Missing Titanic tourist sub

[Superluminal Gremlin]

BREAKING:

Noises apparently heard by P-3 have been confirmed by the USCG. 

https://www.bbc.com/news/live/world-us-canada-65953941

The sound is almost certainly the crew. That raises the question. Why are they still alive? How are they still alive? What happened?

https://twitter.com/USCGNortheast/status/1671372007110320128

OceanGate fired expert who warned about Titan safety in 2018

Mike Wendling

BBC News

 

David LochridgeCopyright: David Lochridge

Submarine expert David Lochridge was fired after flagging up safety issuesImage caption: Submarine expert David Lochridge was fired after flagging up safety issues

A submarine expert who worked for OceanGate – the company that operates the missing submersible – warned of potential safety problems in 2018, according to US court documents.

David Lochridge moved from Scotland to Washington state to work for the firm. In a BBC interview in 2017 he enthused about the mission and said it was "destined for the sea".

But less than a year later he warned his bosses that flaws in the Titan's carbon hull might go undetected without more stringent testing, and urged the company to have an outside agency certify the vessel.

He said his verbal warnings were ignored until he wrote a report and was called into a meeting with several officials - including OceanGate chief executive Stockton Rush, who is aboard the missing submersable.

OceanGate responded by firing Lochridge. The company sued him for revealing confidential information, and the submarine expert countersued for unfair dismissal. The lawsuit was later settled. Through his lawyer, Lochridge declined to comment today.

Court documents also state that Lochridge learned that the manufacturers of the Titan’s forward viewport only certified it to a depth of 1,300 metres. The Titanic wreck lies 3,800 metres below the ocean surface.

 

Interesting to note the hull is made of carbon. A potential failure could be a micro-crack opening resulting in the destruction of some critical systems which stranded the ship. Also interesting is that Rush is on board a vessel he was warned was inadequately designed. Perhaps he either didn't believe him of thought firing him would get rid of the issue (cough, cough, Soviets). Either way, his life is in peril.

 

 

 

Edited June 21, 2023 by Superluminal Gremlin

[kerbiloid]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shahzada_Dawood

Quote

 He currently serves as vice-chairman of Engro Corporation, director of Dawood Hercules Corporation,^[1] a board member of Prince Charles' Charity, a board member of the SETI institute

<...>

Dawood is a personal friend of King Charles III.^[3] Dawood has spoken at the World Economic Forum in the past on several occasions.

 

[DDE]

2 hours ago, Superluminal Gremlin said:

Noises apparently heard by P-3 have been confirmed by the USCG. 

https://www.bbc.com/news/live/world-us-canada-65953941

The sound is almost certainly the crew. That raises the question. Why are they still alive? How are they still alive? What happened?

https://twitter.com/USCGNortheast/status/1671372007110320128

Kursk wibes... Various sounds were reported at a point when, from forensic evidence, everyone was already dead.

Edited June 21, 2023 by DDE

[Superluminal Gremlin]

@DDEI never knew that. What made the noises then?

[DDE]

2 hours ago, Superluminal Gremlin said:

@DDEI never knew that. What made the noises then?

It is unclear, the story is poorly documented and heavily politicized, so most prefer not to pry.

[Gargamel]

2 hours ago, DDE said:

It is unclear, the story is poorly documented and heavily politicized, so most prefer not to pry.

Noises are one thing, but noises on 30 minute intervals are most likely survivors tapping on something.   
 

Although, in “On the Beach” one of the missions of the sub was to figure out what was sending the signal from Seattle over the radio.  Spoiler (yes I know it’s 50 years old, but still a good read):
 

Spoiler

Turns out it was just the wind through a broken window wiggling the telegraph tapper?  wires?  I forget what, but it was DJ Gusty Wind spinning his records.  

Edited June 21, 2023 by Gargamel

[tater]

9 hours ago, Superluminal Gremlin said:

The sound is almost certainly the crew. That raises the question. Why are they still alive? How are they still alive? What happened?

