Titanic tourist submersible goes missing with search under way

a reply to: MrInquisitive

They made at least two other dives. People that went on them, or backed out have come forward and talked about it.

There was ZERO excuse for this 'accident' - tourist or not.

There were 5 people in the vessel and one small window. So you spend your time looking at tiny TV screens NOT out the window.

That experience could have been accomplished successfully and safely by sending a remotely controlled drone to beam high definition pictures back to you sitting in a shallow water submersible (so you get the under water motion feel). Or you could be sitting in the ships lounge sipping champagne. Or your own couch at home in front of your fireplace. Hey! that's three different price levels - Platinum, Gold, and 'pay for your own beer' - there's money to be made there.

The whole concept of actually tourist tripping to the bottom is pointless and ludicrous.

a reply to: BernnieJGato

Place two plaques down there.

One for the 4 paying passengers that's nothing but respectful to their memory.

And one for Stockton Rush that says:

"At some point, safety just is pure waste. I mean, if you just want to be safe, don't get out of bed. Don't get in your car. Don't do anything."

This guy claimed to have worked with three prestigious entities to design this.

From the hatchet job Wikipedia page.

UW claimed the APL had no involvement in "design, engineering, or testing of the Titan submersible." A Boeing spokesperson also claimed Boeing "was not a partner on the Titan and did not design or build it." A NASA spokesperson said that NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center had a Space Act Agreement with OceanGate, but "did not conduct testing and manufacturing via its workforce or facilities"

What a fly-by-night s# show. A quarter million to die in some guys' international waters death wish contraption.

** Amend a previous post to say a ⅓ scale version of this vessel was "rated" down to pressures equivalent to 3000 meters, or 9,800 feet.

The Titanic is at 12,500. That is way beyond the design depth of the ⅓ scale model tested. He actually took Titan to 127% its limits as tested on a scale model.

A 1⁄3-scale model of the Cyclops 2 pressure vessel was built and tested at the Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) at UW; the model was able to sustain a pressure of 4,285 psi (29.54 MPa; 291.6 atm), corresponding to a depth of approximately 3,000 m (9,800 ft).

It was claimed The Cyclops 2 was going to be capable of 4000 meters by the company. Yet UW only tested it to 3000 apparently. I can't find record of a ⅓ scale vessel being tested to 4000 meters by UW. Only articles claiming UW was helping OceanGate build the Cyclops 2 to be able to go to 13,000 feet.

This guy bugs me more and more and it's a shame others died because of him.

originally posted by: BernnieJGato
a reply to: MrInquisitive

And what was the pilot thinking?And what was the pilot thinking? He was evidently a very experience deep diver in conventional submersible craft? Seems like hubris and stupidity from top to bottom.

rush the CEO was the pilot.

abc reprint of a Associated Press article.

Although his background is in aerospace and technology, Rush founded OceanGate Inc. in 2009 to provide crewed submersibles for undersea researchers and explorers, according to the company's website. Rush was the Titan's pilot, said company spokesperson Andrew Von Kerens.
A Titanic expert, an adventurer, a CEO, and a father and son were killed in Titan's implosion

probably explains the hubris and stupidity

Thanx for the correction. I was going by an article in the Independent, which said otherwise.

Daughter of French pilot on Titanic sub says if he died he would be ‘where he loved’

But checking a couple more articles confirms what you wrote. Makes me wonder how much we can take at face value what has been written about the loose safety standards. Could be better or worse than has been reported.

a reply to: Degradation33

some where i read that in the first and second tests at depth of the prototype vessel which he claimed to have been the pilot, shook and made all kinds of noise so he scrapped it and had a new pressure vessel made by another manufacturer. claimed the new one didn't do that, and i'm thinking that that is also why he had the hulls acoustic warning system installed it was in one of the articles about the lochridge lawsuit, where they claimed that lochridges claims weren't about the new pressure vessel but the old one.

it makes me wonder did he even try find out why and change the design of the pressure vessel or just have a new one made.
i'm leaning towards just had a new one built and got lucky it didn't fail before this last dive.

a reply to: yuppa

Actually oxygen itself is not flammable, but a necessary oxidizer for other stuff to burn. However, you got plastic consoles/panels and wiring and junk that is not fire retardant. Shielding for Ethernet and Romex (home wiring) has a fire resistance rating to it.

originally posted by: AntAcid
a reply to: Arbitrageur

Agreed it does imply they wouldn't of been there in time. But, my point is, why not just let them set off anyway. Setting of Monday morning would of had them here around mid day yesterday. (Still not sure why it takes so long though, considering you can fly from the UK in about 6.5 - 7 ish hours. Logistics of heavy equipment no doubt involved etc.

Now they are accepting help when the oxygen has all but ran out. So in essence they won't be there until Saturday / Sunday now would they? Meaning the air is long gone and they will now as you said, be carrying out a search and recovery operation.

Should they not just of accepted the offer of help when it was first offered, rather than waiting until its too late anyway? Might as well of, and carried on about there own business searching for the submersible whilst waiting for other kit to arrive.

I'm wondering if we had all the information...

originally posted by: Encia22
"After the craft was reported missing, the U.S. Navy went back and analyzed its acoustic data and found an anomaly that was “consistent with an implosion or explosion in the general vicinity of where the Titan submersible was operating when communications were lost,” a senior Navy official told The Associated Press on Thursday."

apnews.com...

