Did you hear about the expedition submersible that is missing in the ocean since Sunday morning?

Ohmigosh! That’s terrible! I have claustrophobia so wouldn’t consider it, but I can sure understand the allure. I hope they’re found soon. Seems like there would be something like an airplane’s ‘black box’ to transmit where they’re located.

“There’s no GPS underwater, so the surface ship is supposed to guide the sub to the shipwreck by sending text messages,” he reported at the time. “But on this dive, communications somehow broke down.”

That seems like a very Mickey Mouse operation! Text messages to guide the sub?!

I heard an Indian businessman and his teenage son are in the submarine. I hope against hope they are rescued.

Good luck, though I wouldn’t hold out much hope. As @smudges said, it sounds like a real rinky-dink operation. If the sub needed text messages to direct it, that means they don’t have navigational capabilities on the sub. That adds a whole lot of issues to the equation. Not to mention I suspect they are all dead at this point anyway. Not knowing all the capabilities of the sub, given what I do know about full grown submarines and picking stuff up off the bottom of the ocean the situation seems like they are already gone or are goners.

Navigational – If the sub started getting into trouble and the one driving it decided to turn around or wasn’t paying attention and drifted off course or even if they lost communications and continued on for a few minutes that makes locating it really difficult. How far away from the last known location are they? In what direction? If you have to search several square miles for something that small it gets exponentially harder the bigger the area you have to search.

Pressure on the outside of the sub at 13,000 feet down is about 5700 psi. That kind of pressure is unforgiving. Any little mistake can be fatal almost instantly.

If they just lost radio contact (text messages!), but the sub was fine, it would likely have already surfaced using normal procedures. I don’t know if there were ballast tanks on this sub that could be blown but that would have popped them to the surface like a cork if it was an emergency. So the lack of communications and still they haven’t surfaced tells me they are likely in pieces at the bottom of the ocean.

Ricky-dink, indeed! In this piece from Yahoo, David Pogue (CBS) discusses the waiver, and some of the attendant problems. Like it hasn’t been OKed by any regulatory body. Like there is no way to escape or open from the inside. And on like that. Worth the read.
https://news.yahoo.com/missing-titanic-submersible-titan-death-waiver-114220229.html

@canidmajor and if they did open it from the inside (not that they could with all the pressure from being so far down) I don’t know if they’d even have the capability to reach the surface or what would become of their bodies from the pressure.

David Pogue said that they are bolted in, even if they popped to the surface, they could still not get out without outside intervention, they could still suffocate. Sound like it’s more about the “ooh, shiny!” than the functional. An expensive (and pretty stupid) risk to take.
What a marketing team OceanGate must have.

Why on earth do people do these things.

@canidmajor Even if there were an escape hatch they would be dead before they reached the surface. 13000 feet is about 2.5 miles. Their lungs would likely explode as they surfaced, the nitrogen in their blood would boil and they would be out of oxygen long before they surfaced.

@seawulf575, I guess you missed the part of my short post where I said: ”…even if they popped to the surface, they could still not get out without outside intervention, they could still suffocate.”

It does bother me, however, that the passengers and OceanGate likely knew that, in the event of lost communication, there would be massive search and rescue efforts that could put many lives in danger, and consume massive resources. The lack of forward thinking about this, and the sheer arrogance, boggles the mind.

Oh my God.

Read about it online this morning. Hope the hell they can be rescued.

@canidmajor I’m not sure what the protocol is for a search like this one, but I’m thinking ok, so the owners of the vessel make a million dollars for this trip and some of that, at the very least, should go to reimburse the US government and the Canadian government and whatever private firms assisted in the rescue or recovery efforts.

@jca2 I agree, and the governments mounting these efforts should sue for full reimbursement, including hazard pay for all put into harm’s way. I hope it bankrupts OceanGate, who I believe was irredeemably irresponsible.

I imagine they are all dead (or will be soon) and eventually the minisub will be found.

I think this adds to the whole Titanic mystique. People will maybe think twice about going exploring around shipwrecks.