This is fascinating if true. They have ballast weights that presumably are enough to surface short of the thing taking on water (which would be pretty fatal anyway)—how could the ballast release system fail? I found this:

Quote

The seven surfacing mechanisms on board Titan. They include:

• Three "enormous," "beat-up" lead construction pipes called "triple weights"
• Two "roll weights"
• Several ballast bags
• Self-dissolving bonds on the ballast bags
• Thrusters to propel the sub upward
• Detachable sub legs
• An airbag to inflate

The "roll weights" are such that you can roll the sub by moving wight inside the vehicle, and they roll off shelves.

The ballast bags supposedly dissolve in 16 hours.

One thought is apparently an abandoned fishing net might have tangled it? (something I never even thought about).

What's bizarre is that they are only hearing noises now.

ASW assets (US P8, Canadian P3) were flying there Monday dropping sonobouys (in addition to other assets with ASW capability).

Edited June 21, 2023 by tater

[Gargamel]

From the BBC:

”On board the missing craft is a retired French diver, who would know the protocol to alert search teams is to bang for three minutes every half an hour.”

[tater]

Would be interesting to compare the government cost of search/rescue operations for this submersible vs surface vessels (sailboats, etc) that they also rescue. Would seem reasonable to tell operators like this that if they want government aid in international waters in case a rescue is needed, they need to pay for the cost that is above and beyond the cost of surface operations. Ie: a sailboat is dismasted or something, we just rescue them, the sub operators would not pay for the same level of aid that any other surface rescue would incur, they would only pay for whatever the increased cost is given the specialized nature of subsurface search, etc.

They would need to have insurance to cover this, effectively as it could require millions of dollars. This increases the cost to the rich people that buy the trip, obviously. Boo, hoo.

The pinger stopping Sunday is also odd. Given the ballast bag that dissolves in 16 hours, perhaps it would be sensible to have a a similar dissolving cover over a redundant pinger with it's own battery? basically a membrane over a water sensor. After X hours (16 like the bag?) the membrane dissolves allowing seawater into the sensor, triggering the pinger. Makes an emergency toned ping series every XX minutes.

[Gargamel]

9 minutes ago, tater said:

Would seem reasonable to tell operators like this that if they want government aid in international waters in case a rescue is needed, they need to pay for the cost that is above and beyond the cost of surface operations

There’s already standards for this.     
 

You pop your EPIRB, somebody comes looking.    Hands down.    No exceptions.    It is unacceptable to think there might be a scenario based on financial reasons that a rescue wouldn’t be mounted.     
 

Later though, and it’s all situationally dependent, the person or persons in need of rescue may or may not be billed depending on what happened.   Same applies here.    
 

You would never have rescue operations contingent on financial agreements up front.  

17 minutes ago, tater said:

The pinger stopping Sunday is also odd. Given the ballast bag that dissolves in 16 hours, perhaps it would be sensible to have a a similar dissolving cover over a redundant pinger with it's own battery? basically a membrane over a water sensor. After X hours (16 like the bag?) the membrane dissolves allowing seawater into the sensor, triggering the pinger. Makes an emergency toned ping series every XX minutes.

I can’t think of a membrane that would survive those depths and have a reliable fail time.  

[DDE]

36 minutes ago, Gargamel said:

You would never have rescue operations contingent on financial agreements up front.  

We're not in the world of Cyberpunk 2077's Trauma Team. Yet.

[Nuke]

1 hour ago, Gargamel said:

From the BBC:

”On board the missing craft is a retired French diver, who would know the protocol to alert search teams is to bang for three minutes every half an hour.”

i for one refuse to step into a submarine without a boom box, and the complete works of slayer. 

[tater]

48 minutes ago, Gargamel said:

You would never have rescue operations contingent on financial agreements up front.  

Again, submarines are above and beyond any normal rescue though. Requiring commercial operators to have insurance (or money in escrow) to cover such a costly rescue is different than requiring Joe Blow to do the same for a sailboat (which I am not suggesting). Just seems like a different situation given the inherently higher risk of these operations, combined with their commercial nature. Requiring insurance is not strange, cars have to have insurance already. The plus in this case is that high insurance costs incentivizes more attention to safety, and perhaps even better testing to demonstrate safety to achieve lower insurance costs.

