For those who are unaware: A couple billionaires, a pilot, and one of the billionaires’ son are currently stuck inside an extremely tiny sub a couple thousand meters under the sea (inside of the sub with the guys above).
They were supposed to dive down to the titanic, but lost connection about halfway down. They’ve been missing for the past 48 hours, and have 2 days until the oxygen in the sub runs out. Do you think they’ll make it?
I see this a lot but this thing was successfully used for a very long time and has successfully completed over 200 dives. The hull of this craft was built and designed in a partnership between Boeing and MIT it’s not just some random thing made in a garage. The company is very open about the fact this is dangerous and make quite a big deal of it since that is part of the appeal for the people who sign up for this. You have to sign numerous wavers. I really cannot hold OceanGate at fault here from what I know so far. Perhaps there was something they’ve done but from what I’ve seen if the conditions aren’t perfect and everything doesn’t check out the cancel the dive or do an alternative one they make it very clear it might not happen and they make their money either way so they have no financial incentive to increase risk.
"It was January 2018, and the company’s engineering team was about to hand over the craft — named Titan — to a new crew who would be responsible for ensuring the safety of its future passengers. But experts inside and outside the company were beginning to sound alarms.
OceanGate’s director of marine operations, David Lochridge, started working on a report around that time, according to court documents, ultimately producing a scathing document in which he said the craft needed more testing and stressed “the potential dangers to passengers of the Titan as the submersible reached extreme depths.
Mr. Lochridge reported in court records that he had urged the company to do so, but that he had been told that OceanGate was “unwilling to pay” for such an assessment. After getting Mr. Lochridge’s report, the company’s leaders held a tense meeting to discuss the situation, according to court documents filed by both sides. The documents came in a lawsuit that OceanGate filed against Mr. Lochridge in 2018, accusing him of sharing confidential information outside the company.
In the documents, Mr. Lochridge reported learning that the viewport that lets passengers see outside the craft was only certified to work in depths of up to 1,300 meters.
That is far less than would be necessary for trips to the Titanic, which is nearly 4,000 meters below the ocean’s surface.
"The paying passengers would not be aware, and would not be informed, of this experimental design,” lawyers for Mr. Lochridge wrote in a court filing.
The meeting led OceanGate to fire Mr. Lochridge, according to court documents filed by both sides. OceanGate has said in court records that he was not an engineer, that he refused to accept information from the company’s engineering team and that acoustic monitoring of the hull’s strength was better than the kind of testing that Mr. Lochridge felt was necessary."
Sounds pretty sketch. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/20/us/oceangate-titanic-missing-submersible.html
Just like people insulting the individuals inside. I hate billionaires as much as the next guy. But one of the guys was just doing his job and had been to the Titanic over 35 times in this thing. The operator was also an experienced diver just doing his job. Even one of the tourist was a consummate diver with experience on submarine operations. This seem to have been an unfortunate accident. Going so deep is inherently extremely risky, but these people knew what they were doing. It’s off putting reading a bunch of people talking out of their asses about something they don’t understand just to make morbid jokes.