Submersible tour boat joins the Titanic
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All of this talk about skipped safety precautions and such, but yet Nargeolot was perhaps the most experienced submariner in the world, particularly deep oceanic trench subs. He has made that trek numerous times on different vessels. You would think that if something looked obviously unsafe as many have stated that he would have said no to the trip…
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The CEO’s wife:
Rush married Wendy Weil in 1986.[22] The couple had two children.[23] Wendy Weil Rush is a great-great-granddaughter of Isidor and Ida Blun Straus, both of whom died in the sinking of the Titanic.[22] She is the director of communications at OceanGate.[22]
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@LuFins-Dad said in Submersible tour boat joins the Titanic:
All of this talk about skipped safety precautions and such, but yet Nargeolot was perhaps the most experienced submariner in the world, particularly deep oceanic trench subs. He has made that trek numerous times on different vessels. You would think that if something looked obviously unsafe as many have stated that he would have said no to the trip…
Maybe there's a difference between people who use submarines and people who design and build submarines, and also between them and the people who test the safety of submarines. I know that's definitely the case in my work. It's why we have 3rd party certification.
Proud supporter of Plan 2525. Everything you think, do and say will be in the pill you took today.
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@Doctor-Phibes said in Submersible tour boat joins the Titanic:
@LuFins-Dad said in Submersible tour boat joins the Titanic:
All of this talk about skipped safety precautions and such, but yet Nargeolot was perhaps the most experienced submariner in the world, particularly deep oceanic trench subs. He has made that trek numerous times on different vessels. You would think that if something looked obviously unsafe as many have stated that he would have said no to the trip…
Maybe there's a difference between people who use submarines and people who design and build submarines, and also between them and the people who test the safety of submarines. I know that's definitely the case in my work. It's why we have 3rd party certification.
No doubt, but many of these stories about safety problems are coming from even more uninformed sources. David Pogue is a great and brilliant technology writer for the Times, and his articles about the wonders of the Disklavier and Yamaha Avant Grand pianos are spot on, but I think Nargeolet would be a better source. There’s the documentary maker that also talked about how shady the safety looked… I think the French Submariner would have a better take than a videographer…
It sounds like the issue wasn’t the ballast tanks or Nintendo controllers… Those wouldn’t have caused an implosion. It sounds like repeated stress on the titanium/carbon fiber mix… which should have been inspected and tested more often, but the design should also be recognized to have worked for hundreds of dives…
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The Alvin, which was built in 1964, has made a few thousand dives and is capable of diving much deeper than Titan. I listened to an interview with a physicist who works with carbon fiber who said it doesn't do as well with compression as one might desire for a submersible - especially with repeated use.
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@LuFins-Dad said in Submersible tour boat joins the Titanic:
@Doctor-Phibes said in Submersible tour boat joins the Titanic:
@LuFins-Dad said in Submersible tour boat joins the Titanic:
All of this talk about skipped safety precautions and such, but yet Nargeolot was perhaps the most experienced submariner in the world, particularly deep oceanic trench subs. He has made that trek numerous times on different vessels. You would think that if something looked obviously unsafe as many have stated that he would have said no to the trip…
Maybe there's a difference between people who use submarines and people who design and build submarines, and also between them and the people who test the safety of submarines. I know that's definitely the case in my work. It's why we have 3rd party certification.
No doubt, but many of these stories about safety problems are coming from even more uninformed sources. David Pogue is a great and brilliant technology writer for the Times, and his articles about the wonders of the Disklavier and Yamaha Avant Grand pianos are spot on, but I think Nargeolet would be a better source. There’s the documentary maker that also talked about how shady the safety looked… I think the French Submariner would have a better take than a videographer…
It sounds like the issue wasn’t the ballast tanks or Nintendo controllers… Those wouldn’t have caused an implosion. It sounds like repeated stress on the titanium/carbon fiber mix… which should have been inspected and tested more often, but the design should also be recognized to have worked for hundreds of dives…
Assessing the design as unsafe is one thing. I have no expertise at all in that area, so I really can't comment.
Not having it follow standard safety protocols is another thing. I do know about that, and this guy didn't follow the protocols. He basically invented his own way to assess the safety and ignored what he considered boring, outdated, restrictive practices.
William Kohnen, the chairman of the Manned Underwater Vehicles Committee, said that the rules regarding submersibles have been written in blood. And Oceangate ignored them.
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"The ocean instapot event."
Link to video -
"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
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@George-K said in Submersible tour boat joins the Titanic:
Wow...
Sure would be nice to have some verification that the emails were real. Based on the asshat that posted them? I have some doubts.
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"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
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@LuFins-Dad said in Submersible tour boat joins the Titanic:
Ok. The Twitter guy is still an asshole.
Could well be.
Don't know anything about him.
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@LuFins-Dad said in Submersible tour boat joins the Titanic:
@George-K said in Submersible tour boat joins the Titanic:
Ok. The Twitter guy is still an asshole.
So was the submarine guy, and the Twitter guy didn't kill anybody.
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So it sounds like there was something equivalent to a trade union regarding this stuff, but nothing with any true regulatory authority?
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Were they insured? I would think that insurance would require some type of assurance of the safety of the equipment.
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My understanding is they only operated it in international waters so that there would be no regulatory authority.
I doubt they were insured, probably waivers with air-tight indemnification or at least the attempt.
