CEO: "You know we’re on our last few liters of oxygen, right?
Passenger: “Give me my fucking money.”
Titanic tourist submarine missing 6-19-2023 (Debris field found, passengers presumed dead. 06-22-23)
You mean the people who pumped a capsule full of 100% oxygen and were surprised it caught fire?
But lets talk about the systems used here. They were consumer products used in place of anything certified for commercial use. They wouldn’t have been used in aviation without extensive testing and certification. It’s one thing to fly off an ipad while knocking around the country in a private plane. It’s a completely different scenario when an airliner is involved. The navigation systems must certify to a higher standard.
It doesn’t sound like they established any kind of certification process for their navigation or communication systems.
Chef’s kiss
Funny you should say that…
The judge will probably rule in favor of the living.
But his ass(ets) have been liquidated.
The couple would probably have sued Jeff Bezos, too, but he came through with a spaceflight for them in 2022. True fact, but the Onion article mentioned above nicely captures the wry humour of thrill-seeking billionaires. In fact the wife, Sharon Hagle, has said she also wants to take up Virgin Galactic and SpaceX on whatever they may be offering.
I was on record early on saying that OceanGate is finished. If not, it’s certainly the end of their deep Titanic-type dives. And evidence is mounting for the possibility of lawsuits so major they make the other ones look like peanuts. CNN is currently running a lead story that not one but at least two former employees had serious concerns about the safety of the hull design.
Damages for the wrongful death of the Pakistani billionaire and his 19 year old son would be huge, based on their potential lifetime earnings.
Looking at the CNN story about the former OceanGate employee’s lawsuit, this part jumped out:
"Lochridge’s countersuit says he was tasked by OceanGate’s CEO, Stockton Rush to perform an inspection of the submersible. It says Lochridge brought up concerns that no non-destructive testing had been performed on the Titan’s hull to check for “delaminations, porosity and voids of sufficient adhesion of the glue being used due to the thickness of the hull.”
Glue??
Hopefully this affair will not come down to a decision to use Elmer’s instead of Gorilla glue on the hull.
Daily Mail 20 June 2023
OceanGate took EIGHT HOURS to report missing sub to Coast Guard after it lost contact - as Navy commander says crew has a 'one percent chance of survive.
- The Titan lost contact with its mothership at 9.45am on Sunday morning
- First call didn’t come in until 5.40pm, the Coast Guard confirmed today
I was just going to ask if the hull was ever tested to failure or some point beyond the anticipated use.
Which one did they use on the Space Shuttle tiles? 
You might be surprised at the extent to which adhesives are used in vehicles and aircraft. Glue itself isn’t the problem, but lack of adequate standards and testing and what appears to have been a fast-tracked cheapskate approach may indeed have been issues here.
If it’s a carbon-fibre, as reported upthread, wouldn’t glue make sense?
Would this scandal be called OceanGate-Gate?
My understanding is that carbon fiber construction is very similar to fiberglass hull construction, involving laying blankets of material soaked in resin into a mold. A friend built a gorgeous 35-foot sailboat with the hull made using fiberglass sheets soaked in epoxy resin, and I imagine that carbon fiber construction is similar. The problem, however, in critical applications like the extreme compression pressures that a submersible has to withstand is that the properties of such materials are not as predictable as those of metals and, furthermore, may not be uniform. Hence, I suspect, the concerns mentioned about “delaminations, porosity and voids”. The same issues may exists on fiberglass sailboat hulls but they don’t have to withstand a pressure of 6000 pounds per square inch.
Yes, but it has to be tested beyond the limits of use and retested over time like most anything being used for commercial use.
I don’t understand the odd shape of the vehicle. It doesn’t look like it would take pressure well. It needs to be able to take pressure from all sides and it’s not round on 1 end.
FWIW, I heard on NPR today that the porthole (IMNEO, a likely point of failure), which was not certified for the mission depth, was about 21 inches in diameter. That strikes me as very large for a component expected to withstand such pressures.
From the Daily Mail:
Hope of finding the Titan five - the crew on board a missing sub on an expedition to the Titanic shipwreck - have grown after rescue groups reported ‘likely signs of life’ and ‘banging sounds.’
A Canadian Aircraft, part of the enormous search mission looking for the missing Titanic tourists, heard ‘banging’ at 30-minute intervals in the area the submarine disappeared.
The banging was noted in emails exchanged with the US Department of Homeland Security and seen by Rolling Stone.
Richard Garriot de Cayeux, President of The Explorers Club, confirmed in a Tuesday night social media post that ‘there is cause for hope.’
In a statement he said: ‘We have much greater confidence that 1) There is cause for hope, based on data from the field - we understand that likely signs of life have been detected at the site.’
It’s unclear when the banging sounds were heard, and officials have not confirmed the reports or said they have found the crew that has been stuck in the deep Atlantic Ocean since the submersible launched Sunday and quickly lost contact with others.
Banging from survivors would rule out a catastrophic failure.
I’m skeptical.