I heard this the other day and wondered why it didn’t happen.
The Titanic basically hit the berg, came to a stop and sank. Why didn’t they immediately reverse the engines and run backwards towards the Carpathia? It would probably slowed the rate of sinking and have gotten them closer to the rescue ship, thereby allowing more of the passengers to survive.
There was a lot of confusion after the impact. I suppose with perfect information you could make perfect decisions, but that wasn’t the case here. It was a while before they figured out how bad it was. There are some accounts that they restarted the propellers and tried to keep sailing for a short while. Of course, this was absolutely the wrong thing to do as it just made things worse by forcing water into the breach by the forward motion.
There were a lot of mistakes made in the Titanic voyage. There was a lot of hubris which caused people to take chances they shouldn’t have. They were sailing at full speed through an area which had ice warnings, even though they couldn’t see very far and the lookout didn’t have binoculars because they were misplaced. With that attitude, how would they react to a collision? They would assume that it wasn’t that bad and that Titanic’s watertight holds would keep them afloat. They were slow to alert the passengers and drop the lifeboats. They weren’t even in the mindset to deal with the Titanic actually sinking.
Sailing backwards for miles isn’t standard protocol. You’re thinking it may work, but who really knows? The bow was already tipping down in the water. Maybe going backwards at an angle like that would drag the bow further under. I suppose they would want to try the standard procedures first before coming up with out-of-the-box solutions. But that takes time, and for Titanic it was too late when they finally figured out how bad it was.