Titanic tourist submersible gone missing

Devil#20

Haych said:

What?  There was a distress call made from the sub?  I'd not heard that before.  I thought it was just a case of contact being lost?

I'll admit, I've not followed the story too closely, but when I first heard about it they were supposed to contact the mother ship every 15mins and I thought, maybe misremembered, that the last one was a distress call. Even so 15mins later with no contact was in effect a large clue the vessel was in trouble. It would be below the thermocline at that point and so sonar detection wouldn't work very well so they should have dropped a couple of sonar bouys below that thermocline either side of the wreck to triangulate on which would have allowed them to both listen to any tapping on the hull and locate the vessel. Surprised they didn't have that facility already in place or following the sub down. Also the vessel should have had an independently powered transponder or EPIRB sending out a chirp ID every 5 mins or so. If they lose ship comms and the transponder ID then hull failure is a certainty. I still think that's what's happened. The hull was only sonically tested and not x-rayed and the vessel has been on several dives. All smacks of cost cutting,

I design the automatic flight control systems for military aircraft and the verfication, validation and classification of such is a long and expensive program for both the control sub-system and the aircraft system as a whole. We work typically in quadruplex architechture with MTBF of 1e-9 hours. With commercial airliners, it's more stringent with MTBF of 1e-12 hrs. The safety factor on that submersible wasn't even defined. I wouldn't have got into it, because I know the process regarding safety and they refused to allow independent assessment. We are a trusted organisation and are allowed to do the testing and v&v ourselves but certification still needs to checked and signed off by the MAA.  

LastMantra

LionAquaLooper said:

Not completely redundant I think.  SOS in morse would be more definitive than regular noises at regular intervals.   Whoever's listening wouldn't need to wait at least 3x repetitions every half hour to conclude it's not a coincidence. 
But maybe they are/were banging in morse code but because they're hitting a carbon fibre hull it's getting bloody muffled!.  

Not sure they need to communicate anything in particular, at this point, to let people know they're in trouble. 

LionAquaLooper

LastMantra said:

LionAquaLooper said:

Not completely redundant I think.  SOS in morse would be more definitive than regular noises at regular intervals.   Whoever's listening wouldn't need to wait at least 3x repetitions every half hour to conclude it's not a coincidence. 
But maybe they are/were banging in morse code but because they're hitting a carbon fibre hull it's getting bloody muffled!.  

Not sure they need to communicate anything in particular, at this point, to let people know they're in trouble. 

No not to signal they're in trouble, but that they're still alive.  But there's none of that being picked up.
Unfortunately I agree with @Devil#20 above and some others on here.  I think the Titan imploded at some point.  

Stratavarious

‘The rules are for other people’ disaster waiting to happen.   Tough for the 18yr old.

Haych

Interestingly, I've just watched a vid on YouTube by a yank calling himself the Veteran Biker.  I've seen some of his stuff before and I don't like him much.

But he's an ex submariner and he played an audio excerpt from an interview with Stockton Rush.  In it he seems to intimate that he avoided hiring ex submariners (as is the norm in the industry, I think, at least according to Rush's own words in the excerpt) in favour of a younger, more driven, inspirational employee.

I don't agree with the insinuation of the video  - it seems to be making the connection that diversity and inclusion was at least partly responsible for the disaster on the basis that Stockton Rush was heard to say he didn't want a bunch of 50 year old white guys on his team.  That's a bit of a tenuous connection, in my opinion, for what it's worth.

Audio excerpt begins at about 5:12 in:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OPCe4RIVFg

But, putting aside the anti-woke agenda of the video for a moment, presumably 50 year old ex-navy submariners know a bit about subs, and if other companies in ocean exploration are hiring them then it's an indication that maybe they have something useful to contribute.

Actively not hiring them for lesser experienced, younger, "inspirational" people, though, whether you agree with the anti PC mood of the video or not, seems a bit ill advised.

VimFuego

I wonder if it was an ego thing, that Rush chap may not have wanted to employ people who already had a good idea of how things should be done, who could've disagreed with him. Maybe he wanted to surround himself with younger, "blank canvas" types.

Gilly

Haych said:

Interestingly, I've just watched a vid on YouTube by a yank calling himself the Veteran Biker.  I've seen some of his stuff before and I don't like him much.

