability, and experience to execute a project in an effective manner, and that mix can differ wildly depending on what you are trying to do. In large, long-running organizations, you can maintain a good demographic mix by good hiring practices and the passage of time, and you have a continuous internal flow of experience and knowledge from the older to the younger. In smaller organizations with shorter (even one-off) projects, you must install and maintain that demographic mix from the get-go. It can be done, but it requires someone to actively manage that mix and understand the importance of that mix. A head-strong CEO who dogmatically throws out all of the experienced people because they spoke uncomfortable truths will be left with a young organization that is afraid to speak up and has to painfully relearn all of the bloody lessons that the experienced people learned and could have communicated to them.
 
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Thunder Chicken said:
A head-strong CEO who dogmatically throws out all of the experienced people because they spoke uncomfortable truths will be left with a young organization that is afraid to speak up and has to painfully relearn all of the bloody lessons that the experienced people learned and could have communicated to them.
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In this case, he'll autodarwinate and be left with no organization. It's hard to run a company from Davy Jones' Locker.
 
Linguofreak said:
In this case, he'll autodarwinate and be left with no organization. It's hard to run a company from Davy Jones' Locker.
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Well, thats a fate I don't wish to any one, even evil capitalists. Lets hope they manage to pinpoint the sounds and lift them up.

Nobody should be lost at sea.
Nobody should be lost in space.
 
Urwumpe said:
Well, thats a fate I don't wish to any one, even evil capitalists. Lets hope they manage to pinpoint the sounds and lift them up.

Nobody should be lost at sea.
Nobody should be lost in space.
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The best outcome would be that the five are rescued and the CEO emerges from the sub deeply chastened by the fear of death in his memory and with a completely different attitude about safety and his moral responsibility to his customers. It would be a hell of a way to learn a lesson, but it would be a lasting lesson for most people. Some people just don't understand things until it happens to them personally, especially if they are unwilling to learn based on the experiences of others.

Here's hoping that they survive and lessons are learned, and remembered.
 
Urwumpe said:
Well, thats a fate I don't wish to any one, even evil capitalists. Lets hope they manage to pinpoint the sounds and lift them up.
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I don't think he's an evil capitalist (modulo the universality of human evil), merely an overly optimistic capitalist. An evil capitalist wouldn't eat the dogfood and trust his life to his own sub, and would thus be less likely to autodarwinate. This guy truly believed he could cut corners without compromising safety.

In any case, yes, the hope is that a rescue can be effected, the reality is that it likely won't be.
 
I think one can assume already at this point, that a rescue would be a true miracle. Even if they spot the submarine still today, let's say on the ground of the ocean, how are they going to lift it up?

Time is critically acting against them. It'll be over tomorrow.

What a nightmare... 😩
 
TheShuttleExperience said:
I think one can assume already at this point, that a rescue would be a true miracle. Even if they spot the submarine still today, let's say on the ground of the ocean, how are they going to lift it up?

Time is critically acting against them. It'll be over tomorrow.

What a nightmare... 😩
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With a cranes hook, attached to the submarines by a ROV?
 
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