Little bit of karma going on here…

https://futurism.com/the-byte/titanic-submarine-ceo-safety-waste?fbclid=IwAR2tSla3mV13NhRaV9BWPK4Q2xxlyWS4jff1NvvKP8ZcTw2uJJN-NVfMsi0_aem_th_AZheWTwyO81LFVfrLTZ7ZxCodJ5hvVWmk54dax7KmxCs465QslMo20wsHD34kiqAS_8

Probably the company that owns the submersible is sitting with their attorneys right now, looking into declaring bankruptcy and ending the company. Then the owner(s) will start a new company with a new name and hopefully improved technology, or they’ll just end their undersea exploration and retire.

Safety is a waste if you don’t worry about dying. Looks like he didn’t bother looking at safety features on other deep diving submersibles. As an Engineer, I would want a backup for every safety system on the vehicle. You don’t want to be hosed by any single failure.

And the passengers each paid $250,000 for the trip.

I wonder if that gets refunded.

@elbanditoroso that’s why I’m saying the owner is getting a million dollars for this trip.

I was just watching the news and they had a clip from the owner from a podcast, and he was saying risks to the vessel are getting ensnared in fish nets or other obstacle that would prevent it from surfacting.

@jca2 they’re just as dead, whether it is fishing nets or a broken engine.

@elbanditoroso I’m totally in agrreement with you!

Finding missing subs is difficult at best. I know of 2 subs that were lost at sea, the Thresher and the Scorpion The Thresher failed during testing following repairs, couldn’t get to the surface, went too deep and imploded. They know where that happened but couldn’t get to it. The Scorpion had what they thought was a “hot run” in a torpedo that ended up blowing a hole in the sub. The Scorpion took some imagination and effort and guess work to locate it. They knew the last known location from communications and they knew the general travel path they were going to take. But they couldn’t find any signs of the sub on that path.

There was a guy the military had used before to find missing items and they called him. He had created a thing he called the “Las Vegas” method of detection. He would take a group of the best people they had looking for these items and started asking them questions. In this case it was questions like “The sub was traveling in a set direction. At what speed do you think they were traveling?” “What actual direction?” “How deep were they?” “What direction is the current in the ocean at that point?” “If they sunk, when did they sink…to the minute?” “If they deviated from their normal course, why would they do that?” “What direction did they go?” Of course these people didn’t have the exact answers for these kind of questions but that wasn’t what he was looking for. He figured the people could make “best guesses” that, if taken in total, could point to where the sub was. They ended up finding it very close to where he determined.

If you are looking for more information on this, check out the book (not the NOVA special) called Blind Man’s Bluff which describes what happened, along with a whole lot more info on cold war submarines.

On the news, Wednesday morning, they said banging has been detected but the next issue is pulling the vessel up before air runs out. They said help is coming from around the world but can it find the vessel and get it up in time remains to be seen. If those people survive, imagine what a traumatizing nightmare they’ve gone through?

One guy was on the news saying he was supposed to be on that trip but 2 people took his place. Probably the billionaire and his son. I bet he’s thankful!

@chyna OMG, that’s like the people who say they would have been in the World Trade Center on the day of 9/11 except that they had to take their kid to the first day of kindergarten or they missed the train that day or something. That type of realization could be life changing.

I saw the thing with him, too. He felt that the safety measures on the submersible were woefully inadequate, so he changed his mind. Wise person. The only person aboard that I actually feel sorry for is the 19 year old. What a waste.

@canidmajor yes I feel most sorry for the 19 year old. Never gets to do anything in his life, dead before he can live to his full potential.

On the news, they just said there’s been a debris field found around the area of the Titanic. It seems (my guess but nothing official yet) that it imploded from the pressure.

If the debris is the Titan, then imploded for sure. I thought they tested at that depth many times before with no problems.

@RocketGuy Maybe they did, and maybe each time a little something deteriorated just a little more. Remember, an O-ring took out Challenger, and this submersible was already kind of shabbily constructed.