So one possible interpretation is the Navy heard what they thought might be the implosion, but they probably weren't 100% sure when they first detected it. I don't know if this factored into the decision-making or not, but I'm wondering.

originally posted by: All Seeing Eye
If I'm not mistaken, the process for shrinking heads is to weight them down and drop them deep into the ocean, then retrieve them using ropes.

If the recovery does recover the bodies, I wouldn't be surprised, they are the size of monkeys. I suspect 6000 PSI would do that.

Correct me if I'm wrong...

In this case since you asked to be corrected...you're wrong.

The main thing to remember underwater is that gases and liquids compress at vastly different rates. In rough terms, let's skip exact calculations, about 2 miles down the pressure underwater is about 300 atmospheres. Gases at that depth will compress by a factor of 300 so the air in the lungs would shrink down to the size of a walnut, but liquids like the rest of your body, mostly, would only compress to about 98% of its original size at that depth, so the liquid-filled body does compress a little, but not very much. A bit more around the lungs obviously because of the lungs collapsing, but the tissues around the lungs don't really compress much.

a reply to: sean

You forgot to list human flesh. It will also diesel in those circumstances. Common paper bursts into flames.

a reply to: Arbitrageur

As far as physical pressure affects go, it is the sinus cavities in the skull that are most affected. A skull is not flexible like a chest cavity is.

There was multiple people all in the same area (presumably)… wouldn’t they have been all crushed together into some kind of horrific human goo pile even if bodies were able to be recovered? Some things are better left at the bottom of the ocean.

a reply to: Arbitrageur

I don't care what anyone says about controlling the vessel with a game controller, I think thats pretty rad, and if the pilot with all his experience was cool with it so am I, that and controls like that are intuitive enough that Id ask if I could play too! I wonder if they used the rumble feature as part of the controls, and no I am not being sarcastic or joking, I do think that this is cool because the pilot didn't mind it apparently.

a reply to: Narvasis
You can ask two different questions.
1. What will high pressure from the ocean depths do to a human body?
2. What would an implosion of a failed submarine do to the human body?

They are two different effects. Though related, #2 is potentially more devastating if the implosion is extremely rapid. Instead of just having 300 atmospheres of water pressure applied, the implosion also potentially includes debris from the collapsing hull impacting the bodies at high velocity, or slamming the body against part of the hull or other components.

It wouldn't surprise me at all if the implosion started at one end and the body or bodies at that end got completely mangled by the imploding debris, while bodies at the other end could have been thrown clear by the fluid dynamics of the implosion, and thus might be relatively intact, but I suppose we will see if any human remains are found. They are going to try to determine exactly what failed on the Titan and if they can do that, we might have a better idea of how the implosion progressed. Regardless of the condition of the bodies, I'm sure death was immediate, in the case of the Titan. In the case of the USS Thresher nuclear sub implosion, death was probably immediate, but I'm not quite as sure about that.

a reply to: Arbitrageur

My oldest and first friend on ATS, has this been talked about yet? What if something happened that killed the crew/ people on board leading to the malfunction first in which they were dead before the other events?

a reply to: Brotherman
Hi my friend. I don't know, we could ask a million what ifs?
There could be some clues though, like how much time elapsed between the last message the Titan crew sent to the surface, and the time the US Navy recorded the sound of the implosion? I don't know how much time elapsed, but if it was, say, 5 minutes, then we would know they were alive 5 minutes before the implosion.

a reply to: Arbitrageur

From what i gather no one is even reporting that the course of the vessel was even on track with the planned route so I am curious about this, I don't mean to make a conspiracy or claim to anything but the charted coarse is not part of the news report or anything detailed in reporting other than they were looking to see a ship wreck, for me I wish to know these details because I too am interested in this tragedy.

a reply to: Arbitrageur

I'm most curious about the "banging" heard by listening equipment every 30 minutes, for a day or two.

The Coast Guard has just declared this a "Major Marine Casualty".

The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board issued a statement Friday saying the U.S. Coast Guard had declared the loss of Titan a "major marine casualty" and, as a result, would lead the investigation.

Source: ca.news.yahoo.com...

"Major" = Overhype?

When poor people die, no one cares, when rich people die, they care because there could be lawsuits flying all over the place from the families with deep pockets, to push it all the way up through the judicial system, because they aren't desperate for any money, they are just trying to prove a point, if it takes a decade, they won't care.
Poor people settle fast to get whatever scrapes they can to move on with life.

originally posted by: Brotherman
a reply to: Arbitrageur

From what i gather no one is even reporting that the course of the vessel was even on track with the planned route so I am curious about this,

It's certainly implied they were on course. The sightseeing approach to the Titanic is to descend in front of the bow, then to approach the bow. A debris field from the Titan was found in front of the bow, so it appears they were descending right on course when the implosion occurred.

originally posted by: carewemust
a reply to: Arbitrageur

I'm most curious about the "banging" heard by listening equipment every 30 minutes, for a day or two.

That was interesting, but what I heard was they sent an ROV to where they thought the noise was coming from and nothing was there. I don't know if you read the link about the Thresher sub implosion I posted, but there are some similarities in that noises were heard after the Thresher had already imploded. One search vessel thought the noises were from people in the Thresher, but the investigators thought the noises were from other rescue vessels. I think there were multiple rescue vessels looking for the Titan also, could some of them have been a source for noises? I don't know.

a reply to: Arbitrageur

For sure, then again this is a voyage if i haf money like that i would take