Can’t imagine the company is worth much today, hard to imagine a billionaire’s family spending the time and emotional energy to sue them. But who knows.
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Another story - there's a British TV presenter who was going to make a show on the submersible last year, but they cancelled due to safety concerns after examining the set-up.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/06/24/ross-kemp-turned-down-titanic-trip-unsafe-oceangate-sub/
What happened is really disgusting.
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A submariner writes:
On Hyman Rickover:
Rickover was an absolute beast about safety, yet took military necessity into account when necessary, in ways that I can’t discuss but that are a major reason why the U.S. Navy’s submarine force is such a force to be reckoned with. As Wikipedia says about the Cold War, “U.S. submarines far outperformed the Soviet ones in the crucial area of stealth, and Rickover’s obsessive fixation on safety and quality control gave the U.S. nuclear Navy a vastly superior safety record to the Soviet one.” Of note: Rickover had seven rules that seem mostly applicable to OceanGate. They are:
- You must have a rising standard of quality over time, and well beyond what is required by any minimum standard.
- People running complex systems should be highly capable.
- Supervisors have to face bad news when it comes and take problems to a level high enough to fix those problems.
- You must have a healthy respect for the dangers and risks of your particular job.
- Training must be constant and rigorous.
- All the functions of repair, quality control, and technical support must fit together.
- The organization and members thereof must have the ability and willingness to learn from mistakes of the past.
During my time, which was mostly after Rickover’s passing, another feature that became embedded in submarine culture was the concept of “forceful backup,” meaning that junior members of a watch team were empowered, encouraged, and required to speak up when something didn’t seem right, even if they were the newest person on the ship and the action being taken was the Captain’s. There is a natural impediment to speaking up, usually for one of two reasons: the supervisor is a jerk and/or hates bad news (the usual case, frankly), or is so respected for his prowess and competency that he is almost revered, and the natural inclination is to think that such a person can do no wrong (the so-called “halo effect”). Both are deadly.
His analysis
First, and as we reported previously, Rush “Didn’t Hire ’50-Year-Old White Guys’ With Experience to Guide Titanic Sub Because They Aren’t ‘Inspirational.’” This decision shows that a woke mindset can be deadly:
Stockton Rush, 61, added that such expertise was unnecessary because “anybody can drive the sub” with a $30 video game controller.
This decision violated Rickover’s Rule No. 2, and elevated virtue signaling over a rational acceptance of risk and excellence. Additionally, Rush’s comment about the video game controller irritates me, not because of the controller, but because he had to know that merely “driving the sub” is a minor part of the task – more important is having the experience and capability to survive when things go haywire, something “50-year-old white guys” who are “ex-military submariners” are probably pretty good at — a 25-year-old with no experience? Not so much.
Second, the fact that Rush refused to have his vessel inspected by a third party is important, not because of the refusal per se, but because it shows he didn’t want to know about his own ship. As Liz Taylor, President of DOER [Deep Ocean Exploration and Research] Marine explains:
“Stockton felt like he was pushing the edge, he wanted to push the envelope, use some new materials,” she said.
And that’s when Taylor specifically advised against the use of carbon fiber [to construct the pressure hull], as it’s still experimental and has not been tested over time in extreme depths of the ocean.
“With the carbon fiber, it’s been shown to not be very happy when it’s being immersed first of all and then being hollow on the inside or just one atmosphere on the inside and then having the tremendous pressure of the ocean trying to push in on it, it’s not the right material,” she said...
Taylor says Rush cut obvious corners, like not building his sub in a pair to have self-rescue capacity or with what’s called an ROV.That’s a remotely operated vehicle that can serve as a self-rescue tool.
“There was no capable ROV on board, there was no second submersible,” she said.
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The idea of the second ROV is important, and if you look at pictures of the Titan, you don’t see much redundancy built in: U.S. submarines have (at least) two of everything, in case one fails. U.S. submarines still use, to my knowledge, sound-powered phones to communicate between compartments. These devices, which are glorified tin cans-connected-by-wire arrangements work, even with no power, or light.There is evidence that Rush not only failed to listen to outsiders, as the Taylor report (above) shows, but Rush also fired his Director of Marine Operations and later sued him after the Officer filed a written report outlining dangers with the Titan: The missing Titanic sub would only detect hull failure ‘milliseconds before an implosion,’ company executive warned in 2018
A submarine pilot hired to assess the now-missing Titanic submersible warned in 2018 that its hull monitoring system would only detect failure “often milliseconds before an implosion.”
David Lochridge, a submarine pilot and inspector from Scotland, said in court filings that he was fired after expressing concerns about the safety of the Titan — a 22-foot submersible that disappeared on Sunday while carrying five people to see the wreck of the Titanic...
Lochridge warned that the system would “only show when a component is about to fail — often milliseconds before an implosion,” and couldn’t detect if any existing flaws were already affecting the hull, the lawsuit said.
“Non-destructive testing was critical to detect such potentially existing flaws in order to ensure a solid and safe product for the safety of the passengers and crew,” Lochridge’s lawsuit said.
However, the submarine pilot said OceanGate told him that the Titan’s hull was too thick to scan for weak spots and adhesion issues.
Lochridge said that after he submitted his inspection report, OceanGate fired him and gave the pilot “approximately 10 minutes to immediately clear out his desk and exit the premises.”
