Or NASA (which felt that, because the O-rings had only burned a third of the way through on previous flights, they had a safety factor of three, even though they were not supposed to burn through at all). Except that Rush had the brilliant workaround of calling it a conversion factor rather than a safety factor.
Titanium’s running about $3 a pound right now. It’s something.
Not long before the doomed trip, Rush flew into Las Vegas to try to convince Jay Bloom and his kid to go after they’d decided against it for fear of it being unsafe. (According to the elder Bloom, it was his son Sean who said “fuck no.”) The Pakistani guy and his son, sadly, ended up taking their places. Rush flew in to Vegas to meet them FLYING AN EXPERIMENTAL PLANE HE HAD BUILT HIMSELF, thereby convincing the Blooms even more that they were very much in a different place from Rush in terms of risk aversion.
According to Bloom, Rush had offered to slash the per person price from $250,000 to $150,000. These are not the actions of a man representing a business with lots of dough in the bank and a backlog of clients. I don’t think there’s much left for the families to sue for.
A lot of submersibles have gone down to the Titanic, and well as some other famous wrecks; they’ve explored wrecks almost twice as deep. They’ve even explored Bismarck, which is quite a bit deeper than Titanic. So it’s not like this sort of thing is a tremendous impossibility. A submersible can be designed and constructed that will, with a pretty high degree of safety and reliably, take you down to look at the bottom of the sea. The difference is that Stockton Rush, apparently, tried to do it cheap.
They aren’t regulations, they are certifications issued that state the maximum certified depth. The best class is “unlimited”. Titan had NO certifications and they deliberately avoided seeking one.
Sorry, I’m not aware of one. Don’t know if you’re familiar with Behind the Bastards, but it’s a comedic podcast that discusses in depth real historical (and modern day) bastards so you really need to listen to it to get the maximum enjoyment.
A bit of a nit pik. He built a kit plane called a Glassair III which is a serious plane compared to similar production 2 seat single engine piston planes. And by serious I mean superior.
From the New Yorker article: She added that several of the engineers were in their late teens and early twenties, and were at one point being paid fifteen dollars an hour.
If you are somehow getting away with paying a 19-yr old $15/hr to be an “engineer” and still desperately scrabbling for funds, you are likely not in the greatest of financial shape. He was purportedly worth at least several million, but one wonders how much of that was just ownership of expensive machinery.
The point, though, is that Rush didn’t need to operate in international waters to avoid a certification requirement. Because there are no such requirements. It’s not some sneaky, nefarious thing Rush did to evade he reach of sovereign authority. It’s just something that no relevant sovereign authority seems to have concerned itself with.
Two unfortunate things that will come out of this accident is that the reputations of both carbon composites and kitplanes will both take a hit.
Rush built a Glasair III, which is a very conventional type of two seat airplane. Glasairs have been flying since 1980 so there’s 40+ years of history with an estimated 1200 currently flying. There’s nothing exotic about them (unlike Burt Rutan designs or the “flying telephone pole” Max-Air), they even use a certified Lycoming engine like a “real” airplane. Glasairs are serious airplanes deserving of respect. They are under the Experimental category but they actually follow conventional engineering and rules.
Unlike Rush’s calamitous sub, such two-seat kitplanes are required to adhere to regulations, undergo flight testing, and have regular inspections. Yes, there is a big EXPERIMENTAL painted on the side of the airplane and a plaque in view of any passenger that says EXPERIMENTAL in at least two inch high letters followed by “This aircraft is amateur built and does not comply with the federal safety regulations for standard aircraft”. As someone who flew experimental, amateur-built kitplanes for the better part of 10 years without harm to either myself or anyone else aboard, let me assure that they do have regulations they have to comply with, even if not those for standard aircraft. They require airworthiness certificates before they can carry a passenger. The flight testing also follows rules handed down by the FAA, not whatever random things the builder thinks is OK. Failure to comply means the government might come and take your aircraft away. Also impose penalties. I know pilots who have run afoul of the FAA and the IRS both and of the two they have said they’d rather have the IRS after them.
Of course, there are issues in that community with people who think they know better than physics, think they’re great innovators, and don’t want to follow the rules (either man-made or physics required) which is why I never jumped willy-nilly into one without doing some research, not just on the airplane but also the guy who assembled/owned it. Another respect in which I differ from the average person is that I am actually trained and able to pre-flight (some) aircraft and have enough aviation knowledge to make meaningful decisions about things like safety and weather.