It's not just paying for the rescue ops, it's to incentivize safer operations in general.

 

48 minutes ago, Gargamel said:

I can’t think of a membrane that would survive those depths and have a reliable fail time.  

Well, the ballast bags claim 16 hours (plus or minus whatever). The emergency pinger could be similar—as long as it's greater than a nominal trip, and less than ~96 hours, it's better than nothing (what they have now).

Edited June 21, 2023 by tater

[Nuke]

if they do manage to save these guys, it will be the modern day apollo 13.

[Lisias]

11 hours ago, Superluminal Gremlin said:

The sound is almost certainly the crew. That raises the question. Why are they still alive? How are they still alive? What happened?

Assuming they are still alive, this is merit of the submarine's project.

Au contraire from stupid people criticising the use of a of-the-shelf game controller from a famous game manufacturer, the thing was well engineered. There're lots of safeguards on it (granted, perhaps a few more are needed).

However… exploring the bottom of the sea is as dangerous as exploring the space - lots and lots of things can go wrong, and a single one will ruin your day and probably end your life. No matter how well you engineer something, sooner or later it will fail due something no one had thought of, or plain tear and wear. It's unavoidable that an accident would happen one day in the same sense that's unavoidable sooner or later someone will die on space: hell, we can't prevent people from dying while crossing streets!

My guess, at this moment? Assuming the hull didn't collapsed, they got entangled by a fishing net or something. These guys are diving for years already, anything related to hardware (other than hull tear and wear) would had happened already.

 

16 minutes ago, Nuke said:

if they do manage to save these guys, it will be the modern day apollo 13.

It will be probably the feat of the century!

(sincerely hoping for the best)

[Gargamel]

USCG update is pending.    

[tater]

36 minutes ago, Lisias said:

My guess, at this moment? Assuming the hull didn't collapsed, they got entangled by a fishing net or something. These guys are diving for years already, anything related to hardware (other than hull tear and wear) would had happened already.

Knowing that sonar has been used (passive), I assumed the vessel was lost with the pinger, unsure why no banging earlier.

Regarding the pinger, I'm not sure how the automated ping every 15 minutes failed, and before it was at wreck depth. I suppose it could have been a constellation of issues—as is usually the case with transportation disasters.

Nominal missions were apparently to dive to ocean floor. Pinger tells surface ship where they are, ship pings back instructions on direction/distance to wreck in some code. "225m WSW" or whatever. Sub moves forward in small moves given the danger of the actual wreck (entanglement, etc).

So as soon as the pinger was disabled, they should have surfaced, but a statement before the dive suggested that this was maybe the only weather window this year, so it might well have been gottagetthereitis, a cause of many crashes of small aircraft.

Pinger fails for some reason. It's now, or next year, so they decide to go ahead anyway. At that point, perhaps they reach the bottom (let's discount the fishing net theory for now), with the plan to settle on the ocean floor, pick a direction they think is most likely (they know they were dropped a certain direction/distance from wreck on purpose), then displace that way to see if they can find the wreck without guidance. They're practically there anyway, so why not? Maybe they see it, maybe they just come home.

A couple possibilities:

1. If, during descent the ping shows the surface vessel they are coming down right on the wreck due to currents, they might be told to displace. Before the last ping there were apparently doing fine, but after 90 min, they hit a current that takes them directly over the wreck. They land right on it, and maybe get hopelessly entangled.

2. They descend to a point safely offset from wreck, and move the presumed direction, but currents/visibility result in a collision/entanglement (happened to the Russian sub that managed to get loose).

 

So wreck entanglement seems more plausible now.

Edited June 21, 2023 by tater

[Gargamel]

6 minutes ago, Gargamel said:

USCG update is pending.    

Nothing of interest.   

[Lisias]

19 minutes ago, tater said:

Knowing that sonar has been used (passive), I assumed the vessel was lost with the pinger, unsure why no banging earlier.

Regarding the pinger, I'm not sure how the automated ping every 15 minutes failed, and before it was at wreck depth. I suppose it could have been a constellation of issues—as is usually the case with transportation disasters.