But he's an ex submariner and he played an audio excerpt from an interview with Stockton Rush.  In it he seems to intimate that he avoided hiring ex submariners (as is the norm in the industry, I think, at least according to Rush's own words in the excerpt) in favour of a younger, more driven, inspirational employee.

I don't agree with the insinuation of the video  - it seems to be making the connection that diversity and inclusion was at least partly responsible for the disaster on the basis that Stockton Rush was heard to say he didn't want a bunch of 50 year old white guys on his team.  That's a bit of a tenuous connection, in my opinion, for what it's worth.

Audio excerpt begins at about 5:12 in:

   But, putting aside the anti-woke agenda of the video for a moment, presumably 50 year old ex-navy submariners know a bit about subs, and if other companies in ocean exploration are hiring them then it's an indication that maybe they have something useful to contribute.

Actively not hiring them for lesser experienced, younger, "inspirational" people, though, whether you agree with the anti PC mood of the video or not, seems a bit ill advised.

I imagine he hired people who would give him the answers he wanted not “no we can’t do that - it’s too dangerous”.

goldtop

Haych said:

Devil#20 said:

We'll find the fate of this sub in the next few days maybe. As I understand it, following the last distress call (what did they say), there has been no further communication (regular or otherwise despite reports to the contrary). So they still had power to transmit the distress call. If power was subsequently lost then SOS tapped on the hull in Morse is the obvious alternative. That didn't happen and therefore, the only scenarios left is failure of the air supply or catastrophic hull failure. The only other possible scenario is somebody on there went postal. Either way they died on Sunday. Not what you want to hear but it's true.

That aside, I find it unethical making money to take rich tourists to the site of human tragedy and it should now stop. It shouldn't have started in the first place really.

What?  There was a distress call made from the sub?  I'd not heard that before.  I thought it was just a case of contact being lost?

AIUI there's a way of encoding short text abbreviations within the waveform of the sonar pings between ship and submersible. But I hadn't seen anything about an SOS being received by the ship.

Shrews

With regards to survival. If one of the five died early then that's 20% less oxygen being used, which would equate to about a day extra for the survivors (not sure, would it?). What about a decomposing body, how much oxygen is involved in that process?

Then of course, if two died, three died there would be more I guess?

So it may not quite be a recovery mission yet. It depends what events took place at the the time it went missing.

WezV

Shrews said:

With regards to survival. If one of the five died early then that's 20% less oxygen being used, which would equate to about a day extra for the survivors (not sure, would it?). What about a decomposing body, how much oxygen is involved in that process?

Then of course, if two died, three died there would be more I guess?

So it may not quite be a recovery mission yet. It depends what events took place at the the time it went missing.

or if one of the bill/millionaires did those sums it could be a much darker survival story.

Devil#20

Shrews said:

With regards to survival. If one of the five died early then that's 20% less oxygen being used, which would equate to about a day extra for the survivors (not sure, would it?). What about a decomposing body, how much oxygen is involved in that process?

Then of course, if two died, three died there would be more I guess?

So it may not quite be a recovery mission yet. It depends what events took place at the the time it went missing.

There is the possible scenario that one of them went a bit postal. Unlikely as it  may seem, you can't rule that one out. 

Shrews

WezV said:

Shrews said:

With regards to survival. If one of the five died early then that's 20% less oxygen being used, which would equate to about a day extra for the survivors (not sure, would it?). What about a decomposing body, how much oxygen is involved in that process?

Then of course, if two died, three died there would be more I guess?

So it may not quite be a recovery mission yet. It depends what events took place at the the time it went missing.

or if one of the bill/millionaires did those sums it could be a much darker survival story.

Well, for sure, desperate people do desperate things, and I can't think of anything more desperate than slowly suffocating to death. How about a bribe? 10 million if you take your own life, and we will make sure it goes to your family. Darker things have happened.

Do we think they will have the strength of character NOT to do anything like that. Accept their fate, sit it out quietly until their last breaths? It seems to me it's more likely that panic will set in and they will be willing to do anything to survive. 

octatonic

Shrews said:

With regards to survival. If one of the five died early then that's 20% less oxygen being used, which would equate to about a day extra for the survivors (not sure, would it?). What about a decomposing body, how much oxygen is involved in that process?

