And according to the podcast, a slaveholder at the same time.
whether they were using WWII headphones or digital monitoring equipment the implosion would likely have been recorded. If the sub is in an emergency ascent then monitoring the hydrophone would be their sole focus.
We don’t yet know there was a gap between loss of communications and the implosion, or that it was long enough to cause worry (it was noted that they lost comms on pretty much every previous dive). So it’s possible that they’d have to be recording continuously to capture the implosion. Which is probably what a responsible company would have done, but Oceangate doesn’t appear to be a responsible company.
It may be in the earlier thread but the information that the support ship heard the implosion came from someone they had contacted. I’m not sure when that occurred.
The question that prompted the tangent was “How could they not have heard the implosion?”. And the answer, IMO, is that if the failure was instant, then they’d have no reason to have been listening in real-time. They’d need to have been recording the live audio for some reason. It’s not enough to say that they use acoustic comms, since those happen on specific frequency bands and are modulated.
they were alerted to the emergency ascent. So that should have been a dead giveaway.
Is there a cite for that? I can no longer remember what are rumors vs confirmed reports.
The Titan Submersible Was “an Accident Waiting to Happen”
- McCallum, who was leading an expedition in Papua New Guinea at the time, knew the outcome almost instantly. “The report that I got immediately after the event—long before they were overdue—was that the sub was approaching thirty-five hundred metres,” he told me, while the oxygen clock was still ticking. “It dropped weights”—meaning that the team had aborted the dive—“then it lost comms, and lost tracking, and an implosion was heard.”
Thanks. It’s not totally clear the sequence of events from McCallum’s second (third?) hand report and who heard what. But I’m not sure we can trust OceanGate to be honest about what actually went down, so that might be all we get.
Yeah, it’s a fun podcast. The host and many of the guests were editors and writers for Cracked back when it was good.
Agreed. I’m sure Nova is busy putting together a documentary on it so until the we’re left with citing things that may have been inaccurately reported.
I expect the last person to feel fear would be Rush as he strikes me as the sort with a well-developed capacity for denial. But hey, I could be wrong on that.
There’s been quite a lot of noise about a supposed ‘leaked’ transcript of the text comms between the support vessel and the sub. Internet consensus (if that means a damn thing) seems to be that it appears genuine. I read it and thought it seemed a little bit fake, but maybe that’s me.
Not sure if I should link to it because at this point a lot of the narrative is clickbait and such.
Yeah, I saw that, too.
I think it’s plausible but at this point unverified. If authentic the folks on board knew there was something amiss for about 15-20 minutes, but that doesn’t mean they realized they were about to die.
Initially, when we heard there was an implosion the assumption was that the event was instantaneous and they never knew what hit them. Well, we sort of thought that about the Challenger and Columbia shuttles but it turns out there were a few seconds to a few minutes when the occupants realized that things were going off the rails. So maybe this is like that, that there was a brief period of time when those aboard knew things were getting bad.
But the actual implosion was pretty instantaneous.
I really wish that we could get a solid confirmation or denial about the authenticity of that transcript. Maybe Snopes is working on it.
Or without experience, just believing their expertise translates elsewhere. As a long-time flight instructor I’m cautious when given a Doctor as a student. They’re either great, or a risky problem. (Usually great though.)
I keep wondering whether a “black box” would have been possible. If some sort of recorder and microphone set up could have been attached to the titanium hemisphere in the unpressurized area of the hull. But as I think about it more, I figure Rush would have chinced out on something like that.
I saw that last night and was too skeptical about it to post the link. But since you mention it:
I’m sure it would be possible to do, even cheaply, on a well-thought out, well-designed sub. So there is probably no chance it had one.
BTW, I sometimes think about how outdated airplane “black boxes” are. A more rational design with tiny modern electronics capabilities considered would be to scatter multiple redundant small, flash-based recorders throughout the airframe. Even some under small hatches in the outer skin that are coated in something positively buoyant that would release and float to the surface after a water crash.
Of course, how stupid of me. 
Don’t know what I was thinking.
Me too. It seems slightly off for some reason. It could just be the worry/anxiety showing. I can’t even imagine my thoughts being trapped in there with all the warnings going off.