If they got entangled on a fishing net strong and heavy enough to drag them into the bottom, anything attached to the hull would probably be damaged in the process. Additionally, depending on how much material would cover the submarine on the entanglement, the material would jut absorb the signals.

This can also explain why they are being heard only now - they would be banging the hull for days, but the sound could be being muffled by the fishing net - and only now, when the rescue effort got near enough, the sound could be heard.

Keep in mind that the damned sub is mostly made of carbon fiber, a material not exactly easy to be detected using sonar not to mention magnetometers.

 

19 minutes ago, tater said:

So as soon as the pinger was disabled, they should have surfaced, but a statement before the dive suggested that this was maybe the only weather window this year, so it might well have been gottagetthereitis, a cause of many crashes of small aircraft.

 I prefer to avoid speculating about the motivations that leaded to the accident for now, but yeah… Normalisation of Deviance is usually the root cause of such accidents.

 

— — POST EDIT — — 

A possible explanation for the ping ceasing from being heard during the descent is by crossing a thermal layer. That would shield the mothership from receiving the pings.

Edited June 21, 2023 by Lisias
post edit.

[tater]

9 minutes ago, Lisias said:

This can also explain why they are being heard only now - they would be banging the hull for days, but the sound could be being muffled by the fishing net - and only now, when the rescue effort got near enough, the sound could be heard.

I was under the impression they are concentrating fairly near the wreck right now, but it's hard to tell from interviews.

9 minutes ago, Lisias said:

A possible explanation for the ping ceasing from being heard during the descent is by crossing a thermal layer. That would shield the mothership from receiving the pings.

Yeah, that's always possible, though you'd think they'd have some sort of plan for that given the normal CONOPS (settle, then receive direction). It could also explain the failure of earlier passive attempts to hear them.

[magnemoe]

10 hours ago, DDE said:

Kursk wibes... Various sounds were reported at a point when, from forensic evidence, everyone was already dead.

As I understand some of the crew survived for some hours in the rear part of Kursk. Probably not long enough to been rescued even if everyone cooperated perfectly. 

 

[DDE]

1 hour ago, magnemoe said:

As I understand some of the crew survived for some hours in the rear part of Kursk. Probably not long enough to been rescued even if everyone cooperated perfectly. 

Aha, but the knocks were reported at least half a week later.

Edited June 21, 2023 by DDE

[tater]

USCG saying they are not sure the noise is in fact the sub. Given they heard noises this morning, then not since, zeroing in on it is not a thing.

Could be the sub tangled up and banging against something as well—or wreckage of the sub if it imploded.

[SunlitZelkova]

13 hours ago, Lisias said:

Au contraire from stupid people criticising the use of a of-the-shelf game controller from a famous game manufacturer, the thing was well engineered. There're lots of safeguards on it (granted, perhaps a few more are needed).

However… exploring the bottom of the sea is as dangerous as exploring the space - lots and lots of things can go wrong, and a single one will ruin your day and probably end your life. No matter how well you engineer something, sooner or later it will fail due something no one had thought of, or plain tear and wear. It's unavoidable that an accident would happen one day in the same sense that's unavoidable sooner or later someone will die on space: hell, we can't prevent people from dying while crossing streets!

With this attitude why should we even care? Why should we waste tax dollars to search? This is just the underwater equivalent of someone getting hit while crossing the street.

I do not believe it was well engineered. An employ raised concerns about safety and was fired.

On a separate note, I have seen some takes on Twitter saying it is only a matter of time before some space tourism company does the same thing. What are your guys' thoughts on that? I disagree because there is better regulatory oversight for spaceflight. Rather than being akin to the loss of the Titan, any space tourism disaster will probably end up being more Challenger-like.

[DDE]

1 hour ago, SunlitZelkova said:

I disagree because there is better regulatory oversight for spaceflight

OceanGate apparently chose jurisdictions that had nonexistent regulatory oversight. Similar shenanigans are likely to ensue in space tourism; attempts to impose the launching country's safety standards could be repelled by whinging over "denial of access to space to developing nations".

Wouldn't want to keep Elbonia's space program down!