Then of course, if two died, three died there would be more I guess?

So it may not quite be a recovery mission yet. It depends what events took place at the the time it went missing.

A decomposing body or two will be pretty unpleasant in that small environment.
As the oxygen levels go down the rate of decomposition goes up too.

Devil#20

Haych said:

Interestingly, I've just watched a vid on YouTube by a yank calling himself the Veteran Biker.  I've seen some of his stuff before and I don't like him much.

But he's an ex submariner and he played an audio excerpt from an interview with Stockton Rush.  In it he seems to intimate that he avoided hiring ex submariners (as is the norm in the industry, I think, at least according to Rush's own words in the excerpt) in favour of a younger, more driven, inspirational employee.

I don't agree with the insinuation of the video  - it seems to be making the connection that diversity and inclusion was at least partly responsible for the disaster on the basis that Stockton Rush was heard to say he didn't want a bunch of 50 year old white guys on his team.  That's a bit of a tenuous connection, in my opinion, for what it's worth.

Audio excerpt begins at about 5:12 in:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OPCe4RIVFg

But, putting aside the anti-woke agenda of the video for a moment, presumably 50 year old ex-navy submariners know a bit about subs, and if other companies in ocean exploration are hiring them then it's an indication that maybe they have something useful to contribute.

Actively not hiring them for lesser experienced, younger, "inspirational" people, though, whether you agree with the anti PC mood of the video or not, seems a bit ill advised.

The ironic thing is that it's probably been down to those experienced un-inspirational(sic) 50+ year olds that were trying to drag his cowboy outfit out of the shit at the end of the day. He sacked one senior employee who demanded they do more safety testing apparently. I wonder if that ever crossed this arrogant prick's mind as he sat in his sub alongside the other 4. I doubt it was the case though because I think it's been a recovery mission since Sunday. They just need to find one small bit of it to conclude catastrophic hull failure. 

Timcito

In the late 1990s-early 2000s, I lived on Grand Cayman, where scuba diving was popular among ex-pats. It never appealed to me, though. The idea of all that water between me and the surface should anything go wrong was too scary a thing for me to reconcile. I have a similar sensation on flights, where there's a huge expanse of air between me and the ground, but sometimes I have to fly, and so I banish those sensations of fear when they strike and think about something else. 

So, that's part of the horror of all this for me. There's an unsettling perversity about my puny, vulnerable little human frame being so high up or so far down, an absurdity that almost doesn't bear contemplating. What on earth (ahem!) are you doing flying at jet velocity above the clouds in a tin tube constructed by fallible human knowledge and limitations?? Because when we put huge distances between ourselves and terra firma, whether up or down, then we're pretty much sitting ducks if anything serious goes wrong. And go wrong things most certainly do with sea and aircraft at some point.

Gilly

Timcito said:

There's an unsettling perversity about my puny, vulnerable little human frame being so high up or so far down, an absurdity that almost doesn't bear contemplating. What on earth (ahem!) are you doing flying at jet velocity above the clouds in a tin tube constructed by fallible human knowledge and limitations?? Because when we put huge distances between ourselves and terra firma, whether up or down, then we're pretty much sitting ducks if anything serious goes wrong. And go wrong it most certainly does at some point.

True but I bet you drive a car, which is statistically far more dangerous.

Timcito

Gilly said:

Timcito said:

There's an unsettling perversity about my puny, vulnerable little human frame being so high up or so far down, an absurdity that almost doesn't bear contemplating. What on earth (ahem!) are you doing flying at jet velocity above the clouds in a tin tube constructed by fallible human knowledge and limitations?? Because when we put huge distances between ourselves and terra firma, whether up or down, then we're pretty much sitting ducks if anything serious goes wrong. And go wrong it most certainly does at some point.

True but I bet you drive a car, which is statistically far more dangerous.

True, but a powerful psychological difference is the knowledge that if something serious goes wrong in a car, you're not necessarily dead as a result. 

Jono111

How about a foreign government agency was waiting below the surface to kidnap them in order to fund a war. In a few days we can expect a few ransom notes.

LastMantra

Someone probably noticed it wasn't actually the titanic. 

welshboyo

"Debris Field" found...oh dear....inevitable really