@RocketGuy The company had been warned about numerous safety concerns with the sub recently, safety concerns that should have scrubbed this event. It could have been something completely unrelated that caused the sub to implode…a failure in the pressure control system, a crack in the hull…something.

I was told that it imploded from the pressure.

Certainly a quicker and more merciful end than slowly suffocating.

I feel bad for the friends and families of the people who died, because they willingly went on this trip, trusted the company that owned the vessel, and then suffered tragic and untimely deaths.

It’s just horrible.

More than horrible, criminal.

@RedDeerGuy1 Implosion is always because of pressure. But it is that pressure exceeded the abilities of something on the sub. In the case of the USS Thresher, the entire sub went deep enough to where the engineering abilities of the hull and the construction could not support the pressure being felt and it crumpled. In this case we may never know what the reason was. But if the hull was not built to the design specifications that might be one thing, or if the window (why in God’s name would you put a window in a submarine!) didn’t meet the criteria that would be another. It could be that everything was engineered and built correctly but there was a flaw from a scratch or dent or even a seal that cause the integrity of the sub to be compromised.

Cut and pasted from the NY Times. They’re interviewing James Cameron, Director of the movie “Titanic.” This is a portion of the article, it is not the article in its entirety.

An implosion in the deep sea happens when the crushing pressures of the abyss cause a hollow object to collapse violently inward. If the object is big enough to hold five people, Mr. Cameron said in an interview, “it’s going to be an extremely violent event — like 10 cases of dynamite going off.”

In 2012, Mr. Cameron designed and piloted an experimental submersible into a region in the Pacific Ocean called the Challenger Deep. Mr. Cameron had not sought certification of the vessel’s safety by organizations in the maritime industry that provide such services to numerous companies.

“We did that knowingly” because the craft was experimental and its mission scientific, Mr. Cameron said. “I would never design a vehicle to take passengers and not have it certified.”

Mr. Cameron strongly criticized Stockton Rush, the OceanGate chief executive who piloted the submersible when it disappeared Sunday, for never getting his tourist submersible certified as safe. He noted that Mr. Rush called certification an impediment to innovation.

“I agree in principle,” Mr. Cameron said. “But you can’t take that stance when you’re putting paying customers into your submersible — when you have innocent guests who trust you and your statements” about vehicle safety.

As a design weakness in the Titan submersible and a possible cautionary sign to its passengers, Mr. Cameron cited its construction with carbon-fiber composites. The materials are used widely in the aerospace industry because they weigh much less than steel or aluminum, yet pound for pound are stronger and stiffer.

The problem, Mr. Cameron said, is that a carbon-fiber composite has “no strength in compression”— which happens as an undersea vehicle plunges ever deeper into the abyss and faces soaring increases in water pressure. “It’s not what it’s designed for.”

The company, he added, used sensors in the hull of the Titan to assess the status of the carbon-fiber composite hull. In its promotional material, OceanGate pointed to the sensors as an innovative feature for “hull health monitoring.” Early this year, an academic expert described the system as providing the pilot “with enough time to arrest the descent and safely return to surface.”

In contrast to the company, Mr. Cameron called it “a warning system” to let the submersible’s pilot know if “the hull is getting ready to implode.”

Mr. Cameron said the sensor network on the sub’s hull was an inadequate solution to a design he saw as intrinsically flawed.

“It’s not like a light coming on when the oil in your car is low,” he said of the network of hull sensors. “This is different.”

At work we design highly loaded composite structures all the time. But we measured the material properties, performed the analyses, and put in safety margin. => no problems. And for vehicles that are not evened crewed. If he’s going to ignore all that, then he was courting trouble.

He didn’t even believe the experts who said that acoustic emission monitoring would give only a millisecond warning before implosion. I’ve watched composite testing with acoustic emission monitoring, and that guy was exaggerating only a little bit. Failure in just under a second. You’d have to be the Flash to get ahead of that.

Aw, geez.
https://futurism.com/oceangate-ceo-expired-carbon-fiber-submarine