Outside of the airlines I’m pretty damn fussy about who I fly with. And that includes commercial pilots in “real”, factory built airplanes in no way experimental. Caught a lot of heat because I refused to fly with one guy but unfortunately I turned out to be right about him.
There are two aspects to safety in hostile environments: the technology, and the people. Both have to be safe. I question if Rush was a safe person given his attitude and actions.
Yes, well, some of us have hearing problems that make listening to 3 hour podcasts a chore instead of a pleasure, but I know you have no way to know that about me.
Up until now that hasn’t been an issue. That may be changing in some places in the near future. But it’s still a problem that no one has jurisdiction in international waters. That’s exactly why Rush was doing this in international waters. Within US waters (for example) there might actually be regulations and requirements (I’m not up on marine topics like that)
This guy, although not an expert in DSVs, per se, has expertise in related areas (he cites his credentials at the start of the video) has some very salient points about the design of Titan.
Somewhat amusing how concerned everybody seems now.
Well, that’s where Titanic is, and it ain’t moving anytime soon.
That sounds more like college students/interns used to augment the actual engineers designing it.
WOW. The images of assembly did not give me any warm and fuzzies… The mating surfaces between the titanium and carbon fiber looked like a major fail point.
Augment or replace. From that same article: college newspaper quoted a recent graduate as saying that he and his classmates had started working on the Titan’s electrical systems as interns, while they were still in school. “The whole electrical system,” he said. “That was our design, we implemented it, and it works.”
And that recent graduate will now find that he is listed as a defendant in the lawsuits. Good work at $15 / hour.
To be fair, we have no evidence the electrical system was the cause of this accident. It is entirely possible that part of this project was sound.
Pretty clear other parts were not so well done.
But yeah, I expect everyone will get sued.
Fair enough that the plane was reasonably safe, but I really don’t think this will hurt sales of kitplanes. That isn’t what people are gonna remember about this. It’s a niche market, and people in that market know full well it has nothing to do with the destruction of a submarine.
That picture just makes me sick to my stomach.
I’ve made a lot of jokes about this and I’m glad I did because they were funny. (I find death hilarious in general.) However, IRL I am a bear for workplace safety, and people who are dismissive of it make me enraged. Rush was a reckless fool; that is the reason this happened. Stockton Rush got what was coming to him but his passengers got what was coming to Stockton Rush, and I believe most of the people still working for Rush bear at least moral responsibility for this. They should have known.
Strictly enforced, as it turns out.
Sure, but the general rule of civil actions is to name as a party everyone who had a hand in construction of the thing that went wrong. At this stage, it’s not known what the problem was. What if a flaw in the electrical system meant they couldn’t release the ballast weights properly? Dunno.
Because of limitation periods, have to add everyone. Maybe further investigation as the law suit proceeds will show that the window broke and it had nothing to do with the electrics? Then the kids are off the hook.
Another value of suing the whiz-kids is to be able to examine them about Rush’s construction practices. Their testimony could help show just how badly he wasn’t interested in safety.
Long ago, when I was an electrical engineering student, I had a campus job that led to me helping some Mech E students whose grad work involved a novel way to stir molten metal. For safety and convenience, they were using an alloy that had most of the mechanical properties of their target metal, but which would melt in boiling water. I never saw their actual test rig until the day of the first test. I came in to help them review the first batch of data, only to find them staring blankly at the puddle of recently solidified metal around the rig.
See, the advantage of the special alloy’s low melting point was that they didn’t need the resources of a foundry. You could melt the stuff with a hotplate. So that’s what they did–their crucible was an aluminum plate bolted to a normal hotplate…with a cylinder of refractory ceramic epoxied to the metal. With a 60C temperature change, the difference in thermal expansion caused the plate to tear the bottom off the ceramic cylinder.
The lesson: Rigidly joining unlike materials at a critical interface will bite you in the ass. Find another way* if you can, test the shit out of it if you can’t, and expect it to fail anyway.
*If anyone happens to be curious, the other way for the project I helped with was silicon rubber. Remove the rigidity from the join, and the problem goes away. Probably not the best idea for the sub, though.
Agreed, but it wouldn’t have just rushed in and equalised - the water would have rushed in, then rebounded probably several times - you can see the effect in this video from the Hydraulic press channel - the chamber implodes, the water sort of bounces in and out several times (and in this case, even though the side wall imploded, the end caps are driven apart forcefully by the rebound).
I think if the porthole had been the initial point of failure, there’s a chance the external porthole fixing ring would still be in place - but it appears missing in the footage - I think indicating the window was lost from forces